bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: December 2008
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html
Sunday, December 14, 2008. NCAA football by the numbers. How do NCAA D1 football conferences compare when you actually analyze the season by numbers? All charts below are based on data from the end of regular season play. Watching ACC football this year was a bit sad, but there were so few ranked teams from the ACC in part because they kept beating each other. Here's a comparison of in-conference play conference by conference, comparing the standard deviation of in-conference win percentages. Throughout ...
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: January 2009
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
Sunday, January 18, 2009. Child Poverty by US State. Nathan at the awesome blog Flowing Data. Posted a call for visualizations. Of age based poverty rates in the U.S. It's an interesting and challenging way to look at the data - state delineations provide a lot of context for the numbers, but are at the same time arbitrary and heterogeneous (hello heteroskedasticity) bucket o' data. These are our political entities though ( except for DC. Population distribution (across age groups). Links to this post.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: October 2008
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008. Thank Yahoo, Google, and Facebook for The Wire and Mad Men. I read Clay Shirky's. Piece on cognitive surplus. With it; Internet apps, e.g. web 2.0 is a mocked but more productive outlet for this cognitive bias. Look like small screen genius (maybe it was). Is it a coincidence that as reality television hit it's tipping point that "art TV" started to gain traction? The mainstream acceptance of Internet applications and communities shattered TV's median (sitcoms), which allows ...
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: Imagining a fearful future
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009/03/imagining-fearful-future.html
Sunday, March 08, 2009. Imagining a fearful future. We make an important error in assuming that we can extrapolate what the future will hold based on past events. Equally we err by assuming what the future will hold based on a vivid imagination. British risk expert John Adams describes an architectural competition in which entrants are supposed to design a building designed to withstand a specifically described terrorist attack ( pdf, 3 pages. Why is this pernicious? Ben's observations and links.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: Screw you, median voter
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009/07/screw-you-median-voter.html
Wednesday, July 08, 2009. Screw you, median voter. Now that Alaska Governor, soon to be ex-Governor Sarah Palin is free of her obligations in Anchorage, national Republican leaders including Michael Steele are rolling out the welcome mat for her to campaign nationally for Republican candidates. Quite understandable, given the fervent support she manages among people who put political bumper stickers on their cars and signs in their lawns. But the Associated Press reports. Ben's observations and links.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: March 2009
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html
Sunday, March 08, 2009. Imagining a fearful future. We make an important error in assuming that we can extrapolate what the future will hold based on past events. Equally we err by assuming what the future will hold based on a vivid imagination. British risk expert John Adams describes an architectural competition in which entrants are supposed to design a building designed to withstand a specifically described terrorist attack ( pdf, 3 pages. Why is this pernicious? Links to this post.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: February 2009
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html
Sunday, February 22, 2009. Campaign finance distortions and the size of Congress - a thought. The cornerstone of economics and the study of supply and demand is that as a good becomes more dear people become willing to pay more for that good. People are quite willing to pay for political favors in many forms because the stakes are high and the seats in Congress dear. That, or it might lower the price of wrangling a. Voice and result in fewer but more serious breaches of political finance regulation.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: August 2009
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html
Thursday, August 27, 2009. Popper on Health Care Reform. Karl Popper on the holistic social planner:. Unable to ascertain what is in the minds of so many individuals, he must try to simplify his problems by eliminating individual differences: he must try to control and stereotype interests and beliefs by education and propaganda. There is an actual set of policies that will effect deep changes and need to be pieced apart. Perhaps the greatest criticism is that it is too much at once. Links to this post.
bennylope.blogspot.com
Irrational Expectations: I saved the dodo bird and all I got was this lousy tshirt
http://bennylope.blogspot.com/2009/08/i-saved-dodo-bird-and-all-i-got-was.html
Wednesday, August 19, 2009. I saved the dodo bird and all I got was this lousy tshirt. Does an heirloom tomato have any. Value, strictly biologically, than a genetically altered tomato? If we could somehow reintroduced the dodo bird through genetic engineering, would the “new” species deserve endangered species status? If we could reintroduce the genetics of the dodo bird through a dodo-puffin combination, would this new species have as much a priori value as either of its antecedent species? The Genesis...
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