Things to Read on the Morning of October 19, 2014
Must- and Shall-Reads:
- Inclusive Growth: For Once, Some Good News
- Climate Uncertainty No Excuse for Inaction
- Market economics means more than just supply and demand: Tirole won a Nobel for crucial work on market dominance
- Euro Area — “Deflation” Versus “Lowflation”
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Poker Pro Says He Didn’t Cheat in $12.4m Baccarat Haul: “Phil Ivey… 38, won the money playing a form of Baccarat called Punto Banco… using a technique known as edge sorting, at Genting’s Crockfords casino in London, according to his lawyers. Genting refused to pay up, saying the practice is unfair. A casino ‘is a cat and mouse environment, it is an adversarial environment,’ Richard Spearman, Ivey’s lawyer said in court. ‘It doesn’t mean you have to be dishonest.’ Ivey, who sued Genting last year, argues that edge sorting isn’t dishonest and he should be paid the money…. Both sides agree that Ivey was in the casino in August 2012 and that he won the money…. Edge sorting is a way a card player can gain an advantage by working out the value of a card by spotting flaws or particular patterns on the back of certain cards…. It’s agreed ‘in the present case that there are legitimate strategies that may used by skilled players which have the purpose and effect of providing the player, rather than the casino, with the advantage on particular bets,’ Spearman said in court documents…”
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#Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group: “My name is Jennifer Allaway…. I’ve been working on a new study on the importance of diversity in game content to game players, and whether or not the game industry is able to predict this desire. Game developers can be hard to reach…. By September 25th, I basically had all the data I needed. And then I got this email: ‘Hey diddle-doodle, Ms. Allaway! A heads-up: your project has been targeted for extensive “vote brigading” (possibly ranging into the tens of thousands of entries). Use that knowledge however you will. Cheers’…. I went into 8chan—the movement’s current and primary forum for coordinating their efforts—and found a discussion on a ‘secret developer survey,’ referring to my questions…. In under four hours, the developer survey jumped from around 700 responses, which had been collected over the course of a month, to over 1100 responses. The responses were not… subtle…. It appeared that less than 5 percent of the new responses had actually come from developers…. Responses like this….
I set about locking down accounts, emailing professors, contacting campus safety, and calling family. It was an exhausting process, but I considered it necessary. The attack could get out of hand…. If you’re even asking about equality or diversity in games, being shouted down in a traumatizing manner is now a mandatory step that you have to sit back and endure. But I don’t hate #Gamergate for what they’ve done to me. I’m a researcher; my goal is to analyze and to understand. And after two weeks of backtracking through the way they’ve carried out their operations, this is the conclusion I’ve reached: #Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group…”
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Mark Thoma: Economist’s View: Melinda Pitts: Changes in Labor Force Participation
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Econometrics, Open Science, and Cryptocurrency: “Mark Thoma wrote the wisest two paragraphs you will read about econometrics and empirical statistical research in general: ‘You are testing a theory you came up with, but the data are uncooperative and say you are wrong. But instead of accepting that, you tell yourself ‘My theory is right, I just haven’t found the right econometric specification yet. I need to add variables, remove variables, take a log, add an interaction, square a term, do a different correction for misspecification, try a different sample period, etc., etc., etc.’ Then, after finally digging out that one specification of the econometric model that confirms your hypothesis, you declare victory, write it up, and send it off (somehow never mentioning the intense specification mining that produced the result). Too much econometric work proceeds along these lines. Not quite this blatantly, but that is, in effect, what happens in too many cases. I think it is often best to think of econometric results as the best case the researcher could make for a particular theory rather than a true test of the model.'”
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Bootstrapping A Solar System Civilization: “Tom Kalil… notes [that] NASA is already working on printable spacecraft, automated robotic construction using regolith and self-replicating large structures. As a stepping stone to in-space manufacturing, NASA has sent the first-ever 3D printer to the International Space Station. One day, astronauts may be able to print replacement parts on long-distance missions. And building upon the success of the Mars Curiosity rover, the next rover to Mars–currently dubbed Mars 2020–will demonstrate In-Situ Resource Utilization on the Red Planet. It will convert the carbon dioxide available in Mars’ atmosphere to oxygen that could be used for fuel and air…. Launching everything we need from Earth is too expensive…. The longer term goal of what Metzger calls ‘bootstrapping a solar system civilization…. Ultimately what we need to do is to evolve a complete supply chain in space, utilizing the energy and resources of space along the way…. We need to realize we live in a solar system with literally billions of times the resources we have here on Earth and if we can get beyond the barrier of Earth’s deep gravity well then the civilization our children and grandchildren will build shall be as unimaginable to us as modern civilization once was to our ancestors…'”
Should Be Aware of:
- Know Your History: Lessons in organizing from the leftists and labor organizers of yore
- Professor Teaches Math To Students Who Hate It – Business Insider
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Some Thoughts on Turning 50:: “These days I’m convinced that the reputation grumpy old men have for being grumpy (not to mention old) is a side-effect of the way chronic low-grade pain goes with the ageing process. It’s a sad fact that once you pass your thirties you get increasingly creaky: and constant low-grade aches and twinges do bad things to your temper. It’s another sad fact that, for better or worse, most of our world leaders are middle-aged or elderly men, who should be presumed grumpy due to low-grade pain until proven otherwise…”
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Inflation derps are people from the concrete steppes: “The people from the concrete steppes see central banks print lots of money. That’s a real concrete step, and real concrete steps have real concrete consequences. Printing lots of money causes lots of inflation. And the fact that lots of inflation hasn’t happened yet simply means it’s a lagged effect…. But if printing lots of money did cause people to spend it and cause inflation, then central banks would immediately put the printing presses into reverse…. And people expect they would do this. And no individual will spend unless he expects other individuals to spend. So nobody spends. It’s a credit deadlock, created by counterfactual conditional expectations about what central banks would do if people did something that they won’t do, because of those expectations…. They cannot see the thing that is causing their predictions to fail, because that thing is not a concrete thing…. A commitment by the central bank not to do what people to expect it to do, to change those counterfactual conditional expectations, would change things. Something like an NGDP level path target. ‘Yes, we will let you spend that $1,000 we lent you at 0% interest’.”