parsimony |ˈpärsəˌmōnē|

noun

extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources : a great tradition of public design has been shattered by government parsimony.

PHRASES

principle (or law) of parsimony the scientific principle that things are usually connected or behave in the simplest or most economical way, esp. with reference to alternative evolutionary pathways. Compare with Occam’s razor .

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin parsimonia, parcimonia, from parcere ‘be

I’ve prefaced my comments in the past with disclaimers about my non-science background, but this one is too rich. Apparently, if you drill straight into a tree, you get really skinny tree rings, and if you drill sideways into that same tree, you get thicker tree rings. Moreover, if you drill all the way around a tree in a big circumferential loop, you get no fracking tree rings, which is pretty astounding, because dendrologists have asserted for quite some time that all trees exhibit a telltale tree-ring shape.

Given that this is the case, it stands to reason that if a tree is irregularly shaped — maybe due to some external pressure like, say, a giant ice monster crashing the hell up against it several thousand years ago — or if it is perfectly round, as if plucked from the fantasy-land of Plato’s forms, you will get different patterns of tree rings. Lordy. Nature is confounding!

Here’s another interesting factoid that I am wholly unqualified to assert (but will anyway): If you stick a needle into my bicep, you will be more likely to strike muscle than if you stick a needle in my skull. My skull, as it turns out, is mostly bone (or rock; hard to tell). Many doctors probably do not know this about my skull and my bicep, but it bears pointing out lest my doctors draw irrational conclusions about their breaking of needles on the top of my head.

More astonishing is that this peculiar topology is true for all people, except those who have led cosmically different lives: who have fantasized exactly 218 times about dining on chocolate for breakfast, who have swum with piranha, sung lullabies to sheep, eaten three micrograms more spinach than paneer, or been attacked by a thousand-year-old ice monster. And yet, this impudent institution loudly insists on extrapolating across a wide population of all humans, mindless of rampant data-collection errors, naive to the perils of individual variation, wholly reliant upon a flawed and out-dated statistical apparatus that can never account for individual difference because, when we look back over time, there is always another causal branch that has not been explored. Four micrograms of spinach, you say? Bullocks. Back to the drawing board. Audacious, then, to insist that we use their imprecise and flimsy analysis to protect our children against the nefarious pig disease that has been giving all manner of press-lackey conniptions since April.

Don’t get me wrong. I make no pretense to know the statistics. I have no interest in such voodoo. Nor am I interested in tree rings or muscle tissue. I’m interested, instead, in holding the highest standards for the sciences, in setting the truth bar so high that no possible methodology could hope to surmount it. There’s grace in sticking to one’s theoretical guns, you see, in insisting that researchers maintain an immeasurable degree of accuracy, that they hold fast to truth with a conceptual stringency only Moritz Schlick could love.

By my humble lights, far better to stick with math. This a posteriori drivel is a disaster.

Have fun storming the castle!

Finance and parsimony…almost sounds like a bizarro Rufus Wainwright song-title. More seriously though, I’ve been reading a variety of perspectives on social science methodology lately; the notion of parsimony, and the role that it plays in “proper” social science research, is often thrown about and debated. Consider the following from King, Keohane and Verba’s seminal Designing Social Inquiry:

Parsimony is therefore a judgment, or even assumption, about the nature of the world: it is assumed to be simple. The principle of choosing theories that imply a simple world is a rule that clearly applies in situations where there is a high degree of certainty that the world is indeed simple. Scholars in physics seem to find parsimony appropriate, but those in biology often think of it as absurd. In the social sciences, some forcefully defend parsimony in their subfields, but we believe it is only occasionally appropriate. Given the precise definition of parsimony as an assumption about the world, we should never insist on parsimony as a general principle of designing theories, but it is useful in those situations where we have some knowledge of the simplicity of the world we are studying (KKV, p. 20, emphases are mine).

KKV categorically deny that parsimony is a necessary feature of good social science, which most people agree with (while I don’t agree with a lot of DSI, this seems like a fairly uncontroversial point). I think the more interesting point in there, though, is that parsimony follows from a certain world-view…la vie en rose, if you will. Recognizing this illuminates much of the methodological debate over the role of parsimony- people holding KKV’s view that parsimony is not essential, seem to often think that proponents of parsimony are turning a desirable condition into a necessary one i.e. that parsimony arises out of a certain view on methodology. However, it would seem more accurate to say that those in favor of parsimony, see this necessity as arising out of a different world-view i.e. an object-related imperative. There is a subtle distinction between object-related and method-related imperatives underpinning the debate.

