An estimated 10 percent of the world’s population is left-handed, but in the men’s and women’s singles at Wimbledon, five of the 32 remaining players, or 16 percent, are.Oh. Okay. So out of 32 not-quite-Wimbledon-quarterfinalists, we probably should have expected there to be 3 (9.4%) or 4 (12.5%) lefties. Neither of those outcomes would have raised an eyebrow. But instead, we've got a whole 5, which means that one lefty who was supposed to lose in the third round... didn't (we'll call him Feliciano Lopez). Meh. What else ya got?
According to the tournament’s Web site, in 125 years 10 left-handers — eight men and two women — have won a total of 26 singles titles.Hey, you went to the tournament's Web site, that's great--puts you one up on Josh Hamilton's friends at ESPN. Unfortunately, your analysis sorta stopped there.
A man in Gaston County, N.C., was jailed after holding up a bank for $1 -- but the crime was all part of a larger plan, according to the robber.
Richard James Verone is 59 and was unemployed with multiple health issues before the crime. Verone says he robbed the RBC bank in order to go to prison and get treatment -- he said it was the only way he could get healthcare.
Verone has an undiagnosed growth in his chest, two ruptured back discs, and a problem with his foot.
His medical ailments made working difficult after his 17-year career as a Coca-Cola delivery driver ended a few years ago. He tried living off of savings and part time jobs, but still came up short. He applied for Social Security benefits but only received food stamps which did not help his medical problems.
When Verone robbed the bank he presented the teller with a note explaining that he was robbing the bank and only wanted $1. He did not want to scare anyone and was not doing it for the money. After receiving the dollar, Verone told the teller, "I'll be sitting right over here on the chair waiting for the police."
When they arrived, the police found Verone sitting on a sofa inside the bank.There's all sorts of angles that you can take in analyzing this story--the economic side, the health care side, the welfare side, even the "screw the banks" side if you feel like stretching--but I'm mostly intrigued by the prison side. I think that we rarely think about what the actual function of prison is in our society, even as we're spending ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer dollars to take care of incarcerated people.
When it comes to hitting, it's been night and day for Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton this season -- and the reigning American League MVP has a theory as to why.
He has blue eyes.
Under the sun, Hamilton's numbers are dim. He is batting .122 (6-for-49) with no home runs, four RBIs and eight walks. He also has 17 strikeouts and a .429 OPS.
At night, it's a different story. Hamilton is hitting .374 (41-for-109) with six home runs, 28 RBIs, seven walks and a 1.076 OPS. And he only has 14 strikeouts while playing under the lights.
"I ask guys all the time," Hamilton told ESPN 103.3 FM's Bryan Dolgin when asked if he had any theories to his drastic splits. "Guys with blue eyes, brown eyes, whatever ... and guys with blue eyes have a tough time."Oh. Okay. You talked to some guys. That's good scientific analysis, Josh. And congratulations, ESPN, for publishing this one as a headline without doing a modicum of background research on it.
A group of US representatives plan to introduce legislation that will legalize marijuana and allow states to legislate its use, pro-marijuana groups said Wednesday.
The legislation would limit the federal government's role in marijuana enforcement to cross-border or inter-state smuggling, and allow people to legally grow, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal.
The bill, which is expected to be introduced on Thursday by Republican Representative Ron Paul and Democratic Representative Barney Frank, would be the first ever legislation designed to end the federal ban on marijuana.
Sixteen of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
But planting, selling or commercially distributing marijuana remains illegal under federal law.Regardless of your feelings on marijuana usage (Karl Denninger, who tipped me off to this article, has fairly strong opinions on the matter), this legislation is consistent with the traditional view of states' rights trumping federal control, a dynamic that has been steadily fading in recent decades.
There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own...
I did my best to steer clear of reporting on immigration policy but couldn’t always avoid it. On two occasions, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. I also wrote an article about Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, then thechairman of the Republican National Committee, who was defending his party’s stance toward Latinos after only one Republican presidential candidate — John McCain, the co-author of a failed immigration bill — agreed to participate in a debate sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-language network.
It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d invite unwanted scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your sense of self. You start wondering who you’ve become, and why.Seriously, take a few minutes and read the whole thing. Regardless of your personal politics and your views on immigration policy, I think that this story--while almost certainly unique--is an important data point in the debate on what America was, is, and wants to be in the coming centuries.
It turns out there is an upside to mounting college debt: self confidence! A new study shows that the higher a young person's debt, the more self-esteem he or she has.
Ohio State University researchers surveyed more than 3,000 adults aged 18 to 34 for the study, which is published in Social Science Research. Their study found that the more debt from college loans and credit cards individuals had in their name, the more control they felt over their lives.Hey, that's great. College students go to school, think it's a great investment in their future (because they've been told so for their entire adolescent lives), and as a result they're brimming with confidence. Cool. Whether or not there's actually a causal link between the debt itself and the self-esteem isn't really discussed here--the correlation is all we're given.
