Moving On

I apologize for the extent to which I hijacked the site for political rantings the last couple months. But now that the election is over I think we're all in agreement about the desire to have general discussions on a variety of interesting topics, political or not.

To that end, well, I need something to do. So if you have anything I can research, or analyze, or whatever, gimme some ideas. Does the stock market do better when Congress and the White House are controlled by different parties? Do the long travel distances mean that sports teams in the West get more of a home-field advantage? I dunno, I'll take anything.

"The Post Free-Market Era"

I keep reading articles about what Obama needs to do to fix the economy that seem to cite capitalism's obituary. I'm still a strong marketeer but perhaps I'm too stuck in the theory to accept the new state of the world. As far as capitalists go I've always leaned left, but been a capitalist nonetheless.

So my real question is, is this crisis a blow to the heart of capitalism? I know "the people" are calling for regulation left and right, but is this the sort of thing that has economists going "yeah, it's time to accept that markets need more regulation to function properly" or are they saying "this certainly isn't good but keeping markets free is the best way out"?

(And referring to an earlier grammar post, I am unapologetic about omitting the two pre-quotation-mark commas as well as putting my question mark outside the quotation mark.)

This is just the beginning...

The Green Revolution!


On a more serious note, it's about time something is done about the ridiculousness of Times Square energy consumption. On election night, ABC was so proud of itself for having commandeered all of the fancy billboards and screens in Times Square. Bart aptly noted the unbelievable excess of this in regards to energy consumption. Well, at least one billboard is starting to change...hopefully this will catch on, and quickly.

Jon Stewart is totally my boyfriend, part a bajillion

Who saw his interview with Bill O'Reilly last night? It was EPIC.

I don't know how to post videos from the web, and this dumbass computer won't even load comedycentral.com's video page, but go there! Watch it! Revel!

New gameshow: Bush, Kennedy, or other!

I would really like to see a gameshow that asks contestants to listen to stories of idiocy and decide whether the stupid acts were committed by a Bush (W. Bush and Jeb leading the charge), a Kennedy (Ted, Arnold, and the various Juniors!), or a mere mortal (a la these guys). Just a thought.

P.S.- I always feel compelled to specify exactly which Bush we are talking about even though there is rarely confusion; this is simply a personal enjoyment of exactitude. That said, my fallback of 'W' has been taken by Oliver Stone. My solution: I will refer to our current president as either Walker Bush or W. Bush, assuming that not many will confuse either of those monikers with Herbert Walker Bush or H.W. Bush. I just really don't want to give Stone any more press than necessary because I can't even elevate that guy to hit or miss; having seen five of his movies I would only consider Platoon to be a good movie (the others I am thinking of are: Alexander, JFK, Any Given Sunday, and The Doors).

we're getting old

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRIS!



ps, I'm slightly disturbed by Bush's the shocker. While being a wildly inappropriate gesture for the president to make, I struggle with the smile on his face. What's he thinking? Does he know what he's doing? Does everyone else in the crowd know what they have made him do? Is he happy to have the opportunity to pose in shocker position? As I said, I am struggling with it. Stupid Arizona State, and the "fake sport" of track!

Almost Makes You Miss Him

Unfortunately they're calling this the "ASU Pitchfork" (they're the Sun Devils) but as the article aptly puts it, I think he's just doing it on purpose.

Secretary of State Clinton?

I've been saying for a while that I liked this idea a lot. I mean, who was more experience, more contacts, etc.? The only problem? I meant the other Clinton.

Hillary Clinton is apparently being thrown around as a possible secretary of state. I, for one, don't buy it. I don't see how that helps Obama govern. I don't see how that helps Hillary get done things that she wants to get done. I don't see how it helps anybody. If she gets a cabinet post I'd think it would be Health and Human Services or something like that.

I do like Bill Richardson as secretary of state. Not sure how I'd feel about John Kerry - of course, I did want him to be president once.

Car talk

I can't remember in which thread Chris asked about opinions on the possibility of a bailout for the automakers in the USA, so I decided to start a new thread.

