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Cnet Reader poll: What's the best free online backup solution?

by Rick Broida February 29, 2012 7:56 AM PST

There are lots of services that give you free storage for your data. The question is, which one works best? Hint: use a few of them.

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33153_7-57387515-10391733/reader-poll-whats-the-best-free-online-backup-solution/#ixzz1nndnCoit

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End of the Republic?

From wikipedia:

Most notorious was his acquisition of burning houses: when Crassus
received word that a house was on fire, he would arrive and purchase the
doomed property along with surrounding buildings for a modest sum, and
then employ his army of 500 clients to put the fire out before much
damage had been done. Crassus’ clients employed the Roman method of
firefighting—destroying the burning building to curtail the spread of
the flames.

Advice from Grantham

Recognize your advantages over the professionals. By far the biggest problem for professionals in investing is dealing with career and business risk: protecting your own job as an agent. The second curse of professional investing is over-management caused by the need to be seen to be busy, to be earning your keep. The individual is far better-positioned to wait patiently for the right pitch while paying no regard to what others are doing, which is almost impossible for professionals.

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HUMOR

 How can you tell an economist from an accountant? The accountant is the one with a sense of humor.

Lies, damn lies and .... economics

Over at the Big Picture, Barry Ritholz is not shy about calling an idiot an idiot. In this case he responds to a misuse of statistics to defend a preconceived notion. One expects politicians to start with a position and then find "evidence " to support it, but journalists and economists are joining in to the sillyness:

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."

-Joan Robinson, Cambridge University



One of the things that really perturbs me are disingenuous, intellectually indefensible commentary consisting of willfully misleading tripe. Up until recently, that territory has been owned by the WSJ OPED pages. This past weekend, the NYT was seen elbowing its way into the same space.

I call this approach to economic analysis Hackonomics.

An OpEd in the Sunday Times is classic Hackonomics. Unfortunately, it takes little craft to slip junk past the editors at the Times OpEd section. Impressive-looking academic or government credentials seems to be all that is required. (Its a shame they don't have, say, a professor from the Princeton Economics department on staff).
Perhaps there is a fear of looking silly or economically ignorant, rather than asking anyone else about any of these "analyses." What we get instead are pieces like You Are What You Spend. The authors are Michael Cox, and Richard Alm, chief economist and senior economics writer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. As my British colleagues would delightfully articulate, "their work is shite."
To wit: These two gentlemen press forward the idea that the proper manner to review economic inequality should involve looking not at income differentials. Rather, this Fed duo favors a more direct measure of economic status: household consumption. They claim "the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society."
Their analysis is so problematic and their theory so full of holes, that, if time permitted, we could identify errors in nearly every paragraph. That sort of critique is best reserved for serious intellectual analysis of major importance. For Hackonomics, we will simply identify 3 major flaws, and then get on to more pressing and important work.

For the details:
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/02/dishonest-econo.html

Mark Twain on Heaven

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race -- and of ours -- sexual intercourse!
It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!


His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists -- utterly and entirely -- of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in heaven.

Politics and Science - Strange Brew

Excerpt from Chaos Manor-

Look at the President of Harvard who dared speculate that one explanation for the discrepancy between numbers of men and women in science might be physiological differences between the sexes. (And I expect that not one in a hundred readers knows what was actually said, which was rather long, rather dull, rather mild, but very much in keeping with what we used to think of as a spirit of free inquiry.)

One MIT biologist collapsed from the vapors from the very suggestion.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Note that Nancy Hopkins was not fired or disciplined or even reprimanded for being about as unscientific as you can get; but Summers got it good and hard. Yet, dare I say it, there's considerable evidence that Summers was right, there is a biological factor here. It might even be worth studying. If, as Summers assumed, we need more women in science because we need more scientists and we have to mobilize all the human resources we have, then it makes a lot of sense to see just why there are more men than women in various scientific fields. Who knows, a well planned research project might discover that it's not physiology at all, or maybe it's a difference in teen age diets, or maybe it really is all cultural; but we'll never know.

telescopic philanthropist

West resembles Mrs. Jellyby

By DAVID HOWELL

There is a character in the works of Charles Dickens who is increasingly coming to symbolize the spirit of the age in which we now live.

Readers of Dickens will recall the figure of Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House," a lady who was full of good intentions and advice about the welfare and standards of distant peoples in Africa and elsewhere, but unfortunately overlooked and neglected the conditions in her own family and her own home. Dickens depicts her as a "telescopic philanthropist," fixated on distant causes at the expense of her own family and home values.

Are today's campaigning do-gooders in the richer countries, who fill the air with demands for more help to the poorer world (which we now call development aid) and deliver more lectures on standards of governance (which we now call human rights), pushing too far in their zeal to do good and make the world a better place, to the neglect of their own societies?

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20090528dh.html

Ideas: Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar

Ideas: Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar: "Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

It is a common failing–and one that I have myself suffered from–to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no. "

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