Uninformed Thoughts about the Nasdaq Index

I have gotten into the habit of using the Apple Stocks app to track significant indices in the United States, Europe, and Asia on a daily basis. (I review my own portfolios on a monthly basis based on statements provided by my broker.) As I write this, the Nasdaq index is at 117.33. This is the highest it has been since the index peaked at 118.67 on February 4!

Let's not kid ourselves. No stock index is a measure of "value." At best the level of an index can be taken as a level of confidence or, perhaps more specifically, willingness to trade. Why should that willingness be higher for the Nasdaq portfolio than it is for the S&P 500? Since I am not in any way an expert on these matter, my best conjecture is that Nasdaq holdings represent businesses that can function with much, if not all, of the employees working from home. Nasdaq reflects companies that "push bits," one way or another, rather than build houses or manage grocery stores.

In other words, while it might be easy to promote Nasdaq as a sign of recovery, the basis for computing the index value may not be a statistically significant indicator of the health of the overall economy.

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

Another Crazy Birthday Coincidence

From a musical point of view, today is important because it would have been Jimi Hendrix 70th birthday. (I happen to be listening to Anton Bruckner as I write this. Go figure it.) However, we know from statistical parlor games that it does not take a particularly large number of people in one room to find two who share the same birthday. When we broaden the scope of history, the room becomes larger; and the coincidences become weirder.

We thus discover that Jimi Hendrix shared his birthday with Buffalo Bob Smith from The Howdy Doody Show. The thought of Hendrix sitting in front of a television set responding to Smith's famous question ("Hey, kids, what time is it?") with "It's Howdy Doody Time!" is more bizarre than the most psychedelic of any of his album covers. Furthermore, for those who think that things could not get weirder, today is also Caroline Kennedy's birthday!

Did Either of Them Know?

Today turns out to be another one of those days on which statistical inevitability has again hit on an amusing coincidence of birthdays. This time it turns out to be one of two French novelists; Jean-Paul Sartre and Françoise Sagan. (Yes, I know that Sartre was far more than a novelist; and I have no intention of opening a comparison of his fiction writing with his other talents, let alone any backhanding remarks about classifying his philosophy as fiction!) Because they are near contemporaries, I have to consider the possibility that at least one of them knew about this coincidence. That being the case, we have to wonder at what each may have thought about it! Perhaps we should all sing a chorus of the "Aquarius" song from Hair in Sartre's memory today!

Statistical Amusement

I know it is nothing more than the sort of coincidence that is statistically inevitable; but it hard not to be amused at the fact that today Donald Trump must share his birthday with Che Guevara (not to mention Boy George)!

Visualizing Statistics

Seattle photographer Chris Jordan has an interesting project. He calls it Running the Numbers, and it is a unique and striking exercise in visualizing some of the more extreme statistics that define American life. Here is his own description from his Web site:

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

Given the scale of the results, the process of assembly must require an inordinate amount of time (and therefore patience); but the results certainly justify the dedication and effort. There are quite a few of those results on the Web page, which means that it takes some time for the page to load. Also, Jordan emphasizes that these images have their greatest impact when viewed at their original scale. However, since this currently entails a trip to Seattle, I am glad that he has provided an opportunity to get an initial feel for what he has done. My favorite is what he did with those 106,000 aluminum cans: He basically adapted the pointillist style of Seurat's "Grande Jatte," reproducing Seurat's canvas by using the colors of the cans as his "points." Since I never really appreciated the original until I was standing in front of it at the Art Institute of Chicago, this is the image that I most want to see at scale; and, alas, no trip to Seattle is currently in the cards!