High speed and computerised trading

Interesting item today by a sociologist on The Conversation about the danger of high-speed trades in stock markets.

It contrasts with other reports of studies that conclude;

Economic research thus far provides no direct evidence that high frequency computer based trading has increased volatility.

Of course, the absence of evidence that high-speed trading increases volatility does not mean that it high-speed trading doesn't increase volatility. But the bigger question isn't just what happens to volatility but how markets are affected.

The particular issue is how a trader, automated or otherwise, values a stock. Like any asset there are two sources of future value for the stock. The first is the income stream from it represented by the value of dividends and an appropriate (see note) discounting formula. The second is the likely future price realised when the asset is sold.

The difficulty in real world markets is how much weight should be given to each. More specifically what is the right response for a trader to make as asset prices move without any corresponding change in expectation of future earnings? If prices are increasing do you buy (on the expectation of future increases) or sell (as the price is now higher than the value of future earnings).

Accountants don't help much because they have accounting rules about assets being "marked to market" - which was partly the issue in the GFC as finance houses reported massive profits by revaluing market assets despite the fundamentals not being there.

The second issue is the extent of correlation between asset prices. The GFC in part occurred because of an assumption that not all house prices would decline at once - but they did. That invalidated the risk modelling that underpinned the derivatives.

The same is true of stockmarkets. Fear of a recession will drive down all stock prices because the fundamentals change - recession equals lower profits. But that small shift based on fundamentals then feeds into the future price expectation.

My sense is that speedier automated trading doesn't increase volatility as such. But standard market models tend to ignore the kinds of real world distributions identified by Talebi in Black Swan or Mandelbrot in the Mis-behavior of Markets.

The other unanswered question is whether once markets have sunk into a hole high-speed automated trading makes it harder to climb out of them.

These are issues that I think are better resolved not by statistical analysis of market behaviour but by agent-based modelling of markets. The latter would provide the means to experiment with market rules designed to manage pricing better. An example of a possible rule is to limit the use of "mark to market" in accounting - that assets cannot be re-valued up faster than a rate of double CPI purely on the basis of "mark to market", and that equally they must be re-valued down strictly according to "mark to market." I don't know how well that rule would deal with the issue. That's why simulation would be desirable.


Note: Discounting is used by economists as if it is easy. However, the first thing we know is that real traders apply "hyperbolic" discounting - they overweight short term payments. The second is that the appropriate "discount rate" is really the market price of another asset - Government bonds - plus other unknown risk factors. In other words "discounting" sounds like a scientifically sound procedural method but it is as much gueework (or estimation) as science.


Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

Where is the BTCE when you need it?

I was grabbing a couple of volumes off my bookcase this morning. Both were reports by the former Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics. (One was report 64 - the cost of Telecom's Community Services Obligations, the other was report 89 - the communications futures report). What was originally just the bureau of Transport Economics morphed into BTCE with the Hawke Government mega-ministries.

Three things decimated research capability in communications. First was the split between comms and transport. (Transport still has the bureau in BITRE). Secondly the Howard Government centalised research into the Productivity Commission. Thirdly a few other research activities got outsourced (e.g ACMA and ACCC reports on the economic value of competition reforms).

For the record here is a list of BTCE reports on communications I found in the NLA catalogue;

Interconnection Pricing Principles
International telecommunications: an Australian perspective"
Communications Research Forum Papers
Communications Research Forum Papers 1994
Communications Research Forum Papers 1993
Australian commercial television 1986-95: structure and performance
Elements of broadcasting economics
Transport and Communications Indicators: Quarterly review of activity
Measuring community benefits of Australian TV programs
Management of radiocommunications frequency: an economic analysis
Demand projections for Australian telecommunications services and equipment to Asia by 2010
Short term forecasting of transport and communications activity
Telecommunications in Australia
Broadcasters and market behaviour
Economic effects of commercial TV aggregation on commercial radio in regional areas
The Australian telecommunications market; ewhen does dominance cease
Communications services in Australia
Cultural regulation of Australian TV programs
Research in Communications Economics in Australia
Elasticities of demand for telephone services
Valuation of commercial broadcasting licences
Australian content on Pay TV
Evaluation of the transitional period in Australian telecommunications
Interconnection pricing principles: a review of the economic literature
Residential demand for broadband services
Film and television co-production in Australia
Economic aspects of broadcasting regulation
Quality of service: conceptual issues and telecommunications case study
Demand projections for Australian telecommunications services and equipment to Asia by 2010: an update
Telecommunications Reform in Australia

That is an impressive array, more recent versions of which would help the convergence review.

