David Kopel mounts a “questionable defence”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_03-2005_07_09.shtml#1120802297 of the changes in gun law that “Silvio Berlosconi” is trying to bring through in Italy. Kopel likes the new law, which by his account allows people to shoot down burglars, even if the burglars don’t present any immediate threat. For him, this is superior to the current law, which requires that defence be “proportional” to aggression (Kopel provides us with a couple of abstract hypotheticals of how the proportionality test might be misapplied, but doesn’t tell us whether these hypotheticals reflect decisions taken by actual Italian courts; I strongly suspect that they don’t). Still, the truly distasteful part of the post is his closing line:

bq. Given Italy’s status as a prime target of al Qaeda, further reform of Italian laws, to enable decent people to protect themselves against sudden attacks, would be eminently sensible.

What exactly would laws of this kind do to stop the kinds of attacks that al Qaeda operatives actually mount in real-world Europe, as opposed to the abstract Europe which exists in the mind of American policy wonks with too much time on their hands? How precisely are they likely to deter terrorists who put bombs with timers on trains? This seems to me to be a rather bizarre and entirely gratuitous effort by Kopel to make his argument attractive by linking it to a current tragedy and future threat to which gun use law is more or less irrelevant.

May be a good idea to have a thread for announcements from anyone who either (a) is in London, has friends who are likely to read CT, and wants to reassure people that they’re safe, or (b) has a friend in London whom they have news of.

Noel Coward was a fine Englishman …

London Pride has been handed down to us.
London Pride is a flower that’s free.
London Pride means our own dear town to us,
And our pride it for ever will be.

Every Blitz your resistance toughening,
From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown,
Nothing ever could override
The pride of London Town.

Update: Lord (Lenny) Hoffman is only an adopted Londoner (like myself) and is the quintessential Hampstead liberal, but he demonstrated that the spirit is still strong, not so long ago.

There may be some nations too fragile or fissiparous to withstand a serious act of violence. But that is not the case in the United Kingdom. When Milton urged the government of his day not to censor the press even in time of civil war, he said:

“Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours”

This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda.

There are reports of a “series of explosions”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4659093.stm on the London Underground. It’s not clear what’s happening. Another Madrid? Or something else?

_Update_: The “eyewitness reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4659243.stm on the BBC make it clear that it’s a co-ordinated bombing of the tube and some buses. I hope they catch the bastards responsible.

_Update 2_: Reports are all over Australian TV now, and obviously this will be a major story across the media so I won’t make any more updates here. But I will keep comments open, of course. At this point the hope is for as few fatalities as possible.

Following up Henry’s post, I happened to reread a passage from James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds in which he discusses the stock market’s reaction to the Challenger disaster, the crucial point being

Did you know that within minutes of the January 28, 1986 space shuttle, Challenger, disaster, investors started dumping the stocks of four major contractors, Rockwell International, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Morton Thiokol, who had participated in its launch? Morton Thiokol’s stock was hit hardest of all … the market was right. Six months after the explosion, the Presidential Commission on the Challenger revealed that the O-ring seals on the booster rockets made by Thiokol became less resilient in the cold weather, creating gaps that allowed the gases to leak out.”

It struck me reading this, that I’d heard of Rockwell, Lockheed and MM in many contexts, but I’d never heard of Morton Thiokol. It turns out that they are a specialist builder of booster rockets and similar items (they’re now a division of ATK).

This seems to suggest a prosaic explanation of the market reaction. Whatever the cause, the space shuttle program was going to be shut for a long time. This would do a bit of damage to everyone involved, but much more to the rocket specialist Thiokol than to the other three big diversified companies.

The ATK website indicates that they still have plenty of shuttle contracts, so it seems as if the faulty O-rings didn’t do them much long-term damage over and above the effect on the shuttle program.

I haven’t got the full book to hand and I haven’t read the study cited there , so it may be that this explanation has already been ruled out in some way, but I thought the easiest way to find it was to post and see what response I got.

“Steve Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/07/inside_informat.html makes an interesting argument about prediction markets.

bq. On the one hand, just as Henry Manne justified insider trading in stock markets by arguing that it improved the accuracy of stock market prices, bets by knowledgeable insiders will significantly enhance the predictive power of markets like the TradeSports contracts. Indeed, given the limits on the power of insiders to affect prices in the stock market, the effect is likely to be much stronger in prediction markets, where the ratio of activity by informed traders to that of uninformed ones is likely to be much higher than in stock markets. … On the other hand, in commercial prediction markets like TradeSports contracts, the proprietor of the market presumably has an incentive to eliminate informed insider trading. If there’s a fairly high probability that you’d be betting against somebody with inside information, who thus can’t lose, would you bet? Me neither.

