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November 30, 2005
An expert has is just someone who has made all the mistakes in a narrow area
I just finished reading Gladwell's Blink last weekend, so the idea of the predictive power of expertise and the amount of information required to power that expertise has been on my mind. Another New Yorker journalist, Louis Menand, has a slightly different take. In his article "EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT", he sees "that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake." Worse, he sees experts as over informed. All that extra data just gives them a wider selection with which to paint flights of fancy. Jane Galt has an explanation that reads more true. Experts aren't usually paid to be right, they are paid to be entertaining.
A special case of this is the financial markets. While many people are paid to both be entertaining as well as make money in financial markets, their ability to place financial bets actually alters the likelihood of certain outcomes. IF everyone believes that stocks will go up and so buys stock, then stock will go up. I'd expect to see the greatest difference in prediction quality between experts and laymen when:
1) A unique true outcome can be established
2) Markets exist in the prediction
3) Those markets cannot really effect the outcome.
Science is a clear example of this. Predict what difference, if any in the time for two smooth balls, one wood and the other lead are rolled down a smooth slide to reach the bottom. The public didn't believe Galileo and they'd likely get it wrong again today.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)
Freakshow finance
Right now I bank with Netbank. However, they recently cut the interest rate on their checking accounts to 1% for accounts under $2500. For accounts over $2500, they have expand their offering, with three free ATM transactions per month and a 1.5% interest rate.I love their money market account. It might only yield 3.36% to ING direct's 3.5%, but you can write checks and pay bills from it, so in my book it is far more functional.
But here is an interesting idea I learned about on PF Blog, GMAC demand notes. They sound a bit scary:
Demand Notes is an unsecured and unsubordinated debt obligation of GMAC ranking equally with all of our other unsecured and unsubordinated obligations (other than obligations preferred by mandatory provisions of law). Demand Notes is neither a bank account nor a money market fund and is not FDIC insured.
But these notes are essentially short term bonds issued by GMAC that you can write checks and pay bills against, yet get over 5% interest. These are not risk free, in fact GM, who owns GMAC is on the verge of bankruptcy, but GMAC is a better credit and may be spun off. Nevertheless, these still could be a part of a diversified investment strategy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:20 AM | Comments (1)
November 29, 2005
Obvious, but nice to see it proven
Cathy Young points out, in her clever and well written way, the obvious truth that retribution against criminals is a legitimate goal of the state that extends beyond merely discouraging crimes and restituting victims.
Researchers at Lawrence University found that women wearing sexy attire hurts perceived capability.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:42 PM | Comments (2)
Making a healthy cookie takes more than lots of eyeballs
Malcolm Gladwell, fun and fast reading author of The Tipping Point, and Blink, has substantive, insightful criticism of the open source movement, learned from baking tasty but healthy cookies.
Because there are so many individual voices involved in an open-source project, no one can agree on the right way to do things. And, because no one can agree, every possible option is built into the software, thereby frustrating the central goal of good design, which is, after all, to understand what to leave out.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
Your mother would abort you
Carol Barbieri has an Op-Ed in the NY Times today about how she lied, committed fraud, and stole private records on her adoption to try to increase the odds that her son would get the correct medical treatment of a heart condition. You see, she didn't know her family medical history because she is adopted, and so she felt entitled to do whatever she had to do to get that information. I understand why she did what she did. Indeed, I think many parents would do what she did. Nevertheless, despite her emotional pleas, it must remain a crime, and she should be punished.
We live in an society where, of the two major parties, the Republicans argue that abortion should be illegal, and the Democrats argue that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. A majority of Americans think abortion should be legal, but that they should be early(86% say no after first 6 months) and medically justified (57 percent oppose abortion solely to end an unwanted pregnancy). The behaviors that she advocates, if widespread or legalized would directly lead to more abortions on the margin. If people are serious about not wanting abortions, then one part of that strategy (on top of legal contraceptives, teaching abstinence, and cultural stigma of premarital sex and abortions) must be legal, anonymous adoption.
To people who were adopted anonymously, I'm sorry that your parents either didn't want you or couldn't care for you, but their privacy is the price of your life. That's the deal and it should not be revisited post facto. As I considered this article, I considered a parental DNA archive to go with an adoption, but that seems unfair for several reasons. First, the burden would fall unduly on the mothers, and lack of paternal involvement must be a major reason for putting a child up for adoption. Second, that thickens the paper trail to allow for the tracking of birth parents.
