The other day on a Dutch blog I saw an offhand statement about the Republican candidates being a bunch of plutocrats. It made me curious about who the rich presidents – and presidential candidates – really were.

An annual income of about $380,000 puts you in the 1% nationally. In Washington, where most of these guys live, it’s more: about $520,000 per year, says the New York Times.

Of course it’s dangerous to conflate net worth and income. But the net worth data is easier to get. A site called 24/7 Wall Street has gathered the data and adjusted every president’s net worth to its equivalent in 2010 dollars. (Because a number of early presidents made and lost fortunes, net worth is measured at its peak.) And a few Google searches yield the same information for recent presidential candidates like McCain, Kerry and Gore.

The result? Look at all the blue in the chart. Leaving aside the Virginia land barons like Washington and Jefferson, the Democrats have an edge in raw wealth. The richest Republican aside from Romney was Teddy Roosevelt, who wasn’t exactly a Tea Partier. Back then, the Democrats were corrupt and the Republicans were the reformers. The next richest Republican? Herbert Hoover, with about $70 million.

The 15 presidents not on the chart had a net worth of close to zero. Lincoln, Grant, Coolidge, Truman, Taft – all frugal civil servants.

In general, though, forget about the parties. The presidency is a rich man’s game – no matter what party you’re from.

I love the 2×2 matrix: a scatter plot with a four-square grid imposed over it. But as a visual metaphor, the matrix is overused. It’s also laden with jargon. Each square gets its own catchy phrase, like “cash cows” or “problem children.”

Instead of revenue growth vs market share, try pineapples vs seedless grapes. I’ll take easy and tasty. From xkcd, courtesy the heroic and hilarious Barry Ritholtz.

The 2×2 matrix: Popularized by Bible salesman turned management consultant Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group.

There’s a lot of talk in the world of university endowments about the “David Swenson’s “Yale Model.” It worked pretty well from 1999 to 2009, yielding annual growth of almost 12%. In 2010 the value of Yale’s endowment fell off a cliff. After that horrific year, Yale dropped into the bottom half of its peers (as the scatter chart below shows).

Swenson’s insights were twofold. One, expand the definition of asset classes and diversify broadly across them. So it’s not just a mix of large cap, small cap and bonds; instead, spread your bets across the Wild West of real estate, private equity and hedge funds. Two, long-term investors shouldn’t embrace liquidity. They should avoid it. On average, the more illiquid the asset class, the higher the return. Nobody gets rich buying T-bills.

What went wrong in 2010? Couple of things. When markets go south, everyone runs for the exit at once. A balanced portfolio won’t help you when the correlation across asset classes approaches one. Second, as more money flows into alternative investments, it becomes harder for them to outperform. Hedge funds fell 9% last year when the S&P 500 was flat. The managers still do well – “Where are the customers’ yachts?” as the saying goes – but for many, their days are numbered.

Any system that outperforms the market will eventually be arbitraged back to the mean. That’s the ultimate problem with the Yale Model. In fact, that’s the problem with modern portfolio theory. Fortunately, it’s a very long-term problem. A friend of mine is busy scouting out companies in Cambodia for private equity investments. Want to diversify? Maybe it’s time to look in Cambodia.

Inspired by Worldmapper, Fedex and its ad agency, BBDO, have created a “Changing World” site with a collection of cartograms driven by data from the Economist Intelligence Unit and content from the EIU and The Economist. (Full disclosure: I’ve been involved in the project since last summer.)

This blobby cartogram showing the 2008 changes in GDP by country is a bit dated, but it’s still striking how much Africa dominates the world in terms of explosive growth. Talk about regional differences: The entire North American continent pales before Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea or mighty Djibouti (not to mention zombie economies like Cuba and North Korea, if the economic data can be believed). Or course, there’s growth and there’s growth: Djibouti’s economy is roughly the size of the GDP of Fort Lee, New Jersey, while Equatorial Guinea is more like Roanoke or Green Bay. In dollar terms, Djibouti’s 5.8% growth rate is roughly the equivalent of, say, a new shopping mall opening in Fort Lee – monster growth for a tiny country but a mere blip for an economy the size of New Jersey’s.

Nevertheless, many of the OECD countries would have been lucky to get even that. Look at the map and see if you can find Japan. See if you can find Ireland. It’s easier to find Sri Lanka. Good thing we have a long way to fall, because we’re definitely headed in the wrong direction.

It’s not a problem when Survivor contestants are narcissists. Nobody’s going to live or die because Richard Hatch has an inflated view of himself. Actors are narcissists; reality-show participants, even more so.

Narcissistic CEOs are different. They surround themselves with sycophants. They spurn tell-it-like-it-is advisers. Instead of trying for incremental improvements, they make dramatic decisions in line with their showboat personas.

And their actions have consequences. Not only for their direct reports, but for shareholders, employees and others in their extended orbits. In the case of narcissists like Bernie Madoff, their behavior can shake up industries and governments, destroy trust within communities and drive followers to suicide.

Let’s create the CEO Narcissism Index. We’ll go on Edgar and troll through the annual reports. How big is the CEO’s footprint? How many times is his name mentioned? How many photos and how big are they? Take it even farther: Count the number of amendments to CEO employment agreements – as documented over the years by Michelle Leder over at footnoted.org – and add up the perks that the CEO has accumulated for himself.  Weigh, mix and try to validate against CEOs who we KNOW are narcissists (Steve Jobs, anyone?). Then, of course, we test it against the stock price.

Yet another project for which there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Lots of New Year’s resolutions posts and tweets out there. As a serial resolver, I looked over the landscape and compiled this long, redundant and often contradictory list of ways to keep your resolutions. Gretchen Rubin‘s are the most thoughtful, and with her book, charts, groups and site, she’s also probably more responsible for more resolutions being kept than anyone out there.

1. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
2. One step at a time.
3. Ask yourself: Am I being overoptimistic?
4. Can it be measured?
5. Schedule multiple resolutions over time.
7. Make changes that feel good.
8. Allow for slipping and sliding.
9. Consider 17 days in a row a success.
10. Write it down.
11. Go public. Tell others.
12. Ask: “What would make me happier?” More of something good, less of something bad.
13. Keep it concrete, not abstract.
14. Follow the one-minute rule.
15. Ask: “Am I starting small enough?” Underestimate, don’t overestimate.
16. What is the smallest action you can take in the direction of the resolution?
17. Frame your resolution in concrete actions.
18. Keep a chart
19. Carry resolutions with you. Review. Score. Constantly.
20. Join a group.
21. Work towards something big.
22. Think small. Look close to home for ways to improve and grow.
23. Ask for help.
24. Consider making only pleasant resolutions.
25. Consider giving up a resolution.
26. Keep the resolution every day. It’s easier to do something daily than every few days.
27. Set a deadline, but don’t give up if something interferes with your deadline.
28. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Clean your desk, not the whole house.
29. Keep the list short.
30. If you falter, let it go and try again,
31. Stay humble. Overestimating resolve leads to failure.
32. Remove temptations.
33. Post reminders everywhere.
34. Reward yourself for successes.
35. Recalibrate resolutions when conditions change.
36. Choose resolutions carefully (for instance, those with the greatest impact).
37. Create bite-sized portions.
38. Create a time-frame and use it to plot progress and measure success.
39. Take notes.
40. Take responsibility. Put yourself in charge.
41. Keep goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time based (SMART).
42. Remind yourself of the benefits of achieving your goals.
43. Try just one resolution.
44. Try a new resolution rather than revisiting an old, failed resolution.
45. Make the resolution a reflection of you, not the crowd.

Searches are cyclical. Just type words like “cupid” or “chocolate” into Google Trends and watch the spikes spring up every year around February 14. “Earnings” yields quarterly peaks, and the word “bored” – which for some reason is most popular in Australia – jumps every year around Christmas.

So I put in the word “marathon.” No particular marathon – just the word. And while the New York Marathon certainly shows up every November (sometimes as a double-peak with Chicago), it’s nothing compared to Boston in April – despite the fact that Boston has fewer participants because (1) you have to qualify to run and (2) it’s not a particularly fast or easy course.

What to conclude? Boston attracts more popular interest. And marathons like Berlin and London aren’t even registering in the public consciousness.

When one guy takes up three seats because he can’t keep his legs together, it’s your duty to push back. If he’s obese, that’s one thing – he probably feels like a misfit, and it’s not as though he can drop 50 pounds on the spot. But when he’s small or skinny, that’s different. One man, one seat. That’s the rule. And you’re the enforcer.

On Thursday I put this belief to the test when sitting next to an elderly man at the opening of a play. The theater was filling up, and his left leg was splayed all over the last seat in the row. I asked if the seat was taken, sat down, put my leg up against his and kept it there in a polite but insistent way. There was a silent struggle for a minute or two until he withdrew to his own territory.  He intruded a couple of times during the first act, but I stood my ground. After the intermission my wife and I moved to better seats when the folks in front of us left.

After the play I mentioned this epic struggle to my wife. And she said, “Did you notice that you were sitting next to Ian McKellen?I looked up and there he was, coming out of the theater. Gandolf. Magneto. The new Number Two. I felt a chill. Even without his staff, he could have summoned lightning with a single thought.  Thank God it wasn’t Saruman or Professor Xavier who was trying to take up two seats. I wouldn’t be here to write this.

He’s Walter Zable, a former player for the New York Giants, and you can see him way out on the right tail of the gorgeous normal distribution below.  Along the horizontal axis are the ages of all of the Russell 3,000 CEOs – youngest is 31, oldest 94 – and the vertical axis shows how many CEOs there are for each age.

Walter’s an anomaly in ways other than his age. As you might guess, he started the company that he runs (Cubic Corp), still owns a big piece of it, and won’t let go until the keys to the executive washroom are pried from his cold dead hands.

Meanwhile, the youngest CEO, 31-year-old Iranian-born Sardar Biglari, is a turnaround investor who started his first company at 14 for $15,000 and sold it at 22 for over $1m. Biglari looks for strong brands that have lost their way (indolent boards, inefficient operations and a general lack of direction).  His first project was Friendly’s Ice Cream, which worked out well; now he’s running Steak n’ Shake, a magnet for the folks you see on the “People of Wal-Mart” site.

It’s hard not to like a CEO who, a la Warren Buffet, quotes from John Maynard Keynes, Isaiah Berlin and Charles Darwin in his most recent letter to shareholders. And Sadar is like Warren in another way: He has used the cashflow from Steak ‘n Shake to buy a 10% stake in a much larger firm, Fremont Michigain Insurance.

The median age of CEOs is 59. Thank goodness I still have a few years left to climb through the last 10 layers of management.

How is today different from all other days? This morning the scale was 30 pounds below what it was in August. Nobody has noticed that I look like a stalk of bamboo. And whether the weight will stay off, I don’t know. Still, 30 pounds in 80 days – not bad.

I owe it all to public humiliation. Not that anyone reads this blog. But the act of weighing, tracking and displaying has psychological power. Every few days I input my weight into a Google spreadsheet and update the annotated timeline. When it goes down, the world smiles. When it goes up, imaginary fingers wag. The result has been surprisingly effective.

Until my mid-40s, I didn’t have to work to get skinny. My weight would creep up to 210 or 215 pounds. I’d go out and start running again. Make a token sacrifice like quitting soft drinks. Soon I’d be back to the low 180s again, with the belt a couple of notches tighter.

But that era is over. It became impossible to burn enough calories to offset those Coca-Colas and Dipsy Doodles, and I’m too old (and too heavy) to run even 30 miles a week without getting injured.

Here are the rules that worked for me.

The Good Stuff

1. Breakfast is free. Eat a good one. No Cinnabon, but don’t worry about oatmeal, bacon, eggs and buttered toast.
2. There’s nothing wrong with half-and-half in your coffee. Or heavy cream, for that matter.
3. Know what’s nice before bed? A big spoon of peanut butter.

Keeping Track

1. Weigh yourself every day at the same time.  (Cheating is OK. Just be consistent about it.)
2. Make a chart. Look at it. Obsessively.
3. If you weigh less than the day before, no need to do anything. You’re golden.
4. If you weigh more, keep that thought in the back of your mind during the day. Be careful about portions. Walk home from work. Spend more time hungry than full.

Portions

1. Eat a little, see how you feel, then eat a little more. No seconds without a wait.
2. Eat until you’re 80% full.  Don’t eat again until you’re 80% empty.

