Power Point is Evil...

Wired article on the failings of power point presentations. I only look at at least 2 a week and agree with said conclusion.

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

Here We Go Steelers Here We Go

Steeler Breakdown via ESPN.com

Cliff Notes version
1 -- O-line is shakey.
2 -- Touchdown Tommy is a ???? still, does he fly or fall?
3 -- Secondary, Secondary, Secondary more ???
4 -- LBs are NASTY
5 -- w/o Vick Randel EL is the most electrifying guy in the NFL

Mortgage Markets Are Out of Control (via the Mises blog)....

Why are rates rising while the Fed attempts to keep them down, according to this article it is the mamoth mortgage market.

Mortgage-backed securities respond violently to moves in interest rates. When rates fall and homeowners refinance, some of the mortgages in large portfolios held by banks, hedge funds and mortgage originators are cashed in. That requires the managers of these portfolios to rebalance their hedges by buying Treasuries. Such buying helped push interest rates down to ridiculous levels earlier this year.

When rates rise, refinancings drop, and the average life of a mortgage grows. That forces traders to rebalance portfolios by selling Treasuries. Selling begets selling; interest rates spike.

Last week, the Federal Reserve rattled the bond market by promising to keep rates low for as long as possible. Traders feared that the accommodative stance could be inflationary. They sold Treasuries, and rates rose.

Here is Robert Blumen's, from the Mises Blog, take on the problem...

Hedging is an attempt to insure themselves against interest rate movements. The problem here is that at this point the GSEs are so large that they are the market. Insurance is based on the pooling of a large number of independent risks. As we are seeing here, the entire system cannot insure itself against the failure of the entire system.