Remember the old gag about the HR manager throwing half of the CVs received straight into the bin and saying: ‘Well, I don’t want to hire unlucky people’? How about we do the same with funds?
Should we, at the end of our fund manager interviews, ask the manager to guess heads or tails for a series of three coin tosses and only select those who are lucky? Or perhaps we should select those who get all three wrong, as their luck will surely revert?
Much of our job is about discerning skill from luck, signal from noise. It is now generally accepted that short-term returns from a fund are essentially random, hopefully with a skew to the upside.
The more skilled the manager, the more instances of positive skew we’d expect to see – statistically, we need 12+ years of consistent positive performance to be ‘sure’ of this but few fund selectors can wait that long.
The alpha lottery
We can think of a fund’s relative performance as the sum of two variables: luck and skill. An interesting study likens this to selecting one lottery ball from each of two bags. In the ‘luck’ bag, there are, say, 15 balls each with a number on.
Let’s be generous and say the sum of the balls in the luck bag is zero; there are a few zingers of -5 or worse and also some four-leaf clovers of +5 or higher. In the ‘skill’ bag, there are also 15 lottery balls.
This time, they don’t sum to zero.
If this is a skilled manager, perhaps it sums to +1 or +2, but there will be some -5s in there too. If the manager has ‘negative skill’ (as these guys must exist too!), then it sums to less than zero.
Draw one ball from each bag then add them together to get your gross alpha for the month (or day or week). Knock off fees and see what you have left – that’s right folks, we’re looking for managers with positively skewed balls!
Now, over time the impact of the luck balls will even out (even assuming you replace the selected ball before choosing for next month), and the average of the skill balls should begin to come through. But the range of the balls in each bag will have a bigger impact in short and medium-term periods. And the fees always detract.
The ratio of the range of numbers in each bag is important to the pace of the skill signal coming through. We’d prefer to buy a manager with less impact from the luck bag and more from the skill bag, right? (That is, if we think the skill bag is positively skewed.)
But there is a clear link between the ranges of the two bags for each manager. Taking more risk in a portfolio expands the range of likely outcomes, but intuitively does so by expanding the range of both bags.
Source: www.citywire.co.uk
Quebec’s new protest law will be struck down by court challenge over charter violation: lawyer - news.nationalpost.com
MONTREAL — A constitutional expert predicts several sections of Bill 78, Quebec’s new law restricting protests, will be struck down by a court challenge and says lawyers representing student associations that plan to contest the legislation as early as this week will have a field day.
“There’s no doubt that this contravenes the charter on all kinds of grounds,” Montreal constitutional lawyer Julius Grey said this week.
He cited the freedom of expression and of association as being among the fundamental freedoms violated by sections of the law.
The Quebec government passed the bill as emergency legislation last week in the wake of ongoing student protests against the government’s plan to hike university tuition fees.
“You could set that law as an exam question in a university and say: ‘Discuss all the ways it could be contested’, and you could probably write for two hours on it,” Grey said.
Tuesday marked the 100th day of the students’ fight against the tuition fee hikes. As students marched in Montreal, Premier Jean Charest and Public Security Minister Robert Dutil tried to defend Bill 78 in Quebec City.
The law requires the police to be given a precise itinerary and eight hours’ notice for any protest involving 50 people or more, at the risk of fines running as high as $125,000 in the case of a student association or a union.
Charest called it “a just law” given mounting violence by protesters at what have become nightly demonstrations.
Still, attacks against Bill 78 are coming from an array of groups, including the Quebec Bar Association and the Quebec human rights commission, which has said it’s prepared to investigate “all cases of discrimination” arising from the application of the law.
“Any application of that law will be subject to a contestation that could wind up in the Supreme Court,” Grey said.
The eight hours’ notice provision of Bill 78 “makes it impossible to demonstrate spontaneously,” Grey said.
Brett Gundlock / Reuters
Montreal police stand in front of smoke from an unknown source, during a protest against student tuition hikes on the 100th day of Quebec's student strikes, in downtown Montreal on May 22, 2012.
As well, Section 9 of the law gives the education minister the power to unilaterally modify the law. Grey called that a delegation of power to legislate in the place of the government and “flagrantly unconstitutional.”
Section 10 orders university and college employees to show up for work on a given day and Section 12 explicitly prohibits a union from participating in a concerted action, both of which Grey called a violation of rights and cuts off their right to freely associate.
Grey also called sections 18 to 20, which call for cutting off of funding and fees to student associations considered to be in violation of the law, an effective dissolution of the association.
He charged that the measures hearken back to the days of Quebec’s long-serving premier Maurice Duplessis, a period known as la grande noirceur, or the great darkness.