Eating and Avoiding

1. Eat: Oatmeal, apples, salads, diet soda, rice, any kind of meat, poultry or fish.
2. Avoid: Potatoes, sodas, desserts, anything with Bisquick.

Living in Manhattan requires a good bit of walking. I took a two-day bike trip, a few long walks and short runs, and had to fast for a day before a colonoscopy. But that’s pretty much it.  Once I got momentum, it wasn’t that hard.

One habit I had to break: scarfing down cereal and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches late at night. The solution: that heaping tablespoon of peanut butter before bedtime.

But the key to the change was measuring, displaying and reacting. I could have used a spreadsheet, but the visualization gadget was more fun. And the results weren’t bad at all.

When I was in junior high school my father got very excited about buying this house, which was on the market for about $30,000. It was part of the plantation called Elizabeth’s Delight, on the site of a land grant dating from the late 1600s (though the house was built around 1850, replacing a log structure dating from the Revolutionary War). The house is about a hundred feet inside the Montgomery County line, but the landholdings extended in all directions to take in parts of DC, the University of Maryland, Takoma Park and Silver Spring.

The house is now divided into apartments, much of the yard is a parking lot, all around are overcrowded duplexes packed with illegal immigrants, and the nearby streets are full of MS-13 gang activity. It’s a weird feeling to walk along Ruatan Street and see a plantation house with a chapel, once surrounded by tobacco fields, now part of a vast suburban slum.

Look for the outliers – high growth, low risk.

A year or so ago my son and I were watching a History Channel show on how researchers had reconstructed the original topography of Manhattan, before developers flattened most of the hills south of 96th Street. One segment focused on a couple of geographers who used GPS to find original markers from the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which laid out the dreary grid that defines the island north of 14th Street.  The markers – iron bolts sunk into the ground at each planned street intersection – would have been uprooted where streets were built, but might still survive in Central Park.

I went to look at a marker they found, couldn’t find it, and ended up contacting Reuben Rose-Redwood, who teaches geography at Texas A&M and was featured in the History Channel show. Reuben couldn’t have been kinder; he answered:

“As for finding the iron bolt, I actually sometimes get lost looking for the bolt myself! So, my best advice is to look on GoogleMaps for the intersection of what would have been 65th Street and Sixth Avenue.”

After a bit of climbing around the rocks just off the 66th Street Transverse, I found it snapped this picture with my cell phone. The bolt is sunk deeply into the Manhattan schist, which is the only reason it survived almost 200 years.

Where there’s one marker, could there be more? Probably not. After all, I had a hard time finding it even when I knew where it was. The professionals know exactly where the markers should be, and this is the only one they’ve found. Says Reuben:

1811 survey bolt

“We’ve already looked through Central Park and Marcus Garvey with GPS and Randel’s survey notes in hand. Based on his field notes, we know where all of the bolts should be. We’ve gone to all the locations and can’t seem to find any others (which may be underground or destroyed).”

But there’s hope. What about Morningside Park or an eastern sliver of Riverside Park? It looks like the original grid included parts of both of them. If anyone has a GPS unit and wants to go looking for more bolts, leave a message in the comments.

I see on Google Analytics that my bounce rate is about 80%, which means that 80% of the people who arrive on this page immediately leave. I think I know the reason: They’ve all come to see the only post that has ever gotten much traffic, Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume.  If that’s what you’re here for, click on the link and time-travel back to 2005, when the post first appeared.  Or you can just skip the post and drop your hate mail directly into the comments.

If you look at the pingbacks, you’ll see that the post has been picked up by Obama-haters. That’s certainly not what I intended. If I had worked with John McCain, I would have been happy to talk about his embellishments. I’m sure every politician has them. And whether you call him “the one” or “that one”, it’s a fact that Barack is a politician (albeit a good one) – something that we’ll all understand when inflated expectations deflate, a year or so down the road.

Where I live In New York City, Barack Obama will win close to 100% of the vote, including the votes of my wife and all of my neighbors, co-workers and friends.  He may win my vote, too.  The Republicans certainly don’t deserve to be re-elected, and Obama has a brain trust that includes many people I admire.  Perhaps it’s not delusional to think that he’ll govern from someplace closer to the center. We’ll see. Until that moment in the election booth, I remain undecided.

Psychologists and political scientists tell us that extremists are happier than moderates. Maybe certainty makes people happy, while a life of questioning brings misery. But what about the certainty that the world is headed for disaster? Are people with “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” bumper stickers happier than the rest of us?

I doubt it. How about “If you’re not grateful, you’re not paying attention“?

She doesn’t look blackish. In fact, she’s a blond. Her mother is Swedish, and she has a bunch of second cousins in Jonkoping.

But it turns out that her grandmother, Jane Helm of Drake, Missouri, was passing all her life. And she carried the secret to her deathbed.

Suddenly it all made sense. The face powder. The parasol. The elbow-length gloves. The high-necked dresses. It wasn’t Victorian formality carried into the 20th century. It was a cover-up.

The evidence of Jane’s ancestry comes from two sources: Census records and a mitochondrial DNA test.

Jane Helm had a brother – my wife’s great-uncle. Born April 4, 1893. Strangled by the umbilical cord. The mother’s “nativity” is Negro. The son’s race is black.

We don’t have the birth certificate for Jane. But we know that the mtDNA test, which traces ancestry through the mother’s line, lists L-type haplogroups, which are typical of West Africa, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

Jane Helm’s father came from Switzerland to America, bought a farm in rural Missouri after the Civil War and married a black woman. I imagine that only a foreigner would have done it. Southern Missouri is still the South, even today.

The ironic part is that Jane’s living children, even after seeing the mtDNA results and the Census records, won’t accept her heritage. They talk about the “Mohawk” in the family – a phrase that Southerners tell me is a codeword.

Republicans represent rich people in poor states.

Democrats represent the rich states – and they look out for everyone from hedge fund managers to the urban poor.

Just ask Chuck Schumer.

