Blessed by the Potato

Asset allocation refers to how you split up your assets (i.e., money). To me, it’s an easy concept, but to others less so. Here’s an analogy to StarCraft I was going over with Netbug the other night:

Bonds/fixed income. This is your defensive stuff. The marines in your bunker aren’t going to get a whole lot of kills through the game, but they’re going to keep you protected. Even in an all-out assault, the enemy has to blow through the bunker before they can even touch the marines. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s always wise to have a few marines on guard duty. As you get nearer the end game, and protecting what you’ve got becomes more important than getting more, it’s wise to shift more of your assets into defensive roles.

Equities. This is where your growth comes from. The expeditionary forces you send out to secure more expansion points. In the long run, you’ll expect to take a few lucrative vespene geysers with these forces, but any individual one could get surrounded and wiped out. Best to diversify by trying a few different expansion locations, rather than putting all your eggs into one basket. Early on, you’ll probably want to put most of your forces into these growth areas, since even if they do get wiped out you’ll have time on your side to make it back. Later on though you’re going to want to shift your focus away from growing more, and back to protecting what you’ve managed to grab.

Which brings us to rebalancing: if you have a good run of luck with your risky growth stuff, it may be wise to use some of those newfound resources to beef up your defense. Vice-versa, after a nasty market decline decimates your equity expansion task force, you’ll probably want to take a few goons off defense to bring you back up to your target allocation. Turtling up after a small setback on the expansion front is not the way to go in investing.

Your last category of asset allocation is what you’ve got in the bank. This mineral stockpile can be easily and quickly spent to buy what you need in the moment, and is an important buffer for your finances. But, it’s not earning anything for you sitting there, so you want to figure out what margin of safety you need (3 months of expenses is a good rule of thumb, or in SC terms, enough to get each of your production buildings going with one unit in the queue if you need to switch directions), and get the rest out there on the field working for you.

It looks like I am done running experiments for my PhD — just* analysis and writing up now!

To mark the occasion, we have come up with a new celebration we call “running the chocolate gauntlet“, which can be staged using items found here on the hospital campus (largely the Tim Horton’s). It involves proceeding through a series of celebratory doughnuts, each chocolatier than the last: a honey dip, a chocolate dip, a chocolate glaze, and finally: the double chocolate.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to test out the chocolate gauntlet due to concerns over the safety of the celebratants, and disagreements over whether boston creme should be included and/or allowed to exist at all outside of Boston. We are now waiting on baseline cholesterol tests from the potential test participants, and have sent the boston creme matter off to a subcommittee for a more educated final decision. Early rumour has it that one compromise option will be to leave the boston creme out, but make the final stage of the gauntlet a double chocolate doughnut with a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top. Some members of the boston creme subcommittee, including members not actively pursuing a boston creme jihad, oppose the proposed solution, warning that ice cream availability is limited at the hospital, and may lead to another round of chocolate escalation as various levels of ice cream chocolatyness are added to the gauntlet.

Nonetheless, good news. Celebrations to follow.

With chocolate.

* – this is still a many-month-long process.

My mom used to freak out when I’d go grocery shopping or something at 4 am, largely worried about the freaks that might prowl the nighttime.

For the most part, the people out and about at 4 am are like me: pasty, sun-starved geeks and shift workers, university kids stocking up on snacks, or sleep-deprived dads picking up diapers and pickle-flavoured ice cream.

But this weekend was different, aside from myself the people out prowling the streets seemed to be right out of my mom’s nightmares: a greaseball guy with a skinny twig of a girl 20 years younger than him who had a thick eastern european accent and dressed like a total ho, and a guy fresh from a goth/industrial concert wearing a leather vest, leather pants, and combat boots, and a grimace (probably because he was wearing head-to-toe leather in this heat).

Anyhow, while I have been consistently underperforming my daily exercise goals, my distance for bike riding has been going well. Unfortunately, I gained another pound this week, and now the heat is on, so the exercise is likely to suffer — and if not, I will (I’m sure the public health guys would agree that being fat is better than getting heatstroke in this nonsense).

