ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Pictures from top: 1. The Confederate flag 2.Manatees: Malabar, Central Florida 3. My good friend Steve Thorpe with NASCAR racer. 4. Welcome to Georgia signboard 5. A Sunday aftertoon blue grass jam. 6. Carwash girl Melbourne, Florida 7. The Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction near Kissimmee 8. Deep-fried duck with black-eyed peas and collard greens 9.Menu at the Marsh Landing restaurant, Fellmere, Florida 10. Barbecue joint in Mount Doro, Florida I moved to Princeton, New Jersey recently, after a year's stay in Melbourne, Florida. Melbourne is on the east coast of the Florida peninsula, right in the center between Jacksonville in the North and Miami in the south. Florida north of Fort Lauderdale is pretty much Southern USA. Not the caribbean culture of Miami and The Keys. Central Florida is more like Georgia and the Carolinas, though with some differences due to it's geographical features and climate. The land of alligators and swamps, cattle ranchers and cowboys called crackers, ci...

Sea change, a fundamental, profound change, a regime-switch in modeling terms, not a gradual process as in Shakespeare's The Tempest where Ariel sang: Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Your Sunny Day and Rainy Day Screens is an auto regime-switching model. * for reference on Sunny Day and Rainy Day screens see http://valuengine.blogspot.com/2007/10/sunny-day-and-rainy-day-screens.html James D. Hamilton of the Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego is one of the pioneers in work on regime-switching models. To explain "regime-switching models", we first quote from the introduction of his paper " Regime-Switching Models" (May, 2005) prepared for the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. "Many economic time series occasionally exhibit dramatic breaks in their behavior, associated with eve...