What comes to mind when you think of the Democratic presidential candidates? Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd haven’t been pegged yet, as far as I know. But here’s my list for the rest:

• Edwards’s $400 haircut and 28,000 square foot home
• Obama’s palmed cigarette
• Biden’s plagiarism
• Kucinich’s UFO sighting
• There are so many possibilities for Hillary that it’s difficult to choose. Go way back to commodity trading (when I realized that I could never trust her) or recently, when she learned to move her mouth without saying anything.

I’ll say one thing for Hillary: She’s managed to cloud the air so much that it’s next to impossible impossible to reduce her to a single word or phrase.

I’ll do the Republicans next.

From Will Fitzgerald’s blog at the NY Times: The number of words spoken at the last Democratic ebate correlates precisely with each candidate’s poll numbers. Hillary is on top (25% of the words) and Joe Biden at the bottom (7% of the words).

The exception is Chris Dodd, who talked himself within shouting distance of John Edwards despite being stuck at half a percent in the latest Zogby poll.

From Statistical Modeling and Social Science: Rich people in red states tend to vote Republican. But in blue states there’s no strong link between income and party affiliation. The well-off are no more likely than anyone else to embrace the elephant.

This blog is an aspirational read for me, since the statistics are usually over my head. But when these guys – Gelman, Yajima and the Slovenian hunk Jakulin – get hold of real data, it’s always interesting.

Popular bloggers may disable the comment function or delete the missives of their attackers. Not me. I feel like a kid so starved for attention that he’s grateful for any notice, no matter how negative. And the surprising thing is – for someone as thin-skinned as I imagine myself to be – that there’s a lot to agree with, even among those critical of the “memories of Obama” post.

To Peter, who said “I read envy in the whole article!”: You’re not the first person to say that.

To KL Moore, aka Voice of Reason: I hope you got all the anger out of your system. Sincerely, Cool White Guy.

To Knemon: Maybe not everyone used drugs. But I’ll bet every presidential candidate – OK, maybe not Guiliani – has gotten high. Barack is the only one with the guts to admit it.

To Ksun: You’re right – race shouldn’t matter. But we all know that it does. Race has a lot to do with what we hear and how we judge it. And a guy like Obama – with one foot in Kansas and the other in Kenya – can say things to both blacks and whites without being accused of racism. Even if he does embellish his resume.

Finally to all the Business International people who commented: Thanks. I remember all of you fondly. Let’s get together on LinkedIn when Jeanne Reynolds sets up the Business International alumni group.

Today the New York Times quoted from my blog on my memories of Barack Obama. Suddenly I’ve got more traffic – and comments – than in the previous five years.

The Times reporter, Janny Scott, talked to me for an hour or so about six weeks ago. I was already familiar with her work from previous articles, notably the one on Barack’s failed Congressional bid in 2000. This time, though, she seemed to fall flat: The article was dull and inconclusive (“Memories Differ”) and the editors buried it in the Metro section.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Janny kept coming back to the drug question. Here’s something I like about Barack: He’s very open about the fact that he did inhale. No parsing, no half-denials. He did it – like everyone else – and it’s no big deal.

The question is how much he did it and when he stopped. And all I can conclude us the Ms. Scott came up empty. Because she sure asked the question enough.

That’s her job. And that’s why the story is in the Metro section, not on the front page.

Lately I’ve been reading books that were on my father’s bookshelf when I was growing up. One category he enjoyed was first-person historical narratives.

Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain is the story of how Cortez and 400 soldiers fought and bluffed their way into the command center of Mexico, where they took Montezuma hostage and had their way with the empire.

It’s a bit like The Mouse That Roared, the bestseller and Peter Sellers movie from the 1960s. One of the greatest empires in the world comes to believe a few rowboats of musket-wielding soldiers also carries a secret weapon that can destroy civilization.

So they do the logical thing: they surrender. Nobody is more surprised than the soldiers themselves, who had already resigned themselves to having their hearts ripped out on stone altars.

Cortez had more enemies than George Bush. His patron in Cuba. Jealous officials in Spain. Every tribe he came across. (They were afraid of Cortez, but they feared Montezuma’s Apocalypto-style violence even more.) And his own soldiers, of course, who saw themselves hopelessly outnumbered and being led to gruesome deaths.

Cortez used a mix of threats, appeals and promises to barely hold together the expedition as he collected gold, planted crosses and took hostages.

Diaz underplays the Gods-from-the-Sun angle. The Mexicans knew the soldiers could be killed like other men. It’s never clear why Montezuma invited the soldiers across the bridges and into Tenochtitlan. Or how the Spaniards were able to walk away and return to Cuba safely.

Suppose the Mexicans had captured Cortez and his men (as they easily could have done)? Suppose they had taken the cannons and firearms and horses, forced the Spaniards to explain them, and built a defensive force of their own? What if they had been able to pull together an alliance with other tribes against the Europeans? Could they have held out another 100 years?

There’s an alternative history waiting to be written: The Defense of the Mexican Empire.

Painfully, stomach-clutchingly funny. From a place we’ve all been.

The sad thing that a mainstream newspaper tried to steal it from the author – and then threatened to sue him for complaining.

As sites are increasingly built with Ajax and Flash, page views stop making sense as a metric. When all of the navigation occurs within a single URL, the use of page views severely undercounts traffic.

“Ajax shatters the metaphor of a web ‘page’ upon which much of web publishing and advertising is based,” [says TechWeb's Fredric Paul]…Ajax reduces the need for an entire webpage to reload to show fresh data: “It questions the assumptions of why do I have to do a page refresh to do anything,” according to Adaptive Path’s Lane Becker.

“If sites track traffic and sell ads based on pageview impressions, everything changes when users start interacting with the site and making multiple changes without ever refreshing a page. Does all of that count as a single page view? Or do we need to count clicks, or use a stopwatch to time how long they spend on each ‘page’?” Paul writes.

Same problem with RSS, but worse: Half of the time I don’t even go to the site I’m reading.

And, as Steve Rubel points out, there’s a big community of advertising agencies and content creators with a vested interest in the page view measure.

I see trouble on the way.

Yesterday my son was late to school and hadn’t eaten breakfast. I tell him to walk ahead while I run into the Dunkin’ Donuts on 105th Street to buy him a bagel. About a half-second ahead of me into the door is a middle-aged, unshaven guy in a porkpie hat who blocks my way as he slowly shuffles up the the counter and says:

“Hey, sweetheart, will you be my girlfriend?”