Overall I think the bailout is necessary. Because the credit markets have dried up completely the major automakers would be unable to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy, which requires the company to continue operating during the proceedings. Without access to credit they would be forced to stop operating, which drops them into chapter 7 bankruptcy, also known as total liquidation. I would love to support the free-market argument right now, but I am not sure that the efficiency gains that would be brought about by the death of these dinosaurs of companies, these iconic names of America, would offset the negative effects of the layoffs, the further drop in (The Conference Board's index of) consumer confidence (already at its lowest level since the index was created in 1967), and the ripple effects felt by supporting industries (e.g. car sales lots).

All that said, I really wish I could see domestic car companies die because of their stupid decisions (e.g. non-military Hummers). But allowing these companies to die as the economy heads into a recession may significantly increase the likelihood that the recession becomes a depression, a risk I do not think this country should take, particularly as the 'untouchable' Eurozone declares itself to be in a recession.

Awesome NYT County Maps

I feel like this has come up here before but in case it hasn't - I can't stop looking at this map. It's like the coolest thing ever.

This is a comparison of the 2008 Obama-McCain margin with the 2004 Kerry-Bush margin by county. So blue counties got bluer (even if they're red counties) and red counties got redder (even if they're blue counties).



Arizona's mildly redder, no surprise there. I'll say this: while my initial reaction was "hey, everybody turned on the Republicans - except the racists in the south," it looks a bit more complicated. First of all, many poor and/or black people have had to move away from southern Louisiana, explaining part of the shift there. Also, Arkansas clearly has a problem, but keep in mind that it is the (original) home state of a former Obama rival (what was her name again?) and so there could quite understandably be some bitterness there. If you count out those two regions, you're left with what is closer to being Appalachia than the South. So when it comes to racism, maybe coal mines are the new cotton fields?

For comparison, here's the 2008 Obama-McCain margin against the 1992 Clinton-Bush margin: (And even more reason not to call 2008 a presidential landslide)

My 'Holy crap my life will be changed by this' moment of the week

Thanks to The Economist for informing me about how WiFi will be improved in the near future. The use of White Space frequencies between television channels may lead to "[...] unlimited access to WiFi hotspots that stretched for miles instead of a few hundred feet, provided unbroken connections even deep inside buildings, and offered broadband speeds ten times faster than today’s wimpy connections [...]"

I highly recommend you read through the end of the article because the last few paragraphs highlight Google's manipulation of the FCC to Google's own advantage. Yet another step toward Leviathan Google running the country using Internet polls, search trends (as mentioned by Carly in her post about tracking the flu), and wireless phone usage.

Don't burn tobacco; burn Jews!

Before reading this Wikipedia page I had no idea that Hitler hated anything more than minorities. It is also nice to see that not only did Hitler carry out one of the worst genocides in history, but he managed to turn smoking into a taboo based on discriminatory views on women, using the argument that "Women who smoked were considered to be vulnerable to premature aging and loss of physical attractiveness; they were viewed as unsuitable to be wives and mothers in a German family." I hate it when evil people get some things right (the non-smoking thing, not the sexism thing).

Hitler was evil, but had this one good campaign (I know that one could argue that the reconstruction of a German identity was a good thing, but for the sake of a comedic argument let's assume this was his only good campaign). Who best epitomizes the reverse of this? That is, which good person in a very public position has openly endorsed, supported, and/or led a campaign based on ignorant hatred? I am struggling to come up with a decent example of the type of person about which I am thinking. Any thoughts?

What's it like to become president?

I know this is what would be going through my head.

AK-Senate

In case you hadn't heard, 60,000 ballots later Mark Begich now has a slight 814 vote lead over Uncle Ted Stevens in Alaska. There still remain many ballots to be counted, but Intrade contracts have gone up to about 95 for the Dems to take the seat.

That would be 58 on the books, with MN and GA remaining.

Talk about a bad year for Republicans...

Losing the presidency sucks, but it happens fairly regularly for each major party; losing ground in the House and Senate also sucks, but also has precedent and should not be too painful. The losses that hurt the most (in terms of confidence and mood, not political influence) are the ones like this, where a "teenybopper" takes an elected position from your party.

Post-Election Analysis: House Edition

So how did things go in the House? As of right now we have 255 Dems and 174 Republicans with 6 races undecided. I predicted (split the tossups) 258-177, so right now I'm not looking too bad.