Now, put those thoughts away for a bit and make a jump over to this post (courtesy Mike Konczal). I won’t bother reproducing the argument here- its a short post anyway- but the relevant take-away point is that revolutions in financial modeling and technology led to a certain standardization in financial markets. The author notes:

It is not just that Black-Scholes-Merton formula allows us to price options. It allowed sophisticated analyses of returns, captured by risk and volatility. Risk is the magic commensuration mechanism. Commensuration here means a metric (often, but not necessarily quantitative) that allows us to compare two otherwise qualitatively distinct objects. Understanding returns as a function of risk and volatility (assumptions and measures about transaction costs, liquidity, and the like can be incorporated as well) means that real estate, bonds, stocks, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, fine art, even your Uncle Earl’s gold coin collection can all be translated into a common metric: how much risk, how much volatility, equals how much return?

And further on:

As a result of this fact – this fact of the contemporary world of risk management and globalized finance – a number of assumptions that we had previously held to be true no longer are. For example, arguably commercial banks, insurance companies, and investment banks are indeed all doing the same thing: they are all trading in risk. The ways they do this continue to differ, but the underlying ways that they can calculate their worlds have moved closer.

This move towards homogeneity has a number of regulatory and systemic implications (covered by the author and Konczal), but my concern here is with the sort of market-view that it engendered. As finance has evolved, it has become stickier in the sense that separation of its various components, in a relevant manner, has become harder. I use “relevant” in the sense that fund managers and investors are largely interested in the means by which ordinal rankings become easier to carry out. Diverse measures across the industry have come to be expressed in similar terms (Konczal refers to this reified entity known as “the underlying”). I keep pointing to Felix Salmon’s great piece in Wired, where he notes inter alia, of David Li’s Gaussian copula:

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn’t just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

And talking about the boom in CDS and CDO markets:

At the heart of it all was Li’s formula. When you talk to market participants, they use words like beautiful, simple, and, most commonly, tractable. It could be applied anywhere, for anything, and was quickly adopted not only by banks packaging new bonds but also by traders and hedge funds dreaming up complex trades between those bonds.

Now, you could make the argument that the increasing homogeneity of market jargon and easy adoption of formulae like Li’s result in a parsimonious view of financial markets, and the world in general. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse here, but at some level, it seems that the continual move towards simplicity must foster a world-view of parsimony. CAPM, Black-Scholes, Li’s copula….they all found remarkably simple ways of describing a wide range of things in the world and I find it hard to believe that expediency was the only reason that such formulae were so readily adopted. We all want to believe that the world can be simplified and are quick to jump onto a bandwagon that does so. Felix Salmon provides the details for why Li’s brand of parsimony failed so spectacularly, but I think the overall lesson is generalizable.

Indeed, I think the problem with such simplifying views of the world speaks to the key methodological issue with positive science- it assumes an underlying (pardon the pun) that is empirically verifiable. KKV themselves have come in for much criticism from interpretivists- amongst others- for providing a parochial view of the world and the manner in which we measure and interpret aspects of it (see this Lisa Wedeen paper for a good example). Now, I don’t mean to carry over a debate in political science methodology over to finance and I’m certainly not advocating interpretivism as the new financial paradigm (would such a suggestion even make sense?) However, I think the broader methodological point viz. that we should be aware of the dangers inherent to fostering a parochial view on the way the world works, is one that has some relevance; I talked about this in the context of the broader macroeconomic debate as well. While the erroneous adoption of a flawed formula is a large part of the problem, lets not forget the culture that engendered it.

Will be watching the price of the kChef over the next couple of weeks – as I have claimed a new discount (not quite as much as the previous price drop, but hey! £16.25 off is a lot more that £0.00 off, no?).

As for me, I’m going to make one more cover for my little helper. Then that’s it. Only clothes sewing from now on – in case I do land that great job.

Had an inkling to check the web site of my favourite store -

and the price of my mixer-to-be has dropped by £20!!!

Must race to claim my discount, as the store’s policy of never being undersold would be put to the test by me!

I can do it, as the new price is also being charged in-store.

But…

…I have got to get the paperwork from the purchased goods (in this case my mixer when it shows up later this week), then I hotfoot it back to the store to get my money back.

For £20 GBP, it’s definitely worth the fuss.