“Duplessis tried dissolving unions that went on strike, and that was struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada even before the charter (existed),” Grey said.
In the 1953 case of the Alliance des professeurs catholiques de Montreal, the Supreme Court invalidated the decertification of the teachers’ union by the Quebec labour relations board after the union ordered its members to go on strike despite a provincial law that prohibited employees of schools from striking without prior warning. The labour relations board revoked the union’s certification without notice of a hearing. The Supreme Court ruled the labour relations board had acted without jurisdiction.
“All these things make it (Bill 78) a law that perhaps parts of it would be upheld, but parts of it would not be,” Grey said.
Normally, when a law is challenged on constitutional grounds it isn’t the entire law that’s declared valid or invalid, he noted. The courts go through the law section by section.
The question now is whether the Quebec government could succeed in defending the violation of rights in Bill 78 in court using the first section of the Charter of Rights, which permits a violation of the charter if it’s considered necessary, Grey said.
“My own view is that it isn’t necessary,” he said. “But some other people might have another view.”
The Education Department did not return calls to defend the measures in Bill 78.
At a news conference, Dutil defended the two sections of Bill 78 that are under the jurisdiction of his Public Safety Department, arguing it’s entirely reasonable for protesters to supply the authorities with their demonstration route in advance of a protest. He cited Toronto, New York, France, Spain and Geneva, Switzerland as examples of places with similar regulations.
The non-profit Juripop Legal Clinic, which is providing lawyers to the student associations that plan to challenge Bill 78, say lawyers plan to file a motion in Quebec Superior Court by the end of this week.
Montreal Gazette
Source: news.nationalpost.com
Law Of The Sea Treaty = The Rape of America - Canada Free Press
Why We Lose if LOST Wins, UN jurisdiction over U.S. territorial waters
Law Of The Sea Treaty = The Rape of America
The Obama Administration has dragged the Law of the Sea Treaty back before the US Senate this week.
The treaty, if approved by the Senate will amount to the rape of America.
Here’s what the Center for Security Policy has to say about the Law Of The Sea Treaty: “If, on the other hand, the members of the U.S. Senate trouble themselves to study, or at least read, the text of the Law of the Sea Treaty, they would immediately see it for what it really is: a diplomatic dinosaur, a throwback to a bygone era when UN negotiations were dominated by communists of the Soviet Union and their fellow-travelers in the Third World.
These adversaries’ agenda was transparent and wholly inimical to American equities. They sought to: establish control over 70% of the world’s surface; create an international governing institution that would serve as a model for bringing nation states like ours to heel; and redistribute the planet’s wealth and technology from the developed world to themselves. LOST codifies such arrangements – and would subject us to mandatory dispute resolution to enforce them via stacked-deck adjudication panels.” SOURCE.
Still, many, if not MOST, Americans have never heard of it—the Law Of The Sea Treaty.
So why is it important?
OK, let’s look at some reasons why the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is important to you as an American and to all inhabitants of the earth:
Why We Lose if LOST Wins
By asserting UN authority over seven-tenths of the Earth’s surface, LOST would be the largest territorial conquest in history.
In principle, the treaty would assert UN jurisdiction over U.S. territorial waters, and eventually over waterways within our country.
It would create a huge bureaucratic entity called the “Enterprise” which would regulate and tax all commercial uses of the high seas.
By taxing all efforts to develop the wealth of the seabed, the UN would be given a huge revenue stream, independent of national governments, to push its agenda for international socialism.
The treaty would require the redistribution of cutting-edge technology from the U.S. to all governments in the “developing world,” including extremely repressive governments.
Get the picture??? It’s that cussed “One World Government thing again! (Otherwise known as “Global Governance) You know… the “GLOBALISTS” at work.
Apparatchiks from the Obama Administration will trudge over to the US Senate this week to sing the praises of LOST. They will applaud it and explain to the Senators that it is the best thing since the US Constitution for America, indeed, for the whole world.
It will be a pack of lies.
So, where do we stand today on LOST? Not good, I’m afraid.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has a website providing educational resources on the Law of the Sea Treaty (also known by the acronyms LOST and UNCLOS).
“The Law of the Sea Treaty is a terrible deal for the U.S. It would threaten our sovereignty, place a significant portion of the world’s resources under the control of a U.N.-style body, and complicate our efforts to apprehend terrorists on the high seas by subjecting our actions to review by an international court unlikely to render decisions favorable to the U.S.,” said National Center Vice President David Ridenour.
