One, Three, Zero

TEDxSV 2009

I’ll be at the TED event at Stanford on Dec 12, 2009.

You should too!

Elements of Statistical Learning (New Edition) now online for free

Holy crap. This is awesome. Profs Hastie, Friedman and Tibshirani have put the new (2009) version of their definitive text, Elements of Statistical Learning, online for free. At 700+ pages (and a lot of megabytes), its still far easier to use the paper copy. Hopefully something will appear in Google Books soon.

Given that a professor in my department has just won the Nobel Prize in Economics — now seems like a good time to mention: I’ve left full-time employment at Google to start a PhD at Berkeley.

Best (and most succinct) defense of the Economics profession

Economists have come under a lot of scrutiny for having not predicted the recession and financial crisis (and for not offering useful advice once the panics were underway). Here are some interesting thoughts from Hal:

Many economists recognized that housing prices were out of line. What we didn’t recognize is how screwed up the mortgage market was. If you had ask 100 economists, “what would happen if mortgage lenders based their loans on self-declared income?” I think that 90% of them would say, “mortgage quality would deteriorate.” Similarly if you asked what the consequences would be of investment banks taking on leverage factors of 30+, they would answer, “you would get an increase in asset volatility.” The problem is that few people outside the industries were aware of these practices. As Warren Buffet puts it, “you don’t know who is wearing a bathing suit until the tide goes out.”

Actually, I’m willing to bet that a lot of people who are not economists could have made those same predictions. So the question is: Whose job is it to uncover these basic facts and sound the alarms? Seems like journalists, consultants, counterparties and investors are equally (or more) responsible for this kind of investigation.

Unfortunate Quote of the Day

“‘She lost her husband. Her job. Her identity,” she said. ‘She’s working on getting that back, and she’s a beautiful woman, inside and out. She did get the shaft really bad.’” — San Francisco Weekly on Ruby Rippley Tourk. Emphasis mine.

Quote of the day

“Have you ever seen a preference? If you have, please take a picture of it for me. Since we like to assert that economics is an emperical science, we would like the theoritical primitives to be observable, at least in principle, otherwise we’re only engaged in a very mathematically rigorous form of theology.” David Ahn’s PhD microeconomics course notes.