Kuebler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief --Applied to our Rec/Depression

Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross's wrote a famous model of grief involving the five steps below. These have been mischaracterized and popularized. Most notable is the view that "acceptance" is a positive state when it is more like the docile and stoic state on the far side of depression.

Diana Garneck picks up on the more pop notion of the 5-stages with this bridge from the depressing, "Let's buy canned goods and ammo" (see my posting of 7-March) to an realistic & constructive condition.

I have come to think the way to approach death is with your personality still well-integrated with your past self.  In the economic example, we need to stop fretting, and start being realistic. Let's think about the future, and start planning for the two decades it will take to rebuild that 401k. 

Today, I had a business meeting where we talked about our less-than-stellar business results--results that in any normal time would have been shocking. The positive thing is not being shocked and starting to act on what I/we can do to make it better.

Five Stages of Economic Grief -- according to Garneck


Stage 1, Denial: "I should throw away my 401K statement without even opening it." Or, "If we suspend mark to market accounting, everything bad will go away."

Stage 2, Anger: "Why did this happen to me? It is unfair that Wall Street benefited at my expense." Or, "Why the f*ck is AIG's bailout money going to its counterparties like Goldman and Deutsche Bank?"

Stage 3, Bargaining: "Just give me one relief rally and I can make it all back and sell."

Stage 4, Depression: "The market sucks, no one is hiring anywhere. Why should I bother?"

Stage 5, Acceptance: "It's bad but these things don't last forever. I'm going to work on my career and portfolio to be prepared for the opportunities when they do come."

Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart tussle -- reported by Jeanie Moos

This is an amusing video from CNN on the spat between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart. I sympathize with Cramer. Stock shows have many bad picks, and it is not fair to sort out the bad ones. Secondly, Jon Stewart is a comedian, and he is just trying to be funny -- not to make a point. 

There  is the idea that by the time something makes it onto CNBC, its value to help your stock portfolio is gone. Too many other people see it at the same time. As mentioned below, Nassim Taleb is of that opinion.  In my view that is exaggerated, there has to be a value to being well informed. The problem is over-reaction to news. 

Canned Goods And Ammunition

The market is down 20% this year, and almost 60% since its peak -- counting the Nikkea, Hang Sang, and the DAX like I do. 

The idea that a better investment is in canned goods and ammunition than stocks and bank accounts has begun to gain some jokey credence. I heard this from Megan McArdle on the Marketplace podcast. The phrase has been bouncing around the blogosphere for about a year. Someone put up a site on it. 

A good link is from Brad McMillian, who says things keep getting worse and worse. We are beginning to see people saying that there will be social unrest in America by the end of the year. This strikes me as a little odd, since cities overheat during the summertime. 

Knot Interesting

We all know that knots form in christmas tree lights or ipod earphone cords spontaneously. 

I thought that the longer the string, the greater the chance of knotting. It turns out that this is not true. The chance of knotting plateaus after a while. At right we have real data from Raymer and Smith at UCalf-San Diego. They shook pieces of rope in a box and counted the knots. They are mathematicians so they topologically categorized the knots. 

The intuitive notion is that there are only two rope ends, and as the rope gets longer, the number of ends stay the same. Any knot must start at the end.

In polymer physics there is the notion of reptation theory which describes the motion of a long linear polymer in the midst of other long linear polymers, as a snake slithering though a snake-pit like in Indiana Jones. Key is the prediction that the motion scales with the molecular weight cubed, which does not fit well with out knot theory.

The Raymer/Smith experiment contradicts the Frisch-Wasserman-Delbruck conjecture which says the chance of a polymer chain being knotted goes to one as the chain increases. And in fact, this has been proven mathematically using a random walk model. This has practical importance in electrophoretic separations. 

I think that the difficulty with reconciling the experiment and the theory is that the infinitely long chain needs an vastly longer time to become knotted. In a practical experiment with fixed tumbling time, there would be a plateau effect. However, at molecular scales polymer probably get tangled faster than common ropes. Secondly, one could speed tangling and knotting by raising the temperature via a time-temperature superposition effect. Third, the theoreticians were considering a rope on a large lattice, and the practical experiment was in a box of fixed size, where longer ropes took up a greater fraction of the free volume -- restricting rope movement. 

An interesting variation is a T-shaped rope. The extra end should increase the number of knots by at least 50%. On the other hand, the decrease in viscosity for T-shape (and higher star chains) is well established. A second contradiction. 

Of course my ipod earphone cords are actually T-shaped, and the theory of T-shaped chains has some practical appeal. I have taken to hanging my earphones instead of coiling them. 

72 Pencils

I find wooden pencils to be comforting objects.

I don't actually write with them, or even have many around. Maybe they are best to play with. Professor and mathematician George W. Hart made the above design/sculpture called 72 pencils. It is the kind of structure a math geek would like/make.

I think it has three axes of symmetry, but I am not sure if it really has six. It would help to see one in person; I'd appreciate a comment on this if you know

My food blog has a recipe from George W. Hart.

Snowy Day

Some winter days, all you can do is wistfully wait for Spring. As you may see on my wine posting, I impatiently tasted the 2008 wine.

I am planning big things for next year. Chief among there are cherry wine from fresh fruit in the summer. I am also tempted to try a Petite Syrah in the fall -- although that depends on getting some good juice.

