Take a look at this article from the NYT. There are hyperlinks all over it, and not just the usual ones linking to related stories at the NYT - they're links to stories and background from all over the Internet, including Bloomberg.com, the CDC, and others. I must admit I'm surprised, but this is a good thing for readers; it enhances a reader's knowledge of the full story, and allows the author to stuff digressions and sources in the links. One advantage of Web/Kindle reading over print is that the Internet allows for placement of footnotes in the actual text, as hyperlinks (you can also do this in a Microsoft Word document, but I haven't seen many people take advantage of this). David Foster Wallace would have loved it.

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I went and saw Karl Rove speak at CMC last semester; one of the things that struck me about his speech was when he described the President's daily routine. The President's time is divided into fifteen or thirty minute blocks, each allotted to a specific group, with little time in between for preparation or formality, and the President is expected to be prepared for each group, each question, and debate that might follow. He gave examples - one minute the President might be in a discussion of whether states or the federal government get the rights to sell permission to drill offshore in certain areas, and he'll need to know the background and make a decision, and the next the President could be consoling the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq, and he'll have to know their names and details. Every night, Rove said, the President gets a 200-page "briefing book," full of twenty different things that the President needs to know about, and he gets about 2 hours to read it before bed, so he'll be ready for the next day. Now my schedule isn't as full as the President's but I loved the idea and I've started to implement my own version. I mix together any and all of the following: - Reading assignments for class (or SparkNotes summaries) - Lecture notes from last class - Lecture notes from classes I took today - Magazine articles (New Yorker, Atlantic, Economist etc) - John Mauldin (a well-regarded financial writer) - Long blog posts (Becker-Posner in particular, Scott Sumner, others on occasion) - Reading from my shelf And I try to split it into chunks of less than ten minutes (any more and I start getting restless). I read this in the time after dinner and before bed. Thinking of it as a "briefing book," that will prepare me for the next day, helps me get through it, and it gives me an idea of how prepared I'm going to be for the next day. Furthermore, the mix of for-pleasure and for-class material is another way to help get through it.

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So, the San Jose Sharks just got bounced out of the playoffs in the first round, to the #8 seed Ducks, after compiling the best regular season record of any team in the NHL. I think that this poor performance was specifically a matchup issue; during six or seven games in the regular season, the Sharks and Ducks scored an equal number of goals, suggesting that while the Sharks were good against most teams, they did not enjoy that much of an advantage against this specific team. I've never really liked playoffs. I understand that they keep things interesting at the end of the season for most fans, and thus they're a necessity for ticket and TV revenue (and as Bill Simmons points out at the end of this article, the NHL needs money badly). But they diminish the importance of the regular season and undercut the accomplishments of the team that played the best over the course of the season. Furthermore, most sports don't take efforts to favor the top teams - the bracket is set at the beginning of the playoffs and never re-set. Hockey deserves plaudits; the top seeded team remaining in every round faces off against the lowest seeded team remaining in the tournament. Again, sports leagues in the US could do well to emulate their European counterparts. European leagues strike an excellent balance between rewarding the top teams and keeping things interesting for fans. The top 20 teams in England play a round robin series of 38 games, and at the end of the league season the first placed team is the champion. The league championship is the most coveted prize for every fan and every team, and comes with prize money and automatic entrance into the European Championship in the following year. There are multiple "prizes" available for teams out of the running for first place - the next three teams also make the European Championship, the next two teams after them qualify for a lesser continental tournament, and the worst three teams in the league are sent down to the lower divisions. Really, how exciting is that! If the Lions, the Knicks and the Pirates faced demotion every season, how much faster do you think the dysfunctional parts of the organization would be tossed out? Everyone has an incentive to play hard through the end, and owners have to spend money on their teams or risk relegation. Still, if you're between 14th and 8th, there's not much excitement. That's where the second great part of English soccer kicks in. The playoff atmosphere in England is created by the FA Cup, which is the second-best trophy to win. Everyone, from college teams to semi-pro to the Premiership teams, faces off in one giant bracket, sort of like the Indiana high school basketball championship. Furthermore, after every round the matchups are drawn out of a giant pot just like the lottery, so such oddities occur as the two best teams facing off in the first round, or non-league (roughly, the 100th best team and below) teams hosting teams in the Premier League. There are vagaries and more vagaries and matches are rarely uncompetitive. In sum, the European league system is vastly superior because they set up parallel trophies: one to reward the best overall team, and one to reward the winner-take-all, luck-driven playoff system. In the US, not every team makes it to the playoffs, and the best team doesn't win a trophy every time. Winning the league doesn't matter so much as getting hot at the end of the season, as the Ducks were in six games this past week.