“The Law of the Sea Treaty would help radical environmentalists achieve what they haven’t been able to achieve through legislation,” Ridenour added. “Greenpeace has said ‘the benefits of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea are substantial, including its basic duties for states to protect and preserve the marine environment and to conserve marine living species.’ The Natural Resources Defense Council challenged the Navy’s use of ‘intense active sonar,’ arguing that it violates the treaty by posing a danger to marine life. The Navy ultimately agreed to scale back use of this technology. The Law of the Sea Treaty has also been used by Australia and New Zealand in an attempt to shut down an experimental blue fin tuna fishing program and by Ireland in an attempt to shut down a plant on land in England”
The website, the United National Law of the Sea Treaty Information Center, contains a collection of research papers, commentaries and blog entries about LOST from a variety of think-tanks, scholars, opinion writers and bloggers. It can be accessed at: unlawoftheseatreaty.org.
“Although the Law of the Sea Treaty has been around for decades—the National Center for Public Policy Research first worked on it in 1982—relatively few people know much about it,” said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty Information Center website is designed to help correct this.”
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, non-profit educational foundation based in Washington, D.C.
It is more important now then ever before to contact your senators and urge them to oppose the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Look. This Law Of The Sea Treaty is serious socialist, global governance, trickery! And NOBODY IS Talking ABOUT IT! Of course, we cannot expect the so-called “Mainstream Media” in America to bring it up, being so deep in the bunker for Obama, that is. The near incestuous relationship between the MsM and Obama prevents them from actually informing their readers, listeners, and viewers, of important, pending, life-changing policy being considered in the nation’s legislature.
We urge you to educate yourself about the Law Of The Sea Treaty—and do so quickly.
In the meantime, however, we suggest that you get on the phone, or send an e-mail or fax to the offices of your US Senators and ask them to vote NO on the Law Of The Sea Treaty.
Every so often, we get a chance to use our constitutional rights for good. This is one of those times.
Source: www.canadafreepress.com
Essex fire crews to vote on strike action - thurrockgazette.co.uk
Essex fire crews to vote on strike action
12:42pm Wednesday 23rd May 2012 in News By Matt Abbott
THE Chief Fire Officer in Essex has urged firefighters to think carefully before they cast their vote in a ballot over strike action.
Firefighters across Essex are to vote on potential strike action from today as ballot papers are sent out.
By law, crews cannot strike before June 20, seven days after the ballot closes but industrial action could be taken on or soon after this date.
The Essex Fire Brigade Union says the ballot is necessary because the fire authority is imposing changes whilst also planning further cuts.
If proposed cuts to crews are implemented, it would mean that since 2008, one in five frontline fire crews have been cut.
Firefighter response times in Essex are already down one minute on the national average since 2008 and Essex FBU is warning that response times might increase again with the next wave of budget cuts.
In Thurrock, a wholetime specialist rescue crew has already been removed from Grays since 2008 and Del Godfrey-Shaw is concerned that there could be more cuts in the future.
Mr Godfrey Shaw, a firefighter at the Grays station and regional official for the FBU said: “We can’t specifically say where job cuts will be. It could be any where where managment may reduce watch.
“That could be here in Thurrock, it could be in Tendring it could be anywhere. We don’t know.
“There is lots of uncertainty and lots of frustration amongst firefighters here.”
The FBU say that whilst there have been cuts to front line fire crews, millions of pounds of tax payers money is being spent on expansion of the headquarters.
In a short video to firefighters, David Johnson, the Essex Fire Brigade chief officer called potential strike action “unfair on communities we serve”. He said: “We are a very good fire rescue service with some of the best firefighters and best equipment in the world.
“I need you to work with me to keep that going. We are ready to sit down and talk to to the FBU to resolve this dispute.
“I would urge you to support us in that.”
Mike Rogers, FBU brigade secretary said: “Essex fire crews are furious at what is going on and will be giving their verdict on cuts and imposed changes.
“Managers need to get their heads out of the sand and realise the strength of feeling.
“There is still time enough to resolve the issues between us and we are now asking the Chair to the Fire Authority to use his good offices to remove the barriers to serious talks getting underway.”
Source: www.thurrockgazette.co.uk
Law Enforcement In Six States And The US Military Honored For Work Involving Missing Or Sexually Exploited Children - YAHOO!
To: NATIONAL EDITORS
Extraordinary Efforts by Law Enforcement in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, and Ramstein Air Base, Germany Recognized as a Part of National Missing Children's Day
ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 23, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, law enforcement officials from around the country were honored for their extraordinary efforts to recover missing children and resolve child sexual exploitation cases at the 17th Annual Congressional Breakfast and National Law Enforcement Awards. Hosted by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children(R) (NCMEC), the event honors exemplary efforts to protect and recover child victims. Federal, state and local officials, as well as members of Congress attended the event which was held on Capitol Hill.