The real solution is that birth parents and adopted children should have an anonymous communication system for requests to initiate contact and to exchange medical information. You could easily do this with a social security number escrow. The SSA used to have a service (they may still) where if you send them a stamped letter and a person's name (SSN if you knew it) and they'd forward it along. This would work the same way.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:18 AM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2005
Be careful how you reinvest
In a recent article, Econobrowser takes look at hedge funds, and how rate of return is insufficient to understand the risk and reward involved. One interesting point that doesn't come up in the article or the comments that follow is the role of diversity. If you can rebalanced your portfolio to pursue uncorrelated several strategies, and your investment vehicles contain limited downside (because the are LLC's), and you have access to a riskless asset (like government bonds) then you can make big money even if all your risky strategies converge to zero value given enough time.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
Necker Cube
The Necker Cube is an optical illusion discovered by the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker in 1832. It describes a wireframe cube that appears to have a different orientation from moment to moment.
Check out an animated example that brings the illusion to life.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2005
At what price misery?
It makes intuitive sense that having a trustworthy boss and a fulfilling job is worth a trade off in salary. Not all that glitters is gold, and having nice place to spend 8, 10, or 12 hours a day is worth forfeiting a few extra treasures. However, would you believe half your salary?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
OneEyedMan's Law
I've always thought that in a big enough group, there would be someone obessed about everything. I got my proof when I learned of the internet.
Everyone has has seen movies where someone shoots a lock off of a door or chest, but is it possible? The Box of Truth Explores just how hard it really is. There advice is bring a shotgun.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2005
New books on the history of Yiddish
Did you know that "Yiddish" is the Yiddish word for "Jewish"?
A handy review of a spate of new histories and epitaphs for that wry and fallen language at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2005
Maybe it is just a dumb West Wing ripoff
Commander in Chief is a show about an accidental first female US president. Is this warming us up for the Hilary Clinton Presidency?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
November 17, 2005
It is sometimes hard to remember that freedom was invented
"British history is too often told -- to children and on television – through the indulged lives of kings and queens, and never through the lives of lawyers. Yet men from the Inns of Court dominated that action-packed age, 1641–60, the crucible years in which they forged many of the ideals the world today most cherishes: the sovereignty of parliament; the independence of judges; freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; the right to silence; comparative religious toleration -- in short, freedom from tyranny.
...
The trial of Charles I was a momentous event, and not only for Britain. After thirty years of continental war, the kingdoms of Europe had, by the Treaty of Westphalia in October 1648, given some guarantee of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities within their domains, but as sovereign states that would police themselves. It was fundamental to this treaty, the foundation of international law, that a prince could not be overthrown for violating the liberties of his own subjects. But the most important thing about the Treaty of Westphalia was that England was not party to it."
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)
One step closer to compact transparency projectors
Two weeks ago we were talking about building a better projector white LEDs. Gizmodo announces that we are one step closer to this product with a recent innovation that doubles the light per watt from LEDs. That means half as many diodes. Half as many diodes means half the price and half the size for the lighting unit.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:47 PM | Comments (2)
November 16, 2005
Best web comic you aren't reading
El Hippo tips me off to the funny and entertaining
Dominic Deegan
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:46 PM | Comments (1)
November 15, 2005
Treating the ridiculous seriously
Check out this amazing, detailed, and serious critique of the American alternate history of Harry Turtledove.
I especially enjoyed Guns of the South, a melange of time travel and alternate history, and a fun read.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:39 PM | Comments (0)
How to hide your point with a bad presentation of data
The Big Picture has a neat graph on the returns of US corporate bonds for the last 200 years. Unfortunately, interesting as the chart is, the aspect ratio doesn't make any sense. The scale is set to show return over getting your $100 back, so it shows a range from 0 to about 120. The data exists only in the band 5 to 15%. This combined with chart junk and low resolution image makes it impossible to get much out of the chart.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:23 PM | Comments (0)
Bayesian Social Science
Bayes' theorem tells us that the probability of a random event A occurring given that we know a related event B occurred is the probability of both happening divided by the probability of B happening.
Or:
This little theorem has revolutionized modern statistics and created a near holy war between the traditionalist classical statisticians and the Bayesian statisticians. Some even consider it a philosophy for daily life.
