Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 April 6

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April 6

Last Surviving Person Who Attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference Question

Who exactly was the largest surviving person who attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference?

I know of Edward Bernays (1891-1995; lived for 103 years), but was there anyone who attended this conference and who died after Mr. Bernays? Futurist110 (talk) 01:56, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Why did you use wikilink syntax for 1919 Paris Peace Conference but not for Edward Bernays? —Tamfang (talk) 06:39, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Don't get saucy... --Jayron32 17:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Sorry. I did this without thinking, and I have now fixed it. Futurist110 (talk) 07:08, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

• I found two documents that may be helpful to you in your search. Either or both of these could also be used to expand our article titled List of participants to Paris Peace Conference, 1919 which has the nations but not the persons who attended. This one is titled "Directories of the Peace Conference" and this one is titled "Peace Conference Delegates at Paris". The first seems to be a well organized directory, by both role and nation, of every attendee, including technical experts, legal experts, and diplomatic missions from every nation that attended. A really good source. The second one I give is probably somewhat redundant, as it lists only the formal diplomatic missions, and not the other attendees who were there in some other role. --Jayron32 17:26, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Yah! pipped Edward Bernays by 3 months; Christian Helen Fraser-Tytler..."she attended the peace conference at Versailles. She died at St Andrews on 30 June 1995" Ref: Philip Warner, ‘Tytler, Christian Helen Fraser- (1897–1995)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004...reverse online search by date of death...she might get a wiki page one day. Tommy Pinball (talk) 21:16, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

A novel about a kid and his Triceratops

I don't remember the title of the book. It's a novel written for teenagers. It was probably published in the 1960s or early 1970s.

The story is about a young boy in a small town who has found a large egg by a lake (I guess). When the egg was hatched, he found a Triceratops. He brought the animal home and fed it with alfalfa.

A town politician was mad and accused the animal eating too much alfalfa ...

I think the story ends with the Triceratops moved to a zoo. The boy went to the zoo to see his old friend. Probably. -- Toytoy (talk) 02:04, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

To the worst of my memory! He found the egg in his chicken farm. Not by a lake.

The book's title is The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth. -- Toytoy (talk) 02:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

• If you enjoyed that premise, User:Toytoy, you might enjoy Heinlein's novel The Star Beast, which I first read and enjoyed as an adult. μηδείς (talk) 03:55, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I had a similar book about a stegosaurus. Made me cry when the kids had to give it up. Boy and a girl. It did something stupid and got in trouble. Pretty foggy now. Anyone know that one? InedibleHulk (talk) 04:41, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

That would be Evelyn Sibley Lampman, The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek. John M Baker (talk) 12:15, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Astonishingly, we have an article called Stegosaurus in popular culture which confirms the previous post. Apparently, here is also a sequel; The Shy Stegosaurus of Indian Springs. Alansplodge (talk) 15:25, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that's the one. Indian Springs. I found Cricket Creek through my own meager Googling, and thought it sounded close, but not quite. The cover wasn't doing it for me, either. Thanks! InedibleHulk (talk) 21:50, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

After I asked the question, the name "Butterworth" came to me! A quick Google search took me to the book. Now I realized why I thought about a lake. It was "The Big Egg" in The Mad Scientists' Club.

A few whiz kids found a big egg. ... In the end, the egg was gone. And there's a tail print that leads to the lake. -- Toytoy (talk) 16:21, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Was it found at Egg Harbor ? StuRat (talk) 23:00, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Unsure about whether this is original research

Recent edit on the Thomas Nashe page, last section, 'Major Works'

Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe is generally accepted (by academics, historians, encyclopedia entries, DNB etc) to have died c. 1601, as though no direct record of death or burial survives, contemporary literary allusions support this; and Nashe produced no further work after that date. An editor who theorises (on linguistic evidence) that Nashe faked his own death and reappeared as a different writer, Thomas Dekker, has supported an entry referring to this by reference to a book she has written herself. Is this original research? (The book's publisher [Cambridge Scholars Publishing http://www.cambridgescholars.com/]also publishes what appear to be genuinely academic works, though it may perhaps be a self-publishing outfit. RLamb (talk) 12:34, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

the publisher does say prospective authors have to submit a proposal which is reviewed by their editorial panel [1], however no details are given for the criteria. I don't know if this is normal in academia. 184.147.128.82 (talk) 14:31, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Am I asking my question in the wrong place? Is there another help desk which would tell me more about the criteria for original research? I accept the theory Nashe faked death and resurrected himself as another writer is not mainstream, and may even be unique to this author. Should I be asking whether any reputable publication has even considered it - apart from this one book? RLamb (talk) 15:57, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

