Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Why Experts Get the Future Wrong


NYTimes

What does the future hold? To answer that question, human beings have looked to stars and to dreams; to cards, dice and the Delphic oracle; to animal entrails, Alan Green­span, mathematical models, the palms of our hands. As the number and variety of these soothsaying techniques suggest, we have a deep, probably intrinsic desire to know the future. Unfortunately for us, the future is deeply, intrinsically unknowable.

This is the problem Dan Gardner tackles in “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better.” Gardner, a Canadian journalist and author of “The Science of Fear,” takes as his starting point the work of Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps.

The most generous conclusion Tetlock could draw was that some experts were less awful than others. Isaiah Berlin once quoted the Greek poet Archilochus to distinguish between two types of thinkers: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin admired both ways of thinking, but Tetlock borrowed the metaphor to account for why some experts fared better. The least accurate forecasters, he found, were hedgehogs: “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains” and “display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ ” he wrote. Better experts “look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things,” “are skeptical of grand schemes” and are “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.” [...]

Spiritual leader of Syrian Jewish community enters guilty plea

YNet

The spiritual leader for the Syrian Jewish community in the United States has entered a guilty plea in a massive federal corruption probe in New Jersey.

Rabbi Saul Kassin of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty in a Trenton federal courtroom Monday to one count of unauthorized money transmitting.

The 89-year-old is the chief rabbi of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
 
Kassin was among five rabbis arrested in July 2009 and charged with money laundering using charitable non-profit groups they or their synagogues controlled.

 


Monday, March 28, 2011

Emmanuel: allegations that sex abuse is behind segregation

Channel 2 news Hat tip Joel Katz
Here's a heads-up on a Israel Channel 2 TV program "360" investigative report.

what was really behind the segregation in Emmanuel's school.

360 reports that the origin of the conflict involved allegations of sexual abuse by rabbi in Emmanuel.

The allegations created conflict between the 'ba'aleh teshuva' population and the haredi population.

Only later did the segregation take place.

Channel 2 http://reshet.ynet.co.il/Shows/360/ Monday 21:00 March 28, 2011.

Joel


Emmanuel: allegations that sex abuse is behind segregation

Channel 2 news Hat tip Joel Katz
Here's a heads-up on a Israel Channel 2 TV program "360" investigative report.

what was really behind the segregation in Emmanuel's school.

360 reports that the origin of the conflict involved allegations of sexual abuse by rabbi in Emmanuel.

The allegations created conflict between the 'ba'aleh teshuva' population and the haredi population.

Only later did the segregation take place.

Channel 2 http://reshet.ynet.co.il/Shows/360/ Monday 21:00 March 28, 2011.

Joel


The Eruv crisis in the Hamptons:The thin Jew LIne



City Show

Readership - South Korea & Iran

Just noticed in my statistics of readership by country - that there are a significant number of readers from South Korea & Iran. 


I would appreciate hearing from these readers what they find of interest?

Supreme Court to Weigh Sociology Issue in Wal-Mart Discrimination Case


NYTimes

When the Supreme Court considers on Tuesday whether hundreds of thousands of women can band together in an employment discrimination suit against Wal-Mart, the argument may hinge on the validity of the hotly disputed conclusions of a Chicago sociologist.

Plaintiffs in the class-action suit, who claim that Wal-Mart owes billions of dollars to as many as 1.5 million women who they say were unfairly treated on pay and promotions, enlisted the support of William T. Bielby, an academic specializing in "social framework analysis."

A central question in the case is whether he should have been allowed, in preliminary proceedings, to go beyond describing general research about gender stereotypes in the workplace to draw specific conclusions about what he called flaws in Wal-Mart's personnel policies.

"Bielby made a conclusion that he had no basis to make," said Laurens Walker, one of two University of Virginia professors who coined the term for the analysis almost 25 years ago. "He hasn't done the research." [...]
   

Sunday, March 27, 2011

The alienation of American Muslims


CNN


The community is growing more defensive in the face of what many here say is a national climate of suspicion reminiscent of the period immediately after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Graves in Yaffo are apparently not Jewish

YNET

The tombs uncovered near Andromeda Hill in Jaffa belong to pagan worshipers buried next to domesticated pigs, according to the latest findings revealed during excavation works at the site.

For the past year, the site has become a political and religious hotspot, with ultra-Orthodox frequently protesting what they claimed was the desecration of Jewish graves.

BCHOL
עצמות יהודים? התמונה אומרת הכל! • צפו והזדזעו
'אתרא קדישא' נערך לטקס קבורה פומבי לעצמות שפונו ממתחם אנדרדומה ביפו • עדות שצולמה במקום מוכיחה באופן חותך: מדובר בעצמות נוצרים • צפו

Abuse: Cyberbullying:5 Essential Parenting Tips


Time

Cyberbullying is back in the news, most recently because of a so-called "smut list" published online that targeted 100 teenage girls, some as young as 14, for being promiscuous. So Healthland asked two bullying experts — Elizabeth Englander, author of Understanding Violence, and Jonathan Singer at the Temple University School of Social Work — for tips for helping parents teach kids to avoid, cope with and understand the harm of digital abuse:

Make sure your kids know cyberbullying is wrong. Many kids don't understand that when they write down and disseminate feelings of frustration, jealousy or anger toward others online, it can quickly escalate into problems in the real world. They also tend to think that what happens digitally "doesn't count" and that digital abuse doesn't hurt, especially since parents usually focus on their kids' behavior in person.


Lawsuit:Magnets defeat push button locks


NYTimes

Yeshai M. Kutoff was house-proud, having bought a home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, for his family of five. And as an Orthodox Jew, he bought push-button locks for the doors — an accommodation for the Sabbath, when many of the devout do not carry keys.

When a neighbor told him that the locks he had bought could be opened by a powerful magnet costing about $30, Mr. Kutoff was perturbed. “It does bother me that other people could easily figure it out,” he said. Mr. Kutoff did not buy a magnet to see for himself. “It doesn’t interest me to know how to break into my own lock,” he said.

If this were a problem with security software instead of errant bits of steel, a company could send out a patch. If this was someplace other than the United States in the 21st century, Mr. Kutoff might have called a locksmith. But because it is the United States in the 21st century, lawyers are involved.