Some have claimed that it is unemployment or the upbringing and not Islam that motivates French rioters. The clever economists over at Stumbling and Mumbling discuss how we can use a Bayesian techniques to peak into the French rioters' motivations.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2005
Testing rational expectations
One of the more interesting consequences of the economic theory of rational expectations is that individuals save their windfalls (lottery, inheritances, tax refunds) and spend their raises, cost of living adjustments, and other permanent increases in income. This follows from an arguments about smoothing changes in consumption. Since people prefer to have a stable amount of consumption to famine mixed with plenty, they save temporary income to supplement the uncertain future.
Human beings, sometimes straying from this hyper-rational abstraction, spend their windfalls until they collapse back into the poverty from which they emerged. There are a few justifications offered for this in economics, that they discount highly their future happiness, that consumers don't actually believe that such income is temporary, or that smoothing just isn't important to them, perhaps because their is no diminishing marginal utility of income. But that isn't to say that the theory belongs in economics's dustbin.
Comparative economics has the potential to remove the distractions of human behavior. Take for example the small orange tree that sits in my living room. How could we test if rational expectations held for this plant? Let's say that you replanted it in a spacious lawn in southern Florida. Drenched with sun and water, this would represent a permanent income change for the tree. As such you'd see an expansion in the consumption of the tree, which is making oranges to create more orange trees. On the other hand, let's say there were a rash of sunny days in August, but that were quickly followed by a cold September. The plant, sensing that it has merely received a solar windfall, invests in deeper roots, nutrient storage, and growing more leaves. In effect, it saves. Now we have some testable hypotheses beyond humans. Create a situation where plants or animals are broken into three categories, a control, those subject to a windfall and those to an income effect. Then simply check for changes in savings (usually food storage or sharing behavior) and consumption (usually reproduction) behavior.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2005
Windfall taxes discourage surplus capacity
Oil prices are high today because oil consumers have ratchet up their consumption faster than oil producers have brought new capacity on line. A little under half of global production is under government control. As such, most oil production is driven by the profit motive. They look at the expected price of oil over the life of a project, and if they see if they can can make a profit, they do it. Oil production cannot be increased on short notice unless someone pays to have idle oil producing wells and equipment. The only way that is is profitable is if they can bring that production on line when prices are very high. Times like today.
Our leaders are concerned about the high price of oil because Americans are concerned about the high price of oil. They should be leading, educating us on what we can do to lower our bills and setting good policies to encourage more production. Unfortunately, they'd rather follow the electorate, pandering with protectionist theatrics by dragging the CEO's of the oil companies before them to abuse them. Hopefully they won't be so dumb as to actually act on that rhetoric.
Reason has a funny send up of these shenanigans and explains that the big American oil companies aren't more profitable enterprise than the average large American.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2005
Does society affect homosexual urges on the margin?
A new paper investigates if having a relative with AIDS effects sexual decision making and urges. Because of the vastly higher potential costs in higher STD incidence, we can estimate the cost of unprotected sex between men and men, men and women, and women and women. Mr. Francis finds that the expected cost of a man having unprotected sex with another man at about 2,000 times the prices of unprotected sex with a woman. He also finds that men who have a relative with AIDS are significantly less likely to have "... a male sexual partner in the last year..." or to "...say they are sexually attracted to men...". Which, if you assume that his statistics have controlled for causality and spurious correlation, suggests that on the margin the high cost of male homosexual sex can discourage men from engaging in homosexual relations.
Marginal Revolution points out that because lesbians don't have to worry about accidental pregnancy, nor do they have a higher rate of disease transmission, their marginal costs of sex are lower than that of straight couples. An lo, having a relative with aids actually increases the likelihood of a woman reporting the homosexual urges and behaviors that were discouraged in men.
This also seems to be borne out by historical evidence. We know that variations in the manifestations of human sexuality are great, but pretty much the same genetic human beings have existed in all societies. That suggests that environmental forces can encourage or discourage homosexual behavior at the margin.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2005
The Mexican government is actively subverting US immigration law
City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where my friend John McWhorter is a fellow. Arts and letters daily featured a recent article on how the problem of New Orleans isn't poverty, it is a culture of violence and corruption. But they had an even better article in this month's issue, about the role of the Mexican government in subverting US immigration law.