You might try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research/Noticeboard . Also see Wikipedia:Notability#Self-promotion_and_indiscriminate_publicity. StuRat (talk) 16:16, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Cambridge Scholars is certainly a legitimate academic publisher, but it is a rather low budget outfit (I should know, since my last article was in a book published by them). They are not, shall we say, very exclusive, but they are certainly not vanity publishers. I should add that strictly speaking this is the wrong place for such enquiries. You should go to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. If this is what the book says, it's certainly not OR, since it's published. It certainly seems a wacky theory. Paul B (talk) 23:43, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I should add that Donna Murphy, the author, is not a literary scholar. She has also written a book published by CSP in which she tries to prove that Marlowe and Nashe collaborated on early Shakespeare works - in other words she appears to be a Shakespeare-wasn't-Shakespeare writer. Paul B (talk) 08:28, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Investment Performance

I'm looking at a newspaper ad in the UK which states that a certain fund manager turned £10,000 into £250,769 between February 1988 and March 2014, claiming a total return of 2,407%. That looks quite impressive, but then I did a quick calculation and I think it works out at just over 13% p.a.which doesn't seem that good bearing in mind that that this is his full time job and doesn't take inflation into account. I googled the Retail Price Index (which is used to measure inflation) and, with a base of January 1987 of 100, it gives December 87 as 103.3 (which is close enough to his start date of Feb 88) and December 2013 as 236.2 (which is close enough to his end date of March 2014). How would you work out his true annual % increase. I think it would be a bit more complicated than 103.3/236.2 x13%. Many thanks. Widneymanor (talk) 16:54, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Divide the starting amount by 103.3 and the ending amount by 236.2, then repeat your calcs. And consistently averaging 13% returns is indeed impressive. I'm sure you've seen examples where one stock went up far more than that, in the short term, but keeping it up, over 26 years, is damn near impossible. StuRat (talk) 17:02, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Note that a standard technique of banks is to open a lot of different funds, some of which get lucky just by chance and are then used in advertising. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:10, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Stu, I did the calcs as suggested and it came out as 9.2% p.a. To an amateur, that doesn't seem very good when the various indexes can rise one percentage point in a day. Still, if I could do it, I wouldn't be here, I'd be sitting on the beach :-) Thanks also, Stephen. Widneymanor (talk) 21:46, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

The stock market has lots of daily variation, but only a slow average increase. Day traders attempt to make their money by correctly predicting which stocks will rise each day. A lot of them en up committing suicide. If it was so easy everyone would do it. In the end, if you can get average returns just a little bit ahead of the stock market index, then you're doing well.

But let's look at it another way. What does 9.2% after inflation get you ? In ten years that's 241%, in 20 years, it's 581%, and in 40 years, it's 3380%. So, invest a lot of money early on, at high average returns, and hold it for years, to get rich. (Also note that we haven't figured in the tax bite or any management fees.) It really is a case of "slow and steady wins the race". StuRat (talk) 23:09, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

No fund manager should ever be evaluated based on their absolute returns or real (inflation-adjusted returns), as they fail to take into account (1) how the market is doing and (2) how much risk the manager is taking on.

As an example for the first point, 13% annual return is not at all impressive if the market as a whole returns 15%. That, of course, has not been the case: Dow Jones returned over 8%, S&P - just under 8% and FTSE 100 - over 5%. In that context 13% return looks impressive.

However, to really understand whether the manager is performing well, you would have to know the ex-ante riskiness of what he's been investing in. In the fund industry, it's usually measured in terms of "beta". In simple terms, if the fund has a beta of 1.5, it is 1.5 times more risky than the market index and is expected to generate 1.5 times the return of the market portfolio over the long term. If the manager manages to exceed the return suggested by its beta, he/she is said to have generated "alpha". A positive and persistent alpha is what signifies a good manager (or insider trader), not a total return (but it is more difficult to put in a newspaper ad). Fun fact: most active managers show a negative alpha after the fees are taken into account, meaning that you're better off investing in a market index.

