Brownian Motion

Long Dong Silver Clarence Thomas John Danforth

Rosie the Riveter Sweet Rosie O'Grady Second Hand Rose

Alfred North Whitehead Sam Brownback Auric Goldfinger

Sponge Bob Buster Crabbe Oysters Rockefeller

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 8, 2008 Findings And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw By JOHN TIERNEY The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology. The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real phenomenon, but he maintains that there’s a fatal flaw in the classic 1956 experiment and hundreds of similar ones. He says researchers have fallen for a version of what mathematicians call the Monty Hall Problem, in honor of the host of the old television show, “Let’s Make a Deal.” Here’s how Monty’s deal works, in the math problem, anyway. (On the real show it was a bit messier.) He shows you three closed doors, with a car behind one and a goat behind each of the others. If you open the one with the car, you win it. You start by picking a door, but before it’s opened Monty will always open another door to reveal a goat. Then he’ll let you open either remaining door. Suppose you start by picking Door 1, and Monty opens Door 3 to reveal a goat. Now what should you do? Stick with Door 1 or switch to Door 2? Before I tell you the answer, I have a request. No matter how convinced you are of my idiocy, do not immediately fire off an angry letter. In 1991, when some mathematicians got publicly tripped up by this problem, I investigated it by playing the game with Monty Hall himself at his home in Beverly Hills, but even that evidence wasn’t enough to prevent a deluge of letters demanding a correction. Before you write, at least try a few rounds of the game, which you can do by playing an online version of the game. Play enough rounds and the best strategy will become clear: You should switch doors. This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. But when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times. Now, for anyone still reading instead of playing the Monty Hall game, let me try to explain what this has to do with cognitive dissonance. For half a century, experimenters have been using what’s called the free-choice paradigm to test our tendency to rationalize decisions. This tendency has been reported hundreds of times and detected even in animals. Last year I wrote a column about an experiment at Yale involving monkeys and M&Ms. The Yale psychologists first measured monkeys’ preferences by observing how quickly each monkey sought out different colors of M&Ms. After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey — say, red, blue and green — the researchers gave the monkey a choice between two of them. If the monkey chose, say, red over blue, it was next given a choice between blue and green. Nearly two-thirds of the time it rejected blue in favor of green, which seemed to jibe with the theory of choice rationalization: Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice). But Dr. Chen says that the monkey’s distaste for blue can be completely explained with statistics alone. He says the psychologists wrongly assumed that the monkey began by valuing all three colors equally. Its relative preferences might have been so slight that they were indiscernible during the preliminary phase of the experiment, Dr. Chen says, but there must have been some tiny differences among its tastes for red, blue and green — some hierarchy of preferences. If so, then the monkey’s choice of red over blue wasn’t arbitrary. Like Monty Hall’s choice of which door to open to reveal a goat, the monkey’s choice of red over blue discloses information that changes the odds. If you work out the permutations (see illustration), you find that when a monkey favors red over blue, there’s a two-thirds chance that it also started off with a preference for green over blue — which would explain why the monkeys chose green two-thirds of the time in the Yale experiment, Dr. Chen says. Does his critique make sense? Some psychologists who have seen his working paper answer with a qualified yes. “I worked out the math myself and was surprised to find that he was absolutely right,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “He has essentially applied the Monty Hall Problem to an experimental procedure in psychology, and the result is both instructive and counter-intuitive.” Dr. Gilbert, however, says that he has yet to be persuaded that this same flaw exists in all experiments using the free-choice paradigm, and he remains confident that the overall theory of cognitive dissonance is solid. That view is shared by Laurie R. Santos, one of the Yale psychologists who did the monkey experiment. “Keith nicely points out an important problem with the baseline that we’ve used in our first study of cognitive dissonance, but it doesn’t apply to several new methods we’ve used that reveal the same level of dissonance in both monkeys and children,” Dr. Santos says. “I doubt that his critique will be all that influential for the field of cognitive dissonance more broadly.” Dr. Chen remains convinced it’s a broad problem. He acknowledges that other forms of cognitive-dissonance effects have been demonstrated in different kinds of experiments, but he says the hundreds of choice-rationalization experiments since 1956 are flawed. Even when the experimenters use more elaborate methods of measuring preferences — like asking a subject to rate items on a scale before choosing between two similarly-ranked items — Dr. Chen says the results are still suspect because researchers haven’t recognized that the choice during the experiment changes the odds. (For more of Dr. Chen’s explanation, see TierneyLab.) “I don’t know that there’s clean evidence that merely being asked to choose between two objects will make you devalue what you didn’t choose,” Dr. Chen says. “I wouldn’t be completely surprised if this effect exists, but I’ve never seen it measured correctly. The whole literature suffers from this basic problem of acting as if Monty’s choice means nothing.”

