Posts

Ezra Klein’s list of reasons why most political journalism has very little value: Campaigns don’t really matter. Elections are largely decided by the fundamentals of the economy. The graphs in this article would’ve done more to predict the 2008 election than reading Politico every day. Presidential speeches don’t matter much, either. Nor does the executive’s legislative strategy, come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it’s told as the story of the executive, but in fact, the rules and composition of the Congress decide 80 percent of everything – including the president’s legislative priorities and strategy. Polls are useful for measuring impressions but very bad for measuring beliefs. The media is a political actor, not an observer. Pretty much no one watches cable news. What you emphasize is a lot more important than what you report. People don’t read you closely. I’d say that coverage that explains the implications of policy choices is important, but that coverage of why it’s happening is almost always wrong, and nearly worthless even when it’s right. People in general prefer a dramatic, personal narrative that describes day to day events, but most of the time events are dictated by broad trends and path dependence. Those stories aren’t very interesting to write or read, so the market dictates that journalists make up a narrative to describe events instead. ...

Here are two fun charts. The first shows that active management of mutual funds adds no value. The blue line shows the actual performance of actively managed mutual funds after fees have been taken into account. The red line shows randomly distributed results. Even at the right (high performing) end of the graph, the active managers still don’t outdo chance. Put your 401k into index funds. The second chart shows that while record labels are suffering, actual recording artists are seeing their income increase. ...

Many Web developers think in MVC, the design pattern that describes Web development frameworks from Struts to Rails to CodeIgniter. What I’m finding lately, though, is that it’s not incredibly intuitive. For one thing, people know what a “view” is (the “v” in MVC), but trying to get people to understand the difference between a “model” and a “controller” can be difficult. Also, what we call controllers in most MVC implementations aren’t really controllers. The controller is a component of the MVC framework itself. Once you’ve built a couple of projects with MVC, that sort of thing doesn’t matter, as long as you get how the applications are built. But these problems present difficulties when training new developers. ...

Back in March, I asked: I really want to buy the new Neko Case album, released last week, but I have a suspicion that Amazon.com is going to make it the deal of the day sometime soon. What would an economist tell me? Today it’s Amazon.com’s MP3 deal of the day and you can get it for $1.99. I purchased it a few months ago when it was on their 50 albums for $5 list, but I wanted to point out that my prediction was correct for some definition of soon. ...

Joe Gregorio writes about CCDs: As I’ve thought about this over the years I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD. Read the whole thing.

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbick on why he didn’t stay on the west coast: I’m really all Bay Area at this point. I’m loving it out there. In the course of this dinner, Tom tells me that he’s moving back to Detroit. I said, ‘That’s crazy, why are you doing that?’ He said: ‘If you can live anywhere in the world, you ought to live here, because it’s fantastic. It has all this natural beauty, and the weather is great. As a consequence, so many people who live here don’t have a reason to be somewhere else. They’re attracted by those things as opposed to something else.’ He said, ‘I need to be someplace where there’s a sense of community because that’s what motivates me.’ ...

I confess that I have never fully immersed myself into the world of Hadoop and map/reduce, but I am very interested in them. Tony Bain does a good job of explaining how Twitter is using Hadoop (and Pig, a scripting language for Hadoop) for analytics. It’s a great explanation of a practical business application for map/reduce for those of us who are still trying to get it.

My level of empathy was higher than average when I read Danah Boyd’s post-mortem on her Web 2.0 talk today. It’s amazing how easily things can start to go sideways when just a few of the inputs shove you out of your comfort zone. For a reminder of my own public speaking misadventures, check out my posts on Ignite Raleigh. If there’s one thing I’m very glad of, it’s that there wasn’t a live stream of Twitter chatter being displayed behind my head during the talk. And also that I only had to stand there for five minutes. ...

One side effect of having been on the Internet for a long time is that there are a lot of people you’re passingly familiar with. I subscribed to Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eater mailing list well over a decade ago, and found it an incredible source of interesting stuff in the pre-blog era. Today on Twitter I learned that he has been missing for over a year. NPR has an article on his disappearance. It’s disconcerting. I hope he’s well. ...

Saddam lived in fear of a coup mounted by the Republican Guard. His solution was to create the Special Republican Guard, whose main remit was to protect him against coups particularly from the Republican Guard. You would think that the head of this outfit would be a fearsome figure who would terrify any budding coup plotters. Woods asked other leading figures if this was indeed the case and the answer was a resounding NO! Why? Saddam was well aware of the “who monitors the monitor problem” – what if the head of the Special Guard mounted a coup himself? Saddam’s solution was not original: appoint a relative. Make sure the appointee is a coward so he would not dream of mounting a coup. Just in case he is tougher than you might think, choose someone stupid so he cannot mount a successful coup and is too stupid to recognize someone else’s good ideas for a coup. ...