The two most important things that the United States can do to increase prosperity, help improve our image around the world, and keep us safe is to legalize drugs and reform our visa and immigration system. High illegal drug prices fund our enemies in Afghanistan, make trouble for our friends in South America, perpetuate international criminal organizations, and squanders billions of dollars and millions of lives in unnecessary law enforcement and incarceration. Immigration restrictions ensures professional smugglers stay in business, who remain ready to bring in terrorists with the throngs of migrants. It also drives significant portions of our economy underground, which suppresses tax revenues, creates an atmosphere of contempt for the law, reduces the liquidity of our labor market, and ultimately encourages jobs to move off-shore because inexpensive workers is not available in the US. Worse, it makes us look as though we've abandoned those cherished words at the feet of lady liberty:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
What greater slap in the face of a pompous and tyrannical enemy then to welcome those he seeks to crush with torture, cultural and religious supremacist rules, corruption, and the jackboots of his troops and abattoirs of his butchers.
That isn't to say that we should have anyone stroll in. I'd consider that, but I think that that level of permissiveness would encourage a backlash at the earliest problem. It is reasonable to put restrictions, especially on those moving for economic reasons.
I expect most to line up jobs and housing before they arrive, that they be free of a criminal past (at least of things that are criminal here) in their own country, to demonstrate that they are learning English, our history, and values, and that commit to continued study when they arrive. Maybe it isn't prudent to allow them to settle in LA and NY as they might want, and we should find ways to encourage them to settle in the less densely populated areas. But the fundamental idea is that immigration is good, and usually more is better.
That's why the immigration article on Mexico was disturbing. We, in our infinite stupidity, haven't solved the migrant labor problem with Mexico. Nevertheless, we are a free, sovereign, democratic country, as are they, and we deserve to have our laws honored, even if they deserve to be strongly criticized. Let them criticize, but not interfere. But Mexico is doing far, far more than criticize.
1) They've created and distributed a "Guide for the Mexican Migrant" that details in comic form how to sneak into the United States.
2) They've contributed to the legal defenses of illegal immigrants
3) They've a law enforcement team, Grupo Beta, to protect illegals as they sneak into the U.S. from corrupt officials and criminals.
4) They've issued ID's for illegal immigrants and then actively lobbied that they be accepted as valid id's for driving and banking
5) The Mexican government has fought to expand and defend legal privileges (food stamps, medicine, education) for illegal migrants
6) Hilariously, they have far higher standards for immigration into Mexico. A Guatemalan G with the same skills as most Mexican migrants could never get into Mexico legally.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
November 7, 2005
So you live in NYC, what should you do on election day?
Election Day is less than two weeks away.
The MTA is working on a big new bond offering to improve and expand the NYC subway system. It is important that New Yorkers turn out to support this ballot measure or upstate voters will defeat it as they did in 2000. We may not like that the government runs mass transit system, but if they do, let's at least insure that they run it efficiently and successfully. New York already has an extensive debt load, but if we can't borrow money to fund constructive public infrastructure, we might as well take away the power of the state to borrow money. Hey, that's an idea...
A less important issue is the candidates themselves. I recommend that you vote against all incumbents, except maybe Bloomberg. Sure, he is an anti-smoking fascist who has done nothing to improve the stifling regulatory and tax environment of NYC, but he does seem to be making progress on the the schools. And one must recognize that Ferrer would be no better and in any case has no shot at winning. So I'd like to recommend MS. Audrey Silk, Libertarian candidate for mayor. A retired police officer and proponent of tax, zoning, and regulatory reform, she may have no chance of winning but a she'll leave you with a much cleaner feeling as you exit the booth.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:53 PM | Comments (0)
Send yourself an electronic time capsule
Forbes has a service that allows your to delay sending an email for 1, 3, 5, 10 or 20 years. That's perfect for sending yourself a list of goals and aspirations to check if you've accomplished them. You could send yourself a list of your favorite websites to see how they change, or even write yourself a long, livejournal like letter about your state of mind and how much your family pisses you off.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:33 AM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2005
This whole Plame mess
Can I, as a prosecutor, make a wild interpretation of a law, drag people into court to and ask them all sorts of person questions, and punish them when I find out later that they lied, even if my interpretation of the law is bogus?
