Wine, Physics and Song is my blog. Roughly speaking, I'm a quantum physicist, working mostly in the foundations of quantum theory, and in quantum computation and quantum information processing. My main focus recently has been understanding the nature of quantum theory by understanding how the possibilities it gives us for processing information compare to what might have been, by studying information processing in abstract mathematical frameworks, using tools like ordered linear spaces and category theory, in which not only quantum and classical theories, but all sorts of "foil" theories that don't seem to be realized in our physical world, but are illuminating to contrast with quantum theory, can be formulated. Sometimes I like to call this pursuit "mathematical science fiction".
I had held off on posting about Ireland because I read some pieces that suggested the final deal was going to involve Irish banks' bondholders taking some losses. From RTE news, I read that:
The Minister [for finance, Brian Lenihan] also said that subordinated bondholders would be dealt with aggressively but said the European partners had ruled out making senior bondholders pay as it would have a spill over effect on the euro.
See also the Financial Times. The IMF favored senior bondholders taking some losses, but the Europeans wouldn't accept it, and the Irish government caved.
What I was going to say was that the Irish problem is essentially about the fact that the Irish government decided, at the beginning of the crisis, to guarantee all of Irish banks' debts. What they should now do is repudiate that guarantee...if not explicitly, than by refusing any bailout that doesn't, effectively, involve a partial writedown. If they don't, it's likely the next Irish government will repudiate, if they can find a legal mechanism for doing so (and my guess is that they'll find *something*). The current plan is basically asking all Irish citizens to tithe themselves for years to ensure that those who unwisely lent to Irish banks fueling the Irish real estate bubble, suffer no loss. A real political winner if I ever heard of one. Sinn Fein --- that's the party that was formerly the political wing of the Irish Republican Army---has already won a byelection, in Donegal, presumably over voter anger at the economic and debt situation. Moreover, the plan will likely be contractionary in a Keynsian sense, making it still more onerous for Irish firms and workers to produce the surplus to render to the bondholders.
About two thirds of the Irish deficit is payments to uphold this guarantee of bank debt; the Irish deficit is not primarily a matter of excessive government spending otherwise.
Various wimpy organizations, in the US at least, seem to be dumping web hosting and DNS service for wikileaks. Hosting was apparently moved to Switzerland but wikileaks.ch doesn't work either (no DNS resolution for it either, I guess).
Here's a URL for Wikileaks that works at the moment:
I don't have a carefully considered opinion but my gut reaction is that Wikileaks is doing journalism, and its publication of classified material that it obtains is probably protected. Some of those in government or the military who supply it with classified material seem likely to be guilty of some crime along the lines of mishandling classified information, but probably not espionage though I haven't read the relevant laws.
Thanks to Google's homepage artwork, I find that today is Dizzy Gillespie's birthday. Here are a few glimpses of him, from youtube. First, one of the first Diz tracks I ever listened to: Long Long Summer, by Lalo Schifrin, Argentine composer/arranger and Diz's pianist for several stretches in the early 60s and the 70s. Live in 1962 (see below the embedded video for details). Nice montage of B&W stills and album covers in the youtube video.
This version is live from "Dizzy on the French Riviera" (and apparently on a budget Compact Jazz compilation as well). I'm not certain whether it was this live track, or a May 1962 version recorded in New York, also for Phillips, that I listened to (borrowed from the Dartmouth College music department library) in high school. This live version is from a Verve reissue "Dizzy on the French Riviera", of the Phillips LP "Dizzy on the Riviera", recorded at a jazz festival at Juan les Pins, July 24, 1962. I'm guessing this is a bonus track for the CD as the discography at the end of Dizzy's fantastic memoirs "To Be or not to Bop" doesn't list the track as on the original LP. Besides Diz on trumpet, the Juan les Pins concert featured Leo Wright on alto sax, Lalo Schifrin, piano, Chris White on bass, Rudy Collins on drums, and Pepito Riestria on additional percussion, and Elec Bacsik (not heard on this track) on guitar. (There's a possibility that the New York date is the source of this bonus track, or that the two albums were combined for the CD. I'll find out when it arrives in the mail.)
