Semantic Compositions

ESPN breaking news: 1/2 of all quarterbacks below average

SC occasionally likes to pick on ESPN for their laxity in the editing of any reference to scientific thinking (i.e., Bill Walton, theoretical physicist extraordinaire). This time, their NFL writer Len Pasquarelli comes under the gun for a classic tautology allowed to slip through as reporting.

In trying to explain how coaches take different approaches to how many plays to give their starting quarterbacks in the preseason, Pasquarelli commits a gorgeous piece of statistical reasoning:

Just four quarterbacks worked 100 or more snaps. Two of them, Young and the Cowboys' Tony Romo, are entering their first full seasons as starters, having opened the 2006 season as understudies. The Raiders gave Daunte Culpepper 105 snaps as they tried to determine whether to make him their starter. The only starter to post 100 or more snaps for a second consecutive preseason was Patriots veteran Tom Brady, who's about as well established in his starter's role as any quarterback in the league.

On the flip side, five quarterbacks worked fewer than 50 snaps in the preseason, and half the projected starters fell below the league overage [sic -- should be "average"] of 73.0 snaps.

A handy table of the number of plays run by each starting quarterback is provided at the end of the article. It crossed SC's mind that Mr. Pasquarelli might have meant that the average of all quarterbacks who played in the preseason was 73.0, and that half of all starters took fewer snaps than that, which would be an interesting indication that coaches were protecting starters (albeit not necessarily a statistically significant one, but hey, one step at a time). So just to be safe, your host plugged the numbers into his calculator -- twice -- and voila! 73.0 is most definitely the average of the starters. It would be a tedious, not to say difficult, task to track down the figures for all quarterbacks, but SC suspects that this didn't happen when the story was prepared the first time around.  Rather than end this post with some sort of zinger, SC has decided it's time to be an agent for change -- so he e-mailed ESPN's ombudsman, and will post any reply that he gets.

UPDATE: ESPN's Le Anne Schreiber graciously responded:

Unless math has changed since I was in school, half of any sample is below the median by definition. More or less than half could be below the mean average, depending on the range and distribution of numbers in the sample.

Of course, it has been a long time since I was in school.

Best,
Le Anne Schreiber

And she's right, of course. Which just goes to prove that it's good to remember which average you're talking about.

On the plain meaning of "three days"

Whenever your host decides to write a post with a title stating "on the plain meaning of X", it's usually safe to assume that the target is someone who managed to miss it anyway. In this case, the recipient of SC's ire is the Hewlett-Packard customer service department. Although this post is being typed on SC's just-returned laptop, he is quite unhappy with the "service" experience he was put through, and as it is a Very Bad Thing to annoy people who have blogs and enjoy sharing, HP will hopefully come to regret their behaviors.

Our saga begins in December of last year. Just two months after purchasing a new Pavilion dv9000 laptop (a then-top-of-the-line notebook) featuring HP's new "Imprint" finish (so named because any handling of it whatsoever leaves an Imprint), the plastic bezel surrounding the screen began to separate right at the point where a hole has been molded in for suckers who wish to use Kensington locks. (Yes, they deter the most casual of thieves, but not anyone who is actually putting some thought into stealing a laptop.) Since the plastic was only a bit separated, it didn't seem worth sending in for repair, as that would mean going without the computer for a week. And nobody whose job starts with "computational" wants to be caught dead without their computer.

Unfortunately, once a seam was open, the bezel continued to separate, and eventually the plastic began cracking, taking one of the hinges with it, and making the lid almost impossible to open and close. Finally, it reached a point where the internal wiring was clearly exposed, and this made for an intolerable situation -- the laptop needed to be repaired.

Like Dell, HP has outsourced their customer service number to a call center in India. SC does not fault the Indian employees for the fact that they have great difficulty doing their jobs -- the phone connection can be somewhat noisy to begin with, the differences in accents are surely as hard on them as they are on the customers, and like any call center employee, they don't know anything beyond what's in their scripts. However, the fact that blame for the low quality of the experience does not rest with the call center employees does not make for a happy customer -- it merely redirects his frustration toward the brand more generally. In this case, specific issues that SC had with the call center were: 1) an inability to determine that his 6-month-old machine was under warranty, 2) a determination without examining the laptop that the damage was due to customer negligence and should be billed to SC, just as soon as they figured out what parts were broken, and 3) an insistence that it would be necessary to wipe my hard drive and "restore the system to initial functionality" despite the completely normal operation of the laptop.

In any event, after contacting HP on May 17th, your host received a box to ship the machine back to HP on May 22nd. This was a helpful reminder never to consider again for purchase any laptop which does not come with the option of onsite service. Since the call center told SC that he would receive the machine back in "3 business days" after sending it to them, and the third day would have been Memorial Day, it seemed to be a good plan to wait until the following Tuesday to ship the package back, with the expectation of getting it back on Friday or the following Monday.

We now interrupt this post to print the relevant text of the "HP Care Pack" statement of turn-around time:

Turn-around time for this service will be three (3) HP business days for eligible geographic locations...Turn-around time is measured in elapsed days from the time the product is received during business hours at the HP-designated Repair Center...until the repaired product is shipped to the Customer...If the product is received at the HP designated Repair Center after 5:00 pm local time, the three-day turn-around time starts with the next business day.

Alas, it wasn't close. According to FedEx, HP received the laptop bright and early on Wednesday morning -- 8:38 AM. SC would have expected this to mean that the laptop should have been shipped out on Friday, as that's three days. Monday would have been a tolerable interpretation of their contract, but not a welcome one. So imagine how upset your host was to receive an e-mail confirming receipt -- and pledging that it would be sent back on Wednesday, June 6th. Ahem. Coworkers suggested that this was done in order to make SC feel that they exceeded expectations if they delivered earlier, but they set an expectation for a time which was well past their contractual deadline, and this is unacceptable. So is the fact that even their "exceeded expectation" is an unambiguous failure.

So then this morning, your host checked his e-mail (thanks to Mrs. SC for the use of her laptop while this was ongoing) and learned that the computer was scheduled for delivery a day "early" (or two days late, depending on your interpretation), meaning that he had better stay home and wait for the shipment -- and that the day was preemptively ruined. Unfortunately, shipping firms such as FedEx and UPS are firmly committed to the Heisenberg Delivery Principle, which involves a tradeoff in measurement of your position versus their delivery window -- if you go out at all, it becomes impossible to predict when they will try to deliver to your home (although it will almost certainly be while you're out), but if you stay home to make sure you get your package, they will guaranteedly arrive just minutes before the endpoint of their committed delivery window. Wanting his laptop back, your host opted to stay home, and FedEx duly held up their end of the bargain.

So now SC has his laptop back, but has lost a good week of productivity to HP, and been rewarded with much aggravation besides. Fortunately, either the service technicians in Fremont, CA, are possessed of a better attitude than the call center employees, or they were at least appropriately unnerved by the pointed note that SC packed in with the laptop, noting the totally unnecessary nature of wiping his hard drive, as it came back in possession of as many operating systems as had been loaded on it when it left. There is no way in which the eight days of SC's separation from his laptop computer can be construed as "three", though, and for that HP richly deserves a public rebuke.

(Colophon: This post composed on a recently delivered HP Pavilion dv9000 notebook.)