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Robin Hanson summarizes the literature, in case you weren't convinced:

Decades of research on financial markets have shown that it is hard to find biases in market estimates. The few direct comparisons made so far have found markets to be at least as accurate as other institutions. Orange Juice futures improve on National Weather Service forecasts (Roll, 1984), horse race markets beat horse race experts (Figlewski, 1979), Oscar markets beat columnist forecasts (Pennock, Giles, & Nielsen, 2001), gas demand markets beat gas demand experts (Spencer, 2004), stock markets beat the official NASA panel at fingering the guilty company in the Challenger accident (Maloney & Mulherin, 2003), markets on economic statistics beat surveys of professional forecasters (Grkaynak & Wolfers, 2006), election markets beat national opinion polls (Berg, Nelson, & Rietz, 2001), and corporate sales markets beat official corporate forecasts (Chen & Plott, 1998)

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Torture is illegal, and unethical, but the death penalty is legal. I think if polled most people wpuld rate torture as worse, ethically speaking, than death. Why?

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If an interrogation technique is painful enough to make a person divulge information that they would not have otherwise divulged, in order to make the pain stop, it's torture. It's that simple. You can't use pain to gain a confession. There are studies of evidence showing that tortured prisoners will confess to anything and everything to avoid further pain. If you don't believe it, read 1984 again. If a technique is so soft (as "walling" supposedly is) that we can describe its effects on the prisoner as "not torture," then it probably wouldn't make anyone reveal anything. But if that assumption is correct, then why were the interrogators using the technique? The only possible argument is that the information we received from torturing prisoners prevented attacks on US, and this benefit outweighs the harm to our reputation, our flaunting of the Geneva Convention, the reciprocal pain that American POWs can expect from now on when they're captured, and the droves of Arabs who want to join terrorist groups to get back at us for torturing their fellow citizens. But we've been given no evidence that the information gained from torture foiled any specific plots. In any event, the marginal benefit from the 183rd waterboarding of a single prisoner is low. We tortured prisoners. Someone high up in the Bush administration either authorized this torture, knew about it and allowed it to proceed, or had no idea, which given this administration, is possible, but sad.

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More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas It's simple time arbitrage, and it'll work as long as your boss doesn't find out. I've wondered when students are going to start hiring overseas assistants.

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“Here’s how to know if you have the makeup to be an investor. How would you handle the following situation? Let’s say you own a Procter & Gamble in your portfolio and the stock price goes down by half. Do you like it better? If it falls in half, do you reinvest dividends? Do you take cash out of savings to buy more? If you have the confidence to do that, then you’re an investor. If you don’t, you’re not an investor, you’re a speculator, and you shouldn’t be in the stock market in the first place.”

From Jeffrey Goldberg in this month's Atlantic. Goldberg's panicking and selling at the bottom, giving the article a view of the market from a speculator's perspective. The quotes from Robert Soros are particularly telling (and remind me  of my post from last week). I'd recommend Less Antman, and fee-based planners in general, to Jeff.

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Zero growth in 2001 and 2002 and slow (under 2%) in each year of 2003-2006. H/t Calculated Risk.

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Video of the Big Dog robot we watched today in class: The way it recovers from slipping on the ice and being kicked is incredible. It's carrying a 300-pound payload on its back. Here's an early version of the same project: Can you spot the difference?

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