This morning before the snow started I was planning on how to expand the garden now that the strawberries have overtaken half of it. The seedlings continue to grow slowly in the basement.

I also have plans for a new fire pit closer to the house. I like the idea of a fire pit; although in truth, I probably would use it once a year.

Conjoint Analysis!

Conjoint Analysis is a market research and psychological research technique, developed by Paul Green of U of Pennsylvania.  It quantitatively ranks a series of customer choices. At work today, we saw the results of a global market survey, and I could not help wondering how they did the statistics. 

If you are thinking, conjoint analysis must be somekind of multiple regression -- well that was exactly what I was thinking. 

The difficult part is extracting a rank ordering from the questionnaire used. There are different ways to arrive at a numerically rank associated with each possible customer choice. Some involve numerical values and some techniques use binary choices. Either way, one can view the whole characteristic space as a full factorial design with an associated point value. 

If you are working with conjoint analysis, make sure the mapping from the questions to the numerical value is done sensibly. Apparently this is often a source or error and confusion. 

Once you do make a full table of options and scores, it is just a multiple regression to optimize the design and extract the coefficients which represent the customer preferences. Of course when multi-valued characteristics are used, then dummy variables need to be introduced. 

This is laid out nicely in this chapter from Orme's "Getting Started with Conjoint Analysis" (Research Publishers: Madison) 2006. 

Depth of Processing and the Retention of Words in Episodic Memory

I started blogging about movies because I believed that if I thought about the movie more and wrote about it, then I would remember more detail about the movie. Now you know that my movie site was first, and my general interest and cooking sites came later. 

I named the site "Depth of Processing" because of Craik and Tulving's paper, where they showed that people remembered things they thought about. As the above graph illustrates, people remember words longer if they think about the meaning of the word rather than superficially.

I was so happy to actually find a reference to the classic paper from 1975.

It is worth pointing out that the paper deals with short term memory rather than the long-term memory that I'd rather cultivate. 

Craik and Tulving have one equation presumably showing the exponential decay of memory with time, although I can't be sure since I can't figure out the definition of the variables. Social scientists never seem quantitative enough for physical scientists.

Miscanthus - A Giant Grass for Biofuel

I love this picture this tall grass, miscanthus giganteus.

 It is ten times more efficient in creating biomass from sunlight than switchgrass. It is a perennial grass, but it does not produce seed, because it is a sterile hybrid. It is laborious to propagate it by digging the rhizomes. On the other hand, being sterile it cannot displace indigenous flora.

The French company Bical harvests miscanthus and produces a fuel pellet, that can be fed automatically to a furnace. 

(photo from allyrose.wordpress.com)

Oil Seed Productivity

I am giving a talk at the Southern Coatings Society in March, and my talk is on coatings materials in a high petroleum cost world. I wrote the talk when prices were high, but now I am giving it when prices are low. Nonetheless, I am going to forge ahead. One of the issues is whether natural oils will ever be economical enough to replace petroleum based feedstocks. The answer is of course, but some oils are going to be cheaper than others. Some of the most popular oils are subsidized by the cost of co-products. For example, linseed oil is a coproduct with seed meal and flax fiber.

The following is a table of oil seed productivity. This table appeared in this form at journeytoforever.com by Ken Addison, but I suspect it is not original with him. Jouneytoforever.org is an interesting site. Maybe I will do a posting on their algae fuel analysis. <>

Ascending order			Alphabetical order
Crop	litres oil/ha	US gal/acre	Crop	litres oil/ha	US gal/acre
corn (maize)	172	18	avocado	2638	282
cashew nut	176	19	brazil nut	2392	255
oats	217	23	calendula	305	33
lupine	232	25	camelina	583	62
kenaf	273	29	cashew nut	176	19
calendula	305	33	castor bean	1413	151
cotton	325	35	cocoa (cacao)	1026	110
hemp	363	39	coconut	2689	287
soybean	446	48	coffee	459	49
coffee	459	49	coriander	536	57
linseed (flax)	478	51	corn (maize)	172	18
hazelnut	482	51	cotton	325	35
euphorbia	524	56	euphorbia	524	56
pumpkin seed	534	57	hazelnut	482	51
coriander	536	57	hemp	363	39
mustard seed	572	61	jatropha	1892	202
camelina	583	62	jojoba	1818	194
sesame	696	74	kenaf	273	29
safflower	779	83	linseed (flax)	478	51
rice	828	88	lupine	232	25
tung oil	940	100	macadamia nut	2246	240
sunflower	952	102	mustard seed	572	61
cocoa (cacao)	1026	110	oats	217	23
peanut	1059	113	oil palm	5950	635
opium poppy	1163	124	olive	1212	129
rapeseed	1190	127	opium poppy	1163	124
olive	1212	129	peanut	1059	113
castor bean	1413	151	pecan nut	1791	191
pecan nut	1791	191	pumpkin seed	534	57
jojoba	1818	194	rapeseed	1190	127
jatropha	1892	202	rice	828	88
macadamia nut	2246	240	safflower	779	83
brazil nut	2392	255	sesame	696	74
avocado	2638	282	soybean	446	48
coconut	2689	287	sunflower	952	102
oil palm	5950	635	tung oil	940	100