Habit formation

Read here http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/07/habit-formation.html

Someone decided to use marketing strategies to convince people to use soap, and claims:

"By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis’s team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent."

First off, how do you calculate these statistics? I'm dying to know. If the campaign was successful in creating disgust, it could very easily lead people to over report (if they were being surveyed) the amount of soap they were using. If this is coupled with the fact that in fact behaviour did not change (or changed very little) then these statistics are more than over-statement, they are signifying behaviour that isn't happening.

Second, there is the usual confusion between the treatment and the cause. How much of the increase reported is due to the advertising campaign? And how much of the effect is due to a combination of traditional + advert campaign?

I have to say I have no problems in using marketing experts to sell hygiene. There are some idiots at the website given above that have problems like that.

As my gibbs sampling wanders over yonder distribution

So I'm running my final run of simulations, results obtained so far for the first of three specifications are theoretically incorrect for 3 out of 6 coefficients. Considering that the whole point of what I'm doing is to ensure that signs are correct, this puts things in a not happy place. Ah well, I tried for days to figure out what was going wrong. Now is time to write, not to find out why.

I don't usually do these look-at-my-life posts but considering I'm running 40,000 iterations I've tons of time.

I like Lemmy's voice; he cannot sing of course, but its in tune. Like Brian Johnson of AC/DC. It's an admirable talent - to not be able to sing but stay in tune.

Maybe my constraints aren't right, but I've taken them from a published paper in Journal of Econometrics, could they be wrong? Unlikely.

Welcome home, it's been too long we've missed you. Feel our bodies breathing as you try to stop believing.

So its a Saturday and the only 2 other human beings in the department is a Moroccan and an Italian. Italian dude is asleep in office, he frequently stays overnight. There is also at least one moth, two cockroaches I think that's it. Yes there are cockroaches.

Maybe I should get a coffee from somewhere.

Charlotte the harlot, who made you this way, to make your rent as a bloody whore?

Read Barkha Dutts article in HT on what's going on in Stephens. Its a bit saddening. But, in a way, it's good. Sometimes there is a tendency to over romanticize college. And the things that are happening now, they serve to highlight the stuff that isn't quite right. So this may provoke some reaction that could have a positive effect. It's ugly to have this stuff on newspapers, but better it to be in newspapers than hidden away.

3000 iterations left to go!

And now, for something different

Bruce Dickinson does a Peter Gabriel...not really my sort of thing but you could put Dickinson's voice to anything and it'd sound good.

Oh, and the lyrics

"My TV fills my world with light
Twenty four hours of second sight"

clap clap

I like some of the keyboard bits too...

Also, check out the prettiest guitar duet in the world.

An aging rock star can be a deadly thing

See here for a brief interview of James Hetfield, talking about the new album Metallica are planning to put out.

Given the endless controversies regarding their selling out, the suing of Napster, the fact that St Anger was worse than 99% of what most metal bands produce, you have to wonder how James Hetfield feels. Here is a man who came up - with Cliff Burton - with some of the best rhythm and melody that four men could make, a living legend, who has realized that most of their fan base although respectful of the past accomplishment has all but abandoned him and his band.

That can be a terrible thing, and listening to him talk, it's a wonder he hasn't committed suicide or something by now. You can sense that he realizes their studio output over the last 18 years has not been up to the mark, and his frustration at being unable to understand why. I don't know how many people can sympathize with this, but at some level despite my intense dislike for what stuff Metallica has put out after 1990's Black Album, I feel really bad for what this guy has had to go through.

I mean, consider this. Your business is rock, and you make one of the greatest records ever. (I mean that. I consider Master of Puppets to be one of the greatest works in music in the 20th century, yes go ahead laugh. I've been listening to this album at least once, if not 10, times a month for the last 9 years, and it still gives me goosebumps. The closest thing to it - apart from Iron Maiden and some Megadeth - has been some classical music. Western classical. I somehow get bored with Indian classical, like I get bored with jazz and blues.)

You're acclaimed left right and center, even by people who don't like your kind of music. And all this without any real pushing by your record company. So, whatever your personal opinion, this record was a big deal. A pretty big deal.

20 years on, most of your fans have left, you and your band is a running joke amongst the very people who put you on your way up, you are struggling to put together a record, and you know your last 3 records have not been great.

I can think of fewer things that can be worse for a music man.

One question - if as it is obvious from the interview, Hetfield realized that some stuff on the albums he has put his name to has been below average, why the hell did he not try and fix it then and there? He does say that "we need a little honesty, someone to smack us and say this is no good". Could it be that he and his band got carried away with their success, and just got lazy with making music, and no one told them their songs were crap? And if so, then he has only himself to blame.

Personally I believe that the loss of Cliff Burton did them in. In every great band, there is a certain chemistry that gets created, and if anything happens to alter that then the band starts falling apart. It happened to Iron Maiden, to Judas Priest, to Black Sabbath, to Deep Purple, to The Who, to Pink Floyd etc etc etc

The smarter bands realized this and work to recreating that chemistry, usually by taming their egos and asking people who had left to come back.

However, Cliff Burton cannot come back. It is this that is Metallica's greatest tragedy. They might still make a good album, I hope they do, but it will never be as good as Master of Puppets. They are trapped by their own success, now in the distant past.

And in music, unlike practically every other profession, resting on past laurels is seen as being a bad thing.

The price of everything, the value of nothing

Ha! So Zeppelin have not realized the full value of their song!

Perhaps this explains why Jimmy Page decided he must re-do Kashmir with that rapper, ensuring in the process two things

(a) He was short of money and thought this might be a cool hip thing to do to bring in the young ones, and thus

(b) Eternal disgust from me