Advice on ganglions is flawed

The Java memory model is fatally flawed

The Java memory model described in Chapter 17 of the Java Language Specification gives constraints on how threads interact through memory. This chapter is hard to interpret and poorly understood; it imposes constraints that prohibit common compiler optimizations and are expensive to implement on existing hardware. Most JVMs violate the constraints of the existing Java memory model; conforming t...

Is Conflicted Investment Advice Better than No Advice?

The value that brokers generate depends on both the quality of their investment recommendations and their clients’ counterfactual portfolios. To identify counterfactual portfolios inside a defined contribution retirement plan, we exploit time-series variation in access to brokers. When brokers are available, the correlations with age, income, and educational attainment suggest that brokers are ...

Advice is Cheap : Information is Not ! ∗

An entrepreneur contracts with a consultant, who is protected by limited liability, to supply information about the state of a project prior to investing in it. For a given level of investment, a good project succeeds with higher probability than a bad one. The entrepreneur makes an upfront payment that the consultant can either invest in information acquisition (work) or divert for private ben...

Flawed analysis, implausible results--move on.

Is our dietary advice effective?

The concept of ‘being effective’ or having an effect is very attractive to us all. It is the way we may come to justify our very presence as a profession (Simko & Conklin, 1989; MacDonald, 1990). If, as highly paid professionals, our advice is largely ineffectual then our employment is hard to justify (Ley, 1982). The effectiveness of any advice must be the extent to which it is acted upon by t...