There is, however, a catch: People over the age of 28 started to show signs of stress and worry about their debt. The downshift in debtors' moods stems from the ongoing growth of their debt obligations over time--though it is of course also true that adults have a general propensity to worry more as they age.Yeah, that's a pretty significant catch. In fact, I'd argue that it's the real finding of the study. Young people are saddled with debt without fully realizing the implications, and only a decade later when they're actually charged with paying that bill do they begin to question whether they made the right decision.
The simple method of figuring out the most dominant majors performance would be to list winners by their margin of victory over the second-placed golfer. That system is not accurate because it just compares two golfers against one another, as opposed to one golfer's performance versus the field. Take two victories by Golfer A and Golfer B, each of whom shoot 11-under-par, while the runners-up each shoot 6-under-par. They look equal, but the rest of the field's performance matters. Let's say the third-place finisher in Golfer A's tournament shoots 5-under-par, but the third-placed duffer in Golfer B's tourney shoots 1-over-par. Player B has clearly outperformed the rest of the field to a greater level than Player A, but raw margin of victory fails to capture that detail.
That's why we need to use a more complex methodology that measures a performance's standard deviations above the mean, referred to as Z-Score. Z-Score measures a particular performance against the entire field of values, accounting for both the average result and the full range of performances from top to bottom. It does a great job in capturing how much better or worse an individual score was versus the entire population, producing a value that translates across different tournaments, locales, and generations. For the purposes of this study, we analyzed the scores produced by players in every major since 1960, including only those players who completed four rounds. Performances in any sort of playoff were ignored.
As it turns out, while McIlroy's performance wasn't the most dominant Major victory of the past 50 years, it deserves to be in the discussion. McIlroy's Z-Score ended up at minus-3.07, meaning that he was 3.07 standard deviations better than the average performance at the tournament. It's the 17th-best performance by a golfer in a major since 1960, which places him in rather elite company.Very impressive stuff, yes. McIlroy's performance places him somewhere in between Nick Faldo's 1990 British Open victory at St. Andrews and Tony Jacklin's 1970 U.S. Open win at Hazeltine. I'd be surprised if any of you casual golf fans out there have ever even heard of Jacklin, and that's sort of my point here.
To put Vancouver's potential feat in its proper context, we can look at every World Series (starting in 1903), NBA Finals (1950), and Stanley Cup Finals (1915) in history. Instead of using raw differential, we'll use Pythagorean expectation: how well the champion would be expected to do in a seven-game series based on its goals/points/runs scored and allowed. This allows us to translate across the three sports. Here are the 10 least-deserving champions in American sports history based on their in-series expected win total (extrapolated to seven games for shorter series):
1. 1960 World Series: Pirates over Yankees 4-3, -28 differential, 1.33 Expected Ws 2. 1996 World Series: Yankees over Braves 4-2, -8 differential, 2.39 Expected Ws
3. 1958 NBA Finals: Hawks over Celtics 4-3, -28 differential, 2.48 Expected Ws
4. 1972 World Series: Athletics over Reds 4-3, -5 differential, 2.74 Expected Ws
5. 1940 World Series: Reds over Tigers 4-3, -6 differential, 2.76 Expected Ws
6. 1912 World Series: Red Sox over Giants 4-3, -6 differential, 2.82 Expected Ws
7. 2009 Stanley Cup: Penguins over Red Wings 4-3, -3 differential, 2.83 Expected Ws
8. 1928 Stanley Cup: Rangers over Maroons 3-2, -1 differential, 2.87 Expected Ws
9. 1997 World Series: Marlins over Indians 4-3, -7 differential, 2.89 Expected Ws
10. 2003 World Series: Marlins over Yankees 4-2, -4 differential, 2.90 Expected Ws
The '60 World Series is best known for Bill Mazeroski's walk-off homer, but it's also remarkable as an extreme outlier in differential: The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55-27. Over seven games, Pittsburgh would be more likely to win zero games than four based on their runs scored and allowed. Of the 263 champions studied, the Pirates were the only ones to be outscored by such a wide margin.
But if the Canucks win tonight, Pittsburgh will have company. A 1-0 victory would give Vancouver 1.28 Expected Wins over the course of the series, which would make the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals the most bizarre in American championship history by that measure. Even a 4-0 blowout would result in 2.23 Expected Wins, still second all-time. It would be one of the flukiest Finals ever, and Canucks fans wouldn't care one damn bit.So far in this series, every game in Vancouver has been a tight, nail-biting affair--each one was a one-goal game decided in the 3rd Period or Overtime--whereas every game in Boston has been a Bruins rout, helping to explain the huge goal differential. Hopefully for my Bruins, we'll get Game 3 or Game 6 Roberto Luongo tonight, and not Game 1 or Game 5 Roberto Luongo.
