Tenerife 1977 (playlist)

USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?

ATHEIST / USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?

One Good Paper: A Stock Market Puzzle - Businessweek

 Bloomberg Businessweek

Stocks & Bonds

One Good Paper: A Stock Market Puzzle

By Brendan Greeley on March 22, 2013

The Federal Open Market Committee is as close as America gets to a table of philosopher kings. Eight times a year, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the five voting chairs of the regional Federal Reserve banks sit in a closed room and make a decision—whether to change monetary policy. Since 1994, the committee has announced its decision at 2:15 on the afternoon of the day it meets. You might expect the FOMC’s announcement to move markets. It does. But since last year, we’ve known that markets move not after the 2:15 p.m. announcement but in the 24 hours before it. Since 1994, the value of the S&P 500 index has increased, on average, 49 basis points the day before the FOMC announcement, an order of magnitude more than on any other day. Again: before. After the announcement, returns average out to zero.
 ...
The timing of stock gains around the FOMC announcement is such an observation. Uhlig recommends the 2012 Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report that documents it: The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift.

The paper’s observation sits atop what is already a long-standing dispute among economists: Why do stocks earn higher returns than bonds? The academics trying to answer that question have at least by now divided themselves into camps. Robert Barro, for example, believes that every couple of decades something disastrous happens to equities, and that this low-probability, high-severity risk underlies all the smaller events that bounce stock prices around and explains why, over time, stocks command a higher return. (Economists call this higher return the “equity premium.”) Now, the New York Fed staff report has determined that what it calls a “staggering 80 percent” of the equity premium since 1994 was earned, yes, in the day before the FOMC announcement. No similar effect was observed for bonds.

.... One Good Paper: A Stock Market Puzzle - Businessweek

BBC - Future - Technology - Qwerty keyboards: Time for a rethink?

 

Life:Connected | 15 March 2013

 

Qwerty keyboards: Time for a rethink?

Tom Chatfield 

 

The Sensory, Elastic and Adaptive (SEA) interface responds to gestures in 3D space

Could a spongy musical instrument hold the future of computer interaction, wonders Tom Chatfield.

 

 Q-W-E-R-T-Y. Six letters that define so much of our waking lives.
If they are not there on the screen in front of you, chances are they are only a click away.
In some ways, these six letters are a triumph of design. They’re wired into our brains, replicated on keyboards, phones and tablets across the world – and have changed very little since Milwaukee port official Christopher Sholes used the layout to stop mechanical levers jamming on a 19th-Century typewriter.
In another sense, though, the over 140 years of continuity embodied in keyboards show a strange tension at work behind technology’s claims of progress and perfectibility. And it’s the same for other interfaces. The mice attached to almost every desktop system in the world still conform to the same essential design set out in the 1965 paper on “computer-aided display control” that coined the term. Even touchscreens ape established layouts and conventions.
Appropriately enough, the name for this inertia is the “qwerty phenomenon. 

 

....BBC - Future - Technology - Qwerty keyboards: Time for a rethink?

Trombone Cam!

GoPro Trombone ORIGINAL - YouTube

Rule of Law » 7 Crappy Products From the Green Movement

Seven Crappy Products From the Green Movement

In the good old days, consumers got what they wanted. Supply and demand governed product design and manufacturing, not causes or ideology. That’s why we have great American icons like the 1969 Chevy Camaro, the charcoal burning Weber grill, and DDT.

But things have changed. The Green Movement’s worship of scarcity has changed the consumer landscape for the worse. Instead of big, powerful, and most importantly, effective products, in 2012 consumers must suffer with pansy products. Sure, they are designed to save energy and make you feel good. But they just don’t work as well as the old, and usually cheaper, versions.

Here are seven crappy products we must endure, courtesy of the Green Movement.

Rule of Law » 7 Crappy Products From the Green Movement

Overweight is healthier than "normal" weight - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor

Our Absurd Fear of Fat

By PAUL CAMPOS

Published: January 2, 2013

 ACCORDING to the United States government, nearly 7 out of 10 American adults weigh too much. (In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorized 74 percent of men and 65 percent of women as either overweight or obese.)

 But a new meta-analysis of the relationship between weight and mortality risk, involving nearly three million subjects from more than a dozen countries, illustrates just how exaggerated and unscientific that claim is. 

The meta-analysis, published this week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewed data from nearly a hundred large epidemiological studies to determine the correlation between body mass and mortality risk. The results ought to stun anyone who assumes the definition of “normal” or “healthy” weight used by our public health authorities is actually supported by the medical literature.

.... Our Imaginary Weight Problem - NYTimes.com

Juvenile Court Reform in Tennessee - NYTimes.com

Editorial

Juvenile Court Reform in Tennessee

Published: December 31, 2012 

The juvenile justice system in the United States is supposed to focus on rehabilitation for young offenders. But for generations, it has largely been a purgatory, failing to protect them or give them the help and counseling they need to become law-abiding adults. Children who end up in juvenile courts often do not get due process protections like written complaints presenting the charges against them, adequate notice about legal proceedings or meaningful assistance of counsel. 

The situation has been particularly atrocious in the juvenile system that serves Memphis and the surrounding area in Shelby County, Tenn. A chilling report by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division issued after a three-year investigation found that the juvenile court — which handles more than 11,000 matters a year across a range of charges — failed to provide proper conditions of confinement, systematically violated due process, like failing to advise young offenders of their rights before they were questioned, and violated the right to equal protection of black children, who were much more likely than whites to be locked up in detention and to have their cases transferred to adult criminal court.

These conclusions are the basis for a settlement agreement announced in December between the Justice Department and the court. The agreement is intended to ensure that every child with a court matter is provided counsel (“independent, ethical and zealous advocacy”).

....
Juvenile Court Reform in Tennessee - NYTimes.com