Since I’ve now gone back up to the weight I was at when I started this plus a pound, I’ve opened the contingency envelope, which contains the nuclear response plan for just this dark scenario. I can only tell myself that muscle weighs more than fat and that all the exercise is doing the trick for so long, it’s time to take action. The diet has to be stepped up (or, technically speaking, down) a notch. I’m also going to have to become lamer and spend more of my time working, working out, and sleeping, and less blogging, having fun, and reading about non-science stuff. Sleeping 4-5 hours a day while trying to churn out papers leads to lots of late-night snacking, which is not helping.

Housing stuff:

Mr. Cheap at MS defuses the idea of your house being your “best investment”, but thinks that the overpricing in Canada will lead to a flat market for a few years until fundamentals catch up, rather than a crash/correction, like I’m calling for. I think that he’ll be proven wrong in short order, especially given that:

Prices in Toronto have already come down 5% last month [down 2.6% for the GTA as a whole]. I don’t know what the typical May -> June seasonality is, but I don’t imagine that June is traditionally all that weak [it was flat in 2008, and up slightly in 2009]. The TREB releases focus on year-over-year numbers, especially when the month-over-month looks bad for them (or year-over-two-years-ago when the year-over-year looks bad for them).

BNN had a housing bear on today, which may also be telling. He’s predicting prices to go back to where they were in 2005 (before the CMHC rules changed and “rampant speculation” began), which would be a 26% decline for Toronto, and he’s saying that will happen around mid-2012. I’m a little more pessimistic, counting on ~35% decrease for Toronto, but also more patient, figuring that the bottoming out will be in 2013-2015.

Other stuff:

Woot is being bought by Amazon, and their letter announcing the deal is a fun read. They also poke fun at the AP today for stealing from their amusing letter, poetic since the AP wants to charge others for quoting even short snippets from their stories.

First London StarCraft 2 LAN party planned for August. Unfortunately, SC2 won’t have LAN support (unless we can change Blizzard’s mind!), so we’re all going to have to connect to BNet over the host’s internet connection. If that fails, we may have to play something else…

Toronto Public Libraries has a new feature that lets patrons check out passes to some of Toronto’s museums. This lets library card holders get access to these venues for free. Best of all, you don’t need to return the passes to the library, just surrender them when you go to the art gallery or museum.

They say quantities are limited, so we’ll have to see how accessible this ends up being…

HT: Julie.

I’m disgusted by this article in the Huffington Post. I’ve been warned about that rag and the quality of their science knowledge (worse than none) before, but it became the topic of some discussion over at PriusChat, and I had to check it out for myself. Note that I have ranted on this subject before.

The author describes her experience buying a Prius, after which she experienced headaches. She took the car back to the dealer, got a Highlander instead, and the headaches went away.

If that was all there was to it, it’d be fine: a weird anomaly, who knows why it happened, but her problem is solved so good for her.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. Because the Prius is a hybrid, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that somehow, the magnetic fields were causing her headaches. She then goes on to insinuate that these same fields caused “inflammatory” issues and a brain tumour in people she knows who happen to drive hybrids.

This is not evidence, it’s not science, it’s fearmongering of the worst sort.

To try to add weight to her arguments, she got a “meter” and tried taking some measurements of the magnetic fields on her own. And you know what, the only thing the general public fears more than magnetic fields are numbers, so you can bet that went well. She obviously did not know how the meter (or magnetic fields) work, because she only gives one number in the article.

Here’s the thing about magnetic fields: they’re kind of like sound. You have a frequency, and a strength. So to say you have a sound of 70 dB, or a magnetic field of 2 mG, doesn’t fully describe it. You’d also want to know if it was a deep bass thrum, or a middle C, or so many Hz for the magnetic field. And she doesn’t say that anywhere.

That gets particularly important when she pulls out this mystery meter. I’ll bet you dollars-to-doughnuts she’s trying to use a cheap “trifield” type survey meter, that only has a little dial readout for showing field strength. These are meant to be used around power line fields where you know the frequency you’re dealing with in advance, and they give very screwy results when presented with fields of unknown frequency and transients. Unfortunately, all we can say about the fields present in a car is that they are highly unlikely to be 60 Hz powerline fields.