Note that this is not perfectly germane to the Plame situation, as Libby is accused as obstruction, not just perjury.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:14 PM | Comments (0)
Innovation from Amazon
Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) are those annoying and disabled unfriendly distorted pictures of text that websites use make you prove that you are not a shell script running on a zombie computer. This hinges upon the fact that most humans are very good at amplifying and operating signal from noise, and so the symbols of language stand out for us in a way that is very difficult for machine to emulate.
Amazon has flipped this idea on its head. They are going to pay you a few cents to identify facts about images that are easy for humans to discern but difficult for machines to do so. Like is this man holding a can of coke? Is their pizza in this picture? This service, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, is named after a famous machine from the 1700's that purported to play masterful chess. Instead of the elaborate mechanism that appeared to play chess, it turned out to be a combination of puppetry and a hidden chess grandmaster.
Yardly points out how this is a great way to cut out the middle man on outsourcing. If true, expect it to be like Google answers, where the response was so tremendous that the price rapidly got bid down.
Labnotes points out the similarity to what spammers are already doing.
Kudos to Maunder for being the first to blog about it, and noticing how this will be useful for organizing the A9 search engine images.
Slashdot has a discussion.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)
An example of great website design
Panic, a T-shirts retailer has a attractive and intuitive method of managing your shopping card without flash or other nonsense. I still have no interest in bizarre hipster tees.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)
10 Principles for delivering a superior technology product
The NY Times reports on ten design and service rules that would make consumers a lot happier with their $300 toys. Not a perfect list, and not the order I'd put them in, but clever and interesting.
I. Thou shalt not entomb thy product in indestructible plastic.
II. Thou shalt hire native English speakers to translate thine instruction manual. "
III. Thou shalt not hype irrelevant specs.
IV. Thou shalt not charge tech-support fees for thine own mistakes.
V. Thou shalt not participate in rebate rip-offs.
VI. Thou shalt not hide from thy customers.
VII. Thou shalt remember the customer's phone number.
VIII. Thou shalt not prevent "zeroing out" of thy phone-mail maze.
IX. Thou shalt not hog the power strip.
X. Thou shalt not plan obsolescence.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)
November 3, 2005
Choosing the best credit card
Your credit card can be more for you then just a free one month loan and an excuse not to carry cash. It can be a tool to discounts and cash rebates. For example, bu using my Amazon Visa Card, the A9 instant reward, and the Amazon Associates program, you can save as much as 12% off you amazon purchases. For my non-Amazon purchases, I use my American Express Cash Rebate card, which gets me about 1.5% back on everything else.
Now, I don't fly much. However, if you pay your balance in full, are willing to jump through hoops, and fly frequently, these deals pale before what you can get with a miles credit card.
The nice folks at A View from the Wing have a great article on choosing a miles card.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:40 PM | Comments (0)
November 2, 2005
Regional distribution of place names
PFLY has a very clever use of the data from the Geographic Names Information System. He's created beautiful maps of the continental United States that show the distribution of place names (brook, run, creek, lake, pond etcetera).
I wonder if the GNIS data is available in time series form. It would be neat to see the evolution and spread of various types of place names.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:09 PM | Comments (0)
Build a better mouse trap transparency projector
For many presentations, a LCD projector has become de rigueur for showing charts and text. But in certain disciplines, most notably mathematics and others that are mathematically intensive, the ability to hand-write on the transparency has preserved the transparency projector
as a communications tool.
But have you noticed that these things suck? They draw a lot of power, throw off so much heat that they need a loud fan, and end up almost two feet deep, three if you include the magnifying arm.
I have a simple design improvement. Add a LED lamp to the device.
Rather than heating a filament in an incandescent bulb until it glows, led use ultra-efficient (bright, cool, and long lasting) diodes use the odd behavior of semiconductors to generate light.
All of the sudden these devices don't require a fan or all that space in the device to cool it. The device is now quiet and energy efficient. But is it bright enough?
A typical transparency projector runs uses about 2,500 Lumens. Luxeon Star makes an LED bulb that produces 25 lumens with 1 watt. This requires a 100, for a ridiculous cost of about $1000. But it uses only 27% of the power. But like most things electronic, the prices are falling fast, so sometime in the next few years a compact, quiet, and cool transparency projector will be cost effective.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:42 PM | Comments (3)
We haven't found all the good, cheap ideas yet III
In August and September we discussed technologies for creating clean drinking water. But people (mostly women) in the developing world ofter live a great distance from water clean enough to bother to sterilize. Normally the very poor devote great time and energy to they carry it on buckets carried on the head or shoulder.
