nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=41292&src=eorss-iotd

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=41251&src=eorss-iotd

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=41289&src=eorss-nh

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=41285&src=eorss-nh

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=41272&src=eorss-nh

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41280&src=eorss-nnews

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41281&src=eorss-nnews

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41282&src=eorss-nnews

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41283&src=eorss-nnews

nasa_earth_feed

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=41284&src=eorss-nnews

marginalrevtion

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/alberta-fact-of-the-day.html

Edmonton and Calgary are among the few metropolitan areas in the developed world that are not connected to comprehensive motorway systems.

Here is much more, on highways in Canada or rather the relative lack thereof.  I am not convinced by his argument that a "bigger and better" highway system is what Canada needs, but I found this interesting reading nonetheless, mostly because it shows how few highways Canada has.

schneiersecrty

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/anti-malware_de.html

Funny.

econlib

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/a_minsky_recove.html

As always, there are conflicting views on the economic outlook. Daniel Gross is optimistic.

In the third quarter, productivity--econospeak for companies doing more work with the same amount of labor--rose at a 9.5 percent annual rate... But just as hamsters can run only so fast on their treadmills, there are limits to productivity growth. "If you look at economies over many centuries, you can't grow productivity for 7 or 9 percent for more than two or three quarters," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at New York-based Economic Cycle Research Institute, whose leading employment indicators are looking up. "At a certain point, people will start to collapse at work."

Meanwhile, Nouriel Roubini writes,

The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest.

I am leaning toward the optimists. I do think that the productivity number is important, because it signifies profits. Profits are an important precondition for recovery, particularly if one takes the Minsky model seriously. Recall that a year ago people were talking about a "Minsky moment."

Hyman Minsky's view is that in good times, firms get more and more confident and willing to use leverage. In bad times, they resist borrowing and instead fund expansion out of profits.

I am sympathetic with Minsky's view. In the Garett Jones world, hiring a worker is as much a capital investment as is buying a machine. I think that as profits continue to improve, firms will be willing to make more investments in both equipment and workers. This will produce a recovery in employment. So, although I do not exactly agree with Daniel Gross's reasoning, I share his optimism based on the recent productivity trends. Contra Roubini, I would bet that jobs will be increasing by June.

The Recalculation does not happen quickly. But it does not take forever, either.

marginalrevtion

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/assorted-links-13.html

1. Reverse remittances: Mexico to the U.S.

2. Will intelligent aliens look like us?  (By the way, I say no.)

3. The most important law passed this year?

4. Pictures of libraries.

5. This is very dangerous information.

6. Provocative feminist (?) blog.

7. Tips for getting better advice: "Listen to people who hate you."

marginalrevtion

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/sentences-to-ponder-1.html

Controlling for location and time fixed effects, weather factors, the pre-game point spread, and the size of the local viewing audience, we find that upset losses by the home team (losses in games that the home team was predicted to win by more than 3 points) lead to an 8 percent increase in police reports of at-home male-on-female intimate partner violence.

Here is the source paper and that is from David Card and Gordon Dahl.  In contrast, if you go see a violent movie, for that same length of time you are sequestered and thus less likely to be a danger to others.

purdue_pow

http://www.math.purdue.edu/pow/fall2009/pdf/problem12.pdf

econlib

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/an_apology.html

In my post yesterday, which I wrote in haste--generally a bad idea--I called former President Bush "a joke." I was expressing my frustration at his willingness to talk a good game but not to play a good game. But we at Econlog have certain standards of decorum and sometimes commenters' comments are deleted because they engage in name-calling. Obviously, the best way to get the kind of decorum we're after is to model it. I failed to do so. I apologize.

rss_thedailywtf

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/For-the-Ease-of-Maintenance.aspx

Ryan Thompson works on a project where all database queries had to go through "stored procedures". Now before you call me out on extraneous quotes or wonder, so what's wrong with stored procedures?, I'm not talking about those kind of stored procedures. I'm talking about "stored procedures" — i.e., the technique developed by Ryan's predecessors for the ease of maintenance.

You see, in Ryan's world, there are hundreds of different procedures, each with a unique identifier such as FNACL0023 or ADUSR0012, all which are stored in a database table named "RawQuery", which, for ease of maintenance, contained the actual SQL queries to be performed. In order to call one of these queries, you'd need to call one of several actual stored procedures — Query0(), Query1(), Query2(), Query4(), Query12(), etc. — depending on the number of "parameters" needed by the query.