Often, these meters are induced-current based, so if you have a 1 mG 60 Hz field, it shows up as 1 on the meter. But, if you have a 1 mG 600 Hz field, it shows up as 10 on the meter. So when someone who is unskilled at science or numbers — or much of anything really — gives a number in an article, I have basically zero faith that that number represents what they think it represents. For example, she says that just turning on the Nav and AC system in her car increased the field almost as much as the hybrid drivetrain did, but that makes little to no sense, on many levels. First off, the nav and AC shouldn’t draw nearly as much power as what’s needed to move the car (though all of these are well-shielded in a hybrid), so the measurement shouldn’t have gone as it did. And even if that was the case, it would mean that the nav and AC should be just as much a cause of her headaches as the hybrid drivetrain if she believes magnetic fields are responsible. She shouldn’t be out on a crusade against hybrids, but against in-dash nav systems!

She justifies getting a nav system in her Highlander by saying that the slightly smaller Prius “compacts” the fields, again showing that she doesn’t understand how things work — the extra space in the SUV is wasted, the design constraint still puts the nav system at arm’s reach for the driver.

She then goes on to insinuate that hybrids pose a health danger, remarking that “I started to wonder about my clients who drive hybrids. Every one of them has an inflammatory issue that baffles me…” Her byline says that she’s “Yoga, health expert”. What do you want to bet that every one of her clients, no matter what they drive, has “an inflammatory issue”?

The conclusion though was the biggest tip-off for anyone remotely familiar with the FUD surrounding hybrids that she was not a source to be taken seriously: she repeats some of the nonsense about the batteries and Sudbury, that has been debunked many times (including here), clearly indicating that she has not done her homework.

Scientific articles have peer review systems to try to catch these kinds of glaring errors, and those occasionally do fail (recently, our group tore apart an article, providing 3 pages of corrections, and the other reviewer said simply “it’s fine”). But the mainstream media, which should be more careful since it deals with a more credulous audience, often has much more glaring mistakes present — perhaps because journalists are equally credulous when it comes to technical matters.

All that said, we return to the issue of her headaches. It’s been said that we can’t disagree with the fact that she experienced headaches that went away when she changed cars. I’d say that we could disagree with even that level of evidence (did she make it up to get a controversial article out that other people would cite, even if just to debunk her?), especially given how subjective and random headaches can be. But, let’s grant that her headaches did happen, and even that they went away with the change in cars. It could be that the headaches were unrelated to the car itself, and could have been due to the stress of buying a new car, worrying about finances, etc., and would have gone away in a few days/weeks anyway. But even if we grant that somehow, the headaches were due specifically to the car, that does not lead us to blame the hybrid transmission and/or magnetic fields. There simply is no evidence of that. She had an individual problem, and she solved it by changing cars, and that’s great for her. But it’s misleading to then go and blame one specific aspect of the car without any evidence. She could have been allergic to the ecoplastic used in the dash, or to a host of other things. My favourite theory revolves around the rearview mirror: the Prius is a great car and I love it, but the rearview mirror is horribly low. I’m constantly ducking my head to look under it to check for pedestrians as I make a right turn, and if she was doing the same that repetitive head-ducking motion could have given her a headache. Or, similarly, the rear spoiler splits the rear window, at just about the height most cars’ headlights fall. If she’s driving down even a moderately bumpy road, their lights would constantly strobe to her point of view as they disappear behind the spoiler and reappear above or below it.

There are numerous reasons why this car in particular could be giving her headaches, and unless she’s willing to get back in it for some experimentation, we can’t say what factor could be responsible (if any). It brings us back to the issue of placebos: for an individual person, a placebo may work to solve their problem, such as a headache. They may be willing to pay money for a placebo (e.g., a homeopathic tincture). On the individual level, that’s fine: do what you need to do to solve your individual problem. But on a societal level, we don’t want to ascribe efficacy to what we know are really just placebos and have them for sale in our pharmacies, because it’s not good science, and it’s not good policy. Likewise, we don’t want to go around banning things like cell phones and wifi and hybrids without evidence that they are indeed causing harm (and if she’s afraid of hybrids, man, wait till she sees some of the controversy over cell phones!).

Finally, a quick repeat of my note on risk vs benefits. We know that hybrid cars have demonstrable environmental and financial benefits. We know that they can reduce our individual exposure to known carcinogens (e.g.: diesel), and our societal exposure to other pollutants. We don’t have good evidence that they even do have increased magnetic fields inside of the passenger compartment, and if they did, whether those fields would be harmful. The risk-benefit right now is highly likely skewed towards there being a worthwhile benefit, but because people are so afraid of the unknown, the unknown risks are large in their minds, and lead to articles like this one.