Meanwhile one has to laugh that the Liberals who gutted the BTCE now want the PC to do a cost benefit analysis on the NBN. The old BTCE did one on the Costs and benefits of a single Australasian aviation market. But I can find no evidence that the PC has ever done one.

A CBA on Country of Origin Labelling was done for them by the CIE, other reports on medical technology, on pharmaceuticals, copyright, and the National Reform Agenda talk of costs and benefits but do not do a CBA.

The closest the PC ever comes is to lecture others on the need for CBAs.

If someone wants an economic advisory office on communications they need to build it first.

PS The PC did do reviews of each of Broadcasting, Radiocommunications and Telecommunications. Each review was more notable for the inaction by the coalition than anything else.

Where is Australia's FuturICT?

I established my DigEcon Research brand as a place to undertake policy research on the implications of the Digital Economy. One of the issues I have in my frame is that the neoclassical model of economics simply doesn't cut it.

There are a couple of reasons. The first is that it can't cope with the fact that there are no longer real restraints to the size of firms. The second is it doesn't account for "network effects" - or generally demand side economies of scale and scope.

FuturICT is a proposed European "flagship" project - looks like what we'd call a Co-operative Research Centre. Their pitch is;

The ultimate goal of the FuturICT flagship project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies probably constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century and is equally important for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive information and communication technologies (ICT), based on socially inspired paradigms.

We think that integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. Data from our complex globe-spanning ICT system will be leveraged to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inform the development of a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems.

Paul Ormerod has provided a take on what that means in economics and posed four hard problems. Anyone familiar with his books Butterfly Economics and The Death of Economics will know that he comes from the school of mathematically aware heterodox economists.

A possible weakness in the Ormerod style is that the straw-man of neoclassicism he presents is one that can be rebuffed by economists who argue that it is all in the simplifying assumptions and that the neo-classical model can deal with the specific issues when it needs to.

A better place to start is a paper by Arnsperger and Varoufakis that identifies the three axioms of neo-classical economics. They are;

1. Methodological individualism. All agents are treated as individuals, and structures are the creation of agents never the other way around. verything worth knowing can be found by studying individuals.
2. Methodological instrumentalism. All behaviour is preference-driven, and preference is given, current and fully-determined. This doesn't permit a decision on emotion or any other basis. It is philosophically the equivalent of determinism versus free-will - just not determined by God.
3. Methodological equilibriation. The assumption that an economic system starts at or will reach an equilibrium.

Each of these is challenged by a model that sees economic agents as being influenced continually by other agents, their preferences being shaped by the networks they are part of and demand and supply "functions" that are always massively auto-correlated and hence more likely to have unstable than stable, and multiple rather than singular, "equilibria".

But we don't research that stuff here.

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

Telco Customer Service

I get stuck into telcos on the subject of customer service in my itNews column today.

I don't think this will win me many friends, might even alienate some I already have who work in "Customer Experience" functions.

I don't really doubt the will and intent of all the people in telcos from CEOs down who are stating the importance of customer service, striving for customer-centricity and implementing various programs with these goals in mind.

What I do doubt is that they really acknowledge the depth of the issue. The starting point isn't they are good and can get better than everyone else, it is that they are bad and until the industry as a whole improves no one will notice their efforts.

There is a very imprtant economic issue - more correctly game theory issue. In the presence of high information asymmetry the market will not value good customer service.


Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

KM in the Oz

Kevin Morgan in the Oz today tries to neatly dust off a diatribe delivered through the pages of Communications Day yesterday. He seems to forget what he battled for all those years ago at the ACTU - which was Government control and social outcomes - and to have instead thought his mission was to preserve the behemoth Telstra.

The so-called "world wide" trends Australian governments followed in our deregulation cycle started in the UK, NZ and Australia. We were in the vanguard not the cravan. Just as we are now.

