"Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years [...] Large parts of the book could better be called Commerce: The First 5,000 Years or Exchange: The First 5,000 Years."

"In my next several blog posts I want to talk about scaling, especially about the very recent controversies surrounding claims of power-law scaling of particular phenomena [...] All this is going to require some forays into the wild and unruly land of statistics and data analysis. My goal in the next series of posts is to make sense of the following quite important papers in complex systems, which, taken together, form a kind of mini-course on scaling. Understanding ideas from these papers is essential in one’s education as a complex-systems scientist or informed “consumer” of this field."

Boosting, Foundations and Algorithms
Robert E. Schapire and Yoav Freund

"I stumbled upon these rather charming 17th Century cooking terms today."

"Most subfields of computer science have an interface layer via which applications communicate with the infrastructure, and this is key to their success (e.g., the Internet in networking, the relational model in databases, etc.). So far this interface layer has been missing in AI. First-order logic and probabilistic graphical models each have some of the necessary features, but a viable interface layer requires combining both. Markov logic is a powerful new language that accomplishes this by attaching weights to first-order formulas and treating them as templates for features of Markov random fields."

"My aim is to introduce graduate students in electrical engineering to such things as Empirical Risk Minimization, generalization bounds, model selection, complexity regularization, minimax lower bounds &c., with certain examples of applications to information theory, signal processing, and adaptive control. [...] As the class goes on, I will be posting additional notes here, but here is what I have covered so far"

""Many works that traditionalists now commonly celebrate as self-evidently “great”, literature that makes its way into Great Books programs, was not infrequently once regarded by expert judgment as derivative, weak, pointlessly transgressive, vulgar, or lowbrow popularizing. Tell me that Dickens is great, and I’ll remind you that there were once expert critics who saw him otherwise. It works as well the other direction as well: there’s a long list of works once lauded as self-evidently great which even the most florid defender of the traditional canon would likely concede are now best forgotten.""

thanks!

"ut they’re not actually not outproducing the United States of America, they’re buying less stuff. Which would be fine if when the world turned around to look at what’s happening with these savings we saw the world’s finest banking system financing highly productive investments all ’round the world. But is that actually what we see? I see German banks financing bum real estate developments in Ireland, Nevada, Spain, Florida, etc. It seems to me that people all around the world—but not least in Germany—would be better-off if German households owned more XBoxes, MacBooks, jamon iberico, and feta cheese and fewer indirect claims on mortgage-backed securities.

The issue of the questionable prudence of the savers is a real one here. If I heard more people saying with a straight face “Matt, the reason our households save so much is our banks are uniquely skilled at channeling savings into profitable investments” I’d feel much happier about the whole thing."

"But Philippon and Reshef determined that up to half of the pay premium was due to something much simpler: people in the financial sector are overpaid. “In most industries, when people are paid too much their firms go bankrupt, and they are no longer paid too much,” he told me. “The exception is when people are paid too much and their firms don’t go broke. That is the finance industry.”"

"In the final moments of Waiting for “Superman,” the children and their parents assemble in auditoriums in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, waiting nervously to see if they will win the lottery. As the camera pans the room, you see tears rolling down the cheeks of children and adults alike, all their hopes focused on a listing of numbers or names. Many people react to the scene with their own tears, sad for the children who lose. I had a different reaction. First, I thought to myself that the charter operators were cynically using children as political pawns in their own campaign to promote their cause. (Gail Collins in The New York Times had a similar reaction and wondered why they couldn’t just send the families a letter in the mail instead of subjecting them to public rejection.) Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the much-maligned American public education system, where no one has to win a lottery to gain admission."

"In this talk, I will discuss the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to analyze Debian mailing lists in order to discover political, social, and technical patterns that could be used to inform project decisions. I will concentrate on a class of techniques known as statistical topic models, which automatically infer groups of semantically-related words, known as topics, from word co-occurrence patterns in documents."

"I have a modest proposal: At 18 every young adult in the world goes through our immigration process to earn their green card, regardless of where they were born or live. We all worry about the quality of our education system - can you imagine the extra hours our kids will put in when they know they're competing against the best that China and Japan can offer? Competition is the American way - it's unfortunate that we'll end up trucking some of our teenagers across the border to Canada or Mexico, but that will be a great encouragement to the others.

I look forward to seeing this adopted as a bi-partisan measure, since the unfairness of inheriting citizenship seems to be such an important principle for so many."

"In other words, the aversion to people we have a relation to may be based in conscious awareness, not an unconscious evolutionary adaptation."

"This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit. He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream."

"My survey of around thirty prominent twentieth-century southern authors has led me to conclude, without fear of refutation, that there is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature, one easily formulated into a question to be asked of any literary text and whose answer may be taken as definitive, delimiting, and final. The test is: Is there a dead mule in it? "

"Contrarianism generally lines up with the "perversity" column in Albert Hirschman's typology "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". Here's the thing: as history progresses, things change. And societies try to adapt to those changes. Experts come up with solutions to the problems the societies face. Those solutions often entail discomfiting established interest groups. And the solutions the experts come up with almost always entail some degree of perverse counterreaction.... It can be very interesting to focus on those counterreactions; it can generate fascinating, eye-grabbing journalism. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the counterreactions aren't as big as the first-order effects of the solutions"

"This is a draft of an incomplete first-year Ph.D. econometrics textbook. This manuscript may be printed and reproduced for individual or instructional use, but may not be printed for commercial purposes."

"Yamada traces the prewar history of Japanese archery, reveals how Herrigel mistakenly came to understand it as a traditional practice, and explains why the Japanese themselves embraced his interpretation as spiritual discipline. Turning to Ryoanji, Yamada argues that this epitome of Zen in fact bears little relation to Buddhism and is best understood in relation to Chinese myth. For much of its modern history, Ryoanji was a weedy, neglected plot; only after its allegorical role in a 1949 Ozu film was it popularly linked to Zen. Westerners have had a part in redefining Ryoanji, but as in the case of archery, Yamada’s interest is primarily in how the Japanese themselves have invested this cultural site with new value through a spurious association with Zen."