I like the study in that it makes the point very clearly that, yes, there are differences between boys and girls (e.g. girls have ovaries and monthly cycles; boys do not), but, no, mathematical ability is not one of them.
Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.
He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs.
Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.
illustration { Stuart Patterson }
Imagine a market for highly sought-after items in which the makers and sellers work hard to ensure that the items go only to certain buyers, even if other buyers might be willing to pay more. The favored buyers are then expected not to resell the items for many years, even if the values skyrocket. Ideally, in fact, the buyers are expected to give these items away eventually, for the public good. And if the buyers don’t abide by these expectations, they risk being cut off, cast out with the other unwashed wealthy who can afford to buy but have no access.
At least according to Craig Robins, a prominent Miami art collector and real estate developer who filed a federal lawsuit on March 29 in Manhattan, this is a portrait of the workings of the primary market for contemporary art, which, despite the recession, remains immense and highly competitive.
At its heart, the $8 million suit is a fairly ordinary contract dispute about confidentiality agreements and sales promises. But the details of the disagreement have provided a rare view into a normally very private world of high-end art selling in which membership rules, responsibilities, rewards and reprisals can be so complex and changeable that even art world veterans say they sometimes struggle to decode them.
{ NYTimes | Continue reading }
Days after the sabotage, one of his best-known older pieces, a suspended, taxidermised horse titled The Ballad of Trotsky, was auctioned in New York for $2.1m (£1.15m). Cattelan claims he won’t get a penny of that money - he sold the horse in 1996 for $5,000. Still, what is it like knowing your work is worth so much? “It’s like going to sleep 14 years old and waking up 30,” he says. “Things that maybe seemed a joke before are now taken more seriously.”
related { The Strange caase of Maurizio Cattelan | The Economics }
photo { unsourced | via Willie }
A collection of paintings that have caused art aficionados to turn a deep shade of purple and have provoked upset and anger throughout the art world are to go on show.
The forged works include a fake Botticelli, which was bought for a higher price than a genuine work by the artist sold at the same time. A gallery director almost had to resign because of another one, a fake Holbein.
In an unprecedented spirit of public transparency (and perverse pride), the National Gallery in central London is dusting down its holdings of forged paintings, accidentally bought as genuine works, supposedly by Botticelli, Holbein and Durer, among others, and showing them off to the public.
Some experts within the gallery actually prefer the fakes to the real thing, they revealed yesterday. Rachel Billinge, a research associate in the gallery’s conservation department, said she sometimes looked upon the forgeries with more admiration than the works by their genuine counterparts. “Sometimes you can appreciate their techniques, and the effort they put in, more than the original that was churned out by a bored apprentice at a workshop,” she said.
The last known fake bought by the gallery was in the late 1950s, when it acquired a painting believed to be a genuine Rembrandt, An Old Man in an Armchair. Signed and dated falsely, many curators have marvelled at its extraordinary technique and artistic achievement.
In 1983, Edward Leamer published an article with contents that would become almost as celebrated as its title. “Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics” began with an analogy that remains useful. Imagine an agricultural researcher who tests the effectiveness of a new fertiliser by dividing land into strips and spreading the new fertiliser only on a randomly chosen selection of those strips. Because of the randomisation, any effect will presumably be thanks to the fertiliser.
Contrast this scrupulous scientist, continued Leamer, with two agricultural econometricians. One notices that crops grow under trees and, after taking careful measurements, announces that bird droppings increase crop yields; the other has noticed the same phenomenon and declares that it can, with confidence, be credited to the benign effects of shade.
This is the “identification problem” – trying to work out whether a statistical pattern is caused by what we think it has been caused by. It muddies any statistical analysis of data that have not been generated by a controlled experiment, and it particularly plagues econometricians, the statistical wing of the economics profession. But, complained Leamer, throughout the 1970s they too rarely cared, and much of their work was dubious at best. Leamer was not alone. David Hendry showed in 1980 that by using the standard methods of the day, he could demonstrate that rainfall caused inflation. Or was it that inflation caused rainfall?
That was then. Now Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jörn-Steffen Pischke of the London School of Economics have published a new working paper arguing that econometrics has undergone a “credibility revolution”. Angrist and Pischke argue that the identification problem is now being faced head on and for many questions it is being solved. Modern econometrics works.