The single biggest achievement of the NBN policy is the structural reform of the industry that was not completed prior to privatisation - largely due to a union backed campaign by Telstra. Conroy to his credit has pursued this single mindedly. It was the one thing Telstra under Sol demanded be dropped to secure Telstra's participation in 2008, and Conroy, unlike every Comms Minister for the last fifteen years stood up to Australia's largest totally domestic corporation and chose consumers and public interest over thuggery.

In response to his longer piece in Comms Day I have written and submitted the following.

It is disappointing that my fellow student of telco policy history Kevin Morgan is prepared to be so wrong in his recollection of the seventies – and indeed the eighties.

We can ignore little things like Telecom getting a monopoly in the “1976 Act” when the Act was 1975, the same year Telecom was formed and Telecom2000 saw the light of day. The single biggest technology change that the report missed was not the growth of wireless but the development of the PC. While it did see a broadband fibre based future it was in either a circuit switched or broadcasting mode.

In his prelude to discussing the Davidson Inquiry, Kevin writes “Telecom could no longer rely on the Budget to support investment plans”. Unfortunately he is one of the few people who I know knows that Telecom had seen no support from the Budget for anything since 1959, the year that the PMG was required to become self-funding. The entire $4.5B debt of the PMG was assumed by Telecom Australia.

He is right to note that the Hawke Government did increase the interest rate payable by Telecom on that debt. Unfortunately for his argument though the discrepancy between the 13% and 7% is entirely explained by the difference in the applicable Government Bond (or risk free capital) rates then and now.

He goes on that “As Telecom became capital constrained in the late 1980s the fibre vision waned.” The fibre vision however at that time had been extinguished by the successful lobbying by the free to air television moguls against Pay TV. Pay TV only re-emerged on the policy horizon – according to Mark Westfield’s The Gatekeepers – at the insistence of Richard Li, then still working for his father at Hutchison. He told the Minister that there was no interest in bidding for AUSSAT if they couldn’t do Pay TV.

Finally, I was left confused by the foray into laws of physics and laws of economics. Wireless isn’t “challenging the laws of physics” – it is actually conforming to them. No part of standard electromagnetic theory has yet been challenged by the development of wireless, and even the information theory of the Shannon limit isn’t even tested.

The non physical laws of relevance are Moore’s Law that the capacity of microprocessors doubles every eighteen months and Cooper’s Law that the capacity of wireless systems doubles every thirty months – wireless capacity keeps falling behind demand which is why there are ever greater demands for more spectrum. The CEO’s of the three mobile networks – Thodey, O’Sullivan and Dews – are all on the record stating that wireless networks cannot meet the bandwidth requirements of citizens.

As for the economics of monopoly, there are plenty of examples where one technology has monopoly characteristics but inter-modal competition can be sustained. We have one electricity distribution network in our suburbs, and no one suggests we duplicate it. We have in some places one gas network, and no one suggests we duplicate it. But they compete to carry energy to premises, energy that has different features and characteristics (or strengths) just as fibre and wireless do.

Kevin started his piece with the saying that if you can remember the seventies you weren’t there. The real saying though is about the sixties and is variously attributed to Grace Slick, Robin Williams and others. What does it say about me that I too have a bookcase full of reports from the era, but my copy of In the Court of the Crimson King is a CD (a girlfriend used to own the record).

NOTE I hope to have a copy of Telecom 2000 up on the DigEcon website in the next day!

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

Ayn Rand "influential"

Ross Cameron writing in this morning's SMH would like us to revere Ayn Rand as a woman of real influence. Before we respond we should consider what that influence has been.

Cameron chooses to label her philosophy “ethical egoism”. Other titles for it as I mentioned in my first Rand blogpost are "objectivism" or "enlightened self-interest". The problem being there was nothing ethical about it, it was a philosophy of pure unadulterated selfishness. It thoroughly rejected the ethical precept known as the Golden Rule and found in every religion of doing to others what you would have them do to you.

If all people live according to Rand’s philosophy none of the essential ingredients of the state to support a market economy, especially the least co-operative enforcement of property rights, can exist. It was not only anti-totalitarian but also anti-capitalist.