On the apparent common etymology of "Verizon" and "Amtrak"

Keeping up the theme of progressively dropping greater hints about the major upcoming change around here, SC would like today to direct readers' attention to three things: 1) the lexical sub-geniushood of the folks responsible for coining "Verizon", 2) the similarly sub-genius nature of the folks who brought you "Amtrak", and 3) how these two organizations conspire to afflict SC mightily.

Verizon is alleged to be a portmanteau derived from "veritas" and "horizon". Per the link (to an official corporate page), the people behind it cannot distinguish between common nouns and proper names; hence the statement in the link that "[T]he root names for Verizon are "veritas" and "horizon." This is nonsense, of course, or at least a very strained back-formation; there's no obvious connection between the company and either of those things, just as "Altria" isn't a derivative of the Latin word "altus" (except perhaps in that strange world where pseudorandom combinations of terms from astronomy and physics are inherently desirable names). The same people who tried this stunt with the Verizon coinage have more recently tried to claim that "Idearc" is: 1) a plausible word pronounced as though it stands for "Idea Arc" (and not as though a hypercorrecting New Yorker had gotten hung up on the word "idea"), and 2) the best idearc anyone could come up with for the name of a new company. Based on a 6-hour ordeal yesterday where your host's $60/month "broadband" connection entirely failed to operate, SC has finally come to appreciate that they might be telling the truth about the "horizon" part, as in "He's ready to punt his Verizon-labeled Blackberry over the horizon".

The ridiculousness of the Verizon portmanteau pales by comparison to the choice of "Amtrak", though, which is supposed to stand for "National Railroad Passenger Corporation". OK, that's not entirely fair -- it actually is a portmanteau of "American" and "track", as in "we are run by the American government" and "we like to have trains sit on a track for 4 hours at a time without moving an inch."

At this point, it should be abundantly clear that SC spent 6 hours on an Amtrak train yesterday, 4 hours of which involved total immobility due to the train breaking down, and that he was unable to do anything productive due to the wholesale failure of his Verizon-provided Internet connection. Your host apologizes for the rant, and will wrap it up by tying it in with what it is hinting at; like the genuinely brilliant mind behind Despair, Inc., says, "If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us". Amtrak and Verizon have spent a long time trying to get SC to stop bugging them.

Some SC lexicography

So where has SC been for the last week? With an assist from Webster's, here goes:

in·flu·en·za, /in-(")flü-'en-z&/, a : an acute highly contagious virus disease that is caused by any of three orthomyxoviruses (Influenzavirus A, Influenzavirus B, and Influenzavirus C) and that is characterized by sudden onset, fever, prostration, severe aches and pains, and progressive inflammation of the respiratory mucous membrance -- often used with letter A, B, or C to denote disease caused by a specific one of the three genera b : any of various human respiratory infections of undetermined cause -- not used technically
flu·shot, /flü-'shät/,a medicine given to prevent getting the flu
im·be·cile, /'im-b&-s&l/,a person who receives repeated warnings from family members and coworkers to get himself a flu shot, based on years of observation, and declines to heed both advice and experience
mo·ron, /'mor-"än/, an individual who passes up free flu shots at work

Usage: During flu season, SC demonstrated that he was both an imbecile and a moron by not getting a flu shot.

OK, these things aren't 100% effective. But you get the point. SC is feeling much better now, though, and blogging will resume shortly.

Copy that

Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily, here's a review of a book SC thinks he'll have to read. Specifically, it's by Richard Posner, who has made something of a career of being an intellectual bomb-thrower, and it sounds like it doesn't disappoint on that score:

Ever the controversialist, Posner is willing to entertain the idea that plagiarism is hardly the high crime that moralists in the media and the academy advertise it as, and he makes a good case for the notion that copying is (and always has been) a crucial element of the creative enterprise.

The reviewer proceeds to (briefly) recapitulate Posner's case, which apparently relies to some extent on the fact that even great writers have been guilty (or at least accused) of passing off other people's work as their own. Once Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne were invoked, though, SC thought he detected a whiff of Harold Bloom, and sure enough, Posner's hometown paper beat him to it. Bloom's thesis isn't that great authors plagiarize per se, with the intention of simply passing off other work as their own, but that they react to it through a process of "creative misreading", coming up with new variations on the same theme. If Judge Posner's point is that plagiarism in the Bloomian sense is a good thing, SC isn't prone to argue too much -- but on the grounds that plagiarism isn't really what we're talking about anymore. Actually, the latter review is quite good on that score, with a highly worthwhile series of what-if scenarios for the reader to consider.

In any event, without a copy of the book at hand, it would be silly to comment in more detail. This goes right to the top of the SC reading list, though.

Five things nobody was asking

Radagast tagged your host with a blogosphere meme titled "Five Things You Didn't Know About Me". While it hasn't been SC's habit to follow up on such things ([or to write much of anything in the last year -- ed.]), and Radagast did the gracious thing by disclaiming any offense if it wasn't taken up, an interesting twist suggested itself to SC almost immediately. Rather than merely passing along 5 items of random trivia about myself, how about 5 items of random trivia about myself that would specifically be amusing to people on my blogroll? They may consider themselves thereby so tagged, with of course no obligation to respond. Without further ado:

• For Neal Whitman: When Mrs. SC was a medical student, and we had been married only about 5 months (but dating for 5 years), one night when she was having a rough time of things, I asked her what I could do to cheer her up. She said, "Make me a pumpkin pie". I had never done anything of the sort in my life, and she had never asked me to do anything like that. Nevertheless, I proceeded to pull out my copy of "The Joy of Cooking", went and bought the necessary ingredients, and made the pie (including crust) completely from scratch. Without using a food processor. (Oh, how I hated using the knives to cut butter into the bowl of flour.) It was only afterward that a stunned Mrs. SC told me that she hadn't actually expected me to do anything of the sort.
• For Heidi Harley (in honor of her first post; haven't seen much about cheese since, but one can hope): When I went to Spain for a month as a high school student, I fell in love with Manchego cheese, which the host family I stayed with introduced me to. On my last day in the country, I went to a grocery store and purchased an enormous wheel of the stuff to take home. Not having correctly calculated the amount of free space in my suitcase, I had to talk a classmate into taking home some of my clothing for me.
• For The Tensor: In 7th grade, I took my first Spanish class. Because I went to a school that had been constructed on an emergency basis to hold the overflow from a rapidly-expanding junior high (which I attended for 8th grade), all of my classes were rather weak on discipline. While I actually liked my Spanish teacher a lot, times when paying attention was going to make a difference were few and far between. Therefore, I proceeded to read the entire series of Frank Herbert-penned Dune novels (the prequels not existing yet), which I checked out of the school library, while holding them under my desk during class sessions. Fortunately, I hadn't hit my critical age yet (not that I knew this at the time), and still managed to pick up Spanish fluently enough that I could understand TV newscasts by the end of the year.
• For Claire Bowern: In 1996, my family took a trip to Japan, China and Hong Kong late in the summer. I had begun to seriously consider the idea of a linguistics major after transferring from Harvey Mudd College to Claremont McKenna that summer, and had taken a copy of Akmajian et al. with me as reading on the plane trip over. When we reached Hong Kong, and spent some time shopping, it crossed my mind that a MiniDisc recorder would be a great tool for fieldwork, and so I bought one. Unfortunately, it hadn't occurred to me to consider the voltage it would run on (the AC adapter was set up for the Japanese 100 V standard), and so when I ended up taking a fieldwork course the following spring, on the Bantu language Kimeru, I did so with a conventional cassette recorder.
• For Mark Liberman: Once I had made the decision to be a linguist, I was inspired by my experience with OS/2's included VoiceType to aim for specializing in phonetics, with the goal of doing work in speech recognition. One thing from said experience that convinced me I might be able to help make improvements was the fact that I spent 4 hours trying to train my copy to understand my voice, which struck me as representing considerable room for improvement. It was running on a Pentium/75 laptop with 8 MB of RAM. When I finally got it trained, I dictated an e-mail to a number of my friends bragging about the fact that I had just dictated an e-mail to them. One of them sent back a reply guessing (correctly) that it probably took them a lot less time to reply by typing than it had for me to get the thing set up just so I could dictate a few lines. And then correct the errors that it still made by typing anyway. It took me several years to change my mind about phonetics (which wasn't even so much a matter of me changing my mind as a series of career decisions that all seemed to make sense at the time but that ended up leading me away), but I never dictated another e-mail again after getting that one.

