09 Sept sites

The Weatherman Is Not a Moron  By NATE SILVER NYT, September 7, 2012

The World Future Society

• Wright's Law: A Better Predictor of Technological Progress than Moore's Law 
• Too Many Choices for the Future? Consumers Want Fewer "Flavors"

The Heart of the US Election 

CBO on 'fiscal cliff': newest estimate is gloomiest yet (Christian Science Monitor) (CBO Report) Sept, 2012

• The CBO, Congress's budget watchdog, warns that the US economy will 'probably' slide back into recession, if the tax hikes and spending cuts mandated for year's end take effect.

• Baseline -- Allowing fiscal cliff-like fiscal policy to continue for the next decade would lower US deficits to just 0.9 percent of GDP in 2022 with the nation's overall debt falling... to 58 percent in 2022. 
•  Alternate -- [I]f current tax laws are extended and spending cuts are eliminated, a deficit averaging 5 percent of GDP over the next decade with America owing 90 percent of its GDP in debt come 2022.

New Report on Getting the Best Care

• Two charts explain why.

At the National Conventions, the Words They Used (Dynamic)

Orszag: IPAB Will Promote Higher-Value Health Care
Independent Payment Advisory Board Will Help Reduce Health Costs, Repealing IPAB Would be Unwise 

Obama and Romney Tackle 14 Top Science Questions
Are you more (or less) liberal than President Obama? Take our quiz!

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital By Matt Taibbi,  How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill

• The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney: Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that

A Look Behind the U.S. Decline in Global Competitiveness

• The global debt clock: Our interactive overview of government debt across the planet

Republicans Are Wrong on Call for Gold Standard

• Long-term inflation charts reach back to 1872
• Long term  (Real) Gold Prices 1334-1994
• Short term Gold Prices 1960-2012 (From: Wikipedia: Gold as an investment)

Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore
9 bad decisions people make because of the sunk cost fallacy

Customizable Shortcuts -- Allows to customize Firefox shortcu

Bill Clinton’s Speech: Read the Full Text Here (Barack's 2012 nomination)

•  How Bill Clinton does it (Politico)
• Fact checking Bill Clinton’s speech and other Democrats at the convention in Charlotte (Washington post)

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Tech: 7 Important Features Your Wireless Router Has And You Should Be Using
Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Competition: Selected Images From The Royal Observatory Greenwich's Competition
We decided to test alkaline, lithium and zinc-chloride cells to find the best AA batteries you can buy for your money on the highstreet and online.
 

Paradoxes

The 20-th century was the "No you Can't" century in which there were a number of Paradoxes that were discovered that "proved" that not all things were possible.

Physics

. Relativity -- Large Physics

1. No material particle can be accelerated to the speed of light.
2. The Speed of light is a constant and is not observed to be changed no matter the speed of the observer.
3. There is no absolute space frame, e.g. one can not determine if one is stationary relative to any absolute space.

. Quantum Mechanics -- Small Physics

1. Many measurements are intermingled in that one can not measure both with infinite accuracy, e.g. Position and Momentum.
2. The state of a system often is indeterminate, with no hidden values, and only exists when an observation collapses the state.
3. Small particles (or waves) sometimes seem to be Particles, when their position is measures, and Waves when their path is measured.

Arrow's impossibility theorem (for voting) -- There is no voting system that is a fair way of determining group Public Good from individual preferences if the system is meant to satisfy: "

1. unrestricted domain, -- It should yield a unique and complete ranking of societal choices for any set of individual voter preferences.
2. non-dictatorship, -- It cannot simply mimic the preferences of a single voter.
3. independence of irrelevant alternatives -- Changes in individuals' rankings of irrelevant alternatives (ones outside the subset) should have no impact on the societal ranking of the relevant subset.
4. Pareto efficiency, -- If every individual prefers a certain option to another, then so must the resulting societal preference order. (note: monotonicity, non-imposition, and independence of irrelevant alternatives together imply Pareto efficiency)

Practical Paradoxes

the following seem to be paradoxes, but are not proven.

. Democratic Trilemma -- Fishkin -- No democratic system seems to satisfy the following three objectives.

1. Participation -- All qualified members of the society shall participate in the determination of the policies of the society.
2. Equality -- They shall be equally deterministic of the policies.
3. Deliberation -- They shall spend sufficient time to thoughtfully evaluate the values and implications of their decisions.