She was not only an atheist. Her philosophy is totally inconsistent with any religious belief. You cannot claim to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew and also ascribe to her philosophy.

Rand may well have had real influence, but so did Stalin and Mao. Or as was raised in a later discussion here "Of course its an unsustainable philosophy -- Ayn Rand is to the real world as Karl Marx is. They are both idealists."

Rand's philosophy is as degenerate as the worst writings of Marx or Hitler's Mein Kampf. She should not be held up for any kind of praise.

(And a small aside on copyright. Students of history often wonder how come the British were so naive about Hitler's intentions given he'd laid it all out before hand. The simple answer is that the English translation did not come out till after the war. As copyright holder Hitler refused requests to authorise a translation beforehand - his intended audience was only German speakers.)


Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

Hayek Surprise

That sounds like a recipe for a new desert I know, but really it is about economist/polemicist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek is labelled by many as the founder and genesis of the revival of extreme liberalism that I refer to as "economic libertarianism".

The description of Hayek at the History of Economic Thought website states:

Hayek turned in 1944 to the political arena with his Road to Serfdom, a polemical defense of laissez-faire - the work for which he is best known outside academia. His subsequent political activities include the foundation of the libertarian "Mont Pelerin Society" in the 1940s.

It is instructing to mount against this the following quotes from pages 18 and 19 of The Road to Serfdom.

"Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire."

"No sensible person should have doubted that the crude rules in which the principles of economic policy of the nineteenth century were expressed were only a beginning, that we had yet much to learn, ...There were many obvious tasks, such as our handling of the monetary system, and the prevention and control of monopoly, and an even greater number of less obvious but hardly less important tasks to be undertaken in other fields, where there could be no doubt that the government possessed enormous powers for good and evil;"

So at least in his introduction Hayek doesn't advance the view most commonly ascribed to him. Let us see how the book ends (another day).

The Recession We Had to Have … or Was It

The AFR on 1 June reported John Howard as saying of the 1991 recession “One of the myths is that in some way the recession was an essential part of economic reform process rather than policy failure.”

Howard went on to say that “I am an economic realist in the obvious sense that economic reform can only be achieved if the public is taken with one.”

It is hard to justify the severity of the 1991 recession, as it is widely recognised that it was severe because it was triggered too late. But it appears from Howard’s statements that he believes that not triggering the recession at all, or not letting it be as severe after the fact that inflationary pressures were out of control would be preferable.

Clearly the two party system that has degenerated to a “winner takes all” view of Government leads to the view that doing what’s popular is more important than doing what’s right. In Howard’s words “It’s better to be 85 percent pure in government than 130 percent pure in opposition. You do need to strike a balance between what is achievable and what represents the ideal.”

It’s not the attitude you really want to hear, is it?

Many, many years ago the first modern democrats tried this – and as a consequence Robespierre wound up following the mob, and hence the Terror in the French Revolution began (see below).

And finally – you do worry about the idea that John Howard was ever Treasurer when he thinks you could be 130 percent pure.

Note: There is no speech or transcript on the PM's website at time of writing to confirm the AFR reporting.

J K Galbraith

The report on ABC Radio's AM program of the death of
John Kenneth Galbraith is perhaps as good as any to lead into my own "obituary."

This is not an obituary in any meaningful sense. I can claim no special understanding of the life of Galbraith, and have only skimmed his readings. But as a major critic of what he labelled in 1958 "Conventional Wisdom" - which four years later Thomas Kuhn would have labelled a "paradigm", I share some of his criticisms of what some would call the "orthodox" view.

That said, I also diverge from his views, especially the way those views have been fed through what in the 1970s we called "political economy" to what is now called "heterodox" economics.

The History of Economic Thought website says Galbraith was considered by many as the last American Institutionalist. This description fits with the ABC segment assertion that where traditional economisrs saw individuals and markets, Galbraith saw politics and power. The latter version, however, overemphasises the political dimension. The critique Galbraith made was more that it is wrong to merely focus on the individual and markets and that the structure of markets and production were significant. More specifically that applying tools of analysis designed for studying the question of allocation of scarcity were not appropriate in a world of productive abundance.

