It takes serious chutzah to claim that since you were "at the theatre two hours early" you can, alone, hold ten seats for people who aren't at the theatre yet - especially at a showing for SW, a showing that has a huge line before the purported showtime.
Respectfully Denied.
My favorite Tiger feature: "My favorite Tiger feature is that I can turn off the caps lock key. Yes!
I hit that key several times a day accidentally, and it just drives me nuts. I never actually use it for anything—it’s just an annoyance.
No longer!
In case you haven’t run across it, here’s how to turn it off.
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click on Keyboard & Mouse.
3. At the bottom of the Keyboard tab is a ‘Modifier Keys...’ button. Click it.
4. A sheet appears that lets you remap caps lock (and other keys). Choose ‘No Action’ from the popup menu, then click OK.
It is a thing of beauty."
(Via inessential.com.)
I was told on my way down into the subway station this morning:
"May the force be with you."
-----Original Message-----
From: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:18 pm
Subject: [IP] Economics vs. spam
_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject: Re: [IP] Economics vs. spam
Author: "James H. Morris" <james.morris@cmu.edu>
Date: 17th May 2005 5:12:24 pm
Advertising is Flirtation
I liked the van Alstyn and Loder paper on how to fight spam. It is actually being used by a start-up, Vanquish.com. I've sampled their software and it works as a challenge response system, at least.
Based on the premise that a message can have value to both the sender and receiver, they present an elegant argument to show that even a perfect filter is not a good idea. Economists say that these unilateral solutions are bad because they decrease net social welfare, and they look for mechanisms that promote the transmission and reading of those messages where the sum of the value to sender and receiver is positive. To do so, they recommend the obvious: exchange money to pay the partner who is reluctant to communicate. This works fine when you're paying the sender, but paying the receiver is more dubious.
Alladvantage.com tried this scheme in the 90's and failed miserably.
Apparently economists don't frequent singles bars -- notwithstanding the bar scene in "A Beautiful Mind" in which John Nash discovers Nash equilibriums. Paying someone to read an ad doesn't work anymore than offering a woman $5 to talk with you does. You can pay for her drink, but don't offer to pay her. Either she is offended; or, worse, she takes the money and blows you off. Van Alstyn embellishes this scheme by suggesting you escrow the $5 and she take it only if she doesn't like your line. This seems unproductive, too.
The point is: advertisements are not one-time "information transactions"; they are inducements to learn more and eventually pay for something far more expensive than the ad. They are flirtations; and, as any frequenter of singles scenes knows, where and how you flirt is very important because you are signaling about the kind of relationship you seek. Thus, it is much better to simply buy her a drink, include a quarter in a junk mailing, or throw money away in some other visible way. It makes you look generous, encouraging interest.
Advertisers don't want to force their material on unwilling readers. Nobody wants to show ads the reader no interest in. So if he know that an item was ultimately not interesting, he wouldn't send it.
The essence of communication is that A tells B something B didn't know. Thus the sender/receiver relationship is very non-symmetric. First, the sender knows precisely what the information is and why he would like someone to read it. He also is economically motivated, either to take money for information or pay for advertising. The receiver, of course, doesn't know what the information is. She might pay for it if she expects it to be valuable, but is reluctant to read information for payment. More precisely, if she does read it simply for payment; the sender is unlikely to receive what he ultimately wants. Economists called this adverse selection.
But let's not ignore the economists' main point: the arms race between spammers and browsers is wasteful because it leaves social welfare on the table. We need to find ways to get more of those messages through. Bundling is a better approach than direct payments.
Magazines are a way of bundling information in a way that accomplishes this. The magazine pays authors for content that might interest the readers and it charges advertisers. The reader pays the magazine, presumably for the content; but maybe also for the ads that come along.
What is the the value of an item in a magazine to the writer and reader? The crucial measure is reading time, how long the reader spends looking at the item. It reflects the cost to the reader, her time, but also the value to the sender, how much attention he's getting. Of course, the ultimate value to an advertiser is the profit on something the reader buys; but reading time should be correlate
The new idea here is that the value to both the sender and receiver increases with reading time.
Whether something is content, advertising, editorial, op-ed, or a letter to the editor, is really just a question of labelling the author properly so that the reader can judge the content. The value of an article to the sender rises with the level of rhetoric; i.e. the degree to which the reader is persuaded to do something. But it is not a zero-sum game. Maybe I'd be happier with a penis enlargement. :-)
James H. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
Dean, Carnegie Mellon West
412 609-5000 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm -------------------------------------
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
I need people to suggest some Woody Guthrie Albums.
I'm still at a stage where I can't tell Guthrie apart from Dylan.
This needs to be remedied as soon as possible.
Note that I worked with Edison in the last election.