Very nicely structured solo from Diz on this, showing his increasingly bluesy bent that developed through the 50s and early 60s, and a few of the complex fast passages that were a trademark as he and others pioneeered bebop in the 1940s. Dizzy's in total command of the horn here, getting a brassy, golden, slightly blaring tone when he wants to, a more suave and neutral tone in some fast legato passages that reminds one of Miles Davis on open horn (of course we know who was a key influence on Miles!), or a slightly more brittle and very agile tone in complex bebopish passagework. He's also in total command of the structure of the solo, making his phrases respond to and build on each other, telling a story, getting into slightly different bags as he goes along. His solo's followed by an ensemble interlude after which he repeats a beautifully played latin riff, reminding us that he was one of the most important --- probably the most important --- forces bringing latin rhythms into jazz, and probably also in bringing bebop into latin music.
Next, one of a couple of tracks that got me to understand bebop, again early in high school, is the 1950 Bloomdido from a Charlier Parker / Dizzy Gillespie reunion "Bird and Diz" on Verve. Parker, who Gillespie sometimes referred to as "the other half of my heartbeat", and Gillespie were the star soloists as bebop developed in the 1940s, and their collaboration, as well as the work of each with his own groups, was a major force in creating this music. I first came to dig Parker on the blues Parker's Mood (which I knew through the best alternate take, from the Charlie Parker Memorial Album, which is as great as but different from the master take), but the blues is easier to get into than fast bebop. Bloomdido bridged the gap for me. Again, a nice photomontage for the vid.
Parker, Gillespie, and pianist Thelonious Monk are masterful on this. Amazingly inventive phrasing, well-structured solos. Critics often lament that the drummer on this is the "rhythmically inappropriate" Buddy Rich rather than a bop drummer like Max Roach, but it doesn't seem to bother the soloists one bit on this track. I'd even say that his somewhat more foursquare, slightly less swinging beat here might help drive the soloists to some taut, edgy, quick-thinking statements. Getting away from the setting you're most comfortable in can spark invention, if you can handle it, and it goes without saying that these guys could. And inventions's not in short supply here. The Verve reissue contains alternate versions of this and other tracks that are strongly recommended; the solos are different and usually just as good as on the issued versions. This is some of the world's greatest music by any standard.
Finally, a great Youtube find; this is what they looked and sounded like in action: Gillespie, Parker, Dick" Hyman on piano, Sandy Block on bass, play Tadd Dameron's bop classic "Hothouse" on television in 1952:
"The Taylor rule says that the federal funds rate should equal 1.5 times the inflation rate plus .5 times the GDP gap plus 1. Currently the inflation rate is about 1.5 percent and the GDP gap is about -5 percent (using the average of the seven estimates of the gap provided in the recent update by Justin Weidner and John Williams).
So a little algebra gives a funds rate of 1.5X1.5 + .5X(-5) + 1 = .75 percent.
This number is nowhere near -6 percent, which is what you sometimes hear people say the Taylor rule implies."
I think I've hear the numbers near -6 percent from Krugman, and possibly Delong... the issue, I guess, is that they are not adopting the specific slope and intercept from Taylor's 1993 paper, but are employing some procedure based on economic data for estimating an appropriate slope and intercept---based on "a period during which the Fed has set interest rates too low for too long".
Update: Actually, the Krugman post I was probably thinking of doesn't use Taylor's 1993 rule (which is indeed the one cited in Taylor's post, which is also (modulo trivial algebra) equation (1) of his 1993 paper:
f = 1 + 1.5 p + 0.5 y,
where p is the inflation rate over the past four quarters, and y is the deviation of GDP from target ("output gap"). It uses Mankiw's "Taylor rule" (this having become a generic term for prescriptions for setting the federal funds rate as an affine (i.e. straight-line, with slope and intercept) function of inflation and the output gap), i.e.:
f = c p + c y + d
where c and d are coefficients to be chosen on some basis, p and y as before.
Mankiw's uses equal coefficients on inflation and the output gap, whereas Taylor's inflation coefficient is thrice its output coefficient. Krugman fits c and d to data for 1998--2008. Thus he does do what Taylor gives as the explanation for the people who get -6%: "they change the Taylor rule, replacing variables or estimating coefficients with data during which the Fed has set interest rates too low for too long." Presumably Taylor thinks interests rates were set too low during part of the 2000's at least....I wonder, though, what result one would get by letting output and price coefficients be fitted independently...probably something not too different from Mankiw's rule.