On the question, "Where did you get that information?"

Lately SC has been venting about realtors (not a new pastime -- he does it about once a year). It occurs to him after a conversation last night that perhaps he has been thinking about things in the wrong way. Realtors rank somewhere below mobsters in your host's estimation, but this isn't a function of anything about houses -- it's really about the fact of selling things in a large, one-time transaction. It's not terribly likely that you'll use the same realtor more than twice in a given city -- once when you buy, and if you didn't hate the experience, again when you sell -- so they have to do everything in their power to try to seize hold of their commission when they have the chance. Car salesmen are the same.

This point was driven home to SC with irksome clarity courtesy of a realtor nominally representing both sides of a transaction he might engage in. Perhaps this is a bad idea, but your host's experience has so soured him on the people he's supposedly hiring to represent his side that he does not feel there is any benefit to shoveling $10-15k at someone just so they can advance their own interests at your expense. In any event, the realtor was greatly unhappy to learn that SC had independently received a title report to the property in question, and had learned that the title was held in the name of a trust. Now, the same report also revealed that the trust was at least partially owned by the purported seller, but for our purposes, they are nonetheless distinct entities. While there is a doctrine enshrined in law of the "bona fide purchaser", which would limit the ability of the seller to claim that the trust had been damaged because it didn't sell its share, there are nonetheless sound legal reasons for wishing to be sure that the chain of titles reflects a history of exchanges from grantors to grantees with no gaps. A grantor who had not been the previous grantee would create a gap, and raise many amusing questions which SC's counsel assures him he does not wish to explore.

So what was the realtor's response to learning that SC was aware of this information? Was it "I didn't know that, I had better fix the offer sheet"? Or maybe, "Oops, my mistake, the offer sheet should reflect that"? Or maybe even, "Don't worry about it, the correct titleholder will appear in the documents that go to the title insurance company prior to close of escrow"? No, it was "Where did you get that information?".

The last time somebody asked SC that, their title was "finance manager", they were employed by one of the most crooked car dealers in San Diego (SC declines to name the dealer so as not to get into a libel fight should they ever Google themselves), and they wanted to know why your host was standing in front of them with a piece of paper proving they had lied about the price of an extended warranty in order to sell him another one which was altogether less desirable (for him, not them). Needless to say, a refund was forthcoming; more tellingly, though, the guilty salesman is not only still with the agency, but has since been promoted (SC knows this because he still gets mailings from the dealership, not because he continues to patronize them).

SC is not aware of a linguistic term for utterances conveying the precise combination of fear and feigned outrage that somehow the salesman is the one who has just been crossed, but that's mostly because chutzpah is a noun, not an adjective. Actually, it's really because there doesn't need to be a single word for every single idea that one can think of, but let's set that aside for a moment. Perhaps they should be called "Claude Rains sentences" in honor of the prototypical such exclamation .

Dell could be worse

For all those readers who have followed SC's laptop woes over the last two years, this story should put a smile on your faces. While the pictures do not make the model clear, nor does the story, SC knows in his heart that it's an Inspiron 8600.

The Whitman Diet

Your host spent his lunch hour today attending Glen Whitman's talk today, titled "Against the New Paternalism: Internalities and the Economics of Self-Control". Alas, the amusing word "internalities" never made it into the actual talk, but this should not at all be a distraction from what was a highly enlightening subject, in more ways than one. Of course, in all that follows, errors of interpretation are mine alone, and should not be attributed to Prof. Whitman. Ditto for quotes, which should be regarded as paraphrases.

For those finding the word "internality" opaque, it runs like so: An economic externality occurs when Fat Albert, not being forced by anyone to buy two tickets on a plane, crushes you into half of the seat you paid for. From your perspective, it's an externally-imposed cost, hence an externality. An internality occurs when Fat Albert, reaching for the concession-supply-size box of Twinkies that he bought at Costco, fails to consider the longer-term possibility of having a heart attack as perhaps outweighing the shorter-term pleasure of the next marginal Twinkie. At least that's the theory; the intent of the lecture was to argue that policies attempting to control internalities -- such as "fat taxes" -- are bad ideas.

Prof. Whitman began with a five minute talk about dieting ("en-light-ening"? Get it? [ugh -- ed.]), which was slightly hard to believe insofar as it doesn't look at all like he needs to. Of course, given the fact that SC had never seen him before (he looks remarkably like his brother, though), and has no reference to judge by, the alternate explanation is that he simply found a method that works. But I digress.

The point of his discussion of dieting techniques was that different things turn out to work for different people, and what works for any one individual often is highly idiosyncratic. The nascent SC diet has shown promising results, but features incredibly high start-up costs and an obsessive commitment to record-keeping. Prof. Whitman disclosed his own technique (if he wants seconds, he has to wait a half-hour), as well as his brother's (which your host didn't ask for permission to repeat, so he won't, but it probably would work well for an audiophile like SC, too). None of these three things are identical, though, and that turns out to be important.

Following the diet issue was a discussion of things we now know about preferences via the school of behavioral economics. The most fascinating result from your host's perspective was the discussion of "hyperbolic preferences", the idea that the discount rates we assign to expectations of future rewards are themselves variable and time-dependent. For example, if you tell a person that they can wait 100 days and receive 10 dollars, or 101 days and receive 15 dollars, they'll pick the $15. But if you come back to them on day 100 and say you can have 10 today, or wait a day for 15, they (shockingly to SC) pick the $10. From this, SC concludes that economists should be exempt from human-subjects boards, so that they can slap their idiot test subjects for blowing this no-brainer. More seriously, though, the point is that we do not generally license people to perform such slapping, and that creating a government mechanism for performing it (considering the fat tax as a metaphorical slap to Fat Albert for Twinkie consumption) will run into hard issues, which we'll get to at the end of this post.

The other result of interest is the "peak-end" weighting of preferences. Apparently, a study involving colonoscopies found that people gven an extra period of time at the end of the procedure with the tube in their rectum (which hurts, but not as much as the peak pain level, when the tube is being moved around -- or so I'm told, never having had this procedure myself) reported less pain than people who had the tube removed immediately. SC was so disturbed at the thought this could be true, he had to find the reference as soon as he got home -- here it is. The "peak-end" idea says that we weight our experiences according to an average of the peak of pain/pleasure, and the same measurement at the end of the experience. So a lower average pain produces a better overall experience, even though objectively more pain is being inflicted on patients getting the lower average, with the same peaks.