“No.”

“C’mon, I be sweet to you, baby.”

“What can I get for you, sir?”

“I buy a coffee if you give me a kiss.”

I guess that sexual harassment course is only required for people who work. It was clearly going to take this guy a long time to buy a cup of coffee. And I needed to get the bagel and catch up with my son before school started.

People started to line up behind me. We all waited while he continued to hassle the countergirl, got his coffee, slowly counted out change and shuffled away.

What bugs me is not the “hey baby” piece – it’s the pokiness at the front of the line while others stand and fidget. You know it’s coming when a customer:

• reads her three-year-old twins all of the 27 ice cream flavors and leaves it up to them to decide
• starts to argue about why he should be able to buy beer with his WIC coupon
• slowly takes out a coin purse and digs around in it, squinting at every quarter, nickel and penny
• asks “Do you take checks?”

I used to experience this kind of thing in the South, when every transaction at the Piggly Wiggly included a personal conversation too. At the time it was annoying, but also charming (since I was usually on vacation at the time).

After 25 years in Manhattan, it’s not charming anymore.

Back when I worked at the Globecon Group – a personality-driven boutique that trained wholesale bankers – one of my jobs was to come up with keywords for the thousands of books, articles and PowerPoints that comprised our library of training material.

Some people didn’t like the keywords I chose; they wanted new ones that made more sense to them. “Can’t have that,” I thought. I used the power of the sysadmin to guard those keywords like a paranoid dictator, leading to even more dysfunction in a company that was already pretty screwy.

That’s why I was so interested to read Tagging vs. Cataloging – What It’s All About by the lovely Chiara Fox, who looks like Winona Ryder without the anorexia. Chiara describes the difference between taxonomies – collections of keyword pick-lists like the Library of Congress Subject Headings – and folksonomies, such as the tags assigned by users of Flickr or Del.icio.us.

Librarians have traditionally lived in a controlled world filled with the ultimate of “keyword pick-lists”: the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Medical Subject Headings (MESH) or even the Dewey Decimal System. A cataloger looks at an item to be cataloged, determines its “aboutness” and then finds the word (or words) from the list of accepted subject headings that best describes it.

These keyword pick-lists aren’t perfect, nor are they all-inclusive. But they do help control the terms that are used to describe items, which, as any cataloger worth her salt will tell you, is of the utmost importance. Without a way to account for the ambiguities of language and meaning, there is chaos. Terms and values must be controlled in order for the system to maintain a high level of recall and precision in results. This is something that every cataloger is taught in library school.

Tagging, on the other hand, is a bottom-up, wisdom-of-crowds approach with no standardization whatsoever (though the auto-suggest and type-ahead features of Del.icio.us can elicit some order). And this lack of standardization is one of the biggest criticisms of tagging.

Take the classificiation problem I faced with Globecon’s teaching material, for instance. Almost every piece of content in the system could easily be tagged “corporate finance” – whether the subject was bonds, valuation, yield calculations or even commercial lending. When all content has the same tag, the tag becomes useless. That’s what I was trying to avoid by coming up with a controlled set of keywords.

In any case, I can’t wait for Chiara’s next essay, where she promises to tell us about “the dark side of tagging.”

The Long Tail was just released this month. It seems like it has been out forever. The seminal article in Wired appeared almost two years ago. The ideas have been publicized almost daily on Chris Anderson’s blog. And yet the book is well worth reading: Gladwell-esque in its energy and clarity, with details that haven’t appeared elsewhere.

One thing bugs me, though. Let’s see the data. We all know what a power-law curve looks like. What we need is to see a power-law curve mapped against the data. Otherwise it’s just a theory.

The Washington Post’s Adrian Holovaty on web programming as journalism:

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

“Doing journalism through computer programming” is just a different way of accomplishing these goals.

What Holvaty does is more than journalism via programming, though. Holvaty’s sites, like ChicagoCrime.org and the U.S. Congress Votes Database, are interactive presentations that enable readers to explore data and form their own opinions. Holvaty respects and empowers his readers rather than selecting facts to prove a preconceived point.

The article’s at the Online Journalism Review at USC – a source I intend to go back to.

Last night I learned about the capricious and nasty treatment that Neil Gunton, who runs the CrazyGuyonaBike touring site, received at the hands of a Wikipedia administrator. CrazyGuyonaBike is a six-year open-source labor of love built by Neil for the bicycle touring community. It’s got trip journals, discussion boards, touring partners, equipment tips – everything a real or armchair tourer could want.

But apparently it’s not good enough to be listed as a resource in Wikipedia’s bike touring entry. Administrator Guy Chapman, aka “Just zis Guy, you know?”, not only removed the link to Neil’s site, but also poured on the vitriol, calling the site “spam riddled” and and justifying his actions by saying “I don’t recall ever having heard of it before.” If he thinks a couple of Google Adwords are spam, and he’s a bike tourer who doesn’t already know about Neil’s selfless advocacy for the touring community, that says more about him – and his lack of qualifications for editing an article on bicycle touring – than Neil’s wonderful site.

Is this guy typical of the Wiki cops? For Wikipedia’s sake, I hope not.

My wife and I don’t own a car anymore. But we’re still hunters at heart – always sensitive to the signs of movement that indicate spaces are opening up. The purposefully striding pedestrian reaching for keys; the sound of doors slamming; the changing of doormen’s shifts. Here are the rules that we’ve come up with after 20 years of parking in Manhattan.

Your Block

1. Park only on your block. All other blocks are unsafe.

2. If cars are circling the block, wait until a neigbor comes by. Never give your spot to a stranger. Strangers can’t reciprocate.

Basic Etiquette

3. Don’t take two spots when one will do.

4. On the other hand, don’t assume that someone taking two spaces did it on purpose. It was probably one space when he originally parked there.

5. Double-parking is not the same as stopping in the middle of the street.

6. You can save a spot for someone else by standing in it – for about 60 seconds. If I swing around the block once and your friend hasn’t shown up, it’s mine.

Touching and Shoving

7. Touch parking is OK. That’s what bumpers are for. Taking off a side mirror is not OK.

8. No matter how small the space around your car, somebody will try to park in it. So don’t get hot and bothered when another car jams itself behind you.