So, let's say you wanted to run a query. First, you'd look it up in the RawQuery table as follows.

+-----------+------------------------------------------+
| PROC_ID   |  PROC_QUERY_SQL                          |
+-----------+------------------------------------------+
| FNACL0023 | SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ACCT_ID = %1%  |
|           |      AND STATUS_CD = '%2%' ORDER BY %3%  |
+-----------+------------------------------------------+

Then, all you had to do was the following:

CALL Query3('FNACL0023','882','ACTIVE','ORDER_DT'); 

It made for perfectly opaque coding, but the DBA was happy because he could easily update and add queries. Of course, the real problem was that queries were jealously and closely held by the DBA, and despite the "ease of maintenance", it was nearly impossible to convince them to make changes or add new ones.

The DBA ruthlessly audited each new release, forcing the use of stored procedures on every call. Since the manager was a former DBA himself, he always sided with the DBA.

But one day, an enterprising developer discovered a wonderful workaround in the form of query SPTST0001. It was a test query that the DBA used regularly and took only a single parameter: a table name.

+-----------+---------------------+
| PROC_ID   |  PROC_QUERY_SQL     |
+-----------+---------------------+
| SPTST0001 | SELECT * FROM %1%   |
+-----------+---------------------+

Immediately, developers changed their coding style to.

CALL Query3('SPTST0001', '(SELECT a,b,c FROM x,y,z WHERE d=1 AND e='test' ORDER BY z.c)'); 

All it took was an extra set of parenthesis, and a table name magically became usable as a full SQL query.

The DBA was aware of the workaround, but didn't seem to mind. So long as they were using the stored procedures as required, he didn't care what was actually in them. And besides, the developers finally stopped pestering them to add new queries.

schneiersecrty

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/public_reaction.html

Interesting research:

For the last five years we have researched the connection between times of terrorist threats and public opinion. In a series of tightly designed experiments, we expose subsets of research participants to a news story not unlike the type that aired last week. We argue that attitudes, evaluations, and behaviors change in at least three politically-relevant ways when terror threat is more prominent in the news. Some of these transformations are in accord with conventional wisdom concerning how we might expect the public to react. Others are more surprising, and more disconcerting in their implications for the quality of democracy.

One way that public opinion shifts is toward increased expressions of distrust. In some ways this strategy has been actively promoted by our political leaders. The Bush administration repeatedly reminded the public to keep eyes and ears open to help identify dangerous persons. A strategy of vigilance has also been endorsed by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

Nonetheless, the breadth of increased distrust that the public puts into practice is striking. Individuals threatened by terrorism become less trusting of others, even their own neighbors. Other studies have shown that they become less supportive of the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. In addition, we found that such effects extend to immigrants and, as well, to a group entirely remote from the subject of terrorism: gay Americans. The specter of terrorist threat creates ruptures in our social fabric, some of which may be justified as necessary tactics in the fight against terrorism and others that simply cannot.

Another way public opinion shifts under a terrorist threat is toward inflated evaluations of certain leaders. To look for strong leadership makes sense: crises should impel us toward leadership bold enough to confront the threat and strong enough to protect us from it. But the public does more than call for heroes in times of crisis. It projects leadership qualities onto political figures, with serious political consequences.

In studies conducted in 2004, we found that individuals threatened by terrorism perceived George W. Bush as more charismatic and stronger than did non-threatened individuals. This projection of leadership had important consequences for voting decisions. Individuals threatened by terrorism were more likely to base voting decisions on leadership qualities rather than on their own issue positions or partisanship. You did read that correctly. Threatened individuals responded with elevated evaluations of Bush's capacity for leadership and then used those inflated evaluations as the primary determinant in their voting decision.

These findings did not just occur among Republicans, but also among Independents and Democrats. All partisan groups who perceived Bush as more charismatic were also less willing to blame him for policy failures such as faulty intelligence that led to the war in Iraq.

[...]

A third way public opinion shifts in response to terrorism is toward greater preferences for policies that protect the homeland, even at the expense of civil liberties, and active engagement against terrorists abroad. Such a strategy was advocated and implemented by the Bush administration. Again, however, we found that preferences shifted toward these objectives regardless of one's partisan stripes and, as well, outside the U.S.

