Colorado Senate Bill 126

I oppose and hope that Colorado Senate rejects SB 126 granting illegal immigrants the education privilege to pay in-state college/university tuition.

This bill, if passed, will be a new, added incentive for illegal immigration to our state. It will unfairly deny the much lower resident tuition to qualified students from outside of Colorado. Or to those left or leaving Colorado with their divorced parents for out-of-state jobs. In addition, there are possible several issues regarding the legality of this bill granting in-state tuition to children of federal immigration law-breakers.

Current Colorado severe fiscal constraint demands prudent and careful long-term control and management of resources. Colorado Senate Bill 126 will directly increase the budgetary deficit due to the financial subsidy to each in-state tuition-paying student.

Egypt uprising

Feb 11, 2011. 

Almost to the day in 1979 the Iranian revolution took place. The Shah of Iran was overthrown. The very impressive military machinery was overpowered by Ayatollah Khomeini returning from France. And the rest is history: a theocratic dictatorship in Iran ever since. It is an irony that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i came out - on the same side with the USA - supporting the Egyptian revolution! Quick notes: 

1. Unthinkable events [the overthrow of the Saudi Royal family, a nuclear war/exchange, ...] are not as unthinkable as we'd like to believe. The connectedness of global events, news, telecommunications and the increasing power of a group of common individuals or people can accelerate events. 

2. Many traditional intelligence gathering apparatus have not been successful to predict/monitor/understand this new type of political changes/upheavals. 

3. The concern of the USA's long time allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia, ..) due to its fickle and "opportunistic" foreign policy will further exasperated. 

4. Powerful, international news organizations such as CNN breathlessly makes news instead of reporting it. Their reporters seem so naive and optimistic for a democratic Egypt after the revolution. The instability and risk of major war/problems for the Middle East, our allies and our national interest are very real and sobering. 

5. The first democratic election in Egypt may be its only and last one similar to what happened in Hamas-controlled areas or World War II Nazi election.

On reading "A mathematician plays the stock market" by John Paulos

I am reading an interesting book "A mathematician plays the stock market" by John Allen Paulos. Paulos, a Temple University mathematics professor is the author of several best sellers including "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences", "Beyond Numeracy: Ruminations of a Numbers Man", "Irreligion: A Mathematician explains why the arguments for God just don't add up".

Here are some nuggets of wisdom I gleaned from "A mathematician plays the stock market".

"Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security." Paulos did not tell us not to invest in the stock market. He cautioned us about misunderstanding of applying mathematics to the stock market and investing. His humorous, interesting book includes explanation of scams, psychological blindness such as confirmation bias, and examples of investment mathematics mistakes and analyses. He admits to losing a bit of money himself during the dot-com boom in early 2000.

1. Psychological blindness. Paulos quoted John Maynard Keynes who likened the position of short-term stock market investors picking five prettiest out of hundred contestants in a newspaper. The rewards go to folks who correctly pick the contestants whom they think are most likely to be picked by other readers, and the other readers must try to do the same. This is what Paulos distinguishes between "Being right versus Being right about the Market". He then gave several interesting examples of mathematics involving game theory.

Other psychological blindness include emotional overreactions - the irrational exuberance- and despair. Paulos cited unfounded financial hype and unrealistic "price targets" which influence investors by putting an "anchoring effect" number to stock price.

2. The incoherent market pundits/analysts, blog and chat room noises. Many seemingly technical analyses are fundamentally wrong. There have been data mining and faulty attempts to discover investment scheme that supposedly worked in the past. An exhaustive search of the economic data on a United Nations CD-ROM in the mid-90s found the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index was - drum roll here - butter production in Bangladesh. He reminds us of the mathematically ignorant attempt to "decode" the Bible hidden codes to show that the September 11, 2001 event was "prophesied".

Paulos, through extensive but easy to follow mathematic examples in several chapters gave strong evidence that the technical analysis of trends, cycles, supporting and resistance stock price levels, waves, moving average are ridiculous and quasi-mathematical which seldom hangs together as a coherent theory. Many of current fads are just rehash of past failed theories; the Elliot wave theory to predict the behavior of stocks was based upon the Fibonacci number sequence. He boo-booed the claim that folks have made good money using the rules of technical analysis by saying that some other folks also make money in the stock market using strategies involving tea leaves and sun-spots!