9. In fact, you’re even allowed to push other parked cars forward or backward a few inches. As long as you’re bumper to bumper, that is; Lincoln Navigators shouldn’t push their bumpers against a Mini’s rear window.

10. The same goes for motorcycles: no pushing. On the other hand, it’s perfectly legitimate to pick up and move a motorcycle to create a spot.

11. Manhattan is a level playing field. Your Mercedes will be touched – and even shoved – by an ’86 K-car. If you don’t like it, use a parking lot. When you park a $70,000 car on the street, whatever happens serves you right.

12. When a passerby shakes his head and tells you the spot is too small, ignore him. He’s a pedestrian; you’re a pro.

Alternate-Side Parking

13. Alternate-side parking starts and ends 30 minutes before the posted time.

14. Everyone knows the alternate-side parking practice of double-parking for 90 minutes so the street can be cleaned. If you find yourself parked in because you didn’t move your car in time, be a grown-up. Don’t lean on your horn. Look on the dash of the car parking you in for a phone number. Or talk to a doorman – he’ll know whose car it is. Wait. Relax. Take the bus.

15. Sometimes the street cleaner shows up late, before the end of the posted time but after everyone has already moved back to the empty side of the street. When this happens, each car pulls out to let the street cleaner pass, then moves back and takes the next space in front. This means that the person at the end of the street loses his spot. If it happens to you, be gracious. Swearing loudly does not earn you a spot. Or sympathy. Or the offer of a spot from your neighbors next time you need one.

16. Never forget your obscure religious holidays. Allah and the Virgin are your friends.

Amazon’s “Customers who bought X also bought Y” function displays thousands of paths through hundreds of demographic niches of America’s magazines. You don’t need Amazon to tell you that readers of ‘Guns & Ammo’ are more likely to buy ‘Handguns’ than ‘PETA News.’ But what Amazon can tell you is which magazines Dale Gribble and Comic Book Guy have in common. The hub ‘zines – those that unite groups with little else in common – provide a glimpse into the subjects that draw us together as Americans.

Inspired by the polarized political book networks on Orgnet, the power of Perl and the help of Adi Agafitei, I spent some time spidering around Amazon and dropping the results into Pajek, a free data visualization program from Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana. The resulting networks show a handful of magazines that link us all – families and singles, women and men, liberals and conservatives, teens and boomers, Hummer-drivers and tree-huggers…you get the idea.

The network shows all of the shortest paths from ‘Mother Earth News’ to ‘Special Weapons Assault Team: The Magazine for Prepared Americans.’ The hub is ‘Popular Mechanics’, which I spent hours studying as a teenager. Men who read Popular Mechanics love their home workshops, and what is ‘Family Handyman’ but ‘Mother Earth News’ without the green baggage? Men who read ‘Popular Mechanics’ also like to hunt, fish and tinker with cars. From hunting it’s not a big step to ‘Guns and Ammo’, and from there it’s only a tiny step to assault weapon porn.

Popular Mechanics is a huge hub among men’s magazines. But it’s not the biggest. That distinction goes to Wired. More later.

From Slashdot:

“Fortunately for all you Americans, I believe this jackass was born in Canada which would disqualify him from running for president.

“Unfortunately for us Canadians, his being a jackass makes him perfectly qualified for running Canada.”

According to Slate, Edgar Jr. has been designated Hollywood’s official idiot.

Why is it that only black people are called Jordan? Michael Jordan, Barbara Jordan, Vernon Jordan. And why is it that only white people are called Rockefeller, Rothschild, and DuPont?

Now that the Dutch have adopted rules for euthanizing babies, I hope they’ll apply them sensibly. It’s so annoying when those babies start crying in the airplane cabin. You can’t exactly get up and leave the room. I also don’t like it when two-year-olds sit in the handicapped seats on the subway. They claim that they can’t read the sign, but I don’t buy that for a minute.

Andrew Lee writes in the Financial Times that the misogynistic mix of cuteness, violence and perversion prevalent in manga and anime “…must send many tourists running, their ‘Fujiyama’ image of Japan tainted for life.”

Andy, I’ve got news for you: After seeing a reproduction of Makoto Aida’s “Harakiri Schoolgirls” (detail below), I’m ready start my own Japanese poster collection.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.

Here’s Barack’s account:

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.

First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.

Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.

It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.

…as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

Barack was not promoted. Instead, he did the same thing that I did in my first job out of college: Volunteered for more interesting work (writing articles) than the work he was hired to do (copyediting a reference service). As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the only secretary in the company worked for Norman, the president. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.

Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently…[several pages on his suffering half-sister] A few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.

All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.

Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.

And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.

Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.

A letter to the FT depicts the medieval Christian church as an early regulator rooting out creative accounting practices:

The medieval Christian view was highly sympathetic to risk capital formation. The key was the word “risk”. What was objectionable to the medieval mind (and Mohammed confirmed that this was far from exclusively a Christian view) was the receipt of a return independent of the success or otherwise of the enterprise being financed. This was seen as exploitative and an offence against charity.

Aquinas elaborated this by arguing that, unlike, say, land, which you could own and farm yourself or own and let somebody else farm for a rent, the use of money was inseparable from its ownership. Money had no inherent value; it was merely a token. To charge interest was therefore to charge for something that did not and could not exist – the use of money separated from its possession.

Medieval society had a burgeoning commercial class. “Creative accountants” were regularly coming up with schemes for making interest look like something else and Church courts were constantly rejecting them, with the same mixture of weariness and zeal that Gordon Brown brings to his battle against tax avoidance.

For the past few months I’ve been teaching myself to write spiders – little Perl programs that crunch through URLs and download data. In the spirit of learning by doing, my first project was to grab 5,000 health inspection reports for Manhattan restaurants from the NYC Department of Health website.

The reports list a lot of yucky things, from spoiled food to rat droppings, that you’d rather not know. I’ll tell you one thing, though – after going through this exercise, I’ll never buy the cheap sushi at Daikichi again.

Here’s a narrow slice of what I found: the average number of violations per restaurant for Manhattan chains with five or more locations. Most of the violations aren’t too bad. But unless you like raw sewage, stay away from the Popeyes on Fulton Street.

