Oh yeah.Addenda: Seattle Times main story and some additional thoughts upon further reflecti...
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The Michigan defense played quite well, but not well enough to cancel out a really, really (really, really) sloppy game by the offense. Live by Denard, die by Denard, it seems.This will likely drop Michigan out of the top 25. The good news is that much of the rest of the Big Ten continues to play poorly (e.g. Iowa losing to Central Michigan and Illinois getting routed by Louisiana Tech), so bowl eligibility should not be a problem.annarbor.com coverage he...
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
1. A nice piece from the NYT Economix blog on the voting habits of those who do not pay income tax.2. Matt Welch at reason does some debunking.3. Nick Gillespie at reason on the good news: both campaigns and the media who love them can avoid talking about anything serious for a few more days.4. A good political overview from the Economist.I await the happy day when the election is over and we can return to the usual, marginally lower, level of inanity.Addendum: Matt Welch link fixed. And a very nice piece from Steve Chapm...
Only a few hours left to help Uncle Bonsai - my favorite folk group - out with their children's book / CD project on Kickstarter.I will confess that I am distracted both by the idea of a personal concert - $3,000 is much less than I imagined such a thing would cost - and by the idea of getting a personal recording of a song of my choice for only $500. There are a few UB songs that I recall fondly from my college days that they have never, to my knowledge, recorded. One is "Visible Panty Lines", which they would perform with some...
Thursday, September 20, 2012
As one expects, this Malcolm Gladwell piece on child molesters is well-written and interesting and informed by the literature.What I think is missing is any notion that Type II errors have to be balanced against Type I errors. Gladwell is all about Type I errors - failing to conclude that individuals are child molesters when they actually are - and not at all about Type II errors - falsely concluding that individuals are child molesters when in fact they are not. Both types of error are very costly in this conte...
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
In the world of survey sampling, PSU stands for "primary sampling unit". In the world of college football victories for pay, it apparently stands for "portland state university".The main take-away is that the defense really is a lot better than last year. That's good news.Seattle Times coverage here.Next comes the not so happy part of Washington's schedule: Stanford on Thursday, Sept. 27, then Oregon, then USC. U...
I felt a bit old while watching this game when I realized that my youthful enthusiasm for blowouts in favor of my preferred team is fading away. I can remember having a discussion with my father about this when I was about 12 in which I argued in favor of blowouts and he argued in favor of close wins. I have now come over to his position.Annarbor.com coverage of the one-sided affair is he...
Mother Jones feigns shock at the "secret" video of remarks by Romney at a campaign fundraiser. I the only one who finds it obvious that this was deliberately released by the Romney campaign?What one might call the moral hazard problem (or perhaps the mass corruption problem) of people voting themselves treats at the expense of others is hardly new, and Romney both overstates it as it applies to the poor and is too narrow about it as it applies to the middle class. It is also hardly limited to the blue team. For example, all those folks who...
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Via the Atlantic, a short compilation of political attack ads starting in the 1950s.Even if you already know that attack ads are nothing new, the compilation is interesting because it shows how the technology of television has improved over time, it shows that people in the past often thought differently about particular candidates than we do now, and because it illustrates other historical changes. As an example of the last of these, can you imagine a blue team candidate using the term "God's children" without irony, as Lyndon Johnson does in...
Friday, September 14, 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
What a fascinating documentary! Originally intended to be the story of the building of the largest private home ("Versailles") in the US, the financial crisis turned it into a much more interesting story when it came along and upset the process.The NYT offers both a review by A.O. Scott - a bit more positive than I would be - and another, perhaps even more interesting, piece on the post-movie lawsuit by David Siegel, the patriarch of the family building the house and the boss of the world's largest privately held time-share company.And it was extra...
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
This is what one would watch on a highbrow, French version of the Lifetime channel, if there was such a thing. A.O. Scott walks the thin line between "pretty nice" and "wow, I've seen all those cliches before", which is exactly where to walk with this movie.Recommended as being very good conditional on gen...
Monday, September 10, 2012
From the Journal of Political Economy to insulting everyone who suffered under communism by equating them with the people who celebrated "Chik-fil-A Appreciation Day".An indefensible waste of human capital, I would say, though I suspect Dr. Roback would disagree.Hat tip on the Chik-fil-A piece: Mel Steph...
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Michigan was lucky to get out of this one with a win. The annarbor.com article makes lots of excuses, but the fact of the matter is that the team was over-rated at the start of the season. Hopefully last week's debacle at Alabama and this week's squeaker at home will put an end to the media hype and get the team focused on working hard to get better.The most interesting bit is perhaps the adjustment to the defense that involved putting in a freshman who had been on an option team in high school and so was experienced at defending it. The...
To be honest, this is about what I expected. LSU was in the national championship game last year for a reason and the Huskies were playing them on their field. Not a good recipe for success, especially not in the second week of the season with a young team.My views about the likely outcome for the season, somewhere between six and nine wins, have not really changed. If anything, the defense played a bit better than I expected against LSU, particularly given that they were on the field most of the game due to Washington's offensive woes. If this...
Saturday, September 8, 2012
I spent yesterday morning taking part in a panel on US active labor market programs put on by the American Enterprise Institute in DC. This is the first time I have ever done a sort of think tank policy "event" - all the AEI folks called it the "event" - in my career. It was more fun than I expected.You can watch videos of the event at the AEI web page and on the C-Span (another first for me) web page. AEI excerpted my comments comparing the cost information available at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, where I worked in high school, with...
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Washington's first game of the season was a lot closer than it should have been. That's the bad news. The good news is that the defense looked much improved from last year.Seattle Times story here.Next week: LSU in Baton Rouge. Ugh. I am unsure of the point of putting LSU on the schedule.The other bad news is that Comcast is not carrying the Pac-12 network in Ann Arbor, as well as many other places. Given that they provide hundreds of channels of worthless drivel, this seems an odd choice, particularly given the long-standing rivalry between the...
Reason's interviewer demonstrates what you really already knew: (1) most people hold large numbers of mutually inconsistent political views and (2) that is even true of people at a political convention whom you might have thought would have devoted more CPU cycles to trying to be consistent. Being pro-choice only in cases where you might actually make the choice but not in other cases is a bit like wanting free speech only for people who agree with you (and there are many on both teams who hold essentially that position). It truly is amazing that...
Monday, September 3, 2012
1. Some bits and photos on the history of course registration at Michigan. I always loved picking courses - so many cool choices, but tempered with the frustration at not being able to take all the ones that sounded interesting. Sort of like seminars and conferences, I suppose.2. Size matters at the Fed's Jackson Hole symposium.3. Where the college students are - from Atlantic Cities.4. Organizing the school day morning. This is new for us - tomorrow is Elizabeth's first day of kindergarten.5. Interview with Maggie Gyllenhall on Sal...
The starting paragraphs of Katie's fine essay:If, from beyond the grave, Betty Friedan were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend’s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of...
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