The trial of the year for finance nerds isn't Zimmerman, it's the SEC vs. Fabrice Tourre, the young ex-Goldman Sachs rising star who had the misfortune to have used metaphors in emails to his girlfriend that were as vivid and comprehensible as the subject matter of his financial work was dull and impenetrable.
Before the Great Crash, Goldman not only traded in mortgage-backed securities but in investment vehicles called "synthetic" securities. The securities were called "collateralized debt obligations" or CDOs, an unhelpful name that actually refers to nothing more complicated than a grab-bag of jillions of ordinary mortgages. Packaging mortgages together like this is called "securitization," and it has the advantage of converting a pile of unique, individual, hard-to-trade mortgages into something homogeneous that can be split into standardized pieces that are more easily priced and sold. As this helpful site explains, it's like turning irregular piles of meat and mystery bits into standardized link sausages.
So what's a "synthetic" CDO? It bears the same relationship to an actual CDO that fantasy football bears to actual football players. It's a bet on the performance of a list of real CDOs. The gamblers don't buy the CDOs themselves; they simply bet on whether the whole list will increase or decrease in value. Like every bet, it requires matching up two willing participants: one to bet on one result, and one to bet on the opposite.
Tourre's alleged crime (actual a civil violation, which exposes him to fines and sanctions but not jail time) was to ask a hedge-fund trader to participate in the selection of the mortgage securities on which the synthetic-CDO participants would place their bets, and then fail to disclose the trader's role in the prospectus given to potential bettors. To make matters worse, the trader then placed his own bet on the synthetic CDO--gambling that they would decrease in value--and won big time. (Goldman itself bet on an increase in value and lost.)
It's never a good idea to fail to disclose the role of anyone involved in a deal, but I'm having real difficulty with the harm-causation theory here. I think the idea is that the trader was particularly good at spotting which mortgages were most likely to fail, which gave him an unfair advantage; other bettors might have been unwilling to place their own bets--or might have insisted on betting the opposite way--if they had known of his involvement and his bearish stance. On the other hand, to use the fantasy-football analogy, this was like asking a skillful scout or industry analyst to choose fantasy league players, and then allowing him to bet that the team would end up in the cellar. Is that unfair to other bettors? Should the other bettors be told who chose the players to include in the league, and that he intended to bet that those players would blow their season? It's not as though he has any power to affect their games. It's only a question of whether he's better than most at guessing how they'll play. Perhaps to be more precise, it's a worry that he has inside knowledge of which players have been hiding an incipient knee injury or drug problem.
If you're having trouble following this scenario, you're not alone. Apparently the judge, jury, lawyers, and witnesses are confused, too. The SEC started out with a reasonably helpful analogy to a ship that takes on water and then sinks. The equity investors are in the bilges. Mezzanine investors are in steerage. First-class passengers have the nice cabins with portholes. When the water pours in, equity is submerged first, but if things get bad enough they are soon joined in their misery by mezzanine investors and even the masters of the universe sunning in their deck chairs. Eventually the whole ship plunges to Davy Jones's Locker. But then the judge, trying to be helpful, butted in with the opposite aquatic metaphor, a "waterfall." In complex financial deals, the "waterfall" or "cascade" refers to the detailed directions for the application of income streams. Favored investors get the first dollars, followed by junior debt, and equity gets whatever is left over. This, of course, is the exact reverse of the doomed-ship scenario. In the midst of this confusion, the judge reportedly asked why the prosecution's first witness had to go over the 90 minutes originally slated for his testimony, especially in view of the pole-axed expressions of the jurors.
I'm no litigation ace--much more of a back-office toiler--but even I know it's a bad idea to bore the beans out of the trier of fact. One way or another, the prosecution and the defense had better find a way to connect all this law and evidence to something the jurors can evaluate in their guts. The prosecution starts with an advantage, of course: they can just keep repeating "rich people bad." I'm guessing that the defense's best hope is for the presence of some sophisticated gamblers in the jury box.
H/t Rhymes with Cars & Girls
Fear The Gray Chili
I was amused to see the Daily Caller invoking the lair of the chili pepper. RateMyProfessors is a social media site that allows students to post comments and ratings on professors and teaching assistants at their various colleges. One of the ratings students apparently give is whether the professor is hot or not. The hot ones get red chili peppers by their ratings.
It's also worth viewing the videos at the Professors Strike Back page. Some of them are humorless, but not all.
UPDATE: "I don't like to think of myself as cruel and mean..."
It's also worth viewing the videos at the Professors Strike Back page. Some of them are humorless, but not all.
UPDATE: "I don't like to think of myself as cruel and mean..."