Bainbridge’s argument here reminds me a little of this old “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/08/05/hayekian-markets-reconsidered/ of Dan’s, which argues among other things that Hayek’s notion of the market as a knowledge-creating entity sits rather uneasily with more standard economic arguments such as efficient-market theory. But Bainbridge’s argument is somewhat different and points to a different tradeoff. If you want to use markets to make the best predictions possible on the basis of available information, you’ll want to allow insider trading, which is, by definition, trading by those with valuable hidden information. But this means that you’re likely to lose liquidity by driving out ordinary punters who don’t want to be fleeced by those in the know. And without ordinary punters, insider traders have no incentive to transact (the only reason that they would want to transact is to fleece suckers who know less than they do). The only way in which this contradiction can really be resolved is if there’s a supply of suckers out there, who are willing to make bets against people who are better informed than they are. As Bainbridge points out, this is a condition that can be satisfied. But by and large, it’s only satisfied when people have extraneous reasons to make a bet (they enjoy a flutter). Bets that aren’t “fun,” or otherwise attractive in some way aren’t likely to attract suckers. Thus, they’ll have low liquidity, and not be very useful as a source of information (this seems to be borne out by the empirics; as the authors of “this paper”:http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/zitzewitz/Research/Five%20Questions.pdf note, “as the wonkishness of the contract rises, however, volume and liquidity falls rapidly.”) Thus, even apart from the objections that Dan and John Q. have raised in past posts, prediction markets aren’t likely to be very useful for a very wide variety of important policy issues.

There is a pointer on Lifehacker today that made me smile: an Ask MetaFilter discussion about a question regarding the use of Excel. The Ask MeFi community was able to answer the query so it proved to be useful, as it often is. Regardless, my reaction to seeing that pointer was that the person asking this question probably does not know about the ultimate resource for advice about Excel: MrExcel.com. It is THE place to search for, and if unsuccessful, to ask about advice regarding Excel. I have already blogged about it.. but looking back in my archives I realize now that it was three years ago. I think the site is worth another mention (if nothing else because now compared to three years ago there are many more people reading what I blog about).

The people on the Mr.Excel forum (not necessarily all misters from what I can tell) give free advice about using the program from the fairly trivial to the extremely complex. They will write original code for you if that’s what’s most helpful. I have had some incredibly wonderful experiences with the site getting crucial help with cleaning up some dissertation data way back when and recently while editing some spreadsheets to a more manageable format. I highly recommend that resource if you are stumped by any Excel features (or even if you are not just to see what shortcuts you may be able to dig up).

As I noted in my post a few years ago, I hope there are people studying communities like this. There seems to be quite a bit of work, for example, on the free/open source community. There is also quite a bit of work on various online communities. But I have seen little scholarship (granted, I have not looked actively) about studies of online communities that provide so much tangible value for free to active members and outsiders alike.

PS. Random observation: My initial post about Mr.Excel was on July 10, 2002 and my post last year about online communities was on July 6. I guess I like to blog about this stuff in July. I’ll leave it to Kieran to run a more systematic analysis on the topics of interest by time of year among Timberites.:-)

My latest Poorman Central Station column is up.

Les rosbifs ont gagne! London has beaten Paris to host the 2012 Olympics. I’m amazed at how happy this makes me. The last two cities I lived in were London and Paris, so for a while there I couldn’t decide which I preferred for the games. Before this week, I was a firm supporter of the Paris bid, believing the city to be far superior to London in infrastructure and the centralised sheer force of will it must take to pull off this event with real panache. I thought (and probably still think) that the construction and transport hell London’s bid involve make it a painful undertaking for Londoners – but no better city to get behind every obscure new sport, every under-dog, and make it an event the whole city mucks in to, with more colour, more culture, a few sharp edges and a hell of a lot more fun.

All around the world the problem of how (if at all) to apply campaign laws to the Internet is causing plenty of agitation. In Australia, the main problem arises from laws requiring that electoral advertisements should include the name and address of the person advertising. Usually, this means a TV ad ends with an attribution to a party functionary, spoken in a rapid monotone at the end of the slot. But a site called JohnHowardLies.com (it seems to have vanished, but there’s an archived copy here attracted a lot of attention and suggestions that it should be regulated in the same way.

