Language Log said yes. The false name attached to the new book is Robert Galbraith, and here is the cited reason why:
The clue was in the collocations of the surname. The most famous Galbraith in the whole of Rowling’s lifetime, without any reasonable doubt, was John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian liberal economist, US diplomat under Kennedy, and professor of economics at Harvard. Initials: J. K. Now that I’ve pointed it out, how could you have missed it? Kick yourself.
The name she chose, Ms. Rowling explained, is a mash-up of that of one of her heroes, Robert F. Kennedy, and Ella Galbraith, a fantasy name she chose for herself as a girl.
Ms. Rowling wrote the book under a man’s name, she said, to take her writing persona “as far away as possible” from herself. She said she remembered too late that the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in 2006, shared her first two initials, and feared that might be a clue to her identity.
Yet it wasn’t. I was able to pick up one of the last remaining copies of this book in Scotland, last week, as the volume was sitting sadly alone in a corner of an Edinburgh airport bookstore.
On the whole, most of us perceive short intervals of time
similarly, regardless of age. Why, then, do older people look
back at long stretches of their lives and feel it’s a race to
the finish?
Here’s a possible answer: think about what it’s like when you
learn something for the first time — for example how, when you
are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from
school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in
your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the
first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories
of events, places and people. […]
It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student
again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do
something novel.
Mark Perry points out: "Yes, the middle class has been disappearing, but they haven’t fallen into the lower class, they’ve risen into the upper class."
Good piece by Bruce Schneier on the growing surveillance state:
One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government’s
spying on American citizens is that it’s only used in cases of
terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and
its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of
excesses to prevent it. But there’s a problem with this line of
reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of “terrorism” and
“weapon of mass destruction” are broadening, and these
extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used,
for crimes other than terrorism.
The economist Arthur Laffer is reputed to have drawn his famous
curve—showing that beyond a certain point higher taxes generate
lower revenue—on a paper napkin at a dinner with Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld in the Washington Hotel in
1974.
Another economist, Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University,
last year drew a similar curve on a virtual napkin to
argue that, beyond a certain point, greater protection for
intellectual property causes less innovation. He thinks that U.S.
patent law is well beyond that optimal point.
Last week the Supreme Court came out against the patenting of
genes, on the grounds that they are discoveries, not inventions,
though it did allow that edited copies of the DNA of a breast
cancer gene should be seen as invented diagnostic tools. Dr.
Tabarrok thinks that decision and other recent rulings are nudging
patent law back in the right direction after a protectionist drift
in the 1980s and '90s.
The argument for patents is that, without the monopoly they
grant, inventors will not make discoveries, and if they do, they
won't share them. So inventors get 20 years of protection against
imitators. The counterargument is that patents are often used
defensively to deter rival innovators and thus to discourage
innovation. America's Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984
resulted in more patenting but less innovation as firms tried to
build up defensive "war chests" of patents to use in disputes with
each other.
Many firms use patents as barriers to entry, suing upstart
innovators who trespass on their intellectual property even en
route to some other goal. In the years before World War I, aircraft
makers tied each other up in patent lawsuits and slowed down
innovation until the government stepped in. Much the same has
happened with smartphones and biotechnology today. New entrants
have to fight their way through "patent thickets" if they are to
build on existing technologies to make new ones.
In his 2010 book "The Gridlock Economy," Michael Heller compares this monopolistic use of patents to a
"phantom tollbooth" (a phrase borrowed from Norton Juster's 1961
children's book). Biotech companies that patent molecular
techniques act like medieval barons along the Rhine who stifled
trade by taking advantage of weakened imperial authority to extract
tolls from passing cargo boats.
The logical next step in the corruption of the patent system was
the invention of the patent "troll"—a company that buys up
little-used patents not to develop the product in question but just
to prosecute trespassers and extract money from them. The result
has been some huge payouts, including one from BlackBerry.
Dr. Tabarrok argued in his 2011 book "Launching the Innovation Renaissance" that
patents cannot encourage innovation if they raise its costs. In
fields where innovation is a cumulative process, he argued,
restricting patents would cause firms to lose some of their
monopoly rights, but they would gain the opportunity to use the
innovations of others. "The result is greater total
innovation."
