Dark Night of the Soul

Ana Maria Pacheco has a show in Miami that ends Feb 14. Not sure the blog has any readers in Miami, but if you're there you shouldn't miss this. AMP's website is here.

From Some Exercise of Power







The Banquet

the visa solution

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution on Friedman in the NYT:

Add Thomas Friedman to Tyler, myself, Lee Ohanian and others suggesting immigration as a way to alleviate the recession:

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

Note that the multiplier on the "buy a house, get a visa" strategy would be much larger than any possible domestic multiplier since the money would come from outside the economy (and efficiency would improve as well.)

spring is just around the corner

.. and we know what that means: Continuing Education courses through
ASA!

Make your plans now to attend "Fundamental Statistics Concepts in
Presenting Data:
Principles for Constructing Better Graphics" in warm and cheerful
Alexandria, VA on Friday April 17.

More information available at
http://www.amstat.org/education/learnstat/fscpd_pcbg.cfm


(Lifted from an e-mail from Rafe Donahue. Long-time readers of the blog may remember the day I meant to go to the gym, got a 102-page handout from Rafe and sat devouring the document for the next two hours.  This is the course for which the unputdownable handout was written. Post here.  Link to handout here.)

The ASA is doing its best to exclude credit-crunched riff-raff from the course:

*Cost:                
$475 for ASA Members
$375 for Students
$615 for Nonmembers
*Registration fee includes course material and lunch  on both days


but, well, if you can get sponsorship from big pharma or your local drug dealer it looks like a good day out.

(On a separate but not unrelated subject, I've just been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.  Readers charmed by the logical incoherence and slapdash anecdotal style of The Tipping Point and Blink will not be disappointed by the new book.  (Yes, yes, I know, a reader who failed to be charmed by Mr Gladwell's previous two books had no business buying the third; the title seemed to promise more in the way of statistical substance.)  Anyway, the source of grievance is not really the existence or shortcomings of this particular book, but the non-existence of the brilliant book the Man from Tennessee could have written if given the nod.  Outliers is on sale at Gatwick, "Fundamental Statistics Concepts in Presenting Data: Principles for Constructing Better Graphics" is available on PDF at Rafe's website and to anyone with $615 burning a hole in their pocket who happens to be in the DC area on April 17. But.

Look, the question ostensibly being addressed by Mr Gladwell is not 
"How can I make lots of money selling intellectually underpowered blather to intellectually underpowered readers?"  The question being addressed is "What are the secrets of success?" Mr Gladwell's view is that talent is being squandered; many more people could achieve excellence than actually do so.  And one of the "secrets" is that success comes to be people who work hard, who persevere with difficult subjects, who come from a cultural context where hard work is valued.  Another is that cultures where the language of mathematics is simple, requiring little cognitive processing to learn and deploy, achieve strikingly better results in mathematics.  But in that case surely Outliers itself was an opportunity to push the mass of readers toward a level of excellence not on offer in the educational system, a level their culture had persuaded them was confined to those with exceptional mathematical gifts.  Edward Tufte has argued that if information design is used well it can support analysis in a way that a general audience can follow; instead of cluttering up the book with the textual equivalent of chartjunk, Gladwell could have shown readers that they had the capacity to deal with presentation and analysis of complex material.  That is, he could have done what RD does in his hand-out. Well, we are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas!)

hm

was about to write a new post, checked into the blog, discovered that on the laptop du jour the last post looked like this:

it's a book called The Poem Itself. 45 modern poets in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian with translations. There's also a companion volume, The Hebrew Poem Itself.

does what it says on the tin

The Poem Itself; 45 Modern Poets in a New Presentation, the French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian Poems, Each Rendered Literally in an Interpretative Discussion. Associate Editors: Dudley Fitts, Henri Peyre, John Frederick Nims (Hardcover)

was published in 1960 - offers poems in the original language with translation and analysis. A wonderful book. A handful of copies are available on Amazon and Abebooks.

ultimi Australi

• My writing life has been made possible by the Australian publishers who accepted my work when it was rejected in London and New York, who believed in a literature that would define Australia for Australians and represent us to the world. All my novels, including the two that went on to win the Booker prize, were first published in Australia by an Australian publisher. I am now read in 25 languages only because of an autonomous publishing market and industry. Australia was not always thus.

Early mercantile life was dominated by importers, distributors and retailers. To anyone still thinking in this colonial way, there will be nothing strange about the present proposal to eliminate territorial copyright and with it the discrete Australian market. What matters, if you are a colonial trader, is that you get the goods cheaper, and you do not weigh, not for a second, the damage to any local culture. If you are a true colonial you will not imagine your colony might even have a culture. You would assume that any indigenous books, for instance, would be inferior to those produced at "home".

Peter Carey in the Guardian, the rest here.

our lips are sealed

Evidence of how a British resident held in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was tortured, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because of serious threats the US has made against the UK, the high court ruled today.

The judges made clear they were deeply unhappy with their decision, but said they had no alternative as a result of a statement by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, that if the evidence was disclosed the US would stop sharing intelligence with Britain. That would directly threaten the UK's national security, Miliband had told the court.

the rest in the Guardian, here