Law enforcement from the District of Columbia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, and Ramstein Air Base in Germany were recognized at the 17th Annual Congressional Breakfast held in Washington, DC on Capitol Hill. The event is held each year to commemorate National Missing Children's Day which is observed on May 25. It is hosted by NCMEC, in partnership with the National Fraternal Order of Police and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and will be attended by members of Congress, as well as federal, state and local officials
Actor Tim Kang, from the CBS drama "The Mentalist" attended the event this year. Also attending the event was John Walsh, host of Lifetime Television's "America's Most Wanted" and his wife Reve Walsh.
Each year in America, an estimated 800,000 children are reported missing, more than 2,000 each day. "We set aside one day each year to recognize exceptional law enforcement officers who have distinguished themselves by going the extra mile to rescue children and to capture and prosecute criminals who seek to exploit them," said NCMEC president Ernie Allen. "Our greatest priority as a society is to protect the innocence of our children. The men and women who we honor each year share that goal and have made a real difference."
A list of Award Recipients Follows:
2012 National Missing Children's Award Recipients
OHIO Honorees: Sergeant Terry D. McConnell and Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel DeVille (Columbus, OH).
Sergeant Terry D. McConnell from the Columbus, OH Division of Police and Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel DeVille from the U.S. Marshals Service in Columbus, OH were honored for their work recovering a young girl who was abducted by her non-custodial mother and the mother's boyfriend when she was 7 years old. For two years, the abductors moved multiple times between four different states in an effort to hide the girl and avoid arrest. McConnell and DeVille led a coordinated investigation, executing numerous search warrants and serving legal process to obtain key information. They followed up on leads in Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia. McConnell and DeVille tracked the abductors by monitoring the activities of their parents. Eventually cell phone and financial records led them to Atlanta, GA where both abductors were arrested and the young girl was safely recovered.
VIRGINIA Honoree: Sheriff David Hines (Hanover, VA).
Colonel David Hines, Sheriff of Hanover County, was honored for his work to recover a severely autistic and non-verbal 8-year-old boy, who wandered away from his family during an outing to a Civil War battlefield park. Hines immediately organized a large-scale search. This task was particularly challenging because the area consisted of two miles of trails amid 80 acres of dense woods and Civil War trenches bordering a river. The park is surrounded by property belonging to a mining company with two active quarries. Hines directed a search effort that involved multiple law enforcement agencies and more than 3,500 volunteers. The young boy was safely recovered five days into the search and was in remarkably good health considering the amount of time he had spent out in the elements.
2012 National Exploited Children's Award Recipients
LOUISIANA AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Honorees: Special Agent Leslie Williams (Shreveport, LA) and Special Agent Neil O'Callaghan (Washington, DC).
Special Agent Leslie Williams from Shreveport, LA and Special Agent Neil O'Callaghan from Washington, DC, both with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, were honored for their work on "Operation Delego," one of the largest and most significant undercover child exploitation investigations of its kind. Operation Delego investigated an Internet forum known as "Dreamboard" where members were actively posting and trading hard-core child pornography involving children as young as infants. "Dreamboard" used sophisticated technology intended to evade detection by law enforcement and had an estimated 600-900 members, based in the U.S. and around the world. The team developed innovative investigative approaches to identify the forum's members and spent thousands of hours reviewing and processing evidence. To date, a total of 72 targets have been indicted as a result of Operation Delego both in the U.S. and abroad. Of the total number indicted, 53 have been arrested; 29 of those in custody have pled guilty. Thus far, 13 have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 20 to 35 years.
RAMSTEIN AIR BASE IN GERMANY Honoree: Special Agent Jess Thompson (Ramstein Air Base, Germany).
Special Agent Jess Thompson with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, 13th Field Investigations Squadron at Ramstein Air Base in Germany was honored for his investigation of an Air Force staff sergeant who was engaged in child sexual exploitation and the production of child pornography. The investigation began when a 7-year-old girl reported that the staff sergeant had exposed his genitals to her twice and took pornographic images of her. When questioned by law enforcement he confessed to assaulting additional victims and a review of his computer found 137 images and 16 videos of child pornography that he had produced, along with an additional 2,846 images and 132 videos of child pornography. The thorough investigation included multiple searches, more than 100 interviews, and a total of 27 law enforcement and 18 administrative records checks in three different countries and four states. The investigation led to additional charges for two subjects, criminal intelligence being developed on two subjects, and the arrest of a fifth subject. Authorities prosecuting the fifth subject, who was caught in the act of molesting a child, are seeking life imprisonment. The staff sergeant who was the original focus of the investigation was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Remarkably, his conviction is the Air Force's second non-murder life without parole conviction since the end of World War II.