Stringent new security regulations affecting most tourists have been introduced at US air and sea ports.
Everyone entering the United States with a visa will now have fingerprints and photographs taken and scrutinised...
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the US aimed to be "open to visitors but closed to terrorists".
All 115 US airports that handle international flights and 14 major seaports are covered by the programme, under which customs officials can instantly check an immigrant or visitor's criminal background.Of course, this is all part of a broader crackdown against immigration and foreign visitors, as visas for both travel--and perhaps more importantly, employment--purposes have become increasingly difficult to come by. Tom Ridge's assertion that the DHS wanted to be "open to visitors" is in fact laughable in the face of the ever-increasing restrictions, a point that a recent Time article picked up on.
Everyone should love Brazilian tourists. They spend more per capita than any other nationality. Worldwide, Brazilian tourists shell out an average of $43.3 million a day, dropping a gigantesco $1.4 billion last April alone, up 83% from the same period last year, according to the Brazil's Central Bank. In 2010, 1.2 million Brazilians visited the United States, injecting $5.9 billion into the U.S. economy...
Not that the U.S. has made it particularly easy for os turistas brasileiros to visit. Instead of rolling out the red carpet for the travelers from the increasingly wealthy South American nations, the U.S. makes Brazilians — and every other Latin American nationality — undergo a lengthy and expensive visa-application process that takes months of planning and can cost thousands of dollars in travel, lodging, food and other expenses — all before leaving the country...
In all of Brazil, a country larger than the continental United States, the U.S. has only four consular offices: in the capital Brasilia, Recife, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. That means a family living in Porto Alegre would have to spend hundreds of dollars on domestic airline tickets to fly everyone 700 miles to São Paulo, then drop hundreds more on hotel rooms, food and taxis, just to get a visa application interview, which costs an additional $140 each.
While the State Department claims the average international wait time for a visa interview is 30 days, in Brazil it can be as high as 141 days, according to Steve Joyce of the U.S. Travel Association. That's not due to bureaucratic laziness. The overworked consular staff in São Paulo is currently processing an average of 2,300 visas every day, more than any other U.S. consulate in the world. And they hope to nearly double their production level by next year to keep from falling farther behind. Brazil represents the fastest-growing non-immigrant visa demand in the world, up 234% over the past five years, eclipsing even China's 124% increase in U.S. visa issuances, according to the State Department.
Tourist industry officials say Brazil should be on the list of countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the U.S. There are currently 36 countries on Washington's visa waiver list, but none of them are in Latin America. Some argue it's hampering the U.S.' economic growth and global competitiveness. For example, Chilean tourism to the United States is down more than 30% from 10 years ago, while globally the number of Chileans traveling overseas to other countries is up 50%.The article goes on to cite a U.S. Travel Association statistic that suggests that by hampering international tourism over the last decade, our nation has put itself at a competitive economic disadvantage.
The American tourism market has recovered slowly since 9-11, but it missed out on a decade of growth, according to Roger Dow, president of the U.S. Travel Association. "We call it the lost decade. If we had just stayed on pace with the rest of the world, we would have generated $606 billion more dollars and have 467,000 more jobs right now."In an economy with millions of unemployed citizens that is struggling to generate 100,000 new jobs per month, that 467,000 jobs figure--while debatable--is no small nugget. Consider it one of the hidden costs of our dogmatic and amorphous "War on Terror".
PARIS — France was punished on Thursday for not taking proper care of its hamsters.
The Court of Justice in Luxembourg, the European Union’s highest court, ruled Thursday that France had failed to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, sometimes known as the European hamster, the last wild hamster species in Western Europe. If France does not adjust its agricultural and urbanization policies sufficiently to protect it, the court said, the government will be subject to fines of as much as $24.6 million.
The Great Hamster, which can grow up to 10 inches long, has a brown-and-white face, white paws and a black belly. There are thought to be about 800 left in France, with burrows in Alsace along the Rhine. That is an improvement: the number had dropped to fewer than 200 four years ago, according to figures from the European Commission, which brought the lawsuit in 2009.Alright. Good times. Glad they don't have any bigger things to worry about over in France these days. Things must be great over in Europe, huh?
Not participating in the 2012 London Olympics is a nightmare for every serious athlete, but for the Iranian women’s soccer team the defeat was extra bitter after they were disqualified right before a crucial qualifying match because they wore Islamic headscarves.
