LaTeX, Textmate 2, and Ghost Script
If you’re using Textmate 2, LaTeX, and Mountain Lion, you may run into an this error message when trying to compile latex documents with postscript graphics:
!!! Error: Cannot open Ghostscript for piped input
The solution is to add a PATH variable to Textmate with the following contents:
/usr/local/bin
You may also need to install X11 if you’re on Moutain Lion. You can download it (here)[http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/]. Without it you’ll get an error message like:
!!! Error: Writing to gs failed, signal 127
Bibliography/Footnotes with LaTeX and BibLaTeX
A good reference for folks wanting to start using bibLaTeX in place of bibTeX.
Y files: Praying With Your Eyes Open
No comment needed:
From “Dr. King’s March on Washington, Part II” by Jose Yglesias in the March 31, 1968 New York Times Magazine:
King said he had been frightened twice. There was the time he was marching through Chicago for open housing while people jeered and threw rocks: “It was then I faced the…
Source: yfiles
Felix Salmon and “Out of Touch” Political Scientists
Carl Bialik writes in the Wall Street Journal today about the inability of poll respondents to accurately estimate “national figures” related to things like spending levels, debt and deficit figures, and immigration flows.
Felix Salmon quotes the last paragraph of the Bialik piece which discusses (but does not link to) some recent research by John Sides and Jack Citrin:
A recent immigration study confirmed the finding. Political scientists John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California, Berkeley, hypothesized in a working paper that supplying Americans, who typically overestimate the number of immigrants and illegal immigrants among them, with correct numbers would reduce the perceived threat of immigration and change their views. Instead, getting the right number reinforced their views, and even increased their support for letting fewer immigrants into the U.S.
Salmon then writes, “Which only goes to prove how out-of-touch political scientists can be. Not only are people naturally innumerate, but more generally you can’t argue people out of positions that they weren’t argued into.”
If Salmon had actually read the paper — or even the abstract, he likely wouldn’t have characterized it as “out of touch.” Sides and Citrin are actually very sympathetic of Salmon’s contention that “you can’t argue people out of positions that they weren’t argued into.” They write:
[T]he effects of information — whether correcting innumeracy or priming perceptions of threat — are far from certain. Despite the cited evidence of “information effects,” we do not know whether such effects emerge consistently across different kinds of attitudes, and whether some attitudes are more or less susceptible to these effects than others. In this case, there are good reasons to believe that attitudes toward minority groups are in fact less susceptible. Instead these attitudes may prove relatively stable despite any new, and more accurate, information.
If I were Salmon, this is where I might draw a broad conclusion about what his mischaracterization of Sides and Citrin’s research means about journalists/ism as a whole. Instead, I’ll just suggest that using a second-hand, two-sentence description of a working paper is not a great foundation on which to argue that a whole discipline is “out of touch.”
UPDATE: John Sides responds to Salmon on the Monkey Cage.
Source: The New York Times
The Stolper-Samuelson Blues
One of Bob Dylan’s lesser-known songs is a ballad about workers in a boom-to-bust mining town in the North Country entitled “North Country Blues.” I believe it was first released on Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’.
I can’t help but think that a better title would have been the “Stolper-Samuelson Blues.” Indeed, about half-way through the song, Dylan laments the men “in the East” — capital owners, apparently — who complained that domestic wages were too high relative to foreign labor:
They complained in the East
They are paying too high
They say that your ore ain’t worth digging
That it’s much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing
And as a result, labor suffered the distributional effects of trade:
So the mining gates locked
And the red iron rotted
And the room smelled heavy from drinking
Where the sad, silent song
Made the hour twice as long
As I waited for the sun to go sinking
Kodak Preparing for Chapter 11 Filing
Sad. But this should be a lesson for today’s larger tech companies: keep innovating or die a slow, dull death.
And as a bonus lesson: patent lawsuits will not save you.
What is truly sad about the Kodak bankruptcy and the fact that it is largely due to the digital revolution is that Kodak literally invented the first digital camera, but didn’t know what to do with it. As Audley Jarvis wrote in 2008 for TechRadar:
A Kodak engineer credited with inventing the digital camera has revealed how bewildered company executives couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to look at images on a TV screen when he first proposed the idea of a ‘filmless camera’ to them in 1975. The hefty device was the brainchild of Kodak engineer Steve Sasson and his team from the Kodak Apparatus Division Research Laboratory. According to Sasson the finished article resembled “a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera.”