EDI SUWARDIWIJAYA DAN HARSONO LANYA

Pengantar Peramalan
Organisme Pengganggu Tumbuhan

I. PENDAHULUAN
Penerapan PHT secara operasional mencakup upaya secara preemtif dan responsif. Upaya preemtif adalah upaya pengendalian yang didasarkan pada informasi dan pengalaman status OPT waktu sebelumnya. Upaya ini mencakup penentuan pola tanam, penentuan varietas, penentuan waktu tanam, keserentakan tanam, pemupukan, pengairan, jarak tanam, penyiangan, penggunaan antagonis dan budidaya lainnya untuk menciptakan budidaya tanaman sehat. Sedangkan upaya responsif adalah upaya pengendalian yang didasarkan pada informasi status OPT dan faktor yang berpengaruh pada musim yang sedang berlangsung, serta pertimbangan biaya manfaat dari tindakan yang perlu dilakukan. Upaya ini antara lain seperti penggunaan musuh alami, pestisida nabati, pengendalian mekanis, atraktan dan pestisida kimia
Untuk melaksanakan tindakan operasional tersebut di atas diperlukan informasi ekologis, terutama tentang perkembangan populasi/serangan OPT dan musuh alaminya, perkembangan tanaman inang, dan faktor-faktor lain yang mempengaruhi perkembangan OPT. Informasi tersebut artimya merupakan pemahaman terhadap agroekosistem yang akan dikelola dengan melakukan analisis terhadap data historis ekologis atau analisis ekosistem. Hasil analisis ekosistem tersebut dapat disusun dalam suatu model prediksi kejadian serangan OPT atau model peramalan OPT, yang selanjutnya hasil aplikasi model peramalan berupa informasi peramalan OPT pada suatu daerah atau lokasi dapat dijadikan input dalam merencanakan agroekosistem atau merencanakan usahatani. Pada lingkup kelompok tani, perencanaan kegiatan tersebut dapat dituangkan melalui penyusunan RDK dan RDKK .

Selanjutnya, silahkan download Pengantar Peramalan Organisme Pengganggu Tumbuhan

tweets, status updates and a general shout out to the world concerning AFW2009 : additional parties added to colours marie guide.                                                       

Parsimony Dresses

7/8 •    Austin Handmade hosts Team Fabrication and Robbie Kaye Dodson of Parsimony.  Cutest little dresses.

Apricot Lane Texas is getting excited about hosting “m-squared jewelry” for Austin Fashion Week, July 13-19! You’ll have to come see it!

-Tolley Moseley “Interview with Matt Swinney”

7/9 •  electricpromos AFW Event 7-18:Prints 4 Non-Profit presented by Study Breaks Mag & Brightkite: FREE: AMP Energy, SWEET LEAF TEA, & LONESTAR. 2405 Nueces St.

More Austin Fashion Week: Details on the Alamo Drafthouse / Fashion Week Bruno Screening – http://is.gd/1stNb

Corey Lynn Calter to set up pop-up show for AUSTIN FASHION WEEK! 

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

I’m wrapping up this first series about what goes into taking over a new organization (earlier posts (here. here, here, and here).  The theme of simplicity and parsimony gets mangled during many discussions; for example, sometimes people think that “simple = easy”.    Also, that old simplicity maxim — Occam’s Razor — focuses on analysis to the exclusion of creation (BTW, it wasn’t given its modern form by William of Ockham himself). 

Ockham’s own phrase Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora [It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer] better expresses the essence of elegant design.  Notice the shift from “explain” to “do”?  With Ockham’s words in mind, let’s consider these HBR New Leader leading questions about complexity:

• How complex are your product or service offerings, and what is that degree of complexity costing you?
• Where is your innovation fulcrum?
• What are the few critical ways your products stand out in customers’ minds?
• How complex is your decision making and organization relative to competitors’?
• What is the impact of this complexity?
• Where does complexity reside in your processes?
• What is that costing you?

The paragraph about the user interface generator in my last post, or my other recent attempt to explain what it does, don’t really tell you very much. I hope this quick festive example provides a better idea about how user modeling and code generation can speed up user interface development.

First I needed to think of something Christmassy that might need a simple user interface. I apologise in advance, but I chose Christmas cracker jokes!! On the plus side, they’re really simple, and a basic create, read, update and delete interface makes perfect sense. So, I got started by creating a CRUD Joke UML diagram… and about five minutes later I stopped laughing to myself! Well, it’s funnier than most cracker jokes!

Anyway, the UML tools we provide for user modeling enable you to create a new user object with the default CRUD tasks in one go. Here’s what it looks like:

Next, because the user modeling is focused on the roles and goals of users, I added a few other bits just for the demo:

Perhaps a better role would have been, “Joke quality monitor”, with a goal of, “Maximise Christmas laughter”… or should that be minimise… well, you get the idea!

That’s pretty much it, I can then click the “Generate User Interface…” menu option, deploy the EAR it creates to an application server and fire up my web browser. It took longer to get this far through the blog post than it did to get a working user interface (admittedly I’m a very slow writer, but still, I think that’s pretty good).

(Thanks to a very old BBC article for that joke!)

The activity diagram behind the modify task above looks like this:

At some point you need to put real code in for the commands to interact with the back end system, whatever that might be, but to start with the tool will generate a default implementation so you can quickly prototype and test the UI.

So that’s all there is to creating cracking user interfaces.

