From: Ian Ayres [Ian.Ayres@yale.edu]

Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 12:04 PM

To: 'Ian Ayres'

Subject: more Ayres spam

Dear Friends,

Here are a few short pieces.

Lose Weight? Bet On It, LOS ANGELES TIMES (Jan. 27, 2008) (this tells the story of my weight loss using a stickK contract).

Where Money Is No Object, THE GUARDIAN (Jan. 26, 2008) (with Bruce Ackerman).  The donation booth idea could help England too.

Number Crunching the 2008 Election, Tierney Lab, New York Times (Jan. 9, 2008). A very short excerpt on data mining in politics.

Prepare to be Super-Crunched, THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT 18 (Oct. 26, 2007).  This piece asks whether Super Crunching will change the nature of college and graduate teaching.

Give Freakonomics a Chance," The Economist=s Voice, Vol. 4 : Iss. 5, Article 1.  This article asks David Stern to release the ref data to the world so that people like Levitt and Wolfers can look for electronic trails of wrongdoing.

January 30, 2008, 1:34 pm

Can Bail Bond Dealers Reduce Discrimination? A Guest Post

By Ian Ayres

January 23, 2008, 11:40 am

Swimming Pools and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: A Guest Post

By Ian Ayres

January 21, 2008, 10:32 am

Happy Birthday: A Guest Post

By Ian Ayres

December 26, 2007, 9:31 am

Does This Analysis of Test Scores Make Any Sense? A Guest Post

By Ian Ayres

And from Balkinization:

How Many Candidates Should Be Asked to Debate?

Ian Ayres

Is there anyway to setup in advance some neutral principals for deciding how many candidates to invite to a presidential debate? Last night 7 Republicans debated. But instead of thinking about the specifics of whether Ron Paul should be allowed to debated, I'm looking for rules that might not be articulated now to decide which candidates would be invited 4 or more years hence.

It's a hard question to answer because the debates serve multiple goals. They are both a platform for us to get know relatively unknown candidates and a platform for front runners to articulate their differences.

One approach would be to let the voters (or at least poll responders) decide the question.
A poll could ask likely voters how many or even which candidates they would like to see invited. But its not clear that democratic decision making over invitations would serve democracy's best interest. Front runners would instruct their supporters to favor relatively small debates (or possibly massively large ones where noone had time to carve out a distinguishable immage). On the other hand, letting self-elected elites make the tough call is only as good as elites.

Another possibility is to analyze the results of the most recent traditional ("If the election were held today . . .") polls and invite the "effective number of candidates" with the most support to participate.

What the heck is "the effective number of candidates"? It comes from something called the Herfindahl Index. The Herfindahl Index is a truly non-intuitive measure of industry concentration (does the sum of the squared market shares mean anything to you?). But it is turns out the reciprocal of the Herfindahl index has a natural interpretation as the effective number of firms in the industry. If there are 4 firms in the industry with equal market shares, the reciprocal of the Herfindahl will be 4. As concentration increases in the market shares, the effective number of firms declines.

The same "effective number" calculation can be applied to the candidates shares in the polls. In the most recent USA Today/Gallop Poll, the Republican candidates garnered the following shares:

continue reading . . .

A Song For Jack

Ian Ayres

Here's a toast to Jack Balkin who 5 years ago had the foresight to create Balkinization and who has nurtured it with such loving care all these years.

I drafted this post (about "The Long Black Veil") a while back, but never quite had the nerve to put up... what better way than with a reinterpretation of a song to celebrate Jack's contribution to our worlds.

I’ve always loved the song, “The Long Black Veil.” But I’ve also been troubled by the chorus’s claim: “Nobody knows, nobody sees, Nobody knows but me.” Is it a claim that “nobody knows that she cries over my bones,” or a claim that “nobody knows that I remained silent to protect her”? The latter can’t literally be true. She also knows. It also can’t be a claim “nobody knows that they hung an innocent man.” Because the guilty party would probably know that they tagged someone else for the crime.

Well, as I was driving across I70 in Missouri last fall, I heard the song again on the radio. As if in a Jungian dream, the words of a long-lost 4th verse came to me. Here's the entire song with the additional verse:

Ten years ago, on a cold dark night
Someone was killed, 'neath the town hall light
The people who saw, they all agreed
That the man who killed, looked a lot like me

The judge said son, what’s your alibi
If you were somewhere else, then you won't have to die
I spoke not a word, thou it cost me my life
For I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife

Chorus
She walks these hills in a long black veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees
Nobody knows but me

The scaffold is high, eternity's near
She stood in the crowd and shed not a tear
But late at night, when the north wind blows
In a long black veil, she cries over my bones

Repeat Chorus

One more person knows how this story ends:
the man who killed was my best friend.
He borrowed my coat and disguised his cheek,
‘Cause he knew to protect my love, I would not speak.

Last Chorus

She walks these hills in a long black veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
(Almost) Nobody knows, (almost) nobody sees
(Almost) Nobody knows but me.

To my mind, the song’s even more interesting if the best friend is lurking in the shadows with a bit more information that is not common knowledge. Of course, the hint of the friend’s knowledge is already there, because there’s some chance he’d at least know that his wife was sometimes sneaking off at night in a long black veil.continue reading . . .

Ian Ayres
William K. Townsend Professor
Yale Law School
PO Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520
203.432.7101 (o), 203.432.4769 (f), 203.624.5654 (h), 203.415.5587 (c)
ian.ayres@yale.edu

www.ianayres.com (downloads)

www.stickK.com (stickK to your goals)