Get More:
www.mtvu.com
Math is harrrrrd
An amusing story about outrage based in math confusion. How can North Carolina be 39th in wealth and 12th in child poverty? Ummmmm. . . .
Perhaps even more interesting to me is the dim woman's initial question. "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?" asks the financially comfortable commentator flying home to her comfortable home and job. Oh, I don't know: the same way it's legal for you not to have given 90% of your income to those poor kids? The same reason Massachusetts and Connecticut (fourth and fifth in income and famously liberal) don't voluntarily send foreign aid to North Carolina?
It's a strange way to think about "poverty" and "legality." It's always someone else's responsibility to help. Bad, politically incorrect someone elses! What can account for them?
Perhaps even more interesting to me is the dim woman's initial question. "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?" asks the financially comfortable commentator flying home to her comfortable home and job. Oh, I don't know: the same way it's legal for you not to have given 90% of your income to those poor kids? The same reason Massachusetts and Connecticut (fourth and fifth in income and famously liberal) don't voluntarily send foreign aid to North Carolina?
It's a strange way to think about "poverty" and "legality." It's always someone else's responsibility to help. Bad, politically incorrect someone elses! What can account for them?
'Swords Against Death!', Or, 'Humanities Against the Academy!'
I don't know if they read Fritz Leiber in the English Department, but he was one of the better writers of the last century -- if you like writers who spin a good tale, have deep roots in classical and romantic material, and can build worlds and images that you will not forget. Perhaps it is better if they don't, the Wall Street Journal suggests.
Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.Why does Hector's son cry?
So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it.
The Problem With Rewarding Novelty in Scholarship
If you want to get hired or tenure, you have to get published. If you want to get published, you need to say something novel. Thus:
No art historian has ever put forward an alchemical interpretation to the representation of St George slaying the dragon...Indeed, I imagine not.
Less research is needed
In which a health blogger gets dangerously close to putting her finger on what's wrong with climate science, but pulls back and zings several sacred cows in health research instead:
On my first day in (laboratory) research, I was told that if there is a genuine and important phenomenon to be detected, it will become evident after taking no more than six readings from the instrument. If after ten readings, my supervisor warned, your data have not reached statistical significance, you should [a] ask a different question; [b] design a radically different study; or [c] change the assumptions on which your hypothesis was based.H/t Rocket Science.
The internal nose
Saturday mornings bring the Not Exactly Rocket Science linkfest. Some good ones today. A kidney researcher complained to her advisor about some bad data she was getting from a kidney gene experiment. It almost seemed as if there were scent receptors in the kidney.
A breakdown in one kind of scent receptor may explain why some people have recurrent sinus infections that don't respond to the usual surgical fix.
He kind of looked at me for a second, and he was like "Scent receptors in the kidney. That would be cool though, right?" At that point we both still thought it was one of those crazy, stupid ideas you laugh about later.It turns out that we have scent/taste receptors all over our bodies, in the kidney, in the bronchial tubes, in the sinuses, and in fact anywhere it would be helpful to switch a process off or on upon the detection of a particular molecule. It's possible that scent receptors started in our ancestors' internal organs and migrated to the external sensory organs fairly late in the evolutionary process.
A breakdown in one kind of scent receptor may explain why some people have recurrent sinus infections that don't respond to the usual surgical fix.
An Introduction
Some of you know me as the commenter Tom, and please feel free to continue calling me that. Grim invited me to post here as part of working on two projects in particular which might be of interest to the Hall.
The first is solving The Knowledge Problem: We have very short lives, and many demands on our time, both duties and desires; we must make vital decisions about how to spend those lives; we need reliable information to make good decisions. How can we sift through the oceans of conflicting information out there to find the best information for the decisions we need to make? How can we sort reliable information from un? How can we focus information to solve the riddles we face? And how can we do all this while giving life's many other claims their due as well?
The second project is gaining a fundamental understanding of Aristotle, in which Grim has generously offered to act as tutor. Why Aristotle? Over the last six or eight years I have become convinced that it is impossible to understand the history of the West without at least a basic understanding of The Philosopher's ideas. After Aristotle, the intellectual history of the West is filled with two millennia of attempts to understand, define, modify, challenge, support, extend, apply, and refute his ideas. If we compare intellectual history to a dinner party, not knowing Aristotle leaves you out of the conversation.
I look forward to being part of the crew here, and thanks for inviting me, Grim.
The first is solving The Knowledge Problem: We have very short lives, and many demands on our time, both duties and desires; we must make vital decisions about how to spend those lives; we need reliable information to make good decisions. How can we sift through the oceans of conflicting information out there to find the best information for the decisions we need to make? How can we sort reliable information from un? How can we focus information to solve the riddles we face? And how can we do all this while giving life's many other claims their due as well?