While we’re on the subject of my parsimony, I’d like to share with our readers my unique approach to commerce.  You see, most cheapskates look to save themselves as much money as possible.  This approach, while natural and logical, has a flaw: it allows savvy merchants to exploit the consumer’s predictable and narrow focus on minimizing cost.  Let me illustrate with an example: suppose you go into a cafe and order the cheapest sandwich on the menu.  Knowing that the cheapest item will be ordered frequently, the cafe owner may have priced it such that it yields the highest profit margin on the menu.  You leave the restaurant happy that you saved a buck, unaware of the fact that you put money in the cafe owner’s pockets and settled for what was probably an inferior sandwich.

That’s why I approach transactions not with the intention of maximizing my expected value, but of minimizing that of the merchant.  In a zero-sum game, these approaches are one and the same; capitalism, however, is not zero-sum, so they can lead to very different decisions.  Take a buffet, for example: your typical consumer will eat a substantial but reasonable portion of food and walk away feeling satisfied.  How can he be satisfied, though, knowing that it is possible and indeed probable that the restaurant turned a profit on him?  When I go to a buffet,  I skip the previous meal or two and stuff myself to the point of intestinal distress.  My goal is at least to deny the restaurant a profit, and preferably to cost it money; in my view, temporary discomfort is a small price to pay for accomplishing this.

You're not making a dime off me.

Another example of my strategy in action is pizza.  Most pizza places charge a flat rate for any topping.  Why should I pay $1 for onions or peppers, which cost the restaurant mere pennies?  I order toppings not based on which ones I like best, but on which cost the pizza parlor the most.  That these tend to overlap is purely coincidental; I’m acting with a higher purpose in mind than gratification of my taste buds.

I’ve employed this approach for years, and I’m a true believer in its efficacy.  Be warned, though: it is a highly advanced strategy that can easily backfire in less experienced hands.  Those just entering the wonderful world of frugality should stick with the standard approach, but if you’re a veteran cheapskate looking to take your game to the next level, give it a try.

Dan did something a few weeks ago that requires documentation and recognition. Pointing out the strangeness of Dan’s actions at large would be absolutely pointless (it would require its own blog complete with an encyclopedia and compendium). However, I just can’t get over this particular event, so I feel compelled to share.

In the library at CMU, there’s a coffee shop on the ground floor. Every once in a while, we head over there to get re-caffeinated. On the notable occasion under discussion, Dan stood in line, scrutinizing the menu in a deep computational trance.

Stack my cheese up, because someday I'ma give this street life up.

I’m used to this particular stare that Dan gives. It’s the same stare when he’s trying to figure out how to bullshit you at poker. It’s the same stare when he is trying to figure out the best move in chess, and it’s the stare he assumes when he takes two-hours to move in a board game.

I wondered idly what he could be thinking about and ordered my large coffee. Then came the moment.

“I’d like to order a single shot of espresso, please; and I’d like to add an additional shot.”

“So, a double espresso?”

“No. I’d like to order a single espresso and add an additional shot.”

Apparently, it says on the menu that you can add an additional shot of espresso to any espresso drink (such as a latte or a cappuccino). Technically, espresso is an espresso drink. Under this interpretation of the menu, it creates a loophole where the discerning customer can save a whopping dime.

Every thing counts in large amounts.

No need for comment here. I report, you decide.

- عموجان، شما مسافرت رفته بودید؟

- خیر!

- پس چه طوری مصرف آب‌تون شده 20 لیتر؟

- خوب … صرفه‌جویی کردیم!!

———-
نه، واقعا چه جوری یک عده‌ای وجدان‌شون رو راضی می‌کنند که کنتر آب خونه‌شون رو دست‌کاری کنند و تازه با اسم «صرفه‌جویی» این رو برای کارمند اداره‌ی آب توجیه کنند؟! چرا گاهی -همه‌ی ما- فکر می‌کنیم خون‌مون از بقیه رنگین‌تره؟

Sigmund Mutznock ist ein trauriges Beispiel dafür, wie ein nicht unintelligenter Charakter auf falsche Bahnen gerät und schließlich scheitert. Er biederte sich zunächst im Dankwart-Forum an, später assistierte er – ein vermeintlicher Karriereschub – dem Betrüger “J. Kaplan” in dessem “Redlichkeitsforum”. Gemeinsam mit R. Pfarrpfeifer fiel er “Kaplan” in den Rücken und gründete das “Forum der guten Menschen”, wo er sich auf das Lächerlichste aufspielte, “redliche” und “unredliche” Farben verteilte, was zweifellos den Höhepunkt seines Lebens darstellte. Über Nacht wurde das Forum vom Anbieter geschlossen und der Narr Mutznock verschwand in der Versenkung.