Knowledge is power. It is not safe to have power. You could hurt yourself or others with it. That is why we no longer give our kids the tools to learn.

Atomic Radiation is not good for you. But the fear that it inspires in people is far worse. If a major radiation leek, your first concern should be how to protect yourself from fear crazed people. Unless your right next to the radiation leak, people are almost always the greater danger.

This article from Spiegel explains how the fear of radiation was blown out of proportion.

In the next few decades, America has to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure just to maintain our current living standards. How will we fund such investments? How will we mange such investments? How will we insure that we get good value for the money?

Such questions can be debated endlessly. But if we are smart, we will study the big infrastructure projects of the past to see what worked and what did not. Nicole Gelinas essay entitled “Lessons of Boston’s Big Dig” is a good place to start such a study.

Unless rains come to the south soon, it is going to get a lot worse then this….

As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

Latter in the same article……

Three days a week, the volunteer fire chief hops in a 1961 fire truck at 5:30 a.m. — before the school bus blocks the narrow road — and drives a few miles to an Alabama fire hydrant. He meets with another truck from nearby New Hope, Ala. The two drivers make about a dozen runs back and forth, hauling about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme’s tank.

From Good Magazine….

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

The man has a better track record then most quacks. From later on in the article….

He is wildly controversial, though. As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

The whole article is an interesting read. All I have to say on the issue is that quants make predictions about the stock market in a manner similar to Mr. de Mesquita. In the financial markets, this method works until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, the people who depend on the quants are up a river without a paddle.

I imagine that Mr. de Mesquita’s method will have another problem similar to the quants. What happens when everyone starts using his methods?