And how many rounds were fired?
According to Wikipedia, about 30 rounds were fired in 30 seconds during the famous gun battle at the O.K. Corral. Here is more:
Despite its name, the gunfight actually occurred in a narrow lot six doors west of the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral on Fremont Street, and also in the street. The two opposing parties were initially only about 6 feet (1.8 m) apart. About thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds.
After buying out the Graham family–the old owners of The Washington Post–for $250 million, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos formally took control of The Post on 1 October 2013, but why?
(a) because he wants to revitalize the newspaper industry and modernize how news is reported
(b) because he wants to influence Congress and be taken more seriously by Washington elites
(c) because he is a megalomaniac
Sometimes the simplest, most parsimonious explanations are the best.
Extra Credit: did Bezos pay too much or too little for The Post?
Are jurors Bayesians? Should judges ban Bayes’ Rule from the courtroom? prior probability is reblogging this post because of our fascination with the Bayesian approach to probability and with the application of Bayesian methods to law and the legal process.
Bonus link: Fun with Bayesian Priors
Why are conditional probabilities so rarely used in court, and sometimes even prohibited? Here’s one more good reason: prosecution bias.
Suppose that a piece of evidence X is correlated with guilt. The prosecutor might say, “Conditional on evidence X, the likelihood ratio for guilt versus innoncence is Y, update your priors accordingly.” Even if the prosecutor is correct in his statistics his claim is dubious.
Because the prosecutor sees the evidence for all suspects before deciding which ones to bring to trial. And the jurors know this. So the fact that evidence like X exists against this defendant is already partially reflected in the fact that it was this guy they brought charges against and not someone else.
If jurors were truly Bayesian (a necessary presumption if we are to consider using probabiilties in court at all) then they would already have accounted for this and updated their priors…
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Adam Liptak’s recent report in the New York Times on “lackluster law reviews” is fun to read and highly recommended. Here is an excerpt:
Law reviews are not really meant to be read. They mostly exist as a way for law schools to evaluate law professors for promotion and tenure, based partly on what they have to say and partly on their success in placing articles in prestigious law reviews.
All this is true, but Liptak ignores the most obvious problem with the law reviews: law review editors don’t know how to edit. (*) The proof of this statement is in the law review pudding, so to speak, or the fact that most law review articles are simply dull, tedious, and boring. The editing process, by piling on so many extra footnotes, probably makes them even worse.
Worse yet, the average number of words in a typical law review article has now reached enormous proportions. Compare, for example, the length of the articles appearing in the most recent issues of the Yale Law Journal or Harvard Law Review with the length of the most recent scientific reports appearing in the journals Nature or Science, and you will get some idea of how bloated and unnecessarily long law review articles are. (**) After all, who wants to read a 50+ or 100+ page article with 300+ plus footnotes?
No one. (***)
* Clarification: law review editors certainly know how to edit footnotes and citations but not the content and style of the articles themselves.
** Could there be an inverse relationship between the truth value and originality of an article and its length?
*** prior probability suspects that even law professors don’t really enjoy reading law review articles
Or neither? The State of California recently created a new misdemeanor offense–that of posting identifiable nude photographs of another person online without his or her permission, but only when such public postings are done with the intent to cause emotional distress or humiliation. Why not make such non-consensual postings a civil law tort, thus allowing the victim to recover compensation, including punitive damages (with the level of damages depending on the amount of humiliation suffered), and why we’re at it, why not extend civil liability to any third-party website that does not take down such postings upon the victim’s request?
… you’re never interesting.”
–Felix Salmon
Who said that?
According to this pithy report by Karl Smallwood, Captain Kirk never uttered these precise words in the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk comes close, however, on several occasions. For example, he says “Scotty, beam us up, fast” in the original episode of Star Trek and “Beam us up” in another episode.
Yet, as Mr Smallwood notes, this phrase “is universally and intrinsically linked with the original Star Trek series.” So, who coined this famous phrase, if not Captain Kirk? Nobody really knows.
For additional examples of “wrongfully attributed statements,” check out this essay by Corey Robin.
Hat tip: digg
The NY Times recently interviewed legendary college football coach and ESPN analyst Lou Holtz on a wide range of topics relating to college football. Check out this particular exchange from the interview:
NY Times Question: Are there too many [college football] games on television?
Holtz’s Answer: No. If people didn’t watch, they wouldn’t be on TV. Let the market decide.
Follow-up Question: Should ESPN, and not the colleges, be paying football players with the enormous profit from televising their games?
Holtz’s Answer: Absolutely not. Our contracts are with the conferences or schools, not the athletes. One percent go on to play in the N.F.L. They are students who play athletics. They want to be paid, go work for Walmart. I don’t have time to tell you how strongly I feel about this.
There is something horribly hypocritical and logically contradictory in Lou Holtz’s answers to both questions. After all, if “the market” should determine the optimal number of football games on television, then why shouldn’t player salaries at the college level also be set by market forces and not by arbitrary and self-serving NCAA rules?
Check out the full interview here.
That is the title of this paper which revisits the legendary story of Kurt Gödel‘s purported discovery of a deep logical flaw in the US Constitution on the eve of his citizenship examination in December 1947. But what was this flaw? No one really knows for sure, since there is no written record of Gödel’s lost discovery. The paper “Gödel’s Loophole,” however, is worth reading because it revisits this enigmatic episode in Gödel’s life and poses a simple question, why is there is no record of and so little academic curiosity regarding the details of Gödel’s purported finding, especially considering his intellectual stature and extraordinary genius?
We can all agree that, ideally, blogs should be engaging and entertaining and even educational, but how long should a blog post be?
On one extreme, we have the Twitter model in which “tweets” must be 140 characters or less (characters, not words!). On the other extreme, we have the academic “law review” approach in which the average length of papers in the top law journals easily exceeds 10,000 words or more. There is clearly a wide margin between these two extremes, so wide that it is hard to say what the optimal length of a blog post should be. Perhaps, however, we are asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking instead, What is the optimal or equilibrium number of blog posts per day?
Some blogs, like 3QuarksDaily, Marginal Revolution, and the Volokh Conspiracy, three of our favorite blogs by the way, tend to post a slew of interesting items and tidbits many times per day. Is this “too warm”? From a blogger’s perspective, one problem with multiple posts per day is that it’s got to be hard even for one’s most loyal and devoted readers to keep up with such a hectic pace of posts.
Other blogs, by contrast, like Ashok Rao and Robin Hanson’s excellent blogs, This is Ashok and Overcoming Bias, seem to post only once every few days or sporadically. Is this approach “too cold”? Here, again from a blogger’s perspective, the risk is that one’s readers might lose interest in your blog if they are not fed a steady diet of daily posts.
Still other blogs, like Cheap Talk, Crooked Timber, and prior probability, appear to have settled on a once per weekday equilibrium. Is this “just right”? How about once per week, like the Becker-Posner blog?
What do you think?
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