Now, I didn't really stake much on the House races because there just wasn't much information available. I did the best I could to put predictions together based on information from Wikipedia, polls, CQ politics, etc. Interestingly, of the races still undecided, all of them were classified as "Safe" or "Strong" as opposed to "Weak" or "Tossup".

I probably could have put together a better graph, but here we can see that I predicted 253 seats to go to Dems. 245 went to Dems, 4 to Reps, and 4 undecideds. I predicted 172 seats to Republicans. 166 went to Reps, 4 went to Dems, and 2 undecideds. Dems won 6 of the 10 tossups.

There are six remaining races. Ethan Berkowitz will gain on Don Young in AK, but unlike the senate race, the Republican here may have too large of a lead to overcome. Bill "Cold Hard Cash" Jefferson is in a tossup in LA-02. LA-04 is also a tossup. CA-04 features a race that was tight all year, while OH-15 and VA-05 are tossups where every single poll was lead by the same candidate, a Democrat and Republican respectively.

That's right

NYU Medical Center receives $200 million gift.

Working here, I could share many, many details about this particular announcement. I could also make many suggestions about what that money should fund, as opposed to what it will fund. Actually, that is part of my job...

Some Preliminary Analysis

Unfortunately there is still not enough data to do the analysis I'd like to do - I mean, we've still got one state and two senate races that are too close to call (Georgia's senate race is not over because of the upcoming runoff - the first election, however, undoubtedly was won by Chambliss).

Here's what I know so far. My best projection was Obama 53.1 to McCain 45.9. This was done by a straight-line projection from their polling average, which means that I allocated more of the undecideds to Obama than McCain; I guessed McCain would edge Obama on undecideds but did not take the time to adjust the model. Nonetheless, with 126M votes recorded, the totals thus far of Obama 52.7 McCain 46.0 are not very far from my predictions.

One question of interest is how much of the error in my predictions was tied to how much polling was done in a state. So I did a simple (but nonlinear) regression of Absolute Error against Polling Strength (the sum of each poll's weight, which comes from its age and the reliability of its pollster).



The results fit pretty tightly. I'll try to keep this simple for the non-statistical folks.

Polling Strength (PS) ranged from 0.16 in DC, HI, and MD to 12.95 in MO, with a median of 2.0 and a mean of 3.16. (So Missouri is the farthest blue dot to the right)

Absolute Error (AE) ranged from 0.2% in NH to 22.5% in HI with a median of 2.25% and a mean of 3.8%. (So Hawaii is the highest blue dot from the bottom)

The regression equation is: AE = 4.65 - 1.66*ln(PS)
So MO's expected error is 0.4% and DC's is 7.7%

The p-value on this result is 0.0005. For the non-stat crowd, statisticians never say they've proven anything. What they do say however, is that this result is so extreme you would only see it 1 in 2,000 times by chance. 1 in 20 is generally the rule for significance, so this is a highly significant result. Finally r^2 is 0.25, meaning one quarter of the variability in the model's error is attributable solely to how much polling was done.

*************************

Wow, I really made that more boring than I thought I could.

What is most striking to me is that graph, where I think the line fits pretty well. The takeaway from this is that when people say polls are useless, this is meant as evidence that that's not true, provided you have a good set of polls and not just one or two. Hawaii, for example, had very little polling and the last poll conducted there was way off the mark. My prediction error was 22.5% including it and 4.4% excluding it. In states with more polls this sort of problem could not have arisen.

I'll have data that's actually interesting once more data comes in.

Pick your own administration

Over at NYT

Update: Eh, it's not as cool as I thought it would be.

google, saving the world

I was very impressed with Google's developments in epidemiological tracking systems, given that people I talk to on a daily basis are frustrated with the difficulties in disseminating crucial and timely information. Google is ahead of the game- possibly 10 days ahead of the CDC! (That is an unbelievable number. Way to go, Google.)

I highly recommend checking out some of their other projects at google.org.

Obama the Artist

Maybe this just goes to show how much of an Obama maniac I am, but I actually really like this doodle by the president-elect. Here's the story.