2012 Law Enforcement Excellence Award Recipients
NORTH CAROLINA AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Honorees: Special Agent Sheila Quick and Special Agent Phillip Stevens (Raleigh, NC); Detective Charles Sole, Kristy Roberts, and Alison Hutchens (Durham, NC); Officer JaShawn Logan (Washington, DC).
Special Agent Sheila Quick and Special Agent Phillip Stevens of the NC State Bureau of Investigation in Raleigh, NC; Detective Charles Sole, Kristy Roberts, and Alison Hutchens of the Durham Police Department in Durham, NC; and Officer JaShawn Logan of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC were honored for their efforts in tracking down the killers of a young woman and a 5-year-old boy. The woman was reported missing when her family was unable to get in touch with her after she moved from Washington, DC to live with a man who led a cult-like group in Durham, North Carolina. The boy and his mother also lived with the man. After a confidential informant told police that the man and his followers had killed an unidentified woman and 5-year-old boy, the team worked to determine the victims' identities. The team conducted a thorough multi-state investigation. The case had a major break when the remains of both victims were located at a house that the cult leader's mother had once rented. Autopsy results revealed that they both died from gunshot wounds and the cult leader's fingerprint was found on tape that was wrapped around the young boy's body. He was arrested and charged with murder along with six other members of his group, including the boy's mother.
UTAH Honoree: Special Agent Eric Zimmerman (Salt Lake City, UT)
Special Agent Eric Zimmerman with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Salt Lake City, UT was honored for his work on the development, deployment, and maintenance of technical tools used to combat the online sexual exploitation of children. Zimmerman has developed five peer-to-peer investigative/analytical tools, four investigative tools to assist law enforcement with online covert activity, and one on-scene triage tool. His tools help law enforcement by automatically alerting law enforcement officers to existing undercover contacts on a subject, identifying additional subjects, and providing instant email alerts to law enforcement regarding subjects' online activity. In 2011, the use of these tools led to the rescue of at least 45 children, and the execution of 330 searches and 222 arrests. The FBI and many international law enforcement agencies have adopted Zimmerman's tools as mandatory protocol for certain investigations.
About the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1984. Designated by Congress to serve as the nation's clearinghouse, the organization has operated the toll-free 24-hour national missing children's hotline which has handled more than 3,568,780 calls. It has assisted law enforcement in the recovery of more than 175,230 children. The organization's CyberTipline has handled more than 1,424,930 reports of child sexual exploitation and its Child Victim Identification Program has reviewed and analyzed more than 68,962,840 child pornography images and videos. The organization works in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice's office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. To learn more about NCMEC, call its toll-free, 24-hour hotline at 1-800-THE-LOST or visit its web site at missingkids.com.SOURCE National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
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Source: news.yahoo.com
Law Ministry rules in favour of Health Ministry over no-smoking rules, Information and Broadcasting Ministry to follow rules - indiatoday.intoday.in
Rules restricting onscreen smoking scenes - notified by the Ministry of Health - can't be set aside by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I& B).
This has been conveyed by the Law Ministry in response to clarification sought from it, following disagreements between the Health and the Information and Broadcasting ministries over implementation of the rules, which require running of anti-tobacco messages, scrolls and spots in movies with smoking scenes.
The Health Ministry had notified the rules on October 27 under the anti-tobacco Act. Following this, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry issued directives to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to defer implementation citing "practical difficulties". The matter was then referred to the Law Ministry.
Since the notification has been issued under Section 31 of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act 2003, it can only be set aside or stayed by a competent court of law and not by mere administrative instructions or direction, a note by Law Ministry said. The legislation is regarded as 'validly made' and is part of the law of the land until a court decides otherwise. Therefore, all rules are presumed to be valid.
The Health Ministry officials said the two ministries were discussing the matter to reach a solution. The ministry has written to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting asking it to implement the rules. Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in Parliament said he had also written to CBFC and Advertising Standards Council of India for implementation of the rules and their monitoring.
He said the rules at present were being followed only to a limited extent. The two ministries were trying to minimise practical difficulties faced by the industry to ensure complete implementation of rules.
The two ministries have been at loggerheads over the rules. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has been accused of favouring the film industry over the health of people. Earlier, a note sent to the Health Ministry by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting made it appear that the ministry was never in favour of regulating scenes showing any form of tobacco use in movies.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting states that the Health Ministry's decision to come out with a notification was taken despite the I& B ministry's advice to the contrary.
Source: indiatoday.intoday.in
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