Source: parislemon
As Iowa Goes, So Goes the Nation?
Regarding the expected spoils of winning the Iowa caucuses, Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny write for the New York Times:
Most campaigns were in agreement that a win by Mr. Romney would put him in an enviable position to capture his party’s nomination.
If this is what most campaigns are thinking, they have not read the Wikipedia entry on the Iowa caucuses thoroughly enough. Since 1972, the Iowa caucuses have picked the eventual non-incumbent nominee for the Republican party 2 out of 5 times. A very small n, but that is not a very good track record.
The Iowa record for the Democratic party is better — but not by much. Since 1972, Iowa has picked the eventual non-incumbent Democratic nominee 6 out of 9 times.
Banning Electronics on Take Off and Landing
Larry Greenemeier explains some of the apparent reasoning behind the FAA policy that bans electronics on aircraft at take off and landing.
Technical reasons related interference aside, I’ve always though that a nice benefit of this ban was that should something go wrong during take off or landing you don’t have laptops, tablets, and cellular phones flying all over the cabin. Given that takeoff and landing are the most accident-prone parts of a commercial airline flight, clearing the cabin of most carryon items seems reasonable.
Kerry's 2004 Primary Surge
Back in 2007, Charles Franklin had a post on the 2004 Democratic primary which shows Kerry’s end-of-primary surge.
The Post-Surge Collapse
I’m selecting on the dependent variable with the graph from Charles Franklin above. That said, I found myself wondering if there is any precedent for a candidate surging as quickly as some of the GOP primary candidates have and then not collapsing shortly thereafter.
A well-timed surge — not that a candidate has any real control over that timing — could clearly be beneficial. But under most conditions, the surge seems to create expectations of subsequent support that the candidate can’t possibly fulfill. Perhaps this contributes to the seemingly unavoidable post-surge collapse that we observe above.
I don’t study American Politics, but the canonical work on this the nominating process seems to be Bartels 1988… Another book for the summer reading list.
UPDATE: Charles Franklin (@pollsandvotes) notes that Kerry had a nice surge at the end of the 2004 Democratic Primary.
The Paul Prospect
Matt Yglesias writes:
From a liberal perspective, I think it’s clear that Ron Paul would be the best possible GOP nominee. It would put some useful pressure on Obama in terms of executive power, foreign policy, the drug war, etc. and give Bernanke & Company a powerful incentive to deliver monetary stimulus to ensure Obama’s re-election.
I suppose the second part is conditionally true. Paul is clearly no friend of the Fed. If the Fed thought a Paul presidency were possible and believed that he would be able to implement his radical ideas about monetary policy, Bernake et al would have incentives to prevent Paul’s election.
But the first part seems doubtful, given Paul’s record. I think it would actually give Obama a free hand. The campaign would likely be a series of, “Can you believe Paul said X? Do you really want this man running the country!?”
Meanwhile, Obama could implement whatever agenda he saw fit, comfortable in the knowledge that no plurality or majority of Americans would ever in their right minds vote for Ron Paul of Texas.
NYT Follows WaPo: Wealthy People (Even those who are Members of Congress) Do Well in Recession
The Times has an article similar to the Washington Post article that I criticized earlier. They write:
Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.
As Brenden Nyhan notes, it was good of the Times to highlight (although they did not do so by name), research done by Andrew Eggers and Jens Hainmuller that shows that members of congress generally perform “no better than ordinary investors.”
If you take the article in its entirety, however, the Times seems to want us to be indignant. But the fact is that members of Congress are wealthy and always have been. Wealthy Americans have always been insulted from economic downturns. To expect wealthy Americans who also happen to be members of Congress to not exhibit the same wealth trends as the average wealthy American is foolish.
'GoDaddy loses over 37,000 domains due to SOPA stance'
I transferred three domains away from GoDaddy the other night. I had been meaning to do so for a while, but this SOPA protest gave me a needed boost. Regardless of the merits of SOPA (and there are very, very few), GoDaddy is a bad actor. Administering your domains on their service is an extraordinarily horrible experience. At each and every click GoDaddy is there to try to up-sell you some service you don’t need.
I’ve moved to Namecheap at the recommendation of Dan Benjamin of 5by5. Their service is fast, inexpensive, and reliable. And when I registered this new domain (loglikelihood.net), I got the .info domain for free. Use this link and Dan Benjamin get’s a little something back.