Over 2 Violations per Location
Café Metro
Ray’s Pizza
Sbarro’s

1.5 to 2 Violations per Location
Andrews Coffee Shop
Blimpie
Burger Heaven
City Market Café
Cosi
Daikichi Sushi
Europa Cafe
Kennedy Fried Chicken
Le Pain Quotidien
Pronto Pizza
Ranch 1
Teriyaki Boy
TGI Friday’s
Zaro’s Bread Basket

1 to 1.5 Violations per Location
Au Bon Pain
Baluchi’s
Barnes & Noble Cafe
Burritoville
Chipotle Mexican Grill
City Perk
Cremalita
Crown Fried Chicken
Domino’s Pizza
Jackson Hole
Popeye’s
Subway
Tasti D-Lite
Zaro’s Bread Basket

0.5 to 1 Violations per Location
Burger King
Dean & Deluca
Dunkin Donuts
Haagen Dazs
Hale & Hearty Soups
KFC
Krispy Kreme
McDonald’s
Pret a Manger
Starbucks
Wendy’s

Less Than 0.5 Violations per Location
Ben & Jerry’s

A few observations:

It’s easy to despise the big fast food chains, but when it comes to cleanliness, they seem to have their act together. Just compare Burger King to Burger Heaven or KFC to Kennedy Fried Chicken. (Subway doesn’t count – it’s a network of franchisees rather than a centrally managed operation like McDonalds.)

Pizza – or any restaurant where food is left out for long periods – is a bad bet.

Violations aren’t likely at chains where the food arrives in sealed containers and doesn’t need to be prepared before serving. The prime examples are ice cream shops like Haagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s. Coffee and baked goods (Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Dean & Deluca’s) seem to be relatively safe as well.

I’ve written about fraud among the Mormons before. Here’s another angle, from a social networking thread on Slashdot:

Salt Lake City is the smallest city to have its own SEC office, and the state suffers from a high rate for people getting ripped off by people they know. This has been attributed by the close network of people within the LDS Church. Somebody who is intent on ripping someone off can join the church and instantly gain a large web of trust.

Rashomon retold for fans of Goofus and Gallant.

Interesting conversation on Slashdot about Hollywood Math and Science Consulting, which helps screenwriters portray math and science accurately in their scripts.

The company’s first client was the TV show Numb3rs, about a mathematician who solves crimes via pattern-recognition techniques. It’s a fascinating idea, and I love the eccentric professor played by Dragonslayer’s Peter MacNicol. Unfortunately, he’s a secondary character and can’t carry the show on his own.

Slashdot’s comment-ranking filter allows you to screen out idiots and read only responses that are authoritative, clever, imaginative or funny. So what were the highlights of this conversation on math and science in Hollywood? To summarize:

1. The laws of science are always secondary to the laws of entertainment.

2. Any show that realistically portrayed science and math would be pretty dull.

3. Therefore, no matter what the topic – forensics, technology, you name it – experts will always be horrified by the way it’s treated in Hollywood.

My favorite comment:

“[I read] a Garfield I saw where he ate an entire cake! No cat could eat that much! He’d get sick! Oh, I wish they’d hire some consultants for that horrible Jim Davis.”

I’ve held investments through both TIAA-CREF and Merrill Lynch, and I can’t imagine two more different companies. TIAA-CREF has always been like a big old family-run business – cheap, paternalistic and a bit backwards, but also old-fashioned in its commitment to the educators who comprise its customers. In contrast, Merrill Lynch – like many full-service brokers – seems like an oversized boiler room preying on unsophisticated (often elderly) investors.

That’s why I was disturbed when the former COO of Merrill, Herb Allison, was brought on as CEO a few years back after John Biggs left on his quixotic quest to keep the accounting firms honest. It’s not as if the company didn’t need a shake-up. But it has historically been a nonprofit (at least until losing its tax-free status after a run-in with Tom DeLay in the late 1990s). Its non-profit status allowed it to hold down costs for investors and to pay a relative pittance to the former academics who came aboard to work as CEOs.

All that ended when Allison came. He negotiated “base salary” of $1 million per year, but it’s actually $8 million when you count a $3 million bonus within months of signing on and guaranteed $4 million in long-term compensation (not to mention a $24 million severance agreement). Allison immediately started firing long-time employees, bringing in high-paid Wall Street managers and spending heavily on branches and advertising. None of which is likely to comfort the academics who make up the bulk of TIAA-CREF’s clientele.

Then, last year, two TIAA trustees were forced to resign after a business relationship with TIAA’s auditor came to light. Interestingly, these two trustees also happened to be the ones who brought in Allison, and who were his main supporters on the board.

Maybe TIAA will die a lingering death if it doesn’t change. Maybe it will become even more obscure than it already is. But does America really need another full-service broker and funds supermarket? I don’t think so – especially when the ground that TIAA-CREF covets is already dominated by better known, more experienced companies like Vanguard, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.

You may be a great performer on your own. But how much do you help your team? The metric de jour of the NBA – the plus-minus statistic – goes beyond so-called “glory statistics” like points or rebounds to measure a player’s total contribution to victory.

Refined by Dan Rosenbaum, an economist at UNC Greensboro, plus-minus measures how many additional points a team scores when a given player is on the floor. In Measuring How NBA Players Help Their Teams Win, he says that plus-minus statistics measure “how point differentials change when a particular player is in the game versus when he is not.” Subtracting individual points scored from the point differential isolates the contribution due to teamwork.

For instance, the threat of a three-point shooter may cause the other team to spread its defense and allow someone else to score. Nobody gets credit for a three-point shot, since it didn’t happen. But the plus-minus statistic should capture the extra points made possible by the mere threat of the three-pointer.

We reward glory in sports, business and life. We tend not to measure teamwork, which is less tangible and harder to capture. What’s the plus-minus of a company’s marketing department? Of its legal counsel? Hard to answer, but worth asking.

PWC and KPMG say that 90-95% of business spreadsheets have errors, that each error costs a business $10,000 to $100,000, and that complex spreadsheets (more than 100 columns or rows) have a probability of error approaching 100%.

Gee, do you think the folks at PWC or KPMG know anyone who might be able to audit my company’s spreadsheets?

Forty-three ways to cure writer’s block.