The point of these discussions is to show that our preferences are hardly all that obvious. As Prof. Whitman put it during a Q/A period after the lecture, "rationality isn't an assumption, it's a skill". Choices that would appear not to be grounded in rationality often have more complex causes, and can turn out to be superior when unintuitive facts about our preferences get taken into account.

This brings us back to the internality problem. Any solution to the diet problem that doesn't account for the surprisingly complicated personal dynamics of every individual is going to go wrong somewhere. Prof. Whitman discussed several kinds of internal bargaining that one can conduct with oneself -- rewards for good behavior, rigorously permitted exceptions (say, only eating Twinkies on weekends), or setting up a separate bank account to limit spending on indulgences (i.e, I can eat all of them I want, but when I've eaten $200 worth of Twinkies, I'm done -- for the week). In the paper linked above, Prof. Whitman casts these agreements as being forged between two parties only you really ever have access to -- your present self, and your future self. As soon as one attempts to construct a regulatory scheme that imposes present-day costs, this interferes with the bargaining conducted between your present and future selves, and has a variety of potentially ruinous effects.

For example, one might not develop the willpower and self-control beneficial to other areas of life if the only reason you don't buy Twinkies is that they cost $20 each. Prof. Whitman allowed that it might turn out (we have no idea at this point) that willpower in one domain doesn't transfer to others, so one might be a glutton with food, but a wise investor, or even a miser in other areas. But in that case, another ill effect is that some people who already exhibit preferences in their lives that go in the direction the policy is trying to steer people will be unfairly punished. Say Uncle Scrooge never spent a dime on anything, followed all the desirable public policy prescriptions -- saved enough for retirement, exercised regularly, didn't take out an adjustable-rate interest-only loan on his house, generally didn't make himself in any way a nuisance to society -- but allowed himself one Twinkie a month. Then that Twinkie goes up to 20x its original cost. Why should Uncle Scrooge suddenly pay for Fat Albert's inability to exercise self-control?

Naturally, this has all sorts of applications outside of dieting -- we could have the same argument about any of the other areas where Uncle Scrooge looks like a model citizen. SC found at least as much value in the discussion over how to recognize personal preferences and deal with them as he did in learning about the economics of self-control. But he'll stop talking about it now, because his future self just ordered him to take a break and hit the gym.

Internalities

Tomorrow, your host's move to Los Angeles finally results in a tangible payoff. Glen Whitman, perhaps best known to linguistics bloggers as Neal Whitman's brother, but also as a coauthor of the excellent Agoraphilia blog, will be giving a lunchtime talk at the offices of Reason magazine. Because SC lives close by, he was able to score an invitation, and is looking forward to hearing Dr. Whitman's talk. A summary of his topic can be found here. SC will be sure to introduce himself, and write up the talk afterward.

Can they do nothing right?

SC recently wrote about the death of his Dell Inspiron 8600's motherboard, and the unforgivably bad service experience he had with getting it dealt with. Today, he wishes to write about the reason that he barely has a computer once again, before the power dies completely.

A month ago, your host's AC adapter overheated, and began making a beeping noise which sounded like a movie bomb timer (while ceasing to charge his computer). Unplugging it to let it cool off solved some of the problem, in that it would charge again after a few hours.

Yesterday, however, this problem became a lot worse, where the adapter would not power the computer again even after cooling down. It did eventually, but with a much longer delay. Today, it has failed completely, and as SC types, a technician is ordering him a new AC adapter. It will actually be this computer's third adapter -- the first adapter died after 15 months of service, and Dell only warrants batteries and AC adapters for 12 months (a wise move on their part).

There is absolutely no good reason to buy any Dell-branded notebook or accessory, and SC will continue to hammer away at them in this forum for the remaining 11 months of his association with the company (that's how long he's got until his extended warranty runs out on the notebook). Apologies to readers expecting better, but SC has a number of mission-critical needs, like his programming and tax returns, which are not getting met because of Dell's ultra-poor quality hardware.

A recursive investment strategy

TheStreet.com's James Altucher publishes a weekly roundup of blog postings on finance. In this week's (subscription only), he links to the blog of an anonymous hedge fund manager (this guy could never drop the mask -- his investors would fire him that day). A post of his, albeit not the one that drew Mr. Altucher's attention, features a bit of syntactic recursion that provides both a dose of humor along the lines of recursive acronyms, and also some insight into the sheep-like mentality of large-scale investment management.

The joke is about a hedge fund of fund of funds. If you're not familiar with the phenomenon being satirized, a brief backgrounder: in the late '90s, hedge fund investing became all the rage, because such managers could use all sorts of leverage, and could go both long and short, in theory enabling them to outperform traditional index and mutual funds. However, after the bursting of the bubble, some managers recognized that any one strategy could be very risky, and so developed "funds of funds", which allocated their assets among multiple hedge funds. The theory is that any given hedge fund may pursue a risky strategy that blows up badly, but diversifying among a bunch of them should reduce the damage from such.

Of course, it's no easier to tell who will make the best judgments among fund-of-fund managers, and so fund-of-fund-of-fund managers are beginning to pop up. This is not a joke -- but the anonymous blogger's attempt to ride the wave of recursion is. As he points out, once you've gone this far, it's no great conceptual difficulty to imagine layers five and six -- especially when fees accrue at each one:

So welcome to the first, exclusive fund of fund of fund of funds offering. Please note if you are an institutional investment consultant, we are not paying you a cent to attend your "seminar" or to recommend the product. The F4 sells itself. We are also working on a guaranteed F4 so that we can bury even more fees in the structure. And we have also locked up F5 and F6 patents for when the business evolves to the next level. Quintuple and sextuple fee layers are the next big thing.

It's not so much funny as sobering to realize that real people, exhibiting just the level of rigorous thought being satirized, are actually being trusted to manage billions of dollars of other people's money.

Poor kids

Arnold Zwicky's post this morning on Language Log, on his granddaughter's pluralization of "person", reminds your host of Mrs. SC's greatest fear in marrying a linguist.

In 1998, when SC was just about to graduate from Claremont McKenna College, his linguistics department invited Jeri Jaeger to give a talk, which the then-Girlfriend SC also attended. Dr. Jaeger is a professor at SUNY Buffalo, and one of her research interests at the time was speech errors made by children. Her talk was quite good, and the research continued into a book, released in 2004, called Kids' Slips. Michael Erard, perhaps the best journalistic popularizer of linguistics around (SC readers will recall that he interviewed your host, also in 2004, regarding George Lakoff's work), wrote up the book for the New York Times. The issue, however, is not so much her work, but her methods.

There are two ways for a linguist to get data out of children. One is to go to an institutional review board, get them to approve a protocol for interviewing and/or recording the tots, then advertise for parents willing to volunteer their offspring for whatever length of time is necessary. The other way is to have the children yourself. The latter was Dr. Jaeger's approach.

Needless to say, this caused the future Mrs. SC a certain amount of distress. Would your host immediately begin a line of research upon the birth of future children? Would SC follow the kids around with a microphone, day in and day out, preventing them from growing up normally? Would he spend long nights praying for the birth of triplets so he could test out hypotheses on two children, and have one as a control?