Nothing surprising here. Fear makes people deferential, docile, and distrustful, and both politicians and marketers have learned to take advantage of this.

Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister have written a book, Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public. I haven't read it yet.

marginalrevtion

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/the-big-questions.html

In The Big Questions, Steven Landsburg ventures far beyond his usual domain to take on questions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.  Beginning with Plato, mathematicians have argued for the reality of mathematical forms.  Rene Thom, for example, once said "mathematicians should have the courage of their most profound convictions and thus affirm that mathematical forms indeed have an existence that is independent of the mind considering them."  Roger Penrose put it more simply, mathematical abstractions are "like Mount Everest," they are, he said, "just there."

All this must make Steven Landsburg history's most courageous mathematician because for Landsburg mathematical abstractions are not like Mount Everest, rather Mount Everest is a mathematical abstraction.  Indeed, for Landsburg, it's math all the way down - math is what exists and what exists is math, A=A. 

Read the book for more on this view, which is as good as any metaphysics that has ever been and a far sight better than most.  Moreover, Landsburg's view is not empty, it does have real implications.  Since there is no uncertainty in math, for example, Landsburg's view supports a hidden variables or multiple-worlds view of quantum physics.

Speaking of quantum physics, The Big Questions, has the clearest explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that I have ever read.  In fact, this is a necessary consequence of Landsburg's metaphysical views; since it's all math all the way down, the explanation of the uncertainty principle is the explanation of the math and any true uncertainty or mystery is simply a fault of our own misunderstanding.

Turning to epistemology, the theory of beliefs and knowledge, two chapters stand out for me.  I learned a lot from Landsburg remarkable clear explanation of Aumann's agreement theorem--and I say that despite the fact that in the office next to mine is Robin Hanson, one of the world's experts on the theorem (see Robin's papers on disagreement and also his paper with Tyler, but read Landsburg first!).

Landsburg's skills of explanation are also brought to bear in a wonderful little chapter explaining the theory of instrumental variables and of structural econometric modeling  - and this from an avowedly armchair economist!  

Finally for those, like me, who loved The Armchair Economist and More Sex is Safer Sex there is also lots of economics in The Big Questions.  Highly recommended.

marginalrevtion

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/why-a-twoparty-system-can-be-ok.html

Max Kaehn, an occasional MR commentator, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote:

You think a voting system that sticks us with a two-party cartel instead of a diverse market in political representatives isn’t a major problem? Are you sure you’re an economist?

Here are a few reasons why political competition isn't the same as economic competition:

1. Economic competition lowers costs.  For the average worker, it cost a month's wages to buy a book in eighteenth century England and today it might cost well under an hour's wage.  The competitive incentive to use and introduce new technologies drove that change.  Political competition may support cost-reduction enterprises in an indirect manner, by providing good policy and spurring the private sector, but the mere ability to supply candidates and parties at lower cost is no great gain.

2. Having lots of parties means you get coalition government.  This works fine in many countries but again it is not to be confused with economic competition.  Coalition government means that say 39 percent of the electorate gets its way on many issues, while 13 percent of the electorate -- as represented by the minor partner in the coalition -- gets its way on a small number of issues.  Whatever benefits that arrangement may have, they do not especially resemble the virtues of economic competition.  

3. Many people think that greater inter-party competition, and/or more political parties, will help their favored proposals.  Usually they are wrong and they would do better to realize that their ideas simply aren't very popular or persuasive.

4. Often the U.S. system is best understood as a "no-party" system, albeit not at the current moment, not yet at least.  The bigger a party gets, often the less disciplined it will be.

5. Stronger electoral competition, in many cases, brings outcomes closer to "the median voter or whatever else is your theory of political equilibrium."  That's better than autocracy, but again there are limits on how beneficial that process can be.  It's not like economic competition where you get ongoing cost reductions in a manner which saves lives, brings fun, and enriches millions.

The bottom line: Political competition is better than autocracy, but its benefits are not well understood by a comparison with economic competition.

dictionary_wotd

http://feeds.reference.com/click.phdo?i=e0aa67fa1ec0a1f3ebf94ca8fde0c383

http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2009/11/16.html

dictionary_wotd

http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=e0aa67fa1ec0a1f3ebf94ca8fde0c383&p=4