-----Original Message-----
From: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Date: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:35 am
Subject: [IP] Open source political data analysis: 2004 Election Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible
_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject: Open source political data analysis: 2004 Election Hypotheses of FraudRemain Credible
Author: Peter Jones <peter@redesignresearch.com>
Date: 14th May 2005 12:19:04 pm
Dave - This is what you might call open source political analysis. But what's needed is open access to the public data that we as citizens have paid for! This team - four statisticians and a political scientist -
collaborated remotely much of this year on analyzing the 2004 presidential election exit poll data. It's the strongest study of its kind I've seen.
They have run multiple simulations with sensitivity analysis to assess the
Edison/Mitofsky hypotheses about Democratic vs. Republican exit poll responders, and definitively reject their hypothesis. They statistically support that the most plausible explanation supported by simulation was a significant vote "shift" from Kerry to Bush.
They emphasize that: "Simulations are only used in the absence of detailed source data. Edison/Mitofsky could help us resolve the lingering questions about exit poll discrepancies by releasing the data to enable us to directly measure - rather than infer - precinct level variance between poll results and official vote tallies." Link to report at bottom of post.
Press contact in press release.
Peter Jones http://redesignresearch.com
>From the Abstract:
New evidence from mathematical simulations conclusively shows that any constant mean exit poll response bias hypothesis such as the "reluctant Bush responder" (rBr) hypothesis is not consistent with the pattern shown by the
Edison/Mitofsky exit polling data. Other explanations are required to explain the Edison/Mitofsky pattern of exit poll discrepancies and overall response rates.
US Count Votes' simulations have demonstrated that exit poll patterns in the
November 2004 presidential election could be produced by an exit poll response bias distribution with constant mean if accompanied by shifting of votes cast for Kerry to Bush; or alternatively, the patterns could be caused by a differential pattern of exit poll response bias that would require further explanation.
FROM THE PRESS RELEASE
2004 Presidential Election: Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible; New
Scientific Study Released
kathy@uscountvotes.org electionarchive.org
The persistence of credible hypotheses of election fraud, six months after the election, underscores the fragility of the U.S. electoral system. US
Count Votes continues its systematic statistical study of the discrepancy between the Edison-Mitofsky exit polls and November's reported presidential election results.
Miami, FL. - Ron Baiman, Ph.D. of US Count Votes and the Institute of
Government and Public Affairs of Chicago, will release the new results at the meeting of the American Association of Political Opinion Researchers today, Saturday at a 2:15 p.m. Press Conference in the Hotel Fontainebleau Hilton Resort lobby, 4441 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL
33140.
Mitofsky, of the Edison/Mitofsky group who released an analysis on January
19th of their November 2nd exit poll that had predicted a strong win for Kerry, will also be in attendance at the AAPOR conference.
The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) today has released a new report, demonstrating that data from the Edison/Mitofsky analysis is consistent with the hypothesis of a corrupted vote count, and inconsistent with the competing idea that Bush voters were under-sampled in the poll. Using numerical modeling techniques to simulate the effect of polling bias, NEDA scientists are able to reproduce signature patterns in the Edison/Mitofsky data by incorporating a general shift in the official vote tally in the model.
Most telling is the fact that the highest participation rates and the peak disparity between poll and official returns both occurred in precincts where
Bush made his strongest showing. This feature of the data is inconsistent with the Edison/Mitofsky assumption that polling bias was responsible for the gap.
For the complete report, see http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-polls/USCV_exit_poll_simulations .pdf
This paper follows an earlier study released on March 31, 2005, by a group of statisticians for the National Election Data Archive Project, Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies.
-------------------------------------
Two Sofas, up an average of four floors each, coffee tables, and moving two people from two different apartments to two other apartments, while one person is still packing up to move from one of the moved into apartments.
That and thank you Craigslist.
The last show ended, as the first show started, with laughter.
As Antonia packed, I found myself watching the last episode of Star
Trek: Enterprise, as long ago I had also, along with her, watched the
first episode, back in Ann Arbor.
Back then, we laughed at the theme song, so ... weak.
Now, we were forced to laugh at the audacity, the sheer mediocrity,
nay, the utter disaster that was the last episode of a once promising
show.
My sadness was less with the end of the show than with the poorness
of the script. My conception of a series finale is an episode that
can bring some sense of closure, with an opening for future character
development. In short, leaving open the possibility of that
proverbial 21st chapter that science fiction shows are leaning
towards these days, the motion picture sequel.
Instead, the script writers settled for a play within a play device
that not only killed off principal characters, but also in a spirit
of true hollowness, merely referenced the possibility of great
moments. A show chastened by the reality of its cancellation,
ignominiously slinking off of televion without exit with dignity. The actors deserved better.
For the first time in memory, there will not be new episodes of Star
Trek coloring the horizon. Orson Scott Card puts it best. Sigh.
This after Sarah & Vince's going away dinner at the Thai Spice on University Pl.
Also, blogger photo blogging is busted.
Back to flickr...
Antonia just received Black Adder on DVD, and her movers come on
Monday morning to take her stuff.