The answers are: sort of, no, and no. At the time, your host intended to get a Ph.D., but he also intended an industrial career, so it was never really the case that there would be an established SC research lab with significant study of children. But it's hard to imagine a linguist who doesn't have convictions about child language acquisition, and at least some theories that they'd spend time investigating if they have children of their own. SC's own theory is that "motherese", while being decently established as a good source for helping to acquire phonology, stunts the acquisition of syntax badly, and that he can have his kids reading newspapers by 18 months simply by forbidding people to coo around them (in favor of talking to them like adults.) Whether there is a newspaper left that he'll actually want them to be reading at that time is a difficult question.

Actually, child language acquisition is an area that SC hasn't done much reading in since 2000, with the brief exception of a psycholinguistics course in 2003, and so whenever children finally become part of a future Chez SC, it will be time for your host to sit down with the then-current literature and try to figure out how best to go about teaching his children language. There won't be any intrusive tape recordings ([because you'll have moved to all hard-drive-based equipment, you cheater? -- ed.]), but it's almost certainly the case that interesting anecdotes will find their way here.

Why I call my neighborhood Victory Mansions

Back when your host left his beloved Chez SC, he knew he wouldn't be that much of a fan of the apartment complex he was moving to, and thus dubbed the place Victory Mansions, after the decrepit apartment complex in 1984. Today, he got a reminder of why he feels that way.

There is very little parking available in the apartment complex, and so SC is often forced to park on the street. This afternoon, when your host came out to his car after a morning of nonstop teleconferences, he discovered that this had finally caught up with him -- all 4 hubcaps were stolen. No effort was made to break into the interior of the car, so it looks like the work of obnoxious teenagers rather than serious thieves.

It's not an enormous financial loss. But the police report was an exercise in frustration -- they took some information about your host and his car, then said "thanks for calling" and hung up. His insurance company was friendly, but unable to help -- after getting the replacements ordered, it turns out that the net loss is about half of SC's deductible. All in all, getting robbed stinks.

So long, and thanks for all the service calls

SC was computationally incapcitated on Friday morning by the failure of his Dell Inspiron 8600, a notebook computer of exceedingly poor quality. After having to wait until Monday afternoon to get it fixed, which happened in the middle of an office move, he is finally able to return to blogging. While he previously wrote about the machine in glowing terms, that all happened before it actually arrived at his door. It has been no end of trouble since, and were it not for a three-year warranty (with about 13 months remaining at this writing), would have ended service some time ago.

The reason SC chooses to publicly excoriate Dell, aside from the fact that this represented his second service call from them in four months, and the fourth major problem involving the machine overall, is the especially egregious nature of the failure. Quality is the result of statistically controllable processes. No manufacturing process is completely perfect, but some sort of defect testing akin to the sorts that your host is expected to comply with at work ought to be going on. And while this testing might not produce Six Sigma-type results (3.4 defects per million), it is reasonable to expect failures to not be on the order, of say, four-out-of-four.

Which would happen to correspond to the failure rate of the motherboards of everyone he knows, including himself, who owns an Inspiron 8600. Now, much like cancer clustering, where statistical anomalies sometimes really are just statistical anomalies, despite the best efforts of contingency-fee lawyers to argue otherwise, it might not be correct to assume the worst about Dell's approach to quality merely from the fact that every member of a small sample has failed in the same manner. No, to really reason through to the worst about Dell, we need to add the fact that your host was hung-up on twice by the automated phone system that is supposed to deal with call scheduling. And by the literal 28 copies of the same e-mail, each sent 2-3 minutes apart, notifying SC that the replacement parts had been shipped. And the offensive, blame-the-customer interview conducted by the service technician wherein he attempted to establish that the computer had failed as a result of being dropped, and therefore that the service was not necessarily covered by warranty.

For all these reasons, Dell is now a dirty word in the SC household, and your host will never purchase anything from the company again, nor speak positively of them in any fashion.

Can Google be export controlled?

SC was absolutely thrilled over the weekend to receive an e-mail from Thomas Lipscomb, whose actions in response to Soviet censorship of a book fair were discussed in a recent post about Google's Chinese business dealings. Mr. Lipscomb wished to direct your host to a follow-up piece he wrote for the magazine Human Events, advocating the updating of export control laws to penalize American companies that actively aid and abet tyrannies. It's a provocative idea, and we'll offer just the outline of response because the subject is so complicated.

Your host has some minor experience with export control laws, having prepared an ontology of controlled dual-use materials for an ARDA project a few years ago (in case anybody is worrying about security issues, the project was Unclassified, and also not Sensitive, so it's OK to have mentioned that). The current export control list contains sections for  NBCR (nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological) materials, computers, encryption software, sensors, lasers, and other sorts of hardware or production tools -- in other words, it's essentially the same as it was when SC worked with it 3 years ago. It doesn't really address services, where the actual products/technologies remain under the control of the developer, which is the case with search engines, web-based e-mail, and other offerings from Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft/etc. This of course only demonstrates that Mr. Lipscomb is on target when he writes:

Since those export controls were originally imposed back in smokestack America, the United States economy changed from an industrial economy to an information economy. Today more than half of America’s GDP comes from information technology and information products. Not surprisingly, the Federal Government is often the last to understand changes like this. It can be hard to see that in today’s world information technology might be more dangerous than military equipment.

Regardless of the specific merits of updating export control for dealing with some particular government's policies and behaviors, application service providers have been around for a few years already, and to still have no approach to that business model is insane. Section 730.5 of the Export Administration Regulations addresses this to the extent that it recognizes "export" can mean things other than the physical transfer of hardware or media, and therefore covers things like trying to make nuclear blast simulations a service offering rather than delivered code, but there is still no recognition of the technologies which are best suited to a service model. Filtering technologies provided as a service are functionally equivalent to denial-of-service attacks, in that they have the same outcome of blocking information from being exchanged between legitimate users. The fact that no content provider's servers are being directly vandalized by the filter does not change the outcome. Export controls would come into play with any hardware device designed to provide denial-of-service capabilities to the Chinese government; why mandated filtering should be treated differently is a matter that at least deserves scrutiny.

Mr. Lipscomb also calls for Congress to recall the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked trade status to emigration rights, and act in that spirit. The principle here strikes SC as basically sound -- a foreign policy with no actual implementation mechanisms isn't much of a policy at all -- but also hard to sell. Aside from the fact that the specific compliance mechanism provided by Jackson-Vanik is no longer available, there are material differences between the present situation and the Cold War. Whereas trade with the Soviet Union was limited, U.S. trade with China is pervasive. Whereas a specific grievance could be readily targeted beforehand -- the emigration of dissidents being restricted -- it's harder to see how restrictions on information could be dealt with. Chinese crackdowns on dissident journalists, bloggers, or other media sources, are often couched in terms of "state secrets", and while this is often plainly untrue in any sense that would be recognized in the U.S., a dialogue that consisted of "We have a right to protect our secrets! No you don't! Yes, we do!" would bog down with few results. Trying to gain popular support for restrictions on our biggest source of cheap goods is best undertaken when there is no opportunity to obfuscate the source of conflict.

