wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

•  How many have seen it?
  
•  Is even watching the trailer a spoiler?

Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.

I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles.

Anonymous Claims it Sabotaged Rove Election Hacking

Can anyone make heads or tails of this story? (More links.)

For my part, I'd like a little -- you know -- evidence. Remember that Ohio was not the deciding state in the election. Neither was Florida or Virginia. It was Colorado. So even if there was this magic election-stealing software running in Ohio, it wouldn't have made any difference.

One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israel Defence Forces' official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to "show their faces above ground" because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter's terms of service -- but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially "verified" by Twitter.

And it's not just Twitter, of course: the Israeli army has been uploading videos of rocket attacks to YouTube as the campaign has been unfolding, and some are fairly graphic -- including one that blew up a car carrying the head of the Hamas military wing. That video was removed Thursday morning by YouTube, and it appeared that the site might have decided it breached their terms of service, but then the company said it had removed the video by mistake and it was reinstated.

Threats of violence and shocking images are also something that Facebook has been known to remove, but for now at least the network says it won't be removing content posted by the Israel Defense Forces -- which includes an app that curates photos from Instagram, many of which the army said were taken on the ground during its attack on the Gaza Strip.

I'm SHOCKED, I tell you, SHOCKED

Type: ((shocked))

Migeru Shimbun is out! http://paper.li/MigeruBlogger/1351816577 ... ▸ Top stories today via @MigeruBlogger @WhelanKarl @ecoen2tardes

Thanks to a tweet from Migeru, I learned this morning of Willem Buiter's post on negative nominal interest rates, "Negative interest rates: when are they coming to a central bank near you," which discusses in detail the idea of paper currency that depreciates relative to electronic currency (with the electronic currency serving as the unit of account), which plays such an important role in my post "How Subordinating Paper Money to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation," (which is primarily a link to my Quartz column "E-Money: How paper currency is holding the US recovery back.")

Between 2007 and 2012, airlines cut the number of domestic passenger flights by 14 percent, according to the Department of Transportation -- with the biggest drops occurring at midsize and smaller regional airports. The five heartland hubs of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Memphis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis have lost a stunning 40 percent of their scheduled flights.
[...]

That's smart business, of course. Why expend the same dollars on jet fuel, pilots and Sun Chips on a flight that's likely to leave half-empty from Memphis when you can trim the number of scheduled departures from the same airport and really pack them in on each flight?
[...]
That is, unless policy makers do what they should have done a long time ago and allow foreign airlines, including discount carriers like Ryanair and global players like Qantas and British Airways, to serve domestic routes in the United States. Why, after all, should an industry that has ingeniously used free-market principles to squeeze the most revenue out of each middle seat be protected from competing in a real free market?
[...]
Competition from foreign airlines would put downward pressure on wages, something that union workers may object to. But by reducing fares and expanding service, it would also increase the demand for air travel and related services -- thus, presumably, creating additional jobs during a time of persistently high unemployment.

I sent a mail to the author:

Dear Sir,
I have read with interest your column on the NYT. I understand that you would welcome an increase in competition between companies for internal flights in the US, and you recommend for that an opening to foreign companies, citing one european and one australian company.

I have nevertheless not understood why and how the constraints existing on the US companies would disappear for foreign companies. Why on earth do you believe that Air France or BA would accept to run a deficit line in the US, where AA restricts its flight to earn money. Do you really believe that the market model of european-type companies is that different from the one for US-based companies? Workers union exist also in the EU, and, apart from allowing Koryo airlines to fly in the US, I do not understand how a major change may be generated through open skies. What may happen is a decrease in market share for US companies, and new opportunities for foreign companies. Passengers might benefit from this, but I am not convinced that this would result in strong differences, the market in the US being already quite competitive.

If I could point to a major difference between Europe and the US on the respect of internal travel, it is that, despite the best efforts of the european commission, there is still, horror! a state-led effort in transportation infrastructure construction in the EU. London-Brussels-Paris High Speed Rail has been massively financed by public owned funds/companies. This railway has effectively put out of business the airways between these three towns, being more cost effective and quicker for the passengers.
Customer experience has therefore been improved by a state-led investment over the course of the last twenty years. Maybe, just maybe, this way of developing your country might be worth investigating...

Cordially.
XB