Newmark's Door

Apropos of Monday's Japanese game show post, here's a video clip of Saturday Night Live's Mike Myers and Chirs Farley satirizing Japanese game shows. (Thanks to Ken Hirsch for the link.)

Video clip of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog covering the recent Tony Awards.

Very offensive. If you don't like that sort of thing, don't click.

Slowly but surely change is coming to the advertising business. TV ads are headed down, and Internet ads are headed up. (Book the empty ad slots on the Door before prices rise!)

Want to drive a Gallardo? An F430? But you don't have the cash? If you live near Greenwich, CT, there's now a kind of Netflix for expensive cars.

It's video-clip week here at the Door. Throughout the week I'll be helping you use your bandwidth by linking to some video clips I've found interesting.

The first one . . . you are not ready for this. No, really. Clip of Japanese game show; they hit 'em where it hurts.

Anyone notice how much better things have become since the Democrats again assumed charge of Congress? George Will has a few words for the ever-popular (not!) Harry Reid.

Speaking of our Liberal friends, Harry Stein notes Charles Pickering's new book A Price Too High and asserts that what that distinguished gentleman experienced at the hands of Liberals has no precedent.

More dramatically than any confirmation battle in memory, the Pickering case demonstrates that liberals will seemingly say anything—and tarnish even the most sterling character—to keep control of the nation’s courts.

Of course, cynics see this as merely part of the game. Politics, they’ll say, ain’t beanbag, and weren’t many Clinton nominees to the federal bench similarly done in by Republicans? No, not really—never with the same degree of ruthlessness.

I had thought that modern physics completely ruled out time travel. But one physicist at the University of Washington physicist is raising money to fund an experiment that--as described to laymen--will test whether it is possible to travel back in time.

Paul Isely and Harinder Singh, "Do Higher Grades Lead to Favorable Student Evaluations?" Journal of Economic Education, Winter 2005.

The relationship between expected grades and student evaluations of teaching (SET) has been controversial. The authors take another look at the controversy by employing class-specific observations and controlling for time-invariant instructor and course differences with a fixed-effects model. The authors' empirical results indicate that if an instructor of a particular course has some classes in which students expect higher grades, a more favorable average SET is obtained in these classes. Moreover, they find that it is the gap between expected grade and cumulative grade point average of incoming students that is the relevant explanatory variable, not expected grade as employed in the previous literature.

Joel Spolsky argues that hiring the best programmers is worth it: "design adds value faster than it adds cost".

A little humor to end the week:

A (relatively) new blonde joke.

"The Top Ten Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Post-Mortem One Liners".