There are all sorts of arguments about whether or not export control is even a good idea, the specific goals of present U.S. regulations notwithstanding, and SC won't pretend to consider them in any sort of detail here. However, as the actions of the American software industry come into increasingly sharp conflict with American foreign policy, it would be a grave mistake to simply ignore the issue. Thomas Lipscomb deserves our thanks for his efforts to keep this from happening.

Google, China, and the root of all evil

Today, Google shares have fallen some 9% after reporting earnings of $1.22 per fully diluted share -- a slight surprise to the Wall Street analyst community, which had been looking for $1.76. Of mildly cold comfort to the analyst community -- and to your host, who was net long -- was that excluding options expenses and charitable donations, the figure would have been $1.54, a mere 12.5% shortfall instead of the actual 31% that it represented.

In apparently separate news, Google came under heavy criticism last week for its decision to comply with Chinese government censorship in order to launch a local edition of their otherwise-dominant search engine. When this latter story broke, it was on the heels of news that Google had just refused to comply with a U.S. Department of Justice request for records -- sans personally-identifying data -- of pornography-related search terms. At the time, these stories were generally perceived to illustrate hypocrisy, or at least inconsistency, in Google's claims to "do no evil", a story exposed in these pages previously here and here.  Radagast wrote about it then as well, and wondered what your host might have to say about it. The earnings release does much, however, to clear up the confusion about Google's business practices.

Let's start with two observations about Google's business in general:

1) Google is a private company which provides an enormously, mind-bubblingly useful service for no cost to end users. The terms on which they provide that free service are completely up to them. So long as Google's paying customers believe that Google's management of their service provides them a better return on investment than any other online advertising medium, there is no reason for them to listen to anyone else about how to run their service. And this is how it should be so long as "anyone else" doesn't own a stake in the company, buy advertising services from them, or work for it. People who attempt to define themselves in as "stakeholders" when they are not in one of these roles lack the credibility of someone whose livelihood really does depend on the company's operation.

2) It is an utter fantasy to expect that businessmen making rational calculations about profit-maximizing behavior will voluntarily cede markets to other businessmen, especially when they know that no net gain in ethical behavior will occur as a result. Google's staying out of the Chinese market does not mean that Baidu will behave in a more honorable manner.

This brings us to the fundamental tension in Google's business practices, a tendency for management to act as though they are aware of these issues, while behaving publicly as though they are not. The leadership of the company -- inventors Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and serial technology company CEO Eric Schmidt -- is comprised of two individuals with a disturbingly immature, college-student-sloganeering view of the world, and a man who has worked hard to be as distrusted on Wall Street as he is respected within the technical environments he works in. Don't take SC's word for it, take Jim Cramer's (subscription required):

Google is one of the worst-run companies when it comes to telling its story and dealing with Wall Street. That's in part because of Eric Schmidt, who is not well-liked on Wall Street.

It is hard to be certain which of these three individuals bears the most responsibility for Google's general refusal to disclose material information except at quarterly earnings calls, but suffice it to say that Google's management team has established an arrogant attitude towards the outside public, shareholders and disinterested observers alike, whereby they will frequently make sophomoric moralistic pronouncements about their business, while providing little solid basis for estimating their ability to run it in accordance with their principles. To give just one example of the immature outlook of Messrs. Page and Brin, consider their recent purchase of a jet for the company (admittedly, funded through their private wealth, and not from corporate coffers). Rather than simply saying, "Look, executives like to one-up each other, and buying a Boeing 767 trumps all those other billionaires with their little Gulfstreams", Larry Page justifies it in terms of occasional charitable endeavors, and says of his purchase "I think that can only be good for the world." Google's leadership simply cannot perceive that some of their acts are merely morally neutral, the same as buying a newspaper, because they are so certain of the basic goodness of their intentions.

Having made these points, let's turn to a recent Editor and Publisher editorial by Thomas Lipscomb on the subject of Google's deal with the Chinese government:

Some years ago, as the Soviet Union was headed for its demise, a Moscow Book Fair was announced and publishers in the United States and throughout the world flocked to gain access to a huge potential new market. The Soviets promised an open market at the Fair to display what publishers felt were their best books most suited to the market. But as soon as the Fair opened, Soviet police moved in on publishers and confiscated books they felt might "feed agitation."

Other publishers, fearing this kind of action, had already self-censored the books they displayed or quickly removed them on the spot. Times Books, the general book publisher owned by the New York Times Company, immediately withdrew from the Fair, arguing that it was difficult to maintain First Amendment standards in the United States while conceding them elsewhere. A lively debate ensued, and the Moscow Book Fair was seriously diminished as a marketplace thereafter.

Reserved to the biographical note at the end of the piece is the fact that Mr. Lipscomb was the head of Times Books who made the decision to withdraw.

Mr. Lipscomb's position -- that sometimes, defending the conditions that make your business possible outweighs short-term profit goals -- is the crux of the current controversy. Google's behavior in China does not wholly ignore that idea -- when they provide censored searches, they indicate that censorship has occurred through a notice on the results pages provided to the user. Google's executives also recognize that as they introduce services which result in ever-greater quantities of personal data being stored on their servers, their business is dependent on assuring user confidentiality, a point made ably by John Battelle. As a result of this, they are not offering Gmail or Blogger service locally to Chinese users. These steps contrast admirably with those taken by Yahoo! and Microsoft in launching services, as SC has noted before. And even those comapnies may be regretting the totality of their knuckling under to Communist dictatorship. Just today, Microsoft has changed their own blog censorship policies in response to Western outrage over their behavior in a case involving a blogger working for the New York Times.

The problem is that Google's management is aware of their responsibility to shareholders to grow the company, aware of the problems created by censoring their search results, and yet utterly unwilling to deal with the public relations disaster that occurs by their inability to reconcile hard decisions with their public pronouncements.  Google may actually have taken the most honorable approach of any company seeking to do business in China -- without any Blogger information to turn over to the government, we won't be hearing about journalists jailed because the company compromised their privacy rights, like we did with Yahoo!. They may have taken the most principled position in the U.S. pornography case -- while SC believes the government is acting within their rights in the present circumstance, the precedent of turning over records in the absence of clear wiretapping-type laws that deal with search data is a bad one to set.

Having considered all these conflicting pressures, we can at last be clear about the true purpose of the controversies over Google's apparently inconsistent behavior in the last two weeks. Messrs. Brin, Page, and Schmidt knew well before yesterday that their earnings report would fall shockingly short of expectations, even taking into account the various charitable deductions and option expenses (the latter of which many people are inexplicably opposed to calculating corporate earnings). Therefore, they needed to demonstrate clearly to investors that they were working hard on not being left behind in the Chinese market, a fact evidenced by China and "international markets" being mentioned in ratings reiterations from stock analysts today. The simultaneous announcements of expansion into China with compromised data and an unwillingness to compromise data at home were meant to indicate that while Google is doing everything they can to grow their revenue base, they do not intend to compromise their existing sources of revenue. Pornography is a significant part of their American revenue base (although no exact figures are available, some research estimates say that Google is responsible for over half of all search referrals, and somewhere around 25 percent of all searches -- not just on Google -- are for pornogaphy; SC notes that he has not found a primary source for this latter figure, just several references to it), and so "do no evil" aside, investors can be absolutely certain that Google is moving to protect that revenue. Because Google's executives will not simply acknowledge that their business is a business first, and a charity/public defender second, these announcements come off as the products of a singularly capricious arrogance, and we are left to sift through the fine print to see that perhaps they are doing less evil than things appear at first glance.

