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NSF Expeditions Awarded

“Expeditions in Computing awards” are ten million dollar NSF grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering to pursue long-term research agendas. My favorite kinds of projects: high risk, high reward, and long term. Today the first four award winners have been announced. The winning programs are

  • Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020
  • The Molecular Programming Project
  • Understanding, Coping with and Benefiting from Intractibility
  • Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society

Of note for the theoretical computer science crowd is the third of these, won by a Princeton area team (lead by Sanjeev Arora), which is going to establish a “Center for Intractability” at Princeton. Very cool. And now I know where to go if I ever need a traveling salesman.

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Rounding DeLong

IANAE (that’s I am not a person with severe physics envy but who is compensated for this fact by earning a higher salary than a physicist), but I do not understand Brad DeLong:

Traders! Read the second page of the statistical release before you press the button!
Meredith Beechey…and Jonathan Wright have details:

FRB: FEDS paper 2007-5: “Rounding and the Impact of News: A Simple Test of Market Rationality”:
Abstract: Certain prominent scheduled macroeconomic news releases contain a rounded number on the first page of the release that is widely cited by newswires and the press, and a more precise number in the text of the release. The whole release comes out at once. We propose a simple test of whether markets are paying attention to the rounded or unrounded numbers by studying the high-frequency market reaction to such news announcements. In the case of inflation releases, we find evidence that markets systematically ignore some of the information in the unrounded number. This is most pronounced for core CPI, a prominent release for which the rounding in the headline number is large relative to the information content of the release.

If the market is only reacting to the rounded number, why should a trader pay attention to the unrounded number? Is this just a case of sipping at the cooler of the efficient market hypothesis (i.e. surely the market will eventually revert to the unrounded number.) Or am I missing something?

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Open Access Talk

Last week, before I headed to my current location in the land of Coca Cola and the Cartoon Network (the hotel is so nice here that when my friend stopped outside so that I could drop my bags off, the concierge asked him if he wanted would like some water while he waited), I attended a very inspirational talk on open access by Jonathan Eisen. The video is now available online (lecture 2.) Well worth watching as it was a good talk laying out the case for open access to research journals (which Eisen makes sure to delineate from open science. Say the word open science, I guess, and some people go bonkers.)
Continue reading “Open Access Talk”

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Professor Demoted For Video Game Designer

Say it ain’t so Hasbro, say it aint so. From an NPR story on a makeover of the game “Clue”:

The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he’s a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer — a dot-com billionaire.

Take that you stuffy academic professors, with your padded elbows and your pipes and your uncombed Einstein hair: you’re no longer the smartest person in the room (unless you’ve made a video game, that is.) But I still think you were the murder, in the spa, with the baseball bat.