Patents are supposed to prevent imitation, but in practice,
imitation is often more costly than innovation. Most patent
disputes are not about firms copying each other's inventions but
about two companies discovering simultaneously the next step in an
innovative process. Yet patent law can't easily handle that type of
situation.
The glaring exception is pharmaceuticals, where testing for
safety and efficacy makes innovation extremely costly, but where
imitation can be cheap. In these circumstances, patents are not
only necessary but might be strengthened. Elsewhere they should be
weakened and shortened.
That query is from AskReddit, the link is here, and here are a few of the nominations:
It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.
And:
Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies, “I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”
And:
Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, “Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it’s funny or not?” Gödel replies, “We can’t know that because we’re inside the joke.” Chomsky says, “Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.”
I don’t find that latter one funny at all, as they are telling it wrong.
I broke the law yesterday and again today and I will probably break the law tomorrow. Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have broken. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident that I have broken some laws, rules, or regulations recently because its hard for anyone to live today without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
Harvey Silverglate argues that a typical American commits three felonies a day. I think that number is too high but it is easy to violate the law without intent or knowledge. Most crimes used to be based on the common law and ancient understandings of wrong (murder, assault, theft and so on) but today there are thousands of federal criminal laws that bear no relation to common law or common understanding. The WSJ illustrates:
Last September (2011), retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a congressional hearing about his 1996 misdemeanor conviction for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Though the judge gave him only a $75 fine, the 77-year-old racing legend got a criminal record.
Mr. Unser says he was charged after he went to authorities for help finding his abandoned snowmobile. “The criminal doesn’t usually call the police for help,” he says.
Or how about this:
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land….
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.
The Anderson’s didn’t even find any arrowheads but the attempt to find was punishable by imprisonment. Under statutes such as the Lacey Act one can even face criminal prosecution for violating the laws of another country. Ignorance of another country’s laws is no excuse.
If someone tracked you for a year are you confident that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law .
Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.
One of the responses to the revelations about the mass spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies is “I have nothing to hide. What me worry?” I tweeted in response “If you have nothing to hide, you live a boring life.” More fundamentally, the NSA spying machine has reduced the cost of evidence so that today our freedom–or our independence–is to a large extent at the discretion of those in control of the panopticon.
In addition to monitoring who you call and when, your email, and your internet searches the government also has access to all of your credit card purchases. We usually don’t think about purchases as communication but what people buy says more about most people than does their email. Buying behavior can be used to predict all manner of information about your political views, affiliations, sexual activity, marriage quality and much more.
The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr.
Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any
power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we
have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear
after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who
mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of
unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
For our latest mission, we converted a New York City subway car into a late night talk show set. Host Pat Cassels (CollegeHumor) interviewed random commuters from his desk as bandleader Evan Gregory (The Gregory Brothers) kept the car rocking.
Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos below.
CREDITS Created and Directed by:Charlie Todd Video Produced and Edited by:Deverge (Alan Aisenberg, Ilya Smelansky, Andrew Soltys) Senior Producer for Improv Everywhere: Matt Adams Music:: Tyler Walker Shot by: Matt Adams, Denis Cardineau, Ilya Smelansky, Dave Szarejko Sound: Tony Leonardo Photography: Ari Scott – Flickr set (photo credit for all photos on this page.) Production Assistants: Sam Grant, Michael Tannenbaum, Ryan Wolff Cast: Craig Benzine, Pat Cassels, Evan Gregory, Charlie Todd
We’ve done dozens of ridiculous projects on the subway over the years. We’ve staged a scene from Star Wars, brought 50 redheads onto the same car, put 15 pairs of identical twins across from each other, set up three beds for people to sleep on their way home, thrown birthday parties and marriage proposals, given out dollar bills, and played BINGO, just to name a few off the top of my head. The subway continues to be our favorite stage in New York City. I was excited to take our subway missions to the next level with the project, which I think was the biggest transformation we’ve ever done in terms of the amount of set pieces and props used.
We met at the Deverge production office where the team set up a to scale subway car set with chairs and polls. We ran through the show a few times, making sure everyone knew what props and set pieces they were in charge of setting up. We wanted to set up the show as quickly as possible. Agents Pat Cassels and Evan Gregory also had a chance to rehearse their lines.
We carried everything over to the N train on 28th street and waited on the platform for the last car on the train. We staged this at 9 PM on a Sunday night when knew the trains would be mostly empty. At times it was too empty, but this project wouldn’t work on a crowded train. Our set would be way too annoying. Late at night on a Sunday it would be a welcome diversion.
