prior probability

Check out this short paper on “Variables and parameters” by Douglas Altman and J. Martin Bland, who identify at least three different meanings of the statistical term “parameter” and attempt to distinguish parameters from variables as follows (note: the introductory labels in bold are mine):

1. Parameters as statistical quantities: “… parameters [unlike variables] do not relate to actual measurements or attributes but to quantities defining a theoretical model,” such as the mean and standard deviation of the data pictured in the figure pictured below.
2. Parameters as slope-intercepts: “Another use of the word parameter relates to its original mathematical meaning as the value(s) defining one of a family of curves,” i.e. the slope and intercept of a line or curve.
3. Parameters as variables(!): “In some contexts parameters are values that can be altered to see what happens to the performance of some system.” (Wait, isn’t this what a “variable” is?)

So, which is it? In the alternative, is the definition of the term parameter provided by Wikipedia (see here) even less helpful?

Following up on my Garrincha post, another Cuban artist whose work was featured during the Thirteenth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies last week was Manuel Almenares Estrada, a photographer who lives and works in Havana. (Here is a short bio.) Via Instagram, pictured below are some of his “street scenes” of daily life in Centro Habana — note too the spatial arrangement of the street scenes on his Instagram page:

It’s time to wrap up my series on “Coase and the Constitution“, which I had put on hold last week to attend to other matters. The top two citations to my work appear on the pages of the Columbia Law Review. Erin Ryan, a law professor at Florida State, shouts me out twice in his law review article “Negotiating Federalism” (Ryan, 2015, pp. 10 & 21), along with a number of other scholars who have contributed to the literature on federalism — Heather Gerken, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, Abbe Gluck, Cristina Rodríguez, Samuel Bagenstos, Bridget Fahey, Ari Holztblatt, Abigail Moncrieff, Jim Rossi, Adrian Vermeule, Mark Rosen, Curtis Bradley, and Trevor Morrison — while Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago (where Coase himself used to teach!), simply dismisses my proposed federalism market as “implausible” in his article on “The Negotiated Structural Constitution” (Huq, 2014, pp. 1598-1599, n.10).

Alas, something is amiss. If the sundry legal scholars referred to above “agree that institutional bargaining is inevitable in the absence of clear constitutional entitlements” and “that structural bargaining takes place among the major institutions of governance”, to quote Professor Ryan (2015, p. 24), then why has my federalism market idea either not been taken seriously or been rejected out of hand? Although legal scholars’ blatant hostility toward explicit markets is to be expected — after all, as Coase himself often noted, law professors generally love to solve the world’s problems with complex, top-down administrative solutions — what is less forgivable is the utter lack of creativity in the domain of constitutional law.

Ukraine for Cuba? Why not? I’m just thinking out loud here, but if the Russians were to launch an invasion of Ukraine (even a “minor” one), then the United States should invoke the Monroe Doctrine (look it up!) and invade Cuba. #LiberateCuba #TitForTat

During the Thirteenth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at FIU this past week, I discovered the work of Garrincha, which is the pen name of Gustavo Rodriguez, a Cuban-born artist who now resides in the USA. Both of his cartoons pictured below were published on 13 July 2021, two days after the unprecedented July 11 populist revolt in Cuba, which was brutally repressed by the Cuban military. The cartoon to the left refers to the 37 men, women, and children who drowned at sea when their vessel — the tugboat “13 de marzo” — was deliberately fired upon and destroyed by the Cuban Coast Guard on 13 July 1994, a crime that will live infamy. In the cartoon to the right, a child asks his mother what is going on outside. Her reply: “History, my son.”

where c is the universal constant for the speed of light.

In words, the speed of light traveling through a vacuum is about 186,282 miles per second, or exactly 299,792,458 meters per second (hat tip: @pickover).

Via Kottke: “artist and type designer Marie Boulanger selected 26 postage stamps from around the world with letters on them (C for Cuba, F for France, K for Kenya, etc.) and 10 stamps with the numerals 0-9 on them.” Nine of her postage stamps are pictured below. Check out her Instagram here.

Check out this collage of reward offers and then try to guess which of them are legally enforceable.