But then SC thinks of this experiment suggested by Jonah Goldberg, contrasting image search results for "Tiananmen" from Google's U.S. and Chinese sites, and wonders if even the controls they have put in place really represent change.

At the time of publication, SC was net long Google. Under no circumstances does the information in this column represent a recommendation to buy or sell stocks. SC cannot provide investment advice or recommendations, and the preceding article shall not be construed as a solicitation for the purchase or sale of any mentioned security.

I'll never complain about Amtrak again

Some time ago, Dana Watson wrote in Linguistic Life about her relatives' miserable experiences with Amtrak, comparing them ufavorably to the Japanese bullet train system. When your host went to Italy, he was also more impressed with their trains than he was with Amtrak; they generally ran on time (hat tip: Mussolini -- if you don't get the joke, click here).

But it turns out that your host, who occasionally finds Amtrak's in-train restrooms too disgusting to use, and who earlier this month had to wait 1 1/2 hours for a train when the crew of the one he was supposed to take decided not to show up, has nothing to complain about. NOTHING AT ALL.

On the road again

SC is in Washington again, part of the ongoing tribulations that have made delivering this blog so difficult since his current project started.

While SC's customers have always been on the East Coast, he has never before worked on a project of the magnitude that the present one encompasses. And this raises an issue which should make any academic SC reader glad to have nothing to do with the business world. Since your host allowed the two-year anniversary of this site to pass without comment (it was 6 days ago), we'll address this in a way that recapitulates the history of the blog.

A typical SC post from the first few months might have started off looking at a sentence like:

"Let's have the Blackboard Marker Color Selection meeting at 9:00 a.m."

And it might have noted that there was a time expression in there which associated an event with a particular time, and that evaluating the meaning of the statement required an awareness of the speaker's context. Someone uttering that statement in Washington, D.C. would mean a timepoint that actually equated to 6 a.m. in California.

Then your host moved on to the sociolinguistic phase, where he would be more likely to focus attention on the question of whether or not there was any awareness of this fact by individual speakers.

This was followed by the lamentably overextended George Lakoff phase, where the focus would have shifted to determining whether the appropriate frame was obscene cruelty to people not living in D.C. or inadequate gratitude from Californians for ongoing employment. Or whether an inadequate understanding of the literal reality of Dilbert made the whole effort to cast SC's work in terms of frames a waste of time.

Interspersed throughout all this was SC's enthusiasm for the Wall Street Journal, and if he had only thought to save the link, he would have referenced an article he saw there several months ago regarding a proposed expansion of the trading day from its present 9:30-4 EST duration to 9-5. A New York-based mutual fund manager was quoted -- with no hint of irony -- as saying that it was too bad for West Coast people that they have to get up at 6 instead of 6:30, but that nobody would stand for having to wait until after 5 to end the trading day. That's only 5 to you, pal. Alas, your host has been unable to relocate this article despite trying all manner of searches in the Wall Street Journal website.

And then, alas, after a brief Renaissance sparked by a visit to Italy, Semantic Compositions hit the present work-induced slump. Longtime readers know that traditional SC posts came at midnight or thereabout, sometimes with additional posts during slow daytimes. Having had to adjust to a new lifestyle where your host is regularly up at 5 a.m. to catch trains and take teleconferences, this has been very difficult. But it certainly isn't SC's plan to step away from the blog without a fight, and so here's hoping that 2006 goes better than 2005.

This concludes...

...your free trial to the SC Sportswire betting service. A full-year subscription will be $500.

Truthfully, though, this is closer to the blind squirrel's lucky day with the acorn.

True story: Due to unforeseen events, your host is writing this from an Amtrak train headed to San Diego. It turns out that a Blackberry with broadband access makes you the most popular person in your train car. This resulted in SC talking to a gentleman who turned out to be a writer for Fox Sports West. He said this would be giving his producers heartburn, as they had decided to concentrate on a USC-wins-it-all package by their deadlines this evening, and hadn't prepared for what ultimately was the case. We can be sure that they were far from alone this evening.

Tribute to Texas

The Rose Bowl is seconds from getting underway, and as a USC master's holder, your host feels obliged to comment.

While alumni might normally be expected to wear cardinal-colored glasses, your host is not so partisan. Actually, since Oh Brother SC went to the school first, your host was conditioned to root against them before he joined them. Dad-in-Law SC (another graduate-degree holder from the school) is convinced that your host is just contrary to get his goat, but the list of overhyped USC players can't be ignored: Chad and Johnnie Morton, Keyshawn Johnson, R. Jay Soward, Mike Williams...none of them has been the NFL player that they were supposed to be based on college statistics.

The same could be said of many "can't miss" prospects from other schools, including Texas, but the point is that it's hard to honestly evaluate players since there are so few genuinely good college teams. Your host is convinced, however, that Texas is notably better than anyone USC has faced, including Arizona State, Fresno State, and Notre Dame, all of whom had USC on the ropes at some point.

Based on that, and the 7 1/2 point line right before gametime, your host would pick Texas to at least beat the spread, and actually expects them to win narrowly (albeit not by enough to take them to both win and cover).

Happy Day of Atonement!

Your host apologizes for the sudden dearth of postings. A business trip to McLean, VA, last week (the first of several this year), combined with far more commuting than is healthy between Los Angeles and San Diego in the last few days, has not helped. Seeing as tomorrow as Yom Kippur, there won't be any postings until that's safely past, but it provides the occasion for a post itself.

A coworker remarked to SC on Monday that he'd wish your host a happy Yom Kippur, but the occasion struck him as too solemn for that. This is not a wholly inaccurate way of looking at things, but as irony is a major component of particularly Jewish humor, it misses out on the surprising levity which the holiday can occasion. To give you some idea of what can be so funny about a day devoted to fasting, prayer and repentance, SC directs your attention to this joke, courtesy of The Big Book of Jewish Humor and Amazon's search function. In case you're not an Amazon customer, and have no account with them, the joke runs like so (with a sectarian crack deleted):

A rabbi was so compulsive a golfer that once, on Yom Kippur, he left the house early and went out for a quick nine holes by himself. An angel who happened to be looking on immediately notified his superiors that a grievous sin was being committed on Earth.

On the sixth hole, G-d caused a might wind to take the ball directly from the tee to the cup for a miraculous and dramatic hole-in-one.

The angel was horrified. "Lord", he said, "you call this a punishment?"

"Sure", answered G-d with a smile. "Who can he tell?"

19th-century baseball

Every now and then, the referral logs bring SC a welcome surprise. A post that your host wrote some time ago on the Russian game of lapta has been picked up as a reference by a site which is far, far more interesting if you want to learn about baseball's origins.

That site, 19th Century Baseball, is an absolute treasure trove. The front page alone contains the first useful short summary of cricket that SC has ever read. There are also interesting discussions of other predecessors, like "town ball" and rounders, and the evolution of the field and equipment. Can you imagine the game without overhand pitching? It was illegal in 1873. There's plenty more where that came from, and I don't want to spoil it, so go pay them a visit now.

Enunciate when you say you "blog"

Otherwise, British folks will think you're up to something considerably more disgusting.