At issue seems to be how the Taylor rule should be determined. Taylor's 1993 paper shows that his rule fits the behavior of the fed funds rate from 1987--1992 fairly well. One might reasonably ask that included as part of such a rule be a publicly disclosed formula for updating it, perhaps based on a window of economic data, or some time-profile of weighting of data, so that recent experience influences the rule more than that of decades ago. Krugman, at least, is quite clear about what he's doing along these lines; Taylor does not derive his rule from an explicit fit, merely showing graphically that it fits the preceding fivish years of data reasonably well.
The premiere of a documentary produced by U of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History, on pollution of the Mississippi by agricultural practices, appears to have been canceled by the "University Relations Department." See also this from a U Minn bio professor. He writes that the Vice President of University Relations is married to the president of a PR firm that represents the Minnesota Agri-Growth council. I know, I know, correlation is not causation... Still, I expect outrage from the local Tea Warm Milk and Kahlua party...
Thanks to Dave Bacon, the link (available via a few clicks starting at the About menu item on NBER's homepage) to the 2010 financials summary page of their annual report (if you follow the link, go to the bottom of the page and click). Trying to find the full report online has proven bootless...so far this is what I've turned up.
However as I pointed out in comments on my earlier post, responding to the summary fiscal 2010 financials Dave provided, the vast majority of their money---32.4 million out of revenue of 39 million---is coming from current grants. Given this, the $10 million from four right-wing foundations over 16 years, detailed by SourceWatch, is extremely unlikely to represent a signficant fraction of their funding during that period although without access to financial statements, who knows.
Since I've gone this far, I suppose I should probably just ask NBER for the info!
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for the humorist in all of us, Justin Wolfers posts to the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, but is not actually an author of the recent Freakonomics sequel, Superfreakonomics. (If you picked up on my reluctance to appear implicitly favorable toward the Freakonomists in my previous post, it's largely because of what I've read about Chapter 5 of that sequel, on geoengineering and global climate change---see, for example, this.) Nevertheless, the paper by Wolfers and his Wharton colleague Betsey Stevenson, titled Subjective and objective indicators of racial progress, looks interesting. A rough summary would be that in the US, black or African-American people's self-reported level of happiness has increased substantially since the mid-1980s. Although it is still lower, even controlling for other circumstances like average income, than for white Americans, the gap has narrowed. The overall gap (not controlling for income) has also narrowed, but the narrowing appears not to be due to increases in income, but appears due to other factors; Wolfers and Stevenson suspect, but have no direct data to indicate this, that it is due to the decrease in racism black people encounter in day to day life.
There's some bad news for some of us in the conclusion to their Section II:
Comparing these various estimates, we find that controlling for measurable differences in the lives of blacks and whites explains about one-third of the black-white happiness gap in the 1970s and much of this is due to the differences in income between blacks and whites. Turning to the trends over time we see that little of the change over time is explained by the controls. In all specifications the black-white happiness gap—measured relative to the standard deviation of happiness—is closing at a rate of about 0.5 per century. However, this relative change is composed of both a decrease in the happiness of whites and an increase in the happiness of blacks; the decrease in the happiness of whites is larger once controls for objective indicators have been taken into account. Finally, while the racial happiness gap remains large, around two-thirds of this can be explained by differences in observable characteristics.
White folks, it seems, have been getting less happy---an effect that is only made more pronounced by controlling for other measurable factors. Actually, Stevenson and Wolfers (2009) claim that this is mostly due to a decrease in happiness among white women.
Reading the paper is recommended as a look at a simple piece of modern social science research, how it tries to control for potentially confounding effects, and how tricky it is to deduce correlation from causation. (An example of the latter: "one reason that married people report substantially greater happiness in a cross-section is that happy people are more likely than unhappy people to marry (Stevenson and Wolfers 2007)".)
