This simple model might be wrong, but is it useful? (Via Paul Krugman.)
Creative Commons
Blogs I Follow
Model of North American politics (2 x 2 matrix edition)
This simple model might be wrong, but is it useful? “In chess. First move. E4 or D4. Which is better?”
This is one of the quirky questions the hyper-productive blogger and cultural economist Tyler Cowen posed to Peter Thiel recently. Here is Thiel’s reply (the aside in brackets was added by us):
THIEL: It’s probably the case that D4 is marginally better at this point, because it looks like there are certain defenses to E4 that are very hard to break, like the Berlin defense. But I still always play E4. It’s what I’ve gotten used to.
COWEN: Because it’s the attacking move, right?
THIEL: It’s the attacking move, and if you’re short of world champion level [i.e. if you have nothing to lose!], I always enjoy increasing the risk involved and volatility in the game.
First move … D4 or E4?
Copyright infringement?
J’s on your feet? Via Darren Rovell: A photographer by the name of Jacobus Rentmeester is suing Nike for copyright infringement (you can read more about this case here), alleging that his picture of Michael Jordan (left) was changed slightly by Nike (right) to become Nike’s famous Jumpman logo:
The test for copyright infringement is “substantial similarity” … So your guess is as good as ours!
Optimal video length for student engagement is six minutes …
According to this report by Philip Guo, Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin, who studied student engagement with online courses offered by the edX consortium (edX’s Wikipedia here). Guo, Kim, and Rubin took all 862 educational videos from four edX courses offered in the fall of 2012 and classified each video according to its type (e.g., traditional lecture, problem-solving tutorial) and its production style (e.g., PowerPoint slides, Khan-style tablet drawing, talking head). They also mined the edX server logs to obtain over 6.9 million video watching sessions from almost 128,000 students. After all was said and done, they conclude: “Shorter videos are much more engaging. Engagement drops sharply after 6 minutes. Recommendation: Invest heavily in pre-production lesson planning to segment videos into chunks shorter than 6 minutes. This is the most significant recommendation!” That’s what we thought … Continue reading
Litigation is a crapshoot (“Hot Bench” edition)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55909249/1_jSUu1k690XSIjcxC5NQ8jQ.0.png)
Meet the “hot” judges of the new syndicated TV show “Hot Bench” (Wikipedia article here). Unlike every other judge show in this well-worn daytime TV genre, “Hot Bench” features a panel of three judges and goes behind the scenes to show you the judges deliberating on the merits of the cases before them. This tweak is resonating with many viewers, ourselves included. But what was the original rationale for this new format? According to retired judge Judith Sheindlin in this NY Times report–a/k/a Judge Judy–the producer of the new show: “People rely too much on the judicial system to be perfectly calibrated … “Very often, [however,] it’s a crapshoot. I wanted people to see that when you go to court you can never be sure of the outcome. The people hearing and determining the cases bring all their history with them.” Well said … By the way, while we’re at it, why don’t we consider testing Holmes’s prediction theory of law by allowing viewers to bet on the outcome of these cases?
A friendly critique of Steve Coast’s critique of rules
We stumbled upon this excellent essay (“The world will only get weirder”) by Steve Coast via the hyper-productive Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution (our second-favorite website, by the way). In summary, Mr Coast argues that there is an inverse relation between innovation and the number of rules in a given society: Continue reading
