I took the 5-year old to the OU football game on Saturday. This is the first time he's had to stand up while the national anthem is being played, so I had to tell him what to do. "Put your hand over your chest," I told him, "and look to your right, towards the flag." There were three flags being raised, so that kept his interest until the end of the anthem.
"What are the three flags?," he asked after the crowd had chimed in with "Sooners" where the anthem ends "land of the brave" (don't get me started).
"The one in the middle is the American flag," I told him, "the blue one to the right is the Oklahoma flag and the red one to the left is the OU flag."
He processed that for a while.
"And which one were we praying to?", he finally asked.
Common sense on the Iraq surge
It often takes a really wise person has pointed out the obvious. Obama does it here (YouTube video). Count me impressed by his judgment, especially considering that Congress still can not see the big picture for the bloviation.
The only improvement in the situation in Iraq is in Anbar province where we are paying the Sunni tribes to keep from attacking our troops. It has nothing to do with the surge. In Baghdad, where the surge has been concentrated, the situation is still bad enough that our president stayed away from the city on his last visit there.
The surge has had some impact as suggested ... I would argue that the impact has been relatively modest given the investment ... The improvement in the situation in Anbar has nothing to do with the surge .. the reason for the improvement of the situation in Anbar is political ... we have not seen any improvement in terms of the central government's performance.
The only improvement in the situation in Iraq is in Anbar province where we are paying the Sunni tribes to keep from attacking our troops. It has nothing to do with the surge. In Baghdad, where the surge has been concentrated, the situation is still bad enough that our president stayed away from the city on his last visit there.
Beijing woes
Several people I know are directly involved in the meteorological support for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Algorithms developed by my group will be operated by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Beijing, so even I am indirectly involved. It is a daunting task -- much more daunting than the Atlanta or Sydney Olympics, where there were also
forecast demonstrations organized by the World Meteorological Organization.
Forecasting rain is going to be very important. Something like 60% of the days in August, it rains in Beijing. But it's going to be hard to forecast that rain.
forecast demonstrations organized by the World Meteorological Organization.
Forecasting rain is going to be very important. Something like 60% of the days in August, it rains in Beijing. But it's going to be hard to forecast that rain.
- China is deploying new S-band radars (i.e . very good ones), but as in India (where I visited a couple of installations as part of a USAID project this year), the radars are placed right in the middle of cities. The way these radars work, there is a huge blind spot right above the radar, which means there will be poor to non-existent radar data right over Beijing.
- The topography around Beijing is challenging in other ways for radar siting. There are mountains just to the west. The radar beam will be blocked by those mountains, so the radar can not see very far to the west.
- The climatology does not help either. Storms initiate on the mountains immediately to the west of Beijing and drop all their rain. Nowcasting thunderstorms depends heavily on extrapolation but there will be nothing to extrapolate.
Overestimating food
On Sunday, during the long weekend, we went with some Indian neighbors to Roman Nose state park. There's a nice, cold stream (55-degree water) that runs underground and cascades out of a cave at one point -- the kids really enjoyed it.
Like any Indian gathering, there was a lot of food. We'd decided to take a quick tour of Red Rock Canyon, which was only about 10 miles off our return route to Norman. It got late in the canyon, and everyone was hungry, so we decided to snack on the leftovers of our lunch. Except that the "leftovers" were enough to feed us for dinner too. We had not just overestimated the food that we'd need -- we'd overestimated by a factor of two.
Like any Indian gathering, there was a lot of food. We'd decided to take a quick tour of Red Rock Canyon, which was only about 10 miles off our return route to Norman. It got late in the canyon, and everyone was hungry, so we decided to snack on the leftovers of our lunch. Except that the "leftovers" were enough to feed us for dinner too. We had not just overestimated the food that we'd need -- we'd overestimated by a factor of two.
Don't use credit cards abroad
It used to be that when traveling abroad, paying with a credit card was the smartest way to avoid paying outrageous currency conversion charges. The currency conversion places at airports were, and still are, a ripoff -- often you'll lose 5-10 % of your money when you exchange dollars for the local currency. This is because those places hit you in two ways: (1) you pay a commission to change money (2) the rate you are offered is much worse than the market rate. The credit card companies, on the other hand, would charge no fees or commissions. And to make things better, they do the conversion at the interbank rates -- the best rates possible.
Now, though, credit card companies charge 3% "foreign transaction fees" which alter the balance significantly. For example, a $9.85 purchase in Australian dollars was converted to $8.42, and we were charged an additional 3%. This brings the cost of each Australian dollar to 88.05 cents. A better deal is what I got with my ATM card. Because I bank at a small bank which has no ATM fees, the $300 I withdrew at an ATM cost me $257.27, meaning that the effective rate was only 85.76 cents. There were no extra fees or surcharges. I save $3 on every $100 I spent using cash (from the ATM) rather than using my credit card.
Bottom line: When traveling abroad, use your ATM card to withdraw cash in the local currency. Then pay for everything with cash. From now on, I'm going to use my credit card only for things like hotels where I can not pay with cash. If your bank charges for ATM usage, just withdraw a lot of money at once, so that you pay the surcharge only once. For example, if your bank's ATM surcharge is $3, you come out ahead as long as you withdraw more than $100 U.S. dollars at a time.
Now, though, credit card companies charge 3% "foreign transaction fees" which alter the balance significantly. For example, a $9.85 purchase in Australian dollars was converted to $8.42, and we were charged an additional 3%. This brings the cost of each Australian dollar to 88.05 cents. A better deal is what I got with my ATM card. Because I bank at a small bank which has no ATM fees, the $300 I withdrew at an ATM cost me $257.27, meaning that the effective rate was only 85.76 cents. There were no extra fees or surcharges. I save $3 on every $100 I spent using cash (from the ATM) rather than using my credit card.
