Best wishes this Christmas to all our readers. Here’s a little bit from Alexander McCall Smith’s At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances that I like to think about at this time of year. Plenty of time for shouting at one another in the New Year, but for the moment:
The Master then rose to give […]
It’s that time of the year again: the King William College General Knowledge Paper has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything […]
John “Hannibal” Stokes at Ars Technica has some interesting speculation on what the new technology behind the NSA wiretap abuse scandal might be. Because he knows a lot about computers, he’s also in a position to explain to the likes of Richard Posner one of the (several) things that’s wrong with computer-automated mass surveillance:
Just imagine, […]
A commenter in our previous post points to this chat session with Posner, hosted by the Washington Post. Besides forgetting everything he ever learned about public choice theory, Posner also seems to have abandoned the cost-benefit methods which made him famous. He is now convinced that radical uncertainty is not amenable to probabilistic analysis:
Question: … […]
Earlier this month, Judge Richard Posner wrote a brutal opinion (accompanied by some entertaining oral argument) savaging the Bureau of Immigration Appeals for its capricious decision-making process, its inability to keep track of paperwork, and its willingness to dump the consequences of its ineptitude onto the people it passes judgement on—in this case by deporting […]
All over the U.S. at the moment, academics like me are complaining about end-of-semester woes like administering exams and grading papers. Cheer up! It could be worse. For instance, take this despairing page put up by the economist John Hey, who spends some of his time teaching in England, and the rest as Professore Ordinario […]
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