Category: Web/Tech
Assorted links
1. "Realization utility," by me, for Money magazine.
2. Pick two.
3. The Baseline Scenario, a new web site.
4. Markets in everything: chav-free holidays?
Assorted links
1. Bottom line thinking on the stimulus, pro and con.
2. Which personality types let you cut in line?
3. Cultural treasures of New Jersey?
4. Markets in everything: clothes made out of your pet's fur.
Bill Easterly is blogging
The blog is here, and the introduction is this:
objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor,
but also praising it when it is.
I look forward to subsequent posts.
Addendum: Here is another new website of interest, SmartGlobalist.com.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. Correction on the McFadden Act.
2. Odd restrictions on the stimulus bill.
3. Ridiculous fictional weapons.
4. Putting health care policy in perspective.
5. Not good. Not good at all.
Assorted links
1. An interpretation of new and old BSG: is this for real? Or is it satire?
3. The long lags of fiscal policy.
4. Marty Lederman, torture critic, to join the Obama administration.
Power Computing
I'm in the market for a new computer since my old machine just can't grok the large datasets that I am throwing at it. I asked Paul Heaton, a very smart and productive econometrician with RAND who works with very big datasets, for his advice. He sent me the following which I thought might interest others. Your comments appreciated as well.
a desktop system that accepts more than 8 GB of RAM, and RAM is probably
the biggest factor affecting Stata performance. A 64 bit workstation or server architecture allow for more processors and more RAM, but these components usually cost 3-4 times as much as a
comparably performing desktop. If you want the absolute best performance
(i.e. more than 4 processor cores, 16 or 32 GB of RAM), you'll probably
need to go the workstation route. A good configuration will run you
$4K versus probably $1K for a top-end desktop.
2. I've use a top-end desktop configuration with a quad-core processor
and 8 GB of RAM to run things like NIBRS or value-added models using all
the students in New York City and gotten adequate performance but expandability is key.
3. If you want to run Windows, you'll need a 64-bit version. I use
Vista business which seems to work well for me. You'll need Stata to
send you a 64-bit version and a new license; converting your Stata
license from 32 to 64-bit is cheap. You'll also want to pay to upgrade
Stata to support the appropriate amount of processor cores in your new
machine (much more expensive), this boosts performance appreciably.
4. I suggest setting up your hard drives in a RAID configuration. You
buy four identical hard drives of size X GB instead of just one and a
controller card. The controller card spreads your data across two of
the drives and makes a mirror copy of those drives on the other two;
this is done transparently so from the user's perspective it is as
though you have a single drive of size 2X GB (there are other ways of
doing RAID, but these are less relevant for your situation). There are
2 major advantages to this: 1) The hard drive is often the bottleneck,
particularly when loading large datasets; by parallelizing the
operations across four drives instead of one, your datasets load and
write a lot faster. 2) Because there is a complete copy of your data
that is maintained on-the-fly, when one of your hard drives fails,
instead of losing data or being forced into an onerous restoration of
backups, you simply see an alarm alerting you to the problem. Decent RAID cards run about $200, and disk storage is cheap, so I think
this is something everyone who does serious data analysis ought to be
doing.
Assorted links
1. BSG analysis; excellent but full of spoilers. Julian Sanchez has a good prediction, also a spoiler if he is right but I've wondered the same.
2. Game theory and torture prosecution.
3. Feuchtgebiete, coming soon to a British country near you; U.S. Amazon link here, note that the text of the first link is not for a "family blog" like MR.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. Disputes over neuroscience and the meaning of brain scans.
2. Peter Leeson’s syllabus.
3. Adolf Hitler taken into state custody — in New Jersey.
4. Super Contango.
5. Summary of the stimulus bill, via Matt Yglesias.
Assorted links
1. Nine year old Indian boy beats a chess grandmaster.
2. France's most feted intellectual?
3. Where is progress in macroeconomics?
4. Steven Pearlstein: is the bailout working?
Assorted links
1. A saga of James Heckman; wow. Can anyone explain the line about "lurid fantasies"?
3. Obama dumps the jobs tax credit.
Assorted links
1. Laura Miller's pieces for Salon.com.
2. The increasing use of German words in English; is it just the financial crisis?
3. One moderately fast reader.
5. Via Jim Swofford, do avatars consume as much electricity as do Brazilians?
6. Markets in everything; the usual, etc., nothing new here.
Markets in everything, hedonic pricing edition parts I and II
Burger King recently introduced a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice that allows users to delete ten of their friends in exchange for a Whopper sandwich. Watch the app in action.
Here is much more and thanks to Alex Sheets for the pointer. It also gives you one way of implicitly valuing what Facebook is worth. For another recent exchange, get this example, courtesy of Damon Richardson:
First-time vendor Pasang Sherpa said when the
Metropolitan Museum of Art auctioned off the sales rights to two of its
corners, he decided to pay an additional $81,701 to sell his hot dogs
near its north-side entrance, the New York Post said Wednesday.
The cost increase, which represents thousands of hot dogs in
Sherpa's world, was acceptable for the vendor despite only being 100
feet away from the site's south entrance.
"That (north) side is more busy," Sherpa said of his new sales
locale at the tourism site that more than 5 million people visit each
year.
Assorted links
1. Defending Pluto as a planet
2. David Brooks on recovery; very good.
3. Acemoglu on the crisis, and summarized by Simon Johnson.
4. "Gourmand syndrome: eating passion associated with right anterior lesions"? Oddly, it’s about quality, not quantity.
5. Bruce Bartlett: what kinds of stimulus work?
6. The GMAC debacle.
7. Fiscal stimulus: survey of the skeptics.