Bottom line: When traveling abroad, use your ATM card to withdraw cash in the local currency. Then pay for everything with cash. From now on, I'm going to use my credit card only for things like hotels where I can not pay with cash. If your bank charges for ATM usage, just withdraw a lot of money at once, so that you pay the surcharge only once. For example, if your bank's ATM surcharge is $3, you come out ahead as long as you withdraw more than $100 U.S. dollars at a time.
Custom compression algorithms: worth the cost?
I am in San Diego at a conference on satellite data handling and compression. This is not really my field, but the conference chair emailed me a few months ago asking if I'd be willing to come and give a talk on how radar data are compressed for storage and transmission.
"Are you sure," I emailed him, explaining that the radar program uses only off-the-shelf compression techniques because custom compression techniques provided only a 10% improvement over off-the-shelf solutions such as bzip2. He replied that this was fine.
This morning, my talk was sandwiched between 6 other talks on compression. Each of them demonstrated a 5 to 15% improvement over JPEG 2000. So, you can imagine how the thrust of my talk -- that custom compression techniques that provided only incremental improvements were not cost effective -- carried over.
"What would be the threshold at which it would cost effective," one of the members in the audience asked, "would 100% be enough if the space agency would maintain and release compression and decompression software for use by anyone?"
"Maybe,:" I replied, digging the hole even further. "Remember that this code needs to be maintained, and updated for new languages and platforms. This would cost at least 150,000 dollars per year. You have to justify that the saved storage and transmission costs are sufficient to overcome that hurdle."
I'm just not that popular here today.
"Are you sure," I emailed him, explaining that the radar program uses only off-the-shelf compression techniques because custom compression techniques provided only a 10% improvement over off-the-shelf solutions such as bzip2. He replied that this was fine.
This morning, my talk was sandwiched between 6 other talks on compression. Each of them demonstrated a 5 to 15% improvement over JPEG 2000. So, you can imagine how the thrust of my talk -- that custom compression techniques that provided only incremental improvements were not cost effective -- carried over.
"What would be the threshold at which it would cost effective," one of the members in the audience asked, "would 100% be enough if the space agency would maintain and release compression and decompression software for use by anyone?"
"Maybe,:" I replied, digging the hole even further. "Remember that this code needs to be maintained, and updated for new languages and platforms. This would cost at least 150,000 dollars per year. You have to justify that the saved storage and transmission costs are sufficient to overcome that hurdle."
I'm just not that popular here today.
An expensive reminder
A couple years ago, when we bought our house, our mortgage was underwritten by Countrywide. We went with them because they matched the best rate I found on the Internet. While sitting in their office, signing all the paperwork, I remember reading one of their brochures where they said they kept 98% of their mortgages and that did impress me quite a bit. The mortgage on our first house got transferred around between banks quite a bit, so I had to keep track of which company to send the next month's payment to. Stability would be a good thing.
So, when the sub-prime market cratered, taking Countrywide along with it, I thought it was a typical market over-reaction. If they kept 98% of their mortgages, then obviously they would have taken care that the loans were sound. Care they wouldn't have taken if their plan to was to bundle the loans into securities and sell them off. So, I went out and bought some shares last week at the low prices on offer.
Yesterday's (Sunday's) New York Times had an article on Countrywide and how it, too, was caught up in the sub-prime mess. One in four of its sub-prime loans, the article says, is in default. And the article indicated that Countrywide sells a huge fraction of its loans too. Oops. Had I misremembered something?
I had misremembered all right, but I was naive in not noticing the exact words used by the brochure. The crucial distinction seems to that Countrywide continues to service the loans that it packages and sells. It's responsible for collecting payments, and the brochure was simply saying that I wouldn't have to send payments to a different bank every few months. But Countrywide does sell many of the loans, thus divesting itself of some of the risk. The investors who buy the loans pay Countrywide to take care of collecting the mortgage payments, so even though 98% of its customers wouldn't know it, Countrywide sells a majority of its loans. This of course means that they wouldn't be all that careful when making loans. Most of the time, it would be someone else's problem if the customer defaulted.
Another reminder, if I am ever in doubt again, that it is extremely hard to beat the market with publicly available information -- it's been factored in already. An expensive reminder.
So, when the sub-prime market cratered, taking Countrywide along with it, I thought it was a typical market over-reaction. If they kept 98% of their mortgages, then obviously they would have taken care that the loans were sound. Care they wouldn't have taken if their plan to was to bundle the loans into securities and sell them off. So, I went out and bought some shares last week at the low prices on offer.
Yesterday's (Sunday's) New York Times had an article on Countrywide and how it, too, was caught up in the sub-prime mess. One in four of its sub-prime loans, the article says, is in default. And the article indicated that Countrywide sells a huge fraction of its loans too. Oops. Had I misremembered something?
I had misremembered all right, but I was naive in not noticing the exact words used by the brochure. The crucial distinction seems to that Countrywide continues to service the loans that it packages and sells. It's responsible for collecting payments, and the brochure was simply saying that I wouldn't have to send payments to a different bank every few months. But Countrywide does sell many of the loans, thus divesting itself of some of the risk. The investors who buy the loans pay Countrywide to take care of collecting the mortgage payments, so even though 98% of its customers wouldn't know it, Countrywide sells a majority of its loans. This of course means that they wouldn't be all that careful when making loans. Most of the time, it would be someone else's problem if the customer defaulted.
Another reminder, if I am ever in doubt again, that it is extremely hard to beat the market with publicly available information -- it's been factored in already. An expensive reminder.
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