Given the recent financial crisis, I pause for sceptical chuckles, but academic econometrics is rarely used for forecasting. Instead, econometricians set themselves the task of figuring out past relationships. Have charter schools improved educational standards? Did abortion liberalisation reduce crime? What has been the impact of immigration on wages?
The French invented the suit designations we use today. Each supposedly indicates one of the principal divisions of medieval society: the heart, coeur, the clergy; the club, trefle, the peasants; the diamond, carreau, merchants and tradesman; and the sword, pique, the nobility.
Espada, the Spanish equivalent of the French pique, has become our present day spade.
The symbolic significance of the nobleman’s sword is obvious enough, but some of the other associations are a little obscure.
Clubs can be interpreted into two ways: as walking-sticks or cudgels, the characteristics weapons of the lower class, who were frequently forbidden to own swords; or as cloverleaves, indicating agriculture.
Hearts symbolize courage and virtue, which presumably would pertain to the clergy, the highest level of society.
The diamond apparently was originally a paving tile, indicating the artisan-tradesman group, purveyors of material goods. Alternatively, there is the obvious connection between diamonds and money.
In the early years of the new century, huge force-on-force clashes and low-level irregular warfare aren’t the only threats faced by US military forces. Relatively small hostile groups either have or could acquire in the next few years access to sophisticated and lethal weaponry.
With modest training, modern communications, and strong command and control, these forces can employ such advanced weapons in concert with established guerrilla tactics and gain lethal effects once unavailable to such fighters.
Analysts are calling this type of conflict “hybrid warfare”—blending elements of different forms of combat. Participants in hybrid contests will comprise both nation-states and nonstate actors—sometimes with both on the same side, sometimes opposing one another. This distinctly new type of military challenge requires national security strategists and force planners to understand new realities and prepare America’s armed forces.
Hybrid warfare blurs the distinction between pure conventional and pure irregular warfare. At present, it is also a term with at least three applications. Hybrid can refer, first, to the battlespace environment and conditions; second, to enemy strategy choices; and third, to the type of force the US should build and maintain. Early examinations of this phenomenon have often used the term to apply to all these possibilities. In February, Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, head of US Joint Forces Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, referred to both hybrid enemies and a hybrid force the US might build.
Somebody needs to brief Senators before they get on TV and ask irate questions which demonstrate they have no idea what they are talking about. Expressing shock that someone was short on the trade in question shows you don’t understand the trade. Let me see if I can offer some clarity.
Normally, you think of a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) as a pool of mortgages. This pool is broken into anywhere from 6 to 15 tranches. The highest-rated tranches get their money back first, and the rating agencies made them AAA. While the lowest level would be called the equity portion and be first in line to lose, in theory it paid a very high yield. It was usually not rated. But the level just above that is BBB (just barely investment-grade), and that was typically about 4% of the total deal, but paid a much higher yield than the “safe” AAA portion.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. Investment banks would take the BBB portions of these Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities, which were not as easy to sell, and combine them in a CDO, which the rating agencies then rated using models based on data provided by the investment banks themselves. Since this combining of BBB tranches supposedly created diversification that the rating firms’ models indicated would drastically limit delinquencies and defaults, the AAA tranche of the CDO was jacked up to 75% of the total capital structure, with 12% rated AA. Only 4% was typically considered BBB. So pools of mortgages that probably should have been rated below BBB were miraculously turned into a CDO with 87% of its capital structure rated AAA and AA and only 4% rated BBB, with a chunk as equity. (I wrote about this in January of 2007, based on material from Gary Shilling and others, plus my own research, although I think I wrote about it in an earlier letter as well.)
Who would buy this stuff? Mostly institutions that were reaching for yield in what was, in 2007, a very low-yield world. Yield hogs. And institutions that trusted the rating agencies.
But the CDO in the Goldman case was not this type of CDO. It was hard to find enough BBB pieces to put together a CDO of the type described above, and the demand was high. Remember, everyone knew that housing could only go up. So, what’s an investment bank to do? They create a synthetic CDO. Follow this closely. The various investment banks - it was way more than just Goldman; rumors are it was up to 16 of them - would construct an artificial CDO fund based on the performance of BBB tranches in other deal.
{ John Mauldin, Weekly Newsletter, April 30, 2010 | Continue reading | PDF }
photo { Lauren Verby }
7 Ways to Protect Times Square–Without Invasive Cameras.
Otto Dix at Neue Galerie New York, until Aug. 30, 2010.
related { Jean-Michel Basquiat would have turned 50 this year, had the Brooklyn-born painter not died from a heroin overdose in 1988, at the age of 27. His contemporary and competitor, art provocateur Barbara Kruger, considers his legacy.
