Assorted links

1. Frequent flyers who fly too much and annoy their airline.

2. You know the election is over when Slate goes after our beloved leader.

3. Mark Steyn skewers David Gregory.

4. Spirograph and Ann Arbor.

5. 2013 is the International Year of Statistics! Party on.

Cheating on the SAT?

A minor scandal in Long Island, as reported in the NYT:

Key paragraph:

Neither colleges nor high schools are ever alerted that cheating was suspected. Tom Ewing, an Educational Testing Service spokesman, said that confidentiality laws meant to protect minors prevented his company from disclosing that information. Of 2.25 million SATs taken every year, about 1,000 scores are withdrawn for misbehavior, 99 percent of which are for copying, he said.

1,000 out of 2.25 million is a pretty low rate, but it sounds like the 1000 is people who misbehave during the exam and not people taking the exam for someone else, which is in some sense much more serious.

Optimal deterrent theory, of course, suggests that when the probability of detection is low, the punishment should be large. I suspect that ETS has a better idea of how common it is for students to pay someone else to take their exam. This sort of behavior has also been an issue with the GRE and the TOEFL.

Via: instapundit

Post-tenure hobbies for economists

Daniel Parent with his restored tractor.

I am not sure if my hobby is going to seminars or being on dissertation committees. Maybe both.

Movie: Jack Reacher

The NYT frowns without saying much, while Rolling Stone gushes. I am somewhere in between. Tom Cruise plays only one character, but he plays it well. I enjoyed this rendition better than, e.g. the latest Mission Impossible movie. This one is also interesting for how the politics of guns are handled, something I was suprised to see the NYT not mention.

Recommended if you like the character Tom Cruise plays.

Richard Dawson, RIP

I particularly liked Dawson's performance in The Running Man, which took some character given that he is essentially parodying himself.

NYT obituary here (with not one but two corrections and missing any reference to his years on Match Game) and wikipedia page here.

The Atlantic on Bronzeville

The Atlantic considers Bronzeville, the neighborhood northwest of Hyde Park in Chicago. The neighborhood is relatively unique in being an example of minority gentrification.

I would add a couple of thoughts. First, I do not recall hearing the area actually called Bronzeville until after the gentrification got going. When I was a grad student at Chicago, it was just the bad neighborhood you drove through on the way from Hyde Park to Midway airport. Second, I don't think that lessons from Chicago, with its long and acrimonious racial history, necessarily generalizes to places like DC, which are full of whites who would pay to a premium to live in a stable, racailly mixed neighborhood.

Fiscal cliff deal

No leadership from our "leaders", just a can kicked forward and some envy candy for the mindless part of the left.

If anyone in DC is aware that there is actually a literature on public finance, there is no real evidence of it in this deal.

Pathetic, but not unexpected, and not a very auspicious start to 2013.

Bonus: some smart words from Greg Mankiw and a fine bashing of the NYT from John Cochrane.