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The Hadron Collider's debut has become the most hyped event since The New Millenium.

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Nice pic of Hil. She's a good looking woman.

From one spelling of Allan to another--Happy Birthday!

I'm still waiting for Larry's first bluegrass album.

Haydn Handel Messiah

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I see you got a 1963 Daily News there. That's like saving a turd for 45 years.

Just how tall was he? And who is the little fellow next to him?

Clorinda Thisbe Cinderella Cinderfella Martin Lewis Edward Hopper

Thanks for this. It's always a pleasure to hear Cake Walkin' Babies.

William Lloyd Garrison Garrison Keillor Guy Noir

Listen... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=89148959

Jack Sprat William Spratling William Faulkner

Midge Williams From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Midge Williams (1915-1952) was an African American Swing Jazz vocalist during the 1930s and 1940s. Although not as famous as other Jazz recording artists, Williams was a respected singer and her group, Midge Williams and Her Jazz Jesters, made several well-received recordings during the late 1930s. Contents [hide] * 1 Early life * 2 Adult career * 3 Final Years * 4 Scholarly resources * 5 External links [edit] Early life Midge Williams was born Virginia Louise Williams in May 1915, but she was known by her nickname "Midge" to distinguish her from her mother, also named Virginia Louise. She grew up in the African American agricultural community of Allensworth, California, in Tulare County. Williams’ grandfather, Joshua Singleton, was the son of the famous black separatist leader Benjamin "Pap" Singleton. Joshua Singleton moved his family to Allensworth when the colony was founded in 1909, and the Singletons became prominent members of the Allensworth community. Virginia Louise Williams, Midge's mother, helped run Singleton's grocery store and helped obtain a Girl Scouts of the USA charter for the Allensworth settlement. Allensworth had problems with arsenic in the groundwater supply, and when promised new sources of water did not appear, the economic hopes of the community began to falter. Many residents had to leave, including the Williams family. Virginia Louise Williams moved to Oakland in 1925, while Midge and her brothers, John, Lewis, Charles, and Robert, remained in Allensworth. In 1929, Midge and her brothers joined her newly remarried mother and her uncle, Henry Singleton, in Berkeley, California. Midge Williams came from a talented family. Her grandfather Joshua had been a music teacher, her mother Virginia Louise was a dance teacher, and her uncle Henry played the violin. She also had a half-brother named Lester Williams who worked as a Jazz musician. With this type of background, Midge Williams and three of her brothers formed a singing and dancing act called the Williams Quartette. The group performed regularly in churches and theaters in and around the San Francisco – Oakland area. [edit] Adult career It was during performances of the Williams Quartette in the early 1930s that Roger Seguire saw the act and signed on to be the group’s manager. Seguire was a pianist with experience in Asia, and he immediately booked the group for a tour of China and Japan. In 1933, the Williams Quartette went to Shanghai, China, to perform at the Canidrome. From Shanghai the group went to Japan, performing in clubs and dance halls. It was in Japan in 1934 that Midge Williams made the first recordings of her career, singing Jazz songs in both English and Japanese. Midge had a tremendous impact upon Japanese Jazz fans and became the model for Japanese singers to follow. In August 1934, the Williams Quartette returned to California, but shortly thereafter Midge's brother Charles died from a gunshot accident. With the Quartette finished, Midge went off on her own. She took up residence in Berkeley, and in the summer of 1935 became a regular performer on the radio program Blue Monday Jamboree. In early 1936 she met Al Jolson and sang on his Shell Chateau radio program. By the summer of 1936, Midge Williams moved to New York City and performed several times on Rudy Vallée's radio show. Her singing voice won her a position doing a series of twice-weekly, 15 minute "sustainer programs" of songs for the NBC Blue Network. In early 1937 she did a once per week series of songs for the NBC Red Network. During her time in New York, Midge Williams appeared on a number of important radio programs, including: the RCA Magic Key series, the Studebaker Champions Show, and Ben Bernie’s Show. It was in the summer of 1936 that Midge Williams began her American recording career on various labels, and by 1937 she was recording songs with her band, Midge Williams and Her Jazz Jesters. Members of the Jazz Jesters included such notable Jazz musicians as Raymond Scott, Frankie Newton, Buster Bailey, and Charlie Shavers. While living in New York, Midge Williams performed at prominent Harlem venues, including the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom. She also appeared with several other distinguished Jazz artists, including Lil Armstrong, Bunny Berigan, Harry James, John Kirby, Glenn Miller, Fats Waller, Ben Webster, and Teddy Wilson. In 1938, Midge Williams joined the Louis Armstrong orchestra and toured with him across the country. Although no recordings of Midge Williams with Louis Armstrong were ever made, while she was with the Jazz legend they played in venues across the United States. [edit] Final Years It is not known exactly what happened, but in 1941 Midge Williams left the Louis Armstrong orchestra and entered into a Detroit hospital. Whether for health or other reasons, her career largely ended at that point. She performed in public only one more time, appearing on the Jack Webb radio show in 1946. From there she slipped into obscurity. In early 1952, Midge Williams died from tuberculosis. She was just a few months shy of her 37th birthday and destitute. Williams was cremated and her ashes interred in San Francisco. [edit] Scholarly resources There are very few references to Midge Williams, but information about her life can be found in the following resources. * Arnold, Bob. "A Brief Biography of "Midge" Williams." Liner Notes in The Complete Midge Williams, vol. 1 & vol. 2. (Audio CDs) Hollis, NH: Swing Time Records, 2001. * Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Gove Dictionary of Jazz, vol. 3. London: Macmillan Publishers, Ltd., 2002. * Larkin, Colin, ed. The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, vol. 8. London: Macmillan Reference, Ltd., 1998.

