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BLP contest

May be of interest: Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Contest. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:24, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

if you think you won, put in your score at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Contest/March 2010 Scoring, cheers Pohick2 (talk) 22:18, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject Economics census

Hello there. Sorry to bother you, but you are (titularly at least) a member of WP:WikiProject Economics, as defined by this category. If you don't know me, I'm a Misplaced Pages administrator, but an unqualified economist. I enjoy writing about economics, but I'm not very good at it, which is why I would like to support in any way I can the strong body of economists here on Misplaced Pages. I'm only bothering you because you are probably one of them. Together, I'd like us to establish the future direction of WikiProject Economics, but first, we need to know who we've got to help.

Whatever your area of expertise or level of qualification, if you're interested in helping with the WikiProject (even if only as part of a larger commitment to this wonderful online encyclopedia of ours), would you mind adding your signature to this page? It only takes a second. Thank you.

Message delivered on behalf of User:Jarry1250 by LivingBot.

Firstly, thank you for signing the census, and an apology if you are one of those editors who dislike posts such as this one for messaging you again in this way. I've now got myself organised and you can opt-out of any future communication at WP:WikiProject Economics/Newsletter. Just remove your name and you won't be bothered again.

Secondly, and most importantly, I would like to invite your comments on the census talk page about the project as a whole. I've given my own personal opinion on a range of topics, but my babbling is essentially worthless without your thoughts - I can't believe for one moment that everyone agrees with me in the slightest! :)

All your comments are welcomed. Thanks, - Jarry1250  17:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

DYK for Brander-Spencer model

On April 19, 2010, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Brander-Spencer model, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, quick check ) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

Materialscientist (talk) 18:03, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Proposed Changes to the PED article

Radeksz:

1. I hope to make a moderate number of revisions and to slightly reorganize the PED article over the next week or so. I've been intending to do this for a few weeks but just haven't been able to find the time. All the changes are in the "Definition" section, i.e., up through "Arc elasticity."

My renewed impetus for making the changes comes from Puffcheese's question on the PED talk page about the apparent anomaly between PED and the TR rule that occurred in what probably was a problem he'd been assigned. I have a tentative fix already drafted to try to head-off that potential confusion in the future, but I haven't yet found a way to make it fit smoothly into the "Definition" section of the article's current structure, which is where I'd strongly prefer to put it.

On one hand, the topic would fit very smoothly into the "Arc elasticity" section, because that's what Puffcheese's problem was really about. But I suspect he never got that far in the article, anyway; otherwise he wouldn't have had to go to those other articles to find what was just 2 sections later in the WP article. Instead, I'm guessing he just took the 1st formula he found (i.e., the definition), and looked no further, until he arrived at that strange result.

True enough, Puffcheese paid the "dumb tax" of having to waste more time looking elsewhere for the solution to his problem, but I believe we should learn from his experience, because he probably won't be the last user/reader to make the same mistake. The best way for us to serve our users is to reduce the chance of that happening again as much as we reasonably can. It's also the soundest thing to do pedagogically in this case.

So I think a bit of reorganization of the article help accomplish that noble goal.

2. My plan is to create a subsection under "Definition" that covers some basic properties of the elasticity concept in general, and that problem in particular (which stems from the asymmetry of % changes between 2 quantities and/or prices). A few of the other properties are already covered elsewhere and I'd just relocate them. In addition, a few properties aren't currently in the article, at least not explicitly, and I've been intending to add them.

3. While I'm at this, something else I've been wanting to do is move the partial differential formula for PED out of the "Definition" section into a subsection of its own, possibly in the point elasticity section. After all, that formula really is a point elasticity definition—i.e., it employs derivatives, just like the point-price definition, except they're partial instead of simple derivatives.

In addition, I've also been meaning to mention to you for several weeks: it appears that what Mas-Colell et al. (the source) were doing there was writing a general elasticity formulation that could be either the PED or any cross-elasticity (for related goods, wealth, etc.), depending on which parameter you choose for the subscripts to the E at the beginning of the formula. Currently it reads (sorry, but I couldn't get the LaTeX syntax to work)

E_xl,pk

which they intend to mean, "the elasticity of demand for good x_l with respect to the price of good k (i.e., p_k ), where subscript "small L" can take on any value from 1 to L. Otherwise, why switch secondary subscripts from l to k in E_xl,pk?

Simlarly, the 1st term on the right-hand side of the = sign seems to say, "the partial derivative of the demand function for good X_l with respect to P_k . (Their notation is really confusing -- they seem to use "good x_l " and "good l" interchangeably.)

Another possibility is that a typo has just slipped in somewhere.

In any event, I think we can get the point across just as well, or even better, with much simpler notation. My guess is that their notation was designed to handle a wide variety of applications within their model, and their formula looks natural in the context of the rest of their model. But taken out of that context, it's needlessly complicated and cumbersome.

To make matters even worse, the micro-sized secondary subscript l is one of those characters that LaTeX doesn't seem to render very well in HTML -- it's really hard to read! (According to the WP article on LaTeX, this is a known problem for rendering some characters.)