The second project is gaining a fundamental understanding of Aristotle, in which Grim has generously offered to act as tutor. Why Aristotle? Over the last six or eight years I have become convinced that it is impossible to understand the history of the West without at least a basic understanding of The Philosopher's ideas. After Aristotle, the intellectual history of the West is filled with two millennia of attempts to understand, define, modify, challenge, support, extend, apply, and refute his ideas. If we compare intellectual history to a dinner party, not knowing Aristotle leaves you out of the conversation.
I look forward to being part of the crew here, and thanks for inviting me, Grim.
Sum Ting Wong
Apparently the San Francisco local TV news anchors will read anything they see on the teleprompter.
A banana republic without the bananas
David Goldman examines politics in Egypt, noting that
There wasn’t before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt. The now-humiliated Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-inspired totalitarian party carrying a crescent in place of a swastika. If Mohamed Morsi had remained in power, he would have turned Egypt into a North Korea on the Nile, a starvation state in which the ruling party rewards the quiescent with a few more calories. . . . . The will of a people that cannot feed itself has little weight.So the cash-flush Saudis will turn Egypt into a client state, in order to keep a lid on the Shi'ites.
Free thought
It's here
Every so often in the history of cinema, a film comes along that probes man's inhumanity to man and muses on the enigmatic silence of God throughout human history. Such a film eschews easy answers while engaging the audience in sensitive portrayals of ordinary heroes. Sharknado is that film. And the trailers are here at last.
It took "Snakes on a Plane" four words to sum up the dramatic premise that Sharknado achieves in one: live sharks raining down on people. Cinemaphiles have to reach back to "Mant" ("Half man, half ant: all terror") for disciplined minimalism on this level.
It took "Snakes on a Plane" four words to sum up the dramatic premise that Sharknado achieves in one: live sharks raining down on people. Cinemaphiles have to reach back to "Mant" ("Half man, half ant: all terror") for disciplined minimalism on this level.
I have a ban proposal, too
There's got to be a way to ban this kind of idiocy. I think it involves the ballot box.
The DOE held a public meeting on Energy Conservation Standards Framework for Ceiling Fans and Ceiling Fan Light Kits in Washington D.C. on March 22, 2013, which followed its release of a 100-page Framework Document requesting feedback from members of the ceiling fan industry. The Framework Document indicates that the DOE could impose a requirement for all ceiling fans to transition from AC motors to DC motors. . . . Although DC motors are more energy efficient and use less wattage on high settings, the cost is four to five times higher compared to AC motors. However, since most people do not run their ceiling fans on a high setting the majority of the time—using either medium or low settings instead—the difference in wattage is insignificant.Interested readers may recall the War of the Currents between Thomas Edison, a DC enthusiast, and George Westinghouse, who favored AC.
The 20% Experiment
My Alma Mater, Georgia State University, is trying a novel program to try to encourage women to study philosophy. Apparently they have decided that the problem is that they don't get to read enough women:
For an introductory course, then, you can achieve this mark only by harming the students: by denying them the chance to encounter the really great questions, and the most compelling arguments, in order to fill a fifth of their time with lesser-but-importantly-female voices. Generally watering down the content of a course is popular with students, as it is easier for them, but it's harmful to them in the long run.
It would be easier to achieve this mark in higher-level courses, once the introductions are finished. There are a number of interesting women writing today, including L. A. Paul, whose work in metaphysics I totally disagree with but nevertheless respect; and Kathrin Koslicki, whose similar work is really very good, although I think she's wrong about some key questions. You could construct a very interesting course on these metaphysical questions that had even 50% female-generated readings, if it were important to you to do so; indeed, you could do a course that was wholly about contemporary female writers in metaphysics or any other sub-discipline of philosophy.
I'm not sure why you would, though, since the important thing about what they've written is whether or not they are right about it, not whether or not they are female. They're worth reading, if they are, because they have interesting arguments.
Not that they aren't also interesting as people. Koslicki is a skier, and Paul has a black belt. Interesting to be sure, but Socrates was a veteran and Kant was a hypochondriac. That's not the reason you'd include them in a course. It may make it easier for students to connect with them at some level. If the students can't finally connect with them at the particular level of intellect, it won't matter how otherwise drawn to them they may be.
I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.
That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.