Jazzbo Collins Symphony Sid Concerto for Cootie

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Flub-a-dub Mothra

I've never "got" the humor of sub-moronic behavior. Hate these guys, and hate Lucille Ball's character as well.

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By March 23, 2008 At Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Set in Stone By MATT RICHTEL SAN FRANCISCO — Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling. A bargaining culture once confined largely to car showrooms and jewelry stores is taking root in major stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and Home Depot, as well as mom-and-pop operations. Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing. The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable. “We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot. In the last year, she said, the store has adopted an “entrepreneurial spirit” campaign to give salespeople and managers more latitude on prices in order to retain customers. The sluggish economy is punctuating a cultural shift enabled by wired consumers accustomed to comparing prices and bargaining online, said Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School. Haggling was once common before department stores began setting fixed prices in the 1850s. But the shift to bargaining in malls and on Main Street is a considerable change from even 10 years ago, Ms. Koehn said, when studies showed that consumers did not like to bargain and did not consider themselves good at it. “Call it the eBay phenomenon,” Ms. Koehn said. “The recession is helping to push these seedlings to the surface,” she added. “It’s a real turnabout on the part of the buyer and the seller.” John D. Morris, an apparel industry analyst for Wachovia, said that the ailing economy was not necessarily forcing all retailers to negotiate. But he says he believes that when there is an opportunity for negotiation, the shopper has the upper hand. “This is one of the periods where the customer is empowered,” Mr. Morris said. “The retailer knows that the customer is enduring tough times — and is more willing to be the one who blinks first in that stare-down match.” While tough times give people more incentive to change their behavior, it is the wealth of information about products made available on the Internet that gives consumers the know-how to try it. People now can quickly amass information on product availability and pricing, helping them develop strategies to get the best deal. Michael Roskell, 33, a technology project manager from Jersey City, N.J., said he and a friend from high school periodically visit electronics stores. While Mr. Roskell expresses interest in buying an item, his friend acts as though he is dissatisfied with the price and threatens to leave. “We play good cop, bad cop,” Mr. Roskell said. In February, he said, the friends got $20 off a pair of $250 speakers at 6th Avenue Electronics in the New York area. Earlier, he and the same friend negotiated to buy two 46-inch high-definition Sony televisions at P. C. Richard & Son, a New York-area electronics chain. List price: $4,300. Price after negotiation: $3,305.50. “My parents never did this,” Mr. Roskell said. “But once you get it, you realize there’s a whole economy built on this.” The strategy can even work when buying pants. At least it did for David Achee of Maplewood, N.J., who said he went to a Polo Ralph Lauren store in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan last month and became interested in a pair of pants on the clearance rack for $75. He told the salesperson that he had seen a similar pair on the Internet for $65, adding that he thought the pair on the rack looked worn (even though he did not really think so). He got the pants for around $50, he said. Among his other tactics, he said, he sometimes threatens to walk