When full, the five gallon jerry cans commonly used to carry water weigh about 40 pounds and women sometimes carry the cans to water hours away.
The hippo water roller is a major improvement in low-cost human-powered water transportation. You simply fill up a 20 gallon Polyethylene jug with screw lid with water. You clip-on a steel handle and push it home like a wheelbarrow.
Now households need fewer water trips, which frees up time for other economic activity and leisure. To the extent that children now spend extensive time gathering water, it also leaves more time for their education.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:32 AM | Comments (3)
November 1, 2005
Make yourself more productive (I)
By far the best thing you can do to increase your productivity is to find a keyboard you find comfortable and learn to touch-type on it. I happen to love the IBM Model M (1391401) Keyboard. Don't run it over with your car and it will last longer than your wrists will. But it doesn't have a windows key, it is loud and firm, and is considerably larger than those modern keyboards, so this article isn't about keyboards. It is about monitors.
It has been a while since I've done any technology reviews, so I thought I share the I have a computer tricks that I use to get more done. Buy the best (highest resolution and largest) monitor you can afford, then buy another monitor, it needn't be as good, but if it is, all the better. You might need a more advanced video card then the one that came with your PC, but so be it. Get it all installed and run to Realtime Soft. and download Ultramon. Total cost is maybe $1000, averaged over the 3 year life of your computer is about a dollar a day. It will help you make the extra $700 a year you need to justify the investment and make computing more pleasurable as well. You are worth it, so go for it.
Once you have at least two monitors, you'll see how much time you wasted looking away from the monitor. You'll draft changes to a document while reviewing the original. You will get data out of tables in arcane formats and into Excel. You can manipulate and format charts until the fit perfectly into your presentations. Use Google desktop to find that document with the key statistic for your email to management. Browse the web while keeping an eye on that log file. Just try it, you'll see how great it is.
But multi-monitor setups aren't perfect our of the box, so you'll need Ultramon to fix a problem with multi-monitor work flow in windows that is so obvious, that I'm boggled that the Widows team didn't build it into windows. Without it, by default the task bar in windows only exists on the primary monitor. You can get the task bar to appear additionally on the other monitor, but Windows will only use it when the task bar on the primary monitor is full. You can see it below.
This doesn't make any sense as a metaphor. The task bar should represents a stack on the desktop. Having multiple monitors is like having multiple desks. If you had multiple desks would you keep all your documents in a stack on one desk? No, you'd break up tasks by desk, and manage each separately. That's what Ultramon's smart task bar lets you do, have a separate stack for each monitor.
.
It also gives you a host of other features to make multi-monitor setups more pleasant. It has handy icons to maximize to the entire desktop and move applications between monitors. It also allows you to have a different background and screen saver on each monitor. Your multi-monitor video card might also allow some of this functionality, but I found those applications unstable and ill-designed.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:27 PM | Comments (2)
A great example of political economy
Political economy is the application of the techniques of economics to the problems of political science. Jonathan Klick, professor at Florida State University College of Law has written a creative paper (Mandatory Waiting Periods for Abortion and Female Mental Health) to explore , well, here is the abstract:
Proponents of laws requiring a waiting period before a woman can receive an abortion argue that these cooling off periods protect against rash decisions on the part of women in the event of unplanned pregnancies. Opponents claim, at best, waiting periods have no effect on decision-making and, at worst, they subject women to additional mental anguish and stress. In this article, I examine these competing claims using adult female suicide rates at the state level as a proxy for mental health. Panel data analyses suggest that the adoption of mandatory waiting periods reduce suicide rates by about 10 percent, and this effect is statistically significant. The result is robust to various attempts to control for unobservable heterogeneity and simultaneity.
Using econometric techniques, he tries to control for "labor force participation rate of women in the state, the unemployment rate in the state, real state income per capita, the percent of the state’s population that lives in rural areas, the percent with a college education, and the respective percentages of the state population indicating they belong to the following religious groups: Mormon, Southern Baptists, Catholics, and Protestants" I would have liked to see marriage and imprisonment rates included as other determinants of mental heath. Nevertheless, this is a interesting work in exploring whether women should want abortions, regardless of their legality.
Thanks to Volok for the tip.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:36 AM | Comments (0)