SC thinks he has issues with the survey being described -- how many taxi drivers are likely to spend much time at computers (as opposed to reading billboards or hearing radio ads)? On the other hand, both blogging and "dogging" seem to involve at least a little tech savvy, so maybe this issue isn't really relevant.

Your host had never heard of "happy slapping" before this, either -- at least, not by that name -- so maybe he's simply not hip enough to be advertised to. Or maybe the lesson is that the advertising firm that ran the study needs to get their clients' ads to run at the beginning of happy slap videos. Or maybe it's just that somebody forgot the whole point of doing demographics research, and that you should only run ads in a given medium if you actually have something to sell to its consumers.

Down with Eli

It is by now cliche to remark on the uses of hate in George Orwell's 1984, and how by finely calibrating the scale from a daily Two Minutes Hate to the occasional Hate Week, society can be kept permanently obsessed with external ills. Somewhat less appreciated is how much...fun...it can be.

So, even though SC's Chargers are 0-2, and all sorts of things aren't going right, it's time for Hate Day as the second most evil quarterback ever drafted by the team comes to town (your host can't believe he's only written about #1 three times). The local paper has provided just the right level of anti-Eli vitriol: "Eli Manning did the NFL a disservice", "Eli decides he doesn't want to play in San Diego", "And by the way, Eli -- oh, forget it" (same article as previous link). OK, OK, more sort of slightly annoyed than really hateful, but hey, it's hard to get too worked up about anything in Southern California.

Your host has an appointment with an end-zone seat to go to now...

Before you invest...

...whack yourself over the head a few times with a good, solid hammer. It might help you avoid listening to SC so you buy into Google when it's (comparatively) cheap.

No, seriously. Courtesy of TheStreet.com's Doug Kass, here's an article from the Times of London suggesting that brain lesions are your ticket to more rational investing decisions. The original paper, published in Psychological Science, requires a subscription to access, but even if you don't have one ([that would include SC -- ed.]), you can at least see the abstract here..

Mountains of caveats apply to any discussion of the paper which is grounded only in the newspaper version of events, without recourse to the article itself. It's quite possible that the authors didn't really make many/most/any of the claims attributed to them in the Times' account. However, there are a few things we can say about the experiment nevertheless.

Rather than conduct a study involving any sort of actual portfolio management, the researchers had the subjects play a game involving "20 rounds of investment decisions", as the abstract has it. The "investing" ran like so:

The study set up a 20-round gambling game, at the start of which participants were given $20. At each round, they were asked if they wanted to risk $1 on the toss of a coin.

If they lost, they lost the coin; if they won, they received $2.50. “From a logical standpoint, the right thing to do was to invest in every round,” Mr. Shiv, an associate Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

As the rounds progressed, the “normal” participants passed, becoming cautious and concerned about conserving their winnings. Those with lesions did not, and ended the game with an average of $25.70, almost $3 more than the “normal” group.

The first and most obvious problem with this game is that it is not "investing" as SC understands the term -- it's roulette without betting on individual numbers, and with a boost in the gambler's odds, at the wholly irrational expense of the house. Baba Shiv, the professor quoted above, is absolutely right that the rational course is to take the bet every time. As long as the game isn't rigged in some way, the expected value of every "trade" is a net gain of $.75 per round (see here to get the computation of that), which you would have to be...ah, how to put this...insane not to take.

In order for this experiment to have anything to do with actual investing, the bet size would have to increase or decrease in each round to reflect your performance to that point -- seeing as you have more money to invest if you do well, and a lot less if you shorted Google on the day of its IPO and held on 'til now (full disclosure: SC has never been short Google, but the opportunity cost of not actually having bought that one clearly bugs him). This doesn't even begin to address more complicated market phenomena, like whether an investor believes a market to be trending bearishly or bullishly. Admittedly, runs of one side or the other in coin flips might be mistaken for trends by the subjects here, but it's only the gambler's fallacy. Now, it might be said that believing in market trends is just a more sophisticated version of the gambler's fallacy, but no investor is obligated to commit new money every day, nor is every investment either a 150% or 0% return. An investor seeing multiple down days in a row might average into an investment rather than commit the whole chunk of capital at once. Dollar-cost averaging can be done passively, on a schedule, too -- no actual belief has to be involved in order to commit money in stages.

Another major problem with drawing analogies between this gambling experiment and actual investing is the long-only nature of gambling. You can only put money on positive outcomes in the coin-flip experiment, which is the same as going long a stock. If I think the coin is maybe not quite so fair as I've been told, maybe I want to go short the possibility of heads, rather than gambling on tails to come up. It's true that short-selling isn't part of the typical small investor's strategy -- but it sure is employed by the "star investors" and "CEOs" that the newspaper breathlessly attributes psychopathology to. Ditto for making larger bets through margin borrowing, which is a part of far too many small investors' portfolios thanks to the moral hazard factories known as brokerage firms. (Your host firmly believes that nobody should ever be issued a margin account by default, but that's a topic for another time.)

Of course, the reasonable counter to all of these objections is that the more sophisticated the investing model they work with, the harder it is to control. And that's true -- but as things stand, this experiment doesn't do much to convince your host that just because Jim Cramer screams and throws things on the set of Mad Money, he's a psychopath. Or that just because SC's performance isn't as good as his, he's not a psychopath. Er, wait a second...

All of this is not to say that they haven't made a valuable observation about risk assessment. As the Times article also notes:

The study does not mean that it is a good thing to have lesions in emotional regions of the brain. Such patients generally make worse decisions than those with intact brains. In this experiment, risk-taking was the most advantageous behaviour, so the participants who were less fearful made the better choices.

However, in other studies, the experiment has been set up so that risky choices had lower expected values, and in these studies, normal subjects tended to perform more optimally.

It's something of a relief to find out that when risk goes up, psychopaths don't still have the edge. This actually is rather reassuring, seeing as real investments require real risks ([but does this mean that poor-performing investment managers are actually all psychos? -- ed.]). Aside from that, it's helpful to understand that normal people really are biased towards lower losses, and to try to  minimize irrational risk aversion in your own behavior.

Now, if only SC could stop being unnerved by the fact that the article features a guy named Shiv praising psychotics. (If you don't get that, click here before writing to complain.)

Yo ho, yo ho

SC doesn't have much to add to Mark Liberman's collection of speculations about where the notion that "arrr!" is a frequent utterance of pirates came from. He will, however, note that not long ago, he paid a visit to Disneyland, went on the Pirates of the Carribean ride, and was seated behind a large man who thought that the funniest thing in the world was for him to burst out with "arrrr!" every few seconds. His family kept laughing at it, which ensured that he never tired of the stunt for the duration of the ride.

Halfway through the ride, your host turned to Mrs. SC and said that at the end of the ride, he'd like to tell the would-be pirate:

You're not half as funny as you think you ARRRRRRR!

Discretion being the better part of valor ([and the guy having about 6 inches and a hundred pounds on you -- ed.]), this joke remained private.

Freedom's just another word for...censored

Your host has previously chronicled the willingness of Google to adjust search results under government pressure. But there's really no special animus towards Google on his part; the point has always been to take aim at people who blather about the importance of free speech until called upon to actually show they mean it.

Therefore, it brings him no pleasure to take note of a story on words censored by MSN in their new Chinese blog hosting site. To quote the story:

Microsoft Corp.'s new MSN China Internet venture is censoring words such as