4. Friday p.m. I revised and expanded the "Arc elasticity" section slightly, partly in preparation for the changes described above. (Again, I've been wanting to make these changes for awhile, anyway.)

5. Finally, would you recommend that I discuss the changes I make the the article on the PED talk page (possibly as a series of separate sections, to make it easier to follow any subsequent discussion)? Or maybe just a summary of the changes? Or maybe nothing at all?

I've also posted this discussion on Jarry's talk page.

Cheers, --Jackftwist (talk) 18:40, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Sounds, good, I'll take a look at it and try to help out if I can find some time. I agree that the Mas-Collel et al definition is probably "too theoretical" for Misplaced Pages article.radek (talk) 01:06, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Great, thanks.

No need to rush at all. As the WP philosophy says, "We've got all day," at least as far as WP matters are concerned. I know you have lots of other demands on your time, and so do I, so these revisions will take awhile. Just checking in every week or so, as your time permits, will probably be enough to keep you up to date. If I get desperate for help or advice, I know how to reach you!

Yesterday I made a few of the revisions discussed above, but progress is and will continue to be gradual. (I can't churn 'em out like Jarry can.) I don't yet know LaTeX, so I do any new formulas or significant changes to existing ones by modifying copies of existing code, which requires lots of trial-and-error, hence taking more time.

I'm also spending quite a bit of time surveying my collection of (standard) textbooks, as well as some of the better ones from on-line that Jarry (or some other author) used, so that my revisions reflect sort of a consensus or common practices.

If you look at the article anytime soon, you may find an unusually large number of new tags. I have the citations, but I've been focusing more on the content of the revisions (and stumbling around with LaTeX syntax), so skipping the citations for now saves me a little time to devote to getting the actual revisions themselves done. When I'm doing a large amount of moving big chunks of text around, I'm paranoid I'll accidentally delete text that I didn't mean to, so I'm trying to be really careful with cutting-and-pasting! Cheers, --Jackftwist (talk) 20:55, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I commented at the talk page.

BTW, you can always recover accidentally deleted text from the history of the article.radek (talk) 06:25, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Re deletions: Right, thanks. I should've been more specific -- I'm also concerned about deleting something without realizing it, so I wouldn't even know I needed to go back and restore it. Maybe someone else might notice the missing piece later ... or maybe not! --Jackftwist (talk) 15:40, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Richard Tylman (4th nomination)

Hi, Radeksz. Because you participated in Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Richard Tylman (2nd nomination), you may be interested in Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Richard Tylman (4th nomination). Cunard (talk) 02:26, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Violation of topic ban

Your violation of your topic ban has been reported at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement#Radeksz. --Russavia 09:14, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Alleged violation my dear stalker, alleged. At least for now.radek (talk) 09:24, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Duninowie w Rogalskim

Dziękuję za informację (mi sprawdzić się nie udało). Jeżeli masz wiedzę co do faktu istnienia tych i tamtych osób - byłbym wdzięczny za opinię. Pozdrawiam! Sverige2009 (talk) 14:30, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

The "other" elasticity article, "Elasticity (economics)"

Just for your possible amusement this weekend -- I ran across the following gem in the "other" elasticity article, "Elasticity (economics)," this p.m.

There are two linear demand curves for which the slope and elasticity are identical. The slope and coefficient of elasticity of a perfectly inelastic demand curve is zero. The slope and coefficient of elasticity for a perfectly inelastic demand curve equal negative infinity. The elasticity is constant along each curve.

I nearly choked on my tea! It's utterly and completely wrong, of course. The slope and elasticity are both constant for those 2 classes of curves, but not identical! The footnotes are to Binger & Hoffman, which I recall as being a pretty good text. I can't imagine they would've made such a sophomoric error (or that no one in the army of grad students they had proofreading the manuscript, and maybe even teaching out of it, didn't catch it). Whoever wrote that section/paragraph in the article must've misread or misinterpreted something.

My first reaction was that slope and elasticity could never be equal, because a component of elasticity is the inverse of the slope. But after a little back-of-the-envelope algebra (literally!), I found that they could be equal under 1 condition, after all: if P = Q×(∆P/∆Q), or the inverse function for Q. (I think my algebra is correct. I just set the (P/Q)×(∆Q/∆P) form of the PED equation equal to the slope (∆P/∆Q) and solved for P or Q.)

That article has a lot of material in it (maybe too much), but it badly needs some major editing. I wasted way too much time this p.m. editing various parts it, and I didn't even begin to scratch the surface. Jarry once mentioned that article as an egregious example of how much duplication there is among many of the articles on demand, supply, and related topics when I expressed concernt about all the redundancy. What a waste of effort, and how potentially confusing for users, since the articles frequently contradict each other. Have you noticed how many "real" economists have signed up for Jarry's Census? With enough help, maybe we could eliminate a lot of that duplication ... over the very, very long run.

Have a nice weekend. The spring weather here is absolutely splendid. --Jackftwist (talk) 22:34, 30 April 2010 (UTC)