Agent Ilya Smelansky custom-built the talk show desk with the exact measurements of the N train in mind. He knew down the the inch what would fit on the train. We bought a white IKEA chair off of Craigslist for our guests, and custom created the backdrop with some fabric and paint. When the doors opened our team sprung into action putting everything in place: lights, gopro cameras, coffee mugs with the show logo, and a big talk show microphone. The train was pretty empty, but those that were there got on board pretty quickly with the idea as I invited them in with my producer character.
People reacting as we set up.
Agent Craig “Wheezy Waiter” Benzine served as our stage manager, holding up applause signs for the crowd.
When we first got on the train, the guy pictured above was asleep right next to where we were setting up. He was using his jacket as a pillow and was completely passed out. We set up the entire set around him, and then when the music started he woke up. The look on his face when he realized a talk show set had magically materialized around him as he slept was priceless. He immediately wanted to be a guest on the show, but then later got cold feet about it.
The desk and mugs.
We covered all of the ads in the subway car with ads for our show.
Bandleader Evan Gregory and the Downtown Sound starts the show.
Your host, Pat Caaaaaaaassels! Agent Cassels exited the car in the middle and ran down the platform to the last door to make his entrance. He started the show with 4 monologue jokes, all of which were about the subway. Agent Benzine held up cue cards with the jokes on them.
At each new stop, more people would get on the train, and I would welcome them to the show and let them know there were seats available.
Even the people who sat on the far side of the car still helped out by clapping when the applause sign was up.
I loved this woman’s reaction. It was at Times Square and there were stairs right by our car. So people were running down the stairs trying to make it onto the train and our door was the closet one. They didn’t have an opportunity to see what was going on until they were already inside.
Although she was surprised when she walked in, she ended up enjoying the show.
These guys saw us from the adjacent car through the windows and decided to switch cars. As soon as I saw them coming through the doors, I shouted, “You guys are the next guest on the show!” They got really excited and we interviewed both of them right away.
This was a German couple from Hamburg, visiting New York on vacation. They got on at Times Square and ended up staying on the train for a half hour. At first, they weren’t interested in being guests, but after watching several others, the guy eventually agreed to do it. He was great!
The crowd cheers.
I went back and forth on how to stage this, thinking it might be fun to have actors or even real celebrities as the guests on the show. Ultimately I decided it was way more fun to interview random New Yorkers on the train. This was a talk show on the train, for the train.
Towards the end of the night a couple got on the train who had just come from a party. They were in great spirits and immediately got on board. The woman gave a great interview.
All in all it was a great night on the train. At one point we experienced a train delay of about 10 minutes. Usually train delays are the absolute worst. Everyone on the train starts rolling their eyes and complaining to themselves. But during this delay, the show kept on going, and everyone had a super fun distraction. It was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had on a stalled train.
One of his key reasons for wanting to go to an a-la-carte style is that the price of cable has risen through the years. He cited the data we've charted here from the FCC which shows cable bills rising through the years.
In McCain's view, allowing consumers to pick a small selection of channels they really want should help them save money.
However, Matthew Yglesias at Slate argues that McCain's bill might have the opposite effect. He argues that cable companies are going to get their money one way or another. If people order fewer channels, then cable companies will just charge more for those channels.
Yglesias thinks that if McCain really wants to crack down on the cable/pay TV industry, he should just crack down on it. McCain should just regulate the pay TV business setting a cap on rates, says Yglesias.
The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.
Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.
Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master’s program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.
…The deal started to come together eight months ago in a meeting between Galil and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.
“Sebastian suggested to do a master’s degree for $1,000 and I immediately told him it’s not possible,” Galil said.
Eventually, the program came together for about $6,600 per degree. In a blog post, Thrun compared the day of the announcement to the day he proposed to his wife.
TAMPA BAY, Florida — A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.
The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state’s policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs).
…Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year…with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies….”Red light cameras are a for-profit business between cities and camera companies and the state,” said James Walker, executive director of the nonprofit National Motorists Association. “The (FDOT rule-change) was done, I believe, deliberately in order that more tickets would be given with yellows set deliberately too short.”
