These are my links for February 22nd through February 24th:
- Logic and Formal Semantics for Epistemology Longversion.pdf (application/pdf Object) – This essay introduces some of the formal apparatus of epistemic logic and discusses its applicability to epistemological questions. The literature on knowability and belief revision are discussed in other chapters in this volume and so they will not be treated in detail here.
- How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? – NYTimes.com – It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes.. in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.Last year, everything came apart.
- How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine – [Google] has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to, as its mission statement puts it, “organize the world’s information.” But over the past five years, a slew of companies have challenged Google’s central premise: that a single search engine, through technological wizardry and constant refinement, can satisfy any possible query. Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter’s ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings. None of these upstarts individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search — one that isn’t dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.
- PROFESSIONALS DO NOT PLAY MINIMAX: EVIDENCE FROM MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL AND THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE.pdf (application/pdf Object) – We observe more than three million pitches in baseball and 125,000 play choices for football. We find systematic deviations from minimax play in both data sets. Pitchers appear to throw too many fastballs; football teams pass less than they should. In both sports, there is negative serial correlation in play calling. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that correcting these decision making errors could be worth as many as two additional victories a year to a Major League Baseball franchise, and more than a half win per season for a professional football team.
These are my links for February 2nd through February 8th:
- Dan Ariely: Bonuses boost activity, not quality – In one [experiment] we gave subjects tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target. We promised about a third of them one day’s pay if they performed well. Another third were promised two weeks’ pay. The last third could earn a full five months’ pay. (Before you ask where you can participate in our experiments, I should tell you that we ran this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low.)What happened? The low-and medium-bonus groups performed the same. The big-bonus group performed worst of all.
These are my links for January 21st through January 28th:
- Shadow Government Statistics – Home Page – Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting
- Axiomatics and Progress in the Light of 20th Century Philosophy of Science and Mathematics.pdf (application/pdf Object) – This paper is a contribution to the question of how aspects of science have been perceived through history. In particular, I will discuss how the contribution of axiomatics to the development of science and mathematics was viewed in 20th century philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics. It will turn out that in connection with scientific methodology, in particular regarding its use in the context of discovery, axiomatics has received only very little attention. This is a rather surprising result, since axiomatizations have been employed extensively in mathematics, science, and also by the philosophers themselves.
These are my links for January 18th through January 21st:
- How Likely Is Hyperinflation? — The American, A Magazine of Ideas – But does this mean that inflation may evolve into a hyperinflation in the United States? I believe not. Though it is true that budget deficits with government expenditures covered by 40 percent or more through credits have historically led to hyperinflation, it has been stressed in Monetary Regimes and Inflation that it is not only the size of these credits but also their composition that is important. .. the U.S. deficit, by far not all of the credits borrowed by the government were financed by the Fed. According to preliminary and rough estimates, not 40 percent but "only“ about 13 percent of U.S. expenditures are presently financed this way.
- The truth about all those excess reserves | The Economist – ONE of the biggest challenges facing the Fed is widespread ignorance about how it actually operates. Inflation is falling, unemployment is 10%, yet some people think it’s running an inflationary policy because an extra $1 trillion of reserves are in the banking system.
The misperception has only grown with yesterday’s announcement that the Fed would offer “term deposits” to banks as a way of draining some of the excess reserves its emergency operations have created. The move has been widely reported as aimed at keeping banks from lending the reserves out, which would spur inflation
- Economagic: Economic Time Series Page – This page is meant to be a comprehensive site of free, easily available economic time series data useful for economic research, in particular economic forecasting. This site (set of web pages) was started in 1996 to help students in an Applied Forecasting class. The idea was to give students easy access to large amounts of data, and to be able to quickly get charts of that data. This is also useful during class, so that when we use the computer and overhead projector facility in class, we can quickly retrieve series and do manipulations in class.
At this time, there are more than 200,000 time series for which data and custom charts can be retrieved. Though the greatest utility of this site is the vast number of economic time series, and the easily modified charts of that same data, an overlooked facility of great utility is the availability of Excel files for all series.
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- Philosophical Methodologies.pdf (application/pdf Object) – Methodology is understood here to include methods, approaches, and styles, which are not always easy to separate. This article deals with all three, focusing on ones that have been influential in Australasia, or have developed there, through the efforts of thinkers who have either been born in Australasia, or trained or worked there for a significant period: conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, and naturalism
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