Ready to play a crucial Olympic qualifying match with Jordan in Amman on Friday, the Iranian team was dismissed by officials of the international football association, FIFA. The officials decided just before the kickoff that the tight headscarves the Iranian players were wearing to cover their hair broke the association’s dress code, FIFA said on Monday.
After Jordan was awarded a 3-0 victory, Iran’s players took to the field crying, Press TV, Iranian state TV’s English-language outlet, reported.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran all women are obliged to cover their hair, neck, arms and legs according to the state’s interpretation of Shiite Islamic tenets. Female athletes who compete internationally have to obey the country’s dress code. Iranian women athletes have excelled during international events in sports such as karate and volleyball, but are notably absent from sports such as swimming and gymnastics.
“This ruling means that women soccer in Iran is over,” said Shahrzad Mozafar, the team’s former head coach. She said that now that FIFA is no longer allowing Iranian women to wear scarves, the Iranian government will no longer send them abroad for competitions. “Headscarves are simply what we wear in Iran,” she said.Well-played, FIFA. You continue to set a new standard for missing the point.
Don’t confuse causation with correlation.
“Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.” ~ George Carlin
If you look hard enough for patterns and correlations, for better or worse, you’ll find them. However a correlation should not be confused with causation. The winner of the Super Bowl, for example, does not cause a movement in stock prices.
Don’t try to outsmart the investor herd.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ~ George Carlin
This wisdom extends upon the immediately preceding point. While Mr. Carlin would advise not to confuse causation with correlation, his angle is that many people do confuse them. There are just enough idiots that believe a Super Bowl win from the old American Football League is positive for the stock market and, as a result, they will buy stocks, hence causing a movement in stock prices. No matter how much fundamental analysis you do, the psychology (and irrationality) of the herd can make all of your diligent and intellectual analysis useless in an instant.
Try not to live in a hypothetical world.
“What if there were no hypothetical questions?” ~ George Carlin
Most headlines in financial media are posed in the form of a question that no prudent person will spend significant time trying to answer. Is the Bull Market Over? Is This a Correction or the Beginning of a New Bear Market? Should You Buy Gold Now? Just remember that these questions are designed to get you to read the underlying article and that the media does not exist to provide useful information; it exists to sell advertising. To accomplish this end, media sources must successfully distract you long enough to read their attractive hypotheticals.Good stuff. I miss George Carlin, because he had a true gift in terms of being wickedly funny while also being uniquely insightful. It takes a smart man to be a consistently good comedian, and Carlin was certainly that. To consult his comedy for helpful words of wisdom is therefore not necessarily the worst idea in the world.
The vampire squid haters won’t like this column.
For the past several weeks, I have been trying to understand if Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, could have perjured himself — as Senator Carl Levin has suggested — when he testified last year in front of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and declared, “We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market.”
Based on the subcommittee’s report, which was referred to the Justice Department, I wrote a column raising questions about Mr. Blankfein’s comments. At the time, his testimony seemed ridiculous in the face of evidence that Mr. Levin presented, which showed that the firm had regularly made large bets against the subprime market.
But upon further reporting — talking with executives at Goldman, who pointed me to other documents, and with officials in Washington, and then poring through the report, following the footnotes to the original sources and then cross-referencing them against other public records — I have come to a different and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion for those readers looking for a big scalp: Mr. Blankfein wasn’t lying.The "vampire squid" reference that Sorkin opened his piece with was a direct reference to Taibbi's most famous Goldman Sachs article, and it was probably an ill-advised bit of baiting by Sorkin. Not surprisingly, Taibbi punched back with serious force, tearing apart the foundation of Sorkin's defense of Blankfein.
I've been trying not to say anything bad about Andrew Ross Sorkin. I even made a point of not watching Too Big To Fail so as not to get upset -- and when I heard from friends that the film turned [former Goldman Sachs CEO and Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson into Joan of Arc, that decision seemed to have been validated.
Now I’m bummed to see that Sorkin has written an elaborate defense of Goldman in the New York Times "Dealbook" section, arguing among other things that Lloyd Blankfein probably did not commit perjury and that the bank did not have a huge directional bet against mortgages in 2007. As evidence, Sorkin cites unsubstantiated Goldman documents and Goldman sources who claim, among other things, that the bank had $5 billion worth of long bets on MBS "in other parts of the company," offsetting the now-notorious "Big Short."
The Sorkin piece reads like it was written by the bank's marketing department, which may not be an accident. In November of last year, the New York Times announced that "Dealbook" was entering into a sponsorship agreement with a variety of companies, including ... Goldman, Sachs.Yikes. Taibbi's intimation that Sorkin's defense was corporate-led was probably not a particularly careful accusation, and it may end up getting him in a little bit of trouble with the Times' lawyers, but I also don't think it's an irrelevant link.
 |
| Graphic courtesy of McClatchy |
