Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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Archive for Short Takes »
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Category Archives: statistical thinking
Betting the Farm
NYT, April 12, 2011 - The condition of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan is “static,” but with improvised cooling efforts they are “not stable,” the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told a Senate committee on Tuesday.
Reading between the … Continue reading
The Spirit Level
“A well controlled study of over 1,600 players on 29 (baseball) teams over a nine year period found that major league baseball teams with small income differences among players do significantly better than more unequal teams.”
Spirit Level
Does this finding surprise … Continue reading
Blame the Victims: A Conspiracy of Purpose
Last night I saw the “Inside Job“, which won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary. If you have been keeping track of the changes going on in this country since the Reagan era, you will find little in the … Continue reading
The Peak is Nigh!
The headline in yesterday’s Guardian UK reads: “WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices.”
In a WikiLeak cable release, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco, … Continue reading
Egyptian People Power
Egypt is a nation of 80 million, 91% of whom regard themselves as Arab Muslims. Today these millions inhabit a narrow strip of fertile land along the banks of the Nile River. Economically, their industrial base is even narrower than … Continue reading
Praise for the Corporate Model of Competitive Enterprise
We cannot go back. We cannot return to our nomadic-tribal roots, although, as imagined in many apocalyptic sci-fi stories, we can imagine ourselves catapulted by catastrophe into a new survivalist nomadism a la “Mad Max”, “Water World”, etc. etc.
Beyond Mad … Continue reading
Crime and the Borrower’s Gambit
In my previous post I suggested that the crime rate in the United States is a product of systemic or “common: cause rather than “assignable” causes. In other words, our socio-economic system reliably and predictably produces behavior defined as criminal … Continue reading
Margin Of Error In The Cause Of Justice
Our system of justice is organized to find and eliminate assignable causes. It knows almost nothing about the nature of common cause.
In the business of business, the most important challenge is to distinguish between cause that is “common”, and therefore … Continue reading
New Year’s Resolution 2011
Last year I was thinking big, too big, when I composed my New Year’s resolution. Basically I said, resolve to wake-up to the fact that as Americans, we are all actively participating in a lifestyle and mindset that promotes warring … Continue reading
Collapse: The Movie
It is not possible to continue infinite consumption and infinite population growth on a finite planet.
Michael Ruppert
I have a vivid memory from my time as an undergraduate student back in 1968. I was sitting in the office of Dr. Nick … Continue reading
Story Wars
There’s a mind-boggling story that says we are a nation at war. We are warring against evil-doers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Korea, etc. etc. We are in a nebulous global war against terrorists of various stripes and colors. We … Continue reading
The Box-Cutter Society
Almost a decade ago a small group of religious fanatics secreted box-cutter knives on their persons, boarded several passenger jets, and used their box-cutters to intimidate the crew and passengers aboard those jets into handing over control. The fanatics then … Continue reading
Our Lying Minds
In this month’s issue of “the Atlantic” is an article by David H. Freedman entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science”. In it he profiles a medical researcher who dares to say that the emperor of scientism has no clothes. … Continue reading
Business 101 for the New Economic Age: The Efficiency Myth
“The 14 points for management in industry, education, and government follow naturally as the application of this outside knowledge (SoPK), for transformation from the present style of Western management to one of optimization.”
W. E. Deming
When W. E. Deming spoke of … Continue reading →