Also from the recent PRMIA meeting on liquidity risk:

Ken Winston, CRO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, threw out the following idea on how to hedge against market illiquidity: sell off-the-run Treasuries and buy on-the-run issues. As liquidity disappears, the on-the-run bonds gain relative to the off-the-run issues.

You could offer the hedge to a customer, adding leverage to ensure that your position better tracks the relative price declines of securities less liquid than off-the-run Treasuries, and keeping a bit for yourself to cover the basis risk and make a profit.

Asked whether he would purchase such a hedge for MSIM, Winston said “Sure, under the right circumstances.”

Sounds like the old TED spread (T-bills against LIBOR) in new clothes.

Went to the liquidity risk discussion at PRMIA‘s New York chapter a few months back, shortly before GM was downgraded to junk status. I had meant to write about it at the time, but computer problems and the hassles of moving from Blogger to Moveable Type and then WordPress interfered. In hindsight, though, here’s what I found interesting:

1. Everyone in the room knew that GM was about to be downgraded.

2. One of the speakers said that his firm had surveyed pension managers and hadn’t found a single fund with hard limits on non-investment-grade bond holdings. Therefore, he believed that fears of a selloff triggered by a GM downgrade were overblown.

Which makes me wonder: Why did articles posing this scenario continue to appear up to and through the actual downgrade? It’s as if the press was unable to see beyond the disaster narrative.

The Body Mass Index of presidents is the subject of a chart in Sunday’s New York Times. (Unfortunately, only the accompanying article is available online.) The article points out that BMI is meaningless by itself. Our 6-foot 194-pound president, who regularly runs 6:30 miles at the age of 58, has a BMI of 26.3 – putting him in the 65% of Americans deemed overweight by the National Institutes of Health.

More interesting to me was the historical chart, which ranks presidents in order of their BMIs. Lowest is Madison at 5 foot 4 and 99 pounds, with a BMI of 17 – emaciated even by the standards of Kenyan distance runners. Teddy Roosevelt would have been considered obese (30.2) by today’s standards, and Taft – who got stuck in the White House bathub – was morbidly obese (42.3).

Of course, the use 0f BMI-based cutoffs assumes some universal ideal, independent of time, race, gender. With presidents we don’t have to worry about the gender or race parts – all are men and almost all English, Scotch or Scotch-Irish.

But time is another story. Don Troiani, the famous Civil War artist, says he seeks out models with a lean and hungry look. Very few people were overweight in those days (something the casting director of Cold Mountain apparently didn’t know). If you look at the earlier presidents, they were pretty thin. And surprisingly long-lived despite the medical shortcomings of the age, if you leave out alcoholism (Pierce), cholera (Polk), and weight problems (Taft and Arthur).

A small Utah-based lender, the Bank of Ephraim, collapsed after discovering that 90% of its loan portfolio consisted of loans to a doomsday sect of fundamentalist Mormons.

Sect members, believing that the end of the world was imminent, took an oath several years ago to drain the bank of money before doomsday. They borrowed $18 million to start watermelon farms with no watermelons, motels that collapsed as soon as they were built, and other transparently phoney business ventures.

State regulators discovered the scam as part of a crackdown on Mormons who still practice polygamy. Wouldn’t want to scare away the tourists, would we?

LoanPerformance, which sells retail credit analytics to mortgage lenders, says text mining can boost the accuracy of default models. If a customer uses any of these words when talking to a call center rep, the software flags the customer as more likely to default:

Rental
Renter
Rent
Roommate
Hazard
Debris
Fraud
Death
Marital Problem, Divorce
Mold
Sad
Jail
Motorcycle

If I were a sad divorced guy riding a motorcycle to a moldy jail, I’d probably default too. But I sure wouldn’t talk to a customer rep about it.

Follow this link to try the Autism Quotient test. After taking it, I’m ready to believe that autism is just a special case of being a guy.

The average score is 16.5, and 80% of those diagnosed with autism scored 32 or more. Your score appears to depend mainly on (1) your comfort in social situations and (2) your feelings about numbers, categories and patterns.

Personally, I find license plates fascinating and parties terrifying – and my score was 30. My wife is the opposite, and hers was 6. I’ll bet this chasm is typical. Not only is it men who hail from Mars, but it’s also men who build model airplanes, become mathematicians, write software, play the Blackberry… So it should not be surprising that 10 times as many males as females are diagnosed as autistic.

OK, not really, because it’s all about golf. But just listen to the rest.

The job title is Data Analyst, but it could also be called Database Journalist. The PGA wants someone to mine and analyze data from ShotLink (the PGA scoring system) to “create a depth of analysis, insight and entertaining information never before possible in golf.” Since links on Craiglist disappear in 10 days, I’ll quote directly from the ad:

The golf industry is at the start of a tidal wave of data analysis, and can evolve like baseball, where data, statistics and insights fuel the fan interest and are core to the sport. This person’s primary responsibility is to create interesting output and insight for PGATOUR.COM that will help strategically differentiate the Site from its competitors.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Directly analyze ShotLink data and create compelling outputs specifically for PGATOUR.COM on a regular and frequent schedule

• Coordinate the structuring of analysis of ShotLink data to create interesting, compelling, meaningful and entertaining outputs for fans. Consider construct for both repeatable and customized outputs

• Take a unique perspective on analysis of data. Express a natural curiosity to delve into the data and find insights that have never before been possible

• Structure and perform complex analysis. Do so creatively and without fully built out information system tools and query systems

• Create clear, concise and entertaining presentation of potentially complex information and analysis. Creativity required for compelling presentation of outputs

• Support other PGATOUR.COM statistics based projects (e.g. Fantasy, archives, player profiles)

• Support editorial and newsletter development. Tie analysis to supporting modular information, stories and articles

Bill James, eat your heart out.

The listing is on CraigsList, by the way, where a year or so ago I found some interesting temporary work in might be called “spreadsheet journalism.” Here’s one of the articles that resulted. (To see the analytical part, you’ll have to view the PDF or download the Excel file – which unfortunately requires registering.)

I just love PlasticBag.org. Like Andrew Sullivan (before he went bonkers), but techie and profane. In this post, Tom Coates creates visualizations of his last five years of posts, showing, for example, how his writing style deteriorated as posts become longer and less frequent. There’s also a reference to a Perl module that calculates Flesch-Kincaid.