Posts

Here’s what you’d say about the interim Kay report on the investigation into Iraq’s weapons if staked your reputation on their existence. Update: Here’s Fred Kaplan’s take on the report.

It looks kind of funny when you put it this way. (The link points to a table of various excuses/dodges/justifications for the Plame affair.)

The VICE Emulator is a C-64 emulator that works really, really well. I’ve set up the emulator (easy), and installed a few games, and have been instantly transported back to the good parts of junior high.

Via Medley, an interview with Alton Brown. Lots of great stuff within.

Matt Haughey has written a pretty long item about Google’s AdSense program, mainly about how it’s worked out well for him with PVRBlog. At the same time, the groundswell of criticism of Google’s recent behavior continues.

I was deeply affected by this story about the conditions in North Korea.

The EFF has issued a report on the unintended consequences of the DMCA.

Guaranteed to be a Bushism of the Day: See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction. Remarks by the President on the Economy, today.

Here are a few things that are not true from the Plame affair. I mention them only because I see it being asserted that they are true all over the place. Valerie Plame was not really a covert agent. The New York Times explains her covert role in an article, and a former CIA agent confirms her status here. The CIA outed her itself by confirming to Novak that she worked for the agency when he called them for fact checking. Nonsensical, as explained here. Robert Novak's excuses and evasions still matter. Not any more. Joseph Wilson's investigation in Niger was a joke. (I've seen it referred to as a "tea party.") Wilson discussed his investigation at length in this interview (PDF). Joseph Wilson is a Democratic political hack. Wilson served in the government under Republican and Democratic administrations, and made a $2,000 donation to the Bush campaign in 2000. I’m sure there are others, but that’s all I can think of for now. ...

I’ve talked before here about the book Moneyball. It was, in every sense, a baseball book. It is the story of a guy who runs a baseball team, and includes lots of anecdotes about individual players. At the same time, it was an allegory that can be applied to just about every other situation where we try to assess value, particularly when it comes to people. The book illustrates an extreme case where nearly all the data needed to judge which two people better exhibit a skill is available, and most people ignore that data anyway. The unspoken question that the book poses is whether we’re really as good as we think we are at evaluating talent in any enterprise. Needless to say, the book has sparked much interest among economists. Zimran Ahmed points out the uncomfortable fact that testing and statistical analysis are probably preferable to interviewing when it comes to hiring candidates for jobs. Of course, the problem is devising a test that will be more effective than interviewing in doing the evaluation. The advantage in baseball is that the tasks involved lend themselves to record keeping and quantitative analysis. The other advantage is that the way you become a major league baseball player is playing baseball at lower levels. One of the great revolutions in baseball analysis was the realization that college and minor league baseball statistics are incredibly useful in projecting the performance of a major leaguer. While that may seem obvious, until very recently most teams preferred to ignore those stats and instead judge players based on how they looked to scouts rather than on how they fared against their competition. Anyway, it’s much more difficult to project how a college student studying computer science will perform as a software developer, or, I would imagine, how a vice president of sales will perform as a CEO, since there’s no easy way to quantify their past performance and then project how they’ll do in their new position. That being said, there’s a huge economic incentive to try to figure out a method for improving the quality of these sorts of decisions. I think that the ultimate result would be to adjust executive pay downward over time. What Moneyball teaches us is that if you ignore the fluff and get down to the concrete value that a player brings to a team, you can obtain nearly the same amount of value (and sometimes even more value) as marquee players bring to the table for a fraction of the price. I don’t see why we won’t see the same thing when it comes to business executives. ...