Starting next year, graduate students teaching introductory-level courses in philosophy at Georgia State, who teach about half of all such sections offered, will use syllabuses that include at least 20 percent women philosophers. That's at least double the number included on most syllabuses for the course at the university. The effort is an extension of preliminary research by Eddy Nahmias, professor of philosophy, and several of his graduate students, Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, into why male and female students enroll in introductory-level courses in similar numbers but women drop out of the discipline in much greater numbers.There's a real problem with this approach, which is that an introduction course needs to focus on the most important issues in philosophy -- but women authors are not represented among the historically great philosophers. There are some notable 20th century female philosophers (I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe recently, and we've often talked about Hannah Arendt here), but the 20th century is one of the driest and least important periods in the entire discipline of philosophy (for reasons entirely not the fault of the women, who were often among the most interesting voices). Even in the 20th century, you have to stretch beyond the very top voices to include any women at all (let alone to compose a fifth of your readings from their work). The problem only increases as you move to earlier and more vibrant periods in philosophy.
For an introductory course, then, you can achieve this mark only by harming the students: by denying them the chance to encounter the really great questions, and the most compelling arguments, in order to fill a fifth of their time with lesser-but-importantly-female voices. Generally watering down the content of a course is popular with students, as it is easier for them, but it's harmful to them in the long run.
It would be easier to achieve this mark in higher-level courses, once the introductions are finished. There are a number of interesting women writing today, including L. A. Paul, whose work in metaphysics I totally disagree with but nevertheless respect; and Kathrin Koslicki, whose similar work is really very good, although I think she's wrong about some key questions. You could construct a very interesting course on these metaphysical questions that had even 50% female-generated readings, if it were important to you to do so; indeed, you could do a course that was wholly about contemporary female writers in metaphysics or any other sub-discipline of philosophy.
I'm not sure why you would, though, since the important thing about what they've written is whether or not they are right about it, not whether or not they are female. They're worth reading, if they are, because they have interesting arguments.
Not that they aren't also interesting as people. Koslicki is a skier, and Paul has a black belt. Interesting to be sure, but Socrates was a veteran and Kant was a hypochondriac. That's not the reason you'd include them in a course. It may make it easier for students to connect with them at some level. If the students can't finally connect with them at the particular level of intellect, it won't matter how otherwise drawn to them they may be.
I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.
That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.
Rules
A comment from a substitute teacher on that same Maggie's Farm post, about two approaches to rules:
I especially noticed the difference in the two middle schools in one district. One was calm and the kids were learning. The other was a madhouse and not much learning was going on. After a while I saw what was causing the difference.
One school had a principal who had about a dozen rules, aimed at letting learning happen, and they were rigorously and quickly enforced. The teachers were supported. I had a lesson plan for the day [or more] waiting at the desk with all that I'd need.
The principal was omni-present. He met the buses arriving and leaving and seem to know all 300 or so students by name. I never went more than a few minutes in the hallways without seeing him.
The other school principal had what seemed to be a million rules that were haphazardly enforced if at all. Teachers, especially subs, were left to hang on their own. I never saw the principal. Heck, I don't know whether it was male or female.
So. One place dedicated to learning with the expectations set for clearly. One place dedicated it would seem to being a place to be for a few hours and no one seemed to know why.It always seemed like a good idea to me to have no more rules than you were genuinely prepared to enforce.
The way home
Many of you may have read the description, widely circulated last week, of the howling chaos that is a class full of black kids in a failed school. Without ever saying so explicitly, the author seemed to attribute the problem to race, though maybe he really was referring to a subculture, or wasn't trying to think carefully about the difference.
Anyway, it was a depressing piece. Today at Maggie's Farm they posted another perspective on schoolchildren from an imperiled culture who were doing well in a charter school. The author also described the experience of similar kids in an Outward Bound program:
Anyway, it was a depressing piece. Today at Maggie's Farm they posted another perspective on schoolchildren from an imperiled culture who were doing well in a charter school. The author also described the experience of similar kids in an Outward Bound program:
Of course, taking 16 kids, many of whom came from troubled homes and whose lives were mostly confined to a few blocks in Brooklyn, into the woods for six weeks produced its share of drama. Outward Bound crews go through a normal process that starts with a certain formality and descends into homesickness, alienation, irritation, and conflict, before people adapt and bond and shoulder their responsibilities and really get into it, and this course was no exception. After a few days, one girl decided “this is b***s***” and set out to walk home – about 200 miles. An instructor walked with her, mile after mile, until she got tired and agreed to go back. She went on to complete the course, and cried at the graduation because she had to leave her new “family.”That's my image of a guardian angel. He won't force you to do what's best, but he'll follow you into hell and be ready to lead you back when you see your mistake.
Some kind of abuse, anyway
After both the prosecution and the defense rested in the Zimmerman trial, the prosecution popped out with its secret strategy: they asked the court to drop the aggravated assault charges and instruct the jury instead on felony murder (that is, murder committed in the process of a felony). What's the predicate felony, you ask? Child abuse, because Trayvon Martin was 17 years old.
Kafkaesque.
Kafkaesque.
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