Annoyed by the fact that the Cambridge, MA based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) charges $5 a pop (or requires an institutional subscription) to download its working papers (with some exceptions, such as for journalists, I decided to look into where they (and the people who publish there) get their funding, since I object to publicly funded research being published in venues that are expensive for the public to get access to. Probably this is well-known to professsional economists (so if any read this thing, feel free to comment)---but the overall situation with NBER working papers seems to be that they are (primarily? entirely?) results of research done as part of NBER programs. Perhaps that means, the research is NBER-funded as well? NBER has a contract with the Commerce Department to officially determine when recessions and "stagnations" have begun, and ended. I found it relatively difficult to figure out where NBER gets its money, since googling "NBER funding", "NBER budget" and the like tends to turn up NBER research on national budgets and general economics, not surprisingly. I found this link to a page by an organization called SourceWatch interesting, though I don't have a lot of familiarity with the group. Much of the discussion seems to concern pre-2001 funding, and the introductory paragraphs are confusing. They consist mostly of quoted material, and it is unclear what is being quoted: a New York Times article about the NBER or, as seems more likely, an article from an unnamed source, critical of the NYT piece and of the NBER's then-director Martin Feldstein? In any case, the quoted material seems highly polemical even to someone as leftish on many things as I am. And sure, Feldstein is too conservative for my taste, but he gets a lot of respect from me for recognizing, at least sometimes, that Keynesian theory can be relevant, and calling for substantial fiscal stimulus on Keynesian grounds early in this recession. Nevertheless, this claim from SourceWatch is interesting:
"Between 1985 and 2001, the organization received $9,963,301 in 73 grants from only four foundations:
All four of these are characterized (by SourceWatch, at least, in their own descriptions linked in the above quote) as very conservative, small-government/low-regulation foundations. Actually they say the Scaife foundation is no longer pushing this ideology since Sarah Mellon Scaife took over, but (I think) during the 1985-2001 period they were. I wouldn't necessarily trust SourceWatch on this (e.g. they say the Olin Foundation gave $20.5 million to "right-wing think tanks" in 2001, then give a list that includes the Brookings Institution. I'm fairly confident this is not a mistake, rather a combination of deadpan humor and a genuinely left-wing viewpoint that does see Brookings as part of the right-wing liberal establishment. But Olin is well known as a conservative foundation, so the characterization of Olin, if not of Brookings, seems reasonable.
I'm still at a loss about the pay-for-working papers policy. Perhaps this --- especially library subscriptions to it --- is a significant source of income to the NBER? NBER's working papers are definitely a respected and prestigious series that I see cited a lot (and not just by conservatives--Paul Krugman's blog links them on occasion, as does Brad DeLong's). So they can likely get a significant amount of income that way. It does seem that the goal of spreading knowledge of the results of NBER (oops, I mean covert promotion of right-wing economic ideology ;-)) might be better served by making them free to the public.
Here's Freakonomics on the NBER and the shift in directorship from Feldstein to Jim Poterba. (No opinion implied on the quality of Freakonomics books, blogs, or Steven Levitt, though.) Still, it gives you an idea of the attitude of much of the economics profession toward the NBER.
Just a couple of quick notes on some good wines I've had recently. Perrin's 2008 Reserve Blanc, a white Cotes-du-Rhone made from 50% Grenache Blanc, 20% Bourboulenc, and 10% each Marsanne, Roussanne, and Viognier, is what a white Cotes-du-Rhone should be, and one of the best ways you could spend ten bucks on a white wine (I paid US$9.98 at Ta Lin in Albuquerque). I've posted before on Perrin's excellent reds; this shares some characteristics with them, notably a certain almost glyceriny smoothness, but without stickiness... and a characteristic that I'd call "watery" except that sounds bad, and this is good---it's probably associated with being relatively low in alcohol, and not extremely high (nor excessively low) in acid or tannin. Mainly, it's got intense, but refreshing rather than tiring, flavors, flavors akin to those of a good chardonnay-based wine from the Maconnais, but maybe slightly fruitier and slightly more floral. And much cleaner, more balanced, and more intense than most of the Macon-Villages and such I come across (in North America, anyway) in this price range. Some resemblance to nice Spanish whites, like Muga's white Rioja.
A favorite wine at a party I recently attended was the 2006 Clos du Bois North Coast Cabernet. Nothing super-complex, just a very drinkable, fairly rich, but balanced, Cab. It Googles up at $12-14, which I'd say is reasonable although not a steal. (A 2007 Acacia Pinot Noir, tasted afterwards, seemed excessively jammy and just not enjoyable to drink, which surprised me as their Pinots have seemed decent value even in the $20 range, in the past. Perhaps not fair to judge based just on one bottle.)
