Radio Free Europe

Well, oh my. So the Right Wingnuts are out to invent a smear of Mueller. Now, remember this: at least the Russians and Chinese have been tapping The Manchurian President's clear-text iPhone. Likely the Brits, French, and Germans at least as well. Also, this cute smear didn't come to light until after the tapping revelation. You can be sure that the tappers have tape of The Manchurian President okay-ing the gig. If not demanding it. Recall, also, the reason The Manchurian President uses this phone is that he doesn't want his calls to his cabal logged by the Damn Gummint, so he would surely do the deed on his personal device. If he did it, of course. Would the Brits be willing to share?? How about the Dutch?? Can you say, "even the GOP has to impeach"?

Thought For The Day - 19 October 2018

OK. What are the odds that the latest 'caravan' was instigated by the The Manchurian President brigade? The perfect October Surprise. The Honduras nasties get a few bucks and rid of some malcontents. The Manchurian President gets his 'issue'. 99.44%.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Just go read this piece. Calls bullshit. Just as any intelligent analyst did at the outset. Shift $1.5 trillion from the many to the few, blow up the deficit, and round up the usual suspects.

One way to think about it is from the perspective of a small-business owner. Let's say you run your own bakery. You sell bread for $4 a loaf. Today, you sold 90 loaves, for $360 in revenue. You expect that, because it's a busier day at the bakery tomorrow, you'll sell 100 loaves then, earning $400. But you"d like to sell even more than that, so you lower the price to $3 a loaf to encourage additional purchases.

Congratulations! You sell 125 loaves. Your revenue goes up, to $375. That's more than you brought in the day before. Your price cut, though, has not "paid for itself" - because you ended up bringing in less revenue than you would have otherwise.

In other words, you brought in more money than the day before. But it's less than you would have made if you hadn't cut the price.

It will be so much better for the country when SS, Medicare, and Medicaid are eliminated. Right?

Good Quant, Bad Quant

What is your estimate of the amount of quant analysis or data analysis or data science that does neither descriptive nor inferential statistics? My guess is 99.44%. Sports stats being the most irritating. They're just numbers, fur cryin out loud. Which is not to say that decisions can't be bolstered by mere numbers. It happens a lot. One recent day in the life of The Failing New York Times brought forth some good quant and some bad quant. And no statistics to be found.

First, we get a story about a cranky investor, on the heels of the tenth anniversary of Lehman bullet to the back of the head.

Mr. Rasmussen, founding partner of Verdad Capital in Boston, has written an article and two reports that make a case against investments in private equity, venture capital and private real estate, and he has piles of data to back up his argument.

If you do read the article, there's no analysis beyond stating the obvious: buy small and cheap and sell out expensive. Nice work if you can get it. And no p-values to argue about.

Second, is an article Serena's meltdown, if it were such, and whether her (and others) claim that girls are treated more harshly by officials than boys. Bad quant in this one.

Our Grey Matter as The RM [updates]

Some times I find the experts off in the weeds. Kind of like The Manchurian President does toward any area of endeavor. By now, if you're not living under a rock, you've heard of AI. Self driving cars. Individualized innterTubes adverts. And so on. Exactly what AI is, isn't clearly defined. By coincidence, a NYT crossword blogger of all folks, generated a very off topic discussion of 'what is intelligence, anyway' a few days ago.

So, today the regular NYT prints this profile. Here's where I go off the rails. Hawkins asserts that it's necessary to figure out exactly how the human brain works in order to make AI. As any discussion/argument over the issue of defining 'intelligence' tells us, humans can't even decide where accumulated knowledge ends and intelligence begins. Which is to say: AI has no need to work the same way as the human brain, only be able to solve problems correctly. Just as there are, at least, four distinct ways to store 'structured' data, there's more than one way to skin the problem solving cat.

That said, here's an intriguing quote:

As Mr. Hawkins looked at that cup, he decided that cortical columns did not just capture sensations. They captured the location of those sensations. They captured the world in three dimensions rather than two. Everything was seen in relation to what was around it.

Does three dimensional mean 3NF?? Well, not necessarily, but you get the idea.

Once again, a dude has figured out that the world isn't flat or hierarchical, it's relational. BooYah!! And it gets better:

"When the brain builds a model of the world, everything has a location relative to everything else," Mr. Hawkins said. "That is how it understands everything."

So, the moral of the story: intelligence is just a RDBMS made out of little grey cells. Now, should it be built on locking transactions, or MVCC? I can live with either.

[updates]
Well, that didn't take long. The NYT has an additional section today in the dead trees version (on-line is a bit fractured); subject being AI. Who knew? Recommended. If only because one of the interviewees has this to say:

What remains the biggest misconception about A.I.?
People confuse intelligence with consciousness; they expect A.I. to have consciousness, which is a total mistake. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems; consciousness is the ability to feel things -- pain, hate, love, pleasure.

Sound a bit familiar?

And this bit of discomfort:

International Business Machines Corp.'s Watson Health head, Deborah DiSanzo, is leaving her role, Stat News reported on Friday. The high-profile departure, which a company spokesperson confirmed to Stat, comes as the famed computer system's usefulness in health care, including in treating cancer, has been criticized as overhyped, including in reports by Stat News and The Wall Street Journal.

Oops.

God's Punishment

This just in.

Michael -- a powerful Category 4 storm -- shattered late-season records. According to Colorado State University hurricane expert Philip Klotzbach, Hurricane Michael is the strongest storm on record to make U.S. landfall in October.
...
Just two weeks ago, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, published a study using a state-of-the-art hurricane climate model. They found that rising sea surface temperatures due to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions will likely lead to a greater number of major hurricanes in the future. That is a consistent finding in most hurricane climate research.

Everybody says that's baloney. It's God's punishment for electing liberals.

I Bet You Didn't Know This

One of the most disturbing reports in quite a long time. I didn't know it. I bet you didn't either.

Native Americans did not obtain the right to vote in the United States until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed, prohibiting voter restriction based on race.