So, to address the original post, the 13% annual return is meaningless without the context of risk. If you had had 100 000$ ten years ago, borrowed another 900 000$ @ 5% interest (mortgage a house, maybe) and invested everything into an emerging market index (around 9% return), you would have generated around 25% return per year over the period. However, anyone can see that ex-ante this strategy was really risky.129.178.88.82 (talk) 14:51, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Minor correction to the calculations. To determine the inflation adjustment, simply divide 236.2 (the index in 2014) by 103.3 (the index in 1988) to find that the inflation adjustment between the two years is 2.28. (That is 2014 prices are 228% of 1988 prices.) That means the investment result of £250,769 is £109,671 in 1988 pounds. So the manager achieved an inflation adjusted return of 1,097% (rounded) over the 26-year period. Now, the way to state the inflation-adjusted return over the entire period as a mean annual return is to take the 26th root of the compounded return (since mean investment returns are exponential over a multi-year period). The 26th root of the unrounded 26-year return is 1.0964, or 9.64%. This obviously substantially beats the mean return over that period of most assets, except perhaps gold. However impressive the number is, there is no way to know from the number itself whether it was the result of skill or luck. Marco polo (talk) 16:08, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Immigration restrictions on Russians ?

Since Russia seems willing to invade and annex any nearby area with a substantial population of Russians, has this resulted in nearby nations trying to stop Russian immigration, in order to protect their territory ? Are any deporting Russian nationals ? StuRat (talk) 23:24, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

See Complex question before proceeding any further, perhaps also Jumping to conclusions. The first part of your question presupposes an idea which is not yet established as true, making it impossible to answer your actual question. We have incomplete information, in the sense that we have a single instance of Russia's invasion and annexation of such an area, and from a single instance we cannot extrapolate into a general principle. If you wish to rephrase your question in a way to remove the unsupported presuppositions, it may become answerable. But until then, you've made assumptions which are not yet established as true. --Jayron32 00:50, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

It's more than a single instance. See Transnistria. Also, recent comments by Putin have been to the effect that he feels a responsibility to protect Russians everywhere, even if this means invading other nations. StuRat (talk) 14:27, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Also, it should be noted that Crimea did not have a substantial ethnic Russian population because they recently moved there. The ethnic Russian population existed in Crimea since before Ukraine existed as a nation, indeed Crimea was explicitly Russian territory before the Soviet Union transferred it to the Ukraine in the 1950s. It had been Russian territory for some time before that. So it wasn't like there was any concerted effort to "Russify" that land in order to annex it. Russia certainly DID do that with many places (see Russification and Population transfer in the Soviet Union) but Crimea, the source of the recent conflict, is actually one of those areas where such an occurance did NOT apply. --Jayron32 00:54, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Indeed whatever one thinks of the conflict, the universal lesson seems to be that it's best to be fair to the ethnic minority populations be they Russian or something else. While considering the large number of deaths, population growth differences when on community was in exile, the fact that there are always likely be some who feel they would be happier where they are, etc, I don't think there was much chance of Crimean Tatars ?regaining their majority (without reducing the population levels of the other groups), it seems likely more would be there now if they had felt more welcomed and so may have been a more effective voice against the annexation. As for ethnic Russians, it may be unlikely you'd get a majority supporting you considering the time frame and conditions, but it would surely help if they didn't have so many legitimate grievances. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Of course you could try the Stalin-Tatar route suggested by StuRat at the end, but that only really works if you are sure there's no one who can and will oppose you. Notably in the current climate, it seems a good way to inspire a Russian invasion at least if you're a neighbour. (The situation for non-neighbours sufficiently far away is more complicated, you can try the Stalin-Tatar route. Or simply do what Ukraine did, intentionally or not, and hope they leave of their own accord. You may rebalance your population but often this doesn't really benefit you. Of course you also need to consider the needs of the majority. Ultimately if you have some magical solution to balancing the needs of both, may be you should be getting a job with the UN and not asking questions on the RD.)

Nil Einne (talk) 03:22, 7 April 2014 (UTC)