Brooklyn 1940’s, Brooklyn 1960’s. [More pics | thanks Greg!]
Jason Florio, NY Gun club [photos]
“Then she started showing stallion-like behaviour, urinating on other horses’ feces, mounting the mare horses.” Intersex horse found on Ontario farm.
Flier banged on the cockpit door, claimed to be space alien, plane diverted.
Chinese man ate 1,500 light bulbs over 42 years.
Missing iPhone case led to ‘virtual strip-search’.
Cleaners accidentally paint over Banksy stencil.
The corrupt reign of Berlusconi.
The Paralyzing Problem of Too Many Choices.
Character strengths and virtues: a 5/8 factor structure?
My brain on my mind. The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember.
The emotional deficits of the psychopathic brain.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess.
Neighborhood context and the development of aggression in boys and girls.
It’s tempting to think of time as a linear sequence of events best captured by a straight line, the x-axis on a graph for example. But physicists have never felt constrained by such a definition, on the contrary they’ve never hesitated to mould time to their own ends. The two-dimensional arrow of biological time.
Controlling cockroach chaos. An interdisciplinary team of scientists from Germany have created a robotic cockroach that autonomously behaves in a way reminiscent of a real cockroach.
Shampoo, cosmetics may form cancer-causing substance.
The idea that the Earth shows signs of having repeatedly passed through the tail of a comet does not bear up to scrutiny. Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Could a comet tail have scarred the Earth in the recent past?
Can a plant virus make you sick?
Steve Jobs: “Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true.”
iPad users targeted by hackers.
iPad sets sales record for totally unnecessary item. Related: The iPad’s coolness trumps an obsession with the printed word.
6 Factors Why Facebook Can’t Make Money.
Major Facebook security hole lets you view your friends’ live chats.
Once the fake card was inserted, the Python script running on the laptop relayed the transaction, suppressed the verify PIN command issued by the terminal, and responded with the 0×9000 code. The researchers said that attackers could carry similar kit in a backpack, with the wires trailing down a sleeve, for use with a stolen valid card.
So much for fish being automatically the healthy choice.’ [via Ray Sawhill]
Cook your meat in a beer cooler: the world’s best (and cheapest) sous-vide hack.
Hosting a major sporting event: economic gains are unlikely, but will it bring happiness?
Why is tennis scoring so weird?
Interview with Steve and Mark O’Donnell, identical twins. Steve O’Donnell has written for David Letterman, Chris Rock, Jimmy Kimmel, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons. Mark O’Donnell has written many books and plays.
‘Film is a visual medium’. So goes the screenwriter’s favourite truism. And hence the most sublime joy of reading screenplays: the language of scene action. I’m not denying the pleasures of the cinematic experience for one moment. But the literary pleasures to be had from reading well-written scene action can be extremely powerful – and yet are largely overlooked.
Constructed Languages: The Five Weirdest In This (Or Any) World.
In this posting, I’m going to talk a little bit about what it is to be a commercial fiction author.
You catch her eye across the aisle. Not once, but again and again. You know that look. Can it be? Is this girl interested? Getting up from your seat, you hear the click of her belt releasing. You meet in the tiny space, slipping in together somehow unnoticed – you hope.
Let’s get down to the sex, shall we? It was bad. Not just bad. EPICLY bad.
Top 13 Ways to Piss Off a Photo Editor.
David McCandless, The Visual Miscellaneum. The book dissects our relationship with information in the digital age.
How many of the paintings in our public museums are fakes?
Do Prices Increase When an Artist Dies? Facts About Death and Art Values.
Refresh the home page to see more butts.
San Francisco in 1905, San Francisco in 2005 [Thanks Matthew!]
Falling objects synchronized to produce rhythm. [video]
Ghost girl prank. [video]
Five Easy Pieces, Diner scene with Jack Nicholson. [video]
Have You Ever Listened To A CIA Agent? [video]
Barack Obama Naked–The Action Figure. [Thanks Glenn]
Google Image search “American Apparel Ass Crack.”
Flashback. Related: Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as Remember you must die.
From left to right: Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Leia, Luke Skywalker and R2D2
{ Vintage porn logos | Thanks Greg! }
{ Bryan Formhals }