I’ve just come back from an appearance before the Parliamentary Electoral Matters Committee Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto, where I presented a submission arguing that blogs, and commenters, should not be required to identify themselves when commenting during an election campaign, using the analogy of callers to talkback radio, who are allowed to be anonymous. It was a pretty vigorous session, and some members of the Committee were clearly not convinced. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see an attempt to restrict anonymous Internet comment coming out of the Committee’s report.

My immediate analysis is that, if anonymous comments were prohibited, the only way to be safe would be to close down comments during election campaigns. Even if people gave full names and addresses, I don’t have the resources to verify them.

Anyway, it would be good to hear other views: I’ll need to think more about my own.
[click to continue…]

David Glenn has an “interesting article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i44/44a01201.htm today about Glyn Morgan’s new “book”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8082.html on the justifications for EU integration. I’ve just started reading the book (it begins very nicely). Morgan sets out to discomfit both euro-skeptics and most euro-enthusiasts by making a straightforward argument for an European super-state rather than the sort of post-sovereign multilevel fudge preferred by many pro-EU types.

bq. Mr. Morgan invites his reader to imagine that foreign-based terrorists someday launch large-scale attacks in Europe, and that the United States cannot offer much help, because its own military is bogged down in China or Iraq or elsewhere. Without a unitary state and a unified military, he writes, “there would be little that European leaders could — other than fulminate about U.S. isolationism — do about it.” … “Europeans need to confront this brutal choice,” the British-born Mr. Morgan says. “Are they going to remain weak and dependent and maintain their decentralized government units, or are they going to try to become players in the world? And if they’re going to become players in the world, they need to centralize. I think presenting that brutal choice is profoundly annoying to both sides of the debate.”

Morgan will also be doing an “online colloquium”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/07/europe/ at the Chronicle on Thursday. I’ll be posting on this more when I finish the book.

Reading John and Belle’s blog, not the place I would usually look for unfamiliar maths results, I discovered that the circle can be squared in Gauss-Bolyai-Lobachevsky space . Checking a bit further, I found this was not a new result but was shown by Bolyai back in C19.

I haven’t found a link that shows how the construction was done, though. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?

Just back from a weekend in Sydney. The Australasian Association of Philosophy’s “annual conference”:http://www.rihss.usyd.edu.au/AAP2005.html started today. We went down a few days early and I fled back to Canberra this morning before the philosophers really got going. Laurie presents her paper later in the week, but this afternoon she was on a Career Workshop panel about balancing career and family. At _precisely_ the time she was doing this, I was back in Canberra, standing at the side of the road with a small baby, wondering what to do next. I had just locked myself out of our apartment. Apart from the baby — who responded to the crisis by repeatedly trying to walk out into the middle of the road — my inventory consisted of no car keys, no money, and only the vaguest notion of the first name of the agent for the property company who own a couple of units in this apartment complex, which doesn’t have a custodian. Cathy something? Or was that the name of the owner of the B&B in Sydney? The person who would assuredly have the relevant information to hand couldn’t be contacted, because she had her phone switched off, seeing as she was giving a talk about work/family responsibilities. Carolyn? Carmel? I’m pretty sure it’s a “C” name. Every other person in Canberra I’d be in a position to phone for assistance was out of town. They were all in Sydney, at the conference. Some of them were probably at the workshop.

Now that I’m back on the right side of the apartment door (the child is still alive, by the way), I can see just how this sequence will play out in the upcoming film version of my life. The director cuts back and forth. The baby has discovered where the dumpsters are and is making a beeline for the abandoned washing machine. The audience at the workshop chats sagely to one another about the domestic division of labor. The actor playing me picks an apartment door at random and knocks, hoping someone is at home. He gets ready to brandish the baby, in order to simultaneously signal his non-threatening nature and his desperate need for aid.

Surfing around, I found this oldish report of “some classes that Steve Earle taught at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago”:http://www.insurgentcountry.net/steve_earle_at_the_old_town_school.htm . The class is about the links between traditional music — as found in Harry Smith’s American Anthology of Folk Music — and contemporary songwriting. There are classes on Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, and on Earle’s own songs. There’s also much gossip and general chit-chat. Interesting stuff.