Monthly Archives: February 2019

Useful Blog: The Vetting Room

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Michael Froomkin

I’ve just discovered The Vetting Room, which looks like a very useful blog offering short descriptions of the qualifications of, and potential controversies about, nominees to the federal judiciary.

Or, as they put it,

The Vetting Room is a legal blog dedicated to discussing, examining, and analyzing judicial nominations.  Specifically, we research the records of President Trump’s judicial nominees, condense the important issues, and present it for public use.  All of our investigations are conducted by volunteer attorneys who are committed to an independent and thorough review.  Our posts are the product of multiple rounds of research and editing, and sometimes include the contributions of multiple attorneys.

The Vetting Room is not formally affiliated with any partisan or nonpartisan groups, and maintains the primary goal of improving public engagement with the federal judicial confirmation process.

Posted in Law: Everything Else, Politics: US | Comments Off on Useful Blog: The Vetting Room

Real or Onion?

Posted on February 11, 2019 by Michael Froomkin

Guess before clicking.

Florida School Hires 2 Former Combat Veterans to Take Down Active Shooters

I guessed wrong.  It really is getting harder to tell.

Posted in Onion/Not-Onion | Comments Off on Real or Onion?

Panic Stations

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Michael Froomkin

Level of CO2 in the atmosphere: 413.69ppm

12 months ago: 407ppm

250 years ago, est: 250ppm

Posted in Global Warming | Comments Off on Panic Stations

Short Notes

Posted on February 3, 2019 by Michael Froomkin

I’ve been busy, so some short notes of things I wish I had time to write full posts about:

  • We’ve got some terrific speakers at We Robot 2019, and are assembling a powerhouse set of discussants to go with them.  See the preliminary We Robot program, and the preliminary pre-conference Workshop program, and register now!  I’ll post the whole program here when it’s more final. And remember – it’s time to pitch a poster, which gets you in free.
  • The Gables Stage production of Indecent is first-rate.  Great play, great production.  You see it coming and it’s still harrowing.  It closes in a couple of weeks, but they’ve added some performances recently so there are still tickets.  I’ve been a season ticket holder for many years, and this is as good as anything they’ve done.
  • Depending on what rules the AIs used, this looks like it might be an important paper to more than one field: Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, Sergio Pastorello, Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, VOX (Feb. 03, 2019).  I found the link to the the summary of the summary on Naked Capitalism. I’ve asked my library to get the paper for me.  The claim is that,

     [W]e experiment with pricing algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in controlled environments (computer simulations), studying the interaction among a number of Q-learning algorithms in a workhorse oligopoly model of price competition with Logit demand and constant marginal costs. In this setting the algorithms consistently learn to charge supra-competitive prices, without communicating with one another. The high prices are sustained by classical collusive strategies with a finite phase of punishment followed by a gradual return to cooperation. This finding is robust to asymmetries in cost or demand and to changes in the number of players.

  • Some USB device on my desktop computer is causing crashes after (or when?) it boots up automatically in the morning.  Of course the Windows 7 (deprecation coming soon…) error messages don’t tell you which.  Never happens when I start it up manually or am using it.
Posted in Linkorama | Comments Off on Short Notes