From this came the view that rather than the consumer being "king", in reality business is creating demand, and that the consumer rather than being king, or even an equal participant, is merely the end of a production process. In this view Galbraith is largely reiterating the views of Thorstein Veblen, the person usually referred to as the first Institutionalist.

I find myself caught, because I absolutely agree with Galbraith's questioning of the institutional assumptions underpinning "conventional wisdom". However, I reject the conclusions reached and the effective jettisoning of the role of the market, the discipline of competition and the view of the disempowered and helpless consumer.

The History of Economic Thought website describes the difference between the American Institutionalists and the New Institutionalists as that the former took institutions as given and critiqued the market view, whereas the latter used the market to explain the latter. I think the reality is that it is a conjoint relationship - markets and institutions evolve together, but that the more concentrated industry becomes and the less like the "competitive ideal" of many small competing firms the real world becomes, the weaker the effective discipline of the market.

In the final analysis it is hard to disagree with the view expressed in the NY Times review (reprinted in the AFR) that "his sweeping ideas, which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models." It is not too late for this task.


Other obituaries
SMH
New York Times (free registration required, reprinted in AFR)

The Work Plan

When I renamed my blog "Anything Goes" before my sudden abandonment of it I wrote a short piece explaining why I chose the title. I did it because too many people in discussion argue from a position of the correctness of their own theoretical position, which is OK so long as both parties adopt the same theory. But increasingly in the area of public discourse this isn't so. There are different theories and they are often "incommensurable" - the same word does not have the same meaning in different theories.

So the adoption of the "Anything Goes" title was meant to mean that there would be blogs about theories rather than just the application of theories. I'm also concious of the fact that "Anything Goes" was the title of a book by the late David Stove that was attacking the "irrationalist" approach to science. I've had the book for a while but have only nibbled at it. I have decided it needs a far more robust response - but not today.

One of the things Stove does in that book is construct his own "strawman" of the general thesis being propounded by his rivals - and this strawman he then attacks. This is a technique that really is the only way of engaging in discussion about theories, but it is not always valid. For example, Stove starts by criticising the irrationalists because they. he claims. do not accept that there is a growth of knowledge, and he attempts to suggest this must be absurd because anyone looking at the last 400 years of science would see more knowledge now than before. I think perhaps Stove has missed a major point here that the "irrationalists" do not dispute this point but do say that the curve of Amount of Knowledge as a function of time is not monotonically increasing everywhere and there are times where it can go down.

But enough of that for now. The purpose of this post is to say I have three projects that I wish to explore here over coming weeks. The first is an assault on what I call "economic libertarianism" - a thesis that the collective action of self-interest cannot be improved upon. The second is a short contribution to what has become known as the History Wars - in which I will try to discuss "What is History" and in the process will rely heavily on a book by that name by E.H.Carr. And finally I wish to launch an assault on what I will call the Quadrant Realist Tradition - a troika of belifs that embraces realism, a correspondence theory of truth and a designation theory of meaning; this belief set is the core of a set of derisory criticisms of a notional left consisting of postmodernists who are painted as describing truth as relative and operating through a collective of manipulative "elites".

So hold on for the ride.

Somalia calling

A colleague brought my attention to this item in The Economist.It is a story that claims that calls from mobiles in Somalia are cheaper and clearer than elsewhere in Africa, and attributes this to an absence of regulation.

This story may give comfort to anti-regulationists everywhere, were it not for the fact that at least part of the success seems to be due to the complete lack of the first tenet of anti-regulationists - that is property rights. If the telcos are not paying to put up towers they are not paying land rents.

The article also mentions that Somalia has had no government since 1991 and was "cut off for a while" before the mobile companies arrived. The CIA World Fact Book describes it as "the public telecommunications system was almost completely destroyed or dismantled by the civil war factions". So in those countries where regulation exists to deal with the market power of formerly government owned monopolies now have a different model to follow. Don't regulate - just have a civil war to destroy the incumbent's infrastructure.

You might think me strange - but I'll stick with the regulatory path.

What are "property rights"?

Michael Duffy wrote an opinion piece on property rights for the SMH on Saturday. ("Safe as Houses? Don't Count On It" at http://smh.com.au/news/opinion/safe-as-houses-dont-count-on-it/2006/01/06/1136387622255.html. )

The fundamental flaw in the Duffy piece is the assumption that on acquiring "real property" one can, does and should acquire an unfettered right to do anything you like with that land.