Left to right: Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Ted Kennedy

What to do about the Big 3

Well this is an active morning at the message board. So here's my question: what should we do with GM, Ford, and Chrysler?

I don't want to poison the well or whatever the phrase is, so I'll hold off a bit before commenting.

Heads Up

In case you hadn't heard, apparently Jamie Gorelick is on the shortlist for Attorney General, but there is no shortage of controversy around her. Just keepin' the people informed.

My Plea to President Obama

Mr. President-Elect,

We are clearly in difficult times. This is no secret. What is of note is the number of problems we face whose solutions are clear but unpopular. Now may not be the time to make tax cuts more progressive. Defense spending must be slashed (or shifted to defense). Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security all pose huge problems into the future.

I don't feel like there would be major disagreement on how to handle these problems if you got a bunch of big-name economists together and had them craft the ideal solutions. What such solutions would be, however, is wildly unpopular.

But you have a unique opportunity. You have a decisive majority in Congress and could still reach 60 seats in the Senate. And you're young. Like, super young.

So do what we need done. Do what's not popular. Solve our crises. The worst case scenario is that you lose the election in 2012. But that's cool. Like I've said before, you could go chill in the Senate for 20 more years, and run in 2032 still younger than John McCain is now. Even if it costs you the next election, do what we need done.

Unless Sarah Palin wins the nomination.

"The IQ level of this group is not impressive"

A hilarious line from an otherwise sad story.

President Who?

I think it is absolutely remarkable how much we are hearing about President-Elect Obama's plan to fix the economy, or what he is saying about the economy today, or who is economic advisors are. There is an across-the-board concession that there is nothing President Bush can or will do to solve this that I would have never predicted. I assumed we'd hear little about him as the campaign heated up, but even now that it's over people don't give a hoot what the guy's up to. It even seems like Republicans wish Obama could just take over tomorrow. Heck, it kind of even seems like President Bush wishes he could leave. Everything he says just rings of "ya know, I'm outta here in two weeks anyway."

As an aside, when I look at him these days, for some reason I always get this feeling in my gut where I feel a little sorry for him. Of course, when I look back at all the crap he's pulled I'm snapped back to life, but it just seems like deep down he's got some sort of sad puppy look about him. Am I crazy? Anybody else getting this?

TroopTube?

I had no idea the Department of Defense put restrictions on their international servers, though I suppose it makes sense, especially with their reasoning of bandwidth issues. And now they've made up their own video site...TroopTube. And it may actually be technologically advancing:

"But the startup's real forte is making sure searches on the site turn up the best video results. Delve's system turns a video's sound into a text transcript. It pares unimportant words like "this" and "that," then compares what's left against a massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages.
The result: Even if speech recognition software trips on the one word someone is searching for, there's a good chance Delve can still deliver relevant results."

...I'm a federal employee, paid by the DoD...and I access youtube on my computer! Don't tell anyone

"Renaissance, this is Renegade"

" ... it's time for a meeting in the Lincoln bedroom."

Nate Silver = Doogie Howser (but with math)?

"By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own."

Daa-yum. Go Nate. Not so much Keith.

Finding Fame With A Prescient call for Obama
by Stephanie Clifford

to me, "Generation O" sounds vaguely dirty...

There's a lot of sweeping statements in here about "young people today" ("they love checklists" was pretty spot-on for me) and general feel-goodery about Obama, but...honestly, it made me feel good. Read it, pat yourself on the back, and enjoy what little of the honeymoon period we've got left.

Generation O Gets Its Hopes Up
by Damien Cave

Oh yeah, and then there's this: http://change.gov/, which is referenced in the article. Haven't had much time to check it out yet myself, but I plan to, and I'm interested in your reactions.

requisite weekly NYTimes Magazine article link

This one's pretty long a little wonky (although what other type do I post, really?), but really fascinating in terms of checks & balances and executive power issues in the Bush era.

Also, if you're feeling a little too hopeful lately and are looking for some comforting, vilifying reminders of why to hate GWB a little more, this is your ticket.

After the Imperial Presidency
by Jonathan Mahler

Franken's chances

I really enjoyed this post on FiveThirtyEight. I know Chris checks every post on that site, but how about everyone else? Is it pointless or helpful to highlight particularly good posts from there?