out of a store and go to a competitor, as he did recently to get a price break on a drum set at a music store. But, mainly, he relies on researching prices and coming armed with information — prices he finds on the Internet and in ads from competitors. “You can negotiate, but you have to do your research,” said Mr. Achee, who works for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “When I’m bargaining, I’m bargaining with information.” Information from the Internet helped Amber Kendall, 24, and her husband, Matt, when they shopped for a camera last October. The couple, who live in Boston, found the Canon camera they wanted online for $350, then used the Internet price to bargain with Ritz Camera, where the price was $400. Then they used the Ritz Camera offer to get the same price at Microcenter, where they preferred the warranty offer. The technological influences are not just on the consumer side. Retail industry analysts said corporate retailers have begun using computer systems that let them do real-time pricing and profit analysis. Such systems tell a company what price it can set and still make money, and they illuminate the trade-off between lowering prices and raising sales volumes, said Andy Hargreaves, a retail industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. Mr. Hargreaves did a little negotiating himself recently. At Best Buy last November, he bargained down the price of a 50-inch Samsung plasma television. “They gave me a number. I gave them another number, and he gave me a final number,” he said, noting that he got a $100 price break in addition to the $200 sale discount. “A lot of people don’t realize you can go into Best Buy and ask them for a lower price.” Frederick Stinchfield, 23, was a Best Buy salesman in Minnetonka, Minn., until last January. He said about one-quarter of customers tried to bargain. Much of the time, he said, he was able to oblige them, particularly in circumstances where a customer buying electronics (like a camera) also bought an accessory (like a camera bag) with a higher markup. He said the cash registers at Best Buy were set up so that prices could be reset at checkout. Salespeople and managers had the latitude to drop prices, though some were more likely to do so than others. His advice for bargainer hunters? “If you get denied once, go looking for someone else who looks nice,” said Mr. Stinchfield, who now works for the federal government in Washington. He added: “Come armed with information, and you will be rewarded.” Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said that retailers willing to haggle were making a calculated gamble that acceding to lower prices means establishing customer loyalty. The retail mantra is “customer lifetime value,” meaning any single sale might not be that profitable, but an enduring relationship with a shopper would be. There is just one problem with the theory, Ms. Raghubir said. It does not prove true over time. Rather than retaining customers, the rise in haggling is making shoppers highly price-conscious and loyal ultimately to the least expensive offer, not to a brand or a retailer. Home Depot, among others, begs to differ. Ms. Gallagher, the company spokeswoman, said that by allowing salespeople and store managers to make some pricing decisions, the company was creating a friendly environment that feels more like a local store than a monolithic corporate superstore. (She declined to say how much leeway individual salespeople or managers have.) Ms. Raghubir says that retailers are realizing that customers are going to keep pressing them on price, because whatever reticence customers had about bargaining has evaporated. “In the past, when you tried to get yourself a deal and it was an embarrassing thing — the kind of thing you did if you couldn’t afford to pay,” she said. “Now it’s about being a smart shopper.”