This is clearly not the case. At all times you acquire land with the full realisation that there are other processes, run by Government as representative of the people, that can change your use of the land. Indeed the property "rights" that have been acquired are only those that are explicitly stated. The property rights lobby is at times guilty of the same failing as the free speech lobby, that is the extent to which the right should be unfettered, irrespective of land use policy (offensive language in the case of free speech) or intrusion on neighbours (defamation).

Yes, property rights are important for the functioning of a capitalist market economy. But what is important is that there is a set of rules for allocation which are followed. To claim all the unspecified "rights" as accruing to the property owner is just as wrong - when you buy a suburban residential building block you do not buy the "right" to build a ten story office tower.

And while real property rights are a means of "wealth" creation - asset price bubbles are just as damaging to the economy in residential housing prices as they are elsewhere, potentially more so as housing mortgages receive a 100% risk weighting in the calculation of lending institutions capital adequacy. What that means is that a sustained drop in the value of residential property would put real strains on the entire banking system.

There is clear justification for compensation when a property right is acquired - that is why the Federal Constitution guarantees compensation "on just terms". But this needs to be clearly understood as being different from the risk that Government policy on building materials or fire ordinances might change. Similarly, property owners do not owe Government compensation when changes result in appreciating values, such as rezoning to allow a commercial development or the improvement in value due to better transport links.

Finally, the core case on which Duffy wrote was a potential heritage listing of former display villages is really a case of an inappropriate policy. There are plenty of ways of "recording" these villages without having to preserve them. However, it should be noted that what attracts residents to these kinds of areas remains the amount of open space - because the houses really were "poky" compared to the land blocks. But if every resident goes and builds a block filling "McMansion" these areas will become indistinguishable from the newer developments further West.

The Whitlam Legacy

The Australian editorial for 7-8 January, 2006 (" The Whitlam Myth") repeats the common criticism of the Whitlam government, that no matter how progressive its social record may have been it was an absolute failure in economic management. It further suggests that the social record is over-promoted, but it is the economic record I wish to defend.

Two major policy decision set up the Australian economy for the reforms and changes we had to wait for the Hawke-Keating era to conclude. The first was the 25% across-the-board tariff cut - the first dramatic step in opening the Australian economy. The second was the passing of the Trade Practices Act 1974, the first coherent step to make corporations more competitive.

A third but less significant step was the creation of Australia Post and Telecom Australia, the first major Australian step in the program of what became known as corporatisation and privatisation.

Yes, during the Whitlam Government both inflation and unemployment grew. This was the consequence of stagflation - a rise in the input costs of factors of production (in that case oil). The Keynesians who occupied all senior economic posts had no idea what to do.

Modern textbooks explain that you need to "free up the economy" - and reducing protection, improving competition policy and removing Government from the direct running of enterprises are pretty good starts.

Lord knows how the country would have faired under the Coalition as their record up to 1969 and from 1975 to 1983 was that they knew absolutely nothing about how to reshape the Australian economy.

New Name

I've decided that a name that describes my core ethos might be better for this blog. And while I'm not sure I really do ascribe to the theory that "Anything Goes" (and I'm sure Paul K. Feyerarbend didn't) I am sick of the people who want to ascribe some priviledged position for their kind of knowledge. I know of no theories that are perfect in their explanatory power - every theory has some Popperian falsification.

Yes some theories are "better" than others, but they are not inherently better - they are merely better in use. It is a nonsense to describe Newtonian mechanics as better than Einstein's relativity (or vice versa), but equally it would be silly to use relativity to describe the motion of billiard balls on a table or Newtownian mechanics to describe the cosmos.

What frustrates me is the fact that economists all acknowledge that their favourite theories have "failings", but still want to debate their relative merits rather than describe their utility. (and yes, as d-squared and blogorrhea have slugged it out some of the competing theories have harder maths to use).

Anyway - as anything goes - so will I. I know I only started five days ago but I'm taking a two week break.

(Note: When I get back I'll figure out how to make one of those comments fields work)