Amy Chozick and Ben Protess, reporting for the NYT:
The news gathering technique appears more widespread than the
Goldman incident, which was first reported by The New York Post. A
preliminary analysis at Bloomberg revealed that “several hundred”
reporters had used the technique, a person briefed on the analysis
said. (Bloomberg employs more than 2,400 journalists worldwide. A
spokesman declined to comment on the analysis and said no
reporters had been fired.)
There are also fears that the monitoring may have gone beyond Wall
Street. Banking regulators at the Federal Reserve are examining
whether their own employees were subject to tracking by Bloomberg
reporters, according to people briefed on the matter. A
spokeswoman for the Fed declined to comment.
He [Smolin] goes on to propose a variety of revolutionary ideas to codify further his notion of “real time.” In one, he suggests that every atom in the universe is causally connected to every other atom in the universe, no matter how many light-years away. According to his notion, the failure of standard quantum mechanics to predict the behavior of individual atoms arises from the fact that it does not take into account the vast numbers of interconnections extending across the universe. Furthermore, this picture of the cosmos requires an absolute time (in violation of relativity), which he calls “preferred global time.”
One of Smolin’s most astonishing ideas is something he calls the “principle of precedence,” that repeated measurements of a particular phenomenon yield the same outcomes not because the phenomenon is subject to a law of nature but simply because the phenomenon has occurred in the past. “Such a principle,” Smolin writes, “would explain all the instances in which determinism by laws work but without forbidding new measurements to yield new outcomes, not predictable from knowledge of the past.” In Smolin’s view such unconstrained outcomes are necessary for “real” time.
Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - Kareem on What He Wished He'd Known - Esquire: "sat my parents down and asked them a lot more questions about our family history. I always thought there would be time and I kept putting it off because, at thirty, I was too involved in my own life to care that much about the past. I was so focused on making my parents proud of me that I didn’t ask them some of the basic questions, like how they met, what their first date was like, and so forth. I wish that I had."
In case you missed it, the @AP twitter account was hacked , which resulted in a tweet that sent markets spiraling down only to recover a few minutes later once it was revealed that the tweet was a fake. Here is more info.
Why did the market head lower so quickly ? This is from Paste Magazine
“The events last Tuesday were likely caused by the news-reacting algorithms that are designed to electronically read and interpret machine-readable news,” said in an emailed response by Irene Aldridge, a hedge fund consultant on algorithms and author of High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems. “Most of the web content is machine-readable, so lots of algos are built on reading and reacting to news such as the Twitter hack… Clearly in the Twitter case, trading machines did not ascertain credibility of the tweet,”
So how does the future of HFT look in light of Tuesday’s AP hack tweet incident?
Aldridge said in terms of the technology, “going forward, many algorithm designers will take into account the Tuesday situation, and will build ever more sophisticated approaches.”
There is no question that there is an ongoing arms race between algorithm designers, as well as a technology race to improve Language Processing and Translation abilities (disclosure, im an investor in Linguasys ). Billions of dollars are being invested to make trading without humans faster, cheaper, smarter. The problem is that no matter how smart you make machines, they will never be smart enough in our lifetime to detect all levels of deceit and fraud. Particularly online.
No one has any idea, other than the traders using the algorithms, which twitter accounts the algorithms follow and read. The same with websites. Which do they track and read ? If its worth it for someone to hack the @AP twitter feed in order to attempt to destabilize the markets why wouldn’t the same people or others with similar goals set up thousands of twitter accounts that for some extended period are a solid source of news and information, attempting to build a following that include algorithms reading their feed , knowing that at somepoint they will tweet market moving fake information ? (Note, you dont have to actually follow an account to get access to their feeds, there are services that provide the twitter hose to financial companies)
It costs absolutely nothing to try to make this happen. If you follow the writings of Nanex, you know that mini flash crashes happen in individual stocks all the time. That there are algorithms fighting algorithms all the time. Its to the point where it sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie and it is.
Our markets are at risk. I can’t quantify how big a risk there is, but I can tell you this, as long as there are algorithmically driven trades that happen in thousandths of a second, we can not eliminate that risk. As long as that risk exists, there is a significant opportunity for hackers , terrorists (yes terrorists) and crooks to negatively impact our market to the tune of billions of dollars and possibly . This is the rise of the software controlled market.
There is no such thing as bug free software. If you are an investor, learn how to hedge.
