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Readings: VCs, Salmon, Risk, Bubbles, etc.

 

China’s Empty City

 

TED Talks: Living with Data

Good talk and demos from the just-completed TED India about living with data, including such stuff as coffee cups that can help you find coffee. The speaker is MIT grad student Pranav Mistry.

 

Bill Joy: The Promise of Green Technologies

From a recent speech at the University of Michigan, here is KPCB (remember them?) investor-guy (and Sun co-founder) Bill Joy talking about the promise of green technologies.

Full video after the jump.

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Weekend Reading: Tesla, Cycles, Chinese Real Estate, Credit, etc.

A few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column:

 

China Leaps to Second Spot in Global Science

The latest Thomson ISI science data shows that China has leaped to second-spot worldwide in academic science, as measured by papers produced. The U.S. still leads the way, at 340,000 publications per year (not shown), but China could surpass U.S. production within five years at current rates of relative growth.

Of course, paper production is only one measure. Citations matter at least as much, and that isn’t captured here. Nevertheless, it is striking stuff

china-science

[via Thomson]

 

Weekend Readings: Chess, Rhodes Scholars, Trade, etc.

 

Readings: Lawyers, Wealth, and Rare Earths

 

Isildur1 and the Week That Changed Online Poker

This has been an epochal week in online poker. A new playing force has emerged, someone named Isildur1, and his arrival has shaken up this world of massive cash pots in an unprecedented way.

…we have just witnessed a monumental event in the history of online poker – the entrance of Isildur into our world of online poker. A number of other commentators have offered their insight on this event, and there’s no doubt that the commotion over him has rocked the world of high stakes online poker. I felt that given the huge amount of speculation, misinformation, and downright stupidity that has flooded twoplustwo and other forums, it wouldn’t hurt to give the less informed half of the poker world a more accurate glimpse of the high stakes poker world.

Read the whole thing here.

 

The Rise and Fall of Empires

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo

 

Everything is Viral -- Even the Things That Aren’t

With virality continuing to be all the rage, whether it’s swine flu, happiness, or Internet services, it’s worth considering whether many things that seem viral actually are. Here is a 2008 BMJ paper on the subject that deserves wider attention:

Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis

Results
Significant network effects were observed in the acquisition of acne, headaches, and height. A friend’s acne problems increased an individual’s odds of acne problems (odds ratio 1.62, 95% confidence interval 0.91 to 2.89). The likelihood that an individual had headaches also increased with the presence of a friend with headaches (1.47, 0.93 to 2.33); and an individual’s height increased by 20% of his or her friend’s height (0.18, 0.15 to 0.26). Each of these results was estimated by using standard methods found in several publications. After adjustment for environmental confounders, however, the results become uniformly smaller and insignificant.

Source: Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason M Fletcher, “Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis,” BMJ 337, no. dec04_2 (December 4, 2008): a2533.

 

Readings: Zero, Forgeries, Yeast, and Climate Change

 

Research Roundup: Debt and Innovation, Short-selling, Creativity, & Subways

 

Readings: Chocolate, Trends, Trade, and Roger Federer

 

The Best F**king Book About the Financial Crisis?

I get asked all the time what the best fucking book is about the financial crisis. Well, here it is: A (partial)  list of books about the past year’s financial crisis, sorted in decreasing order of the number of times the word “fuck” appears. In the spirit of rigorous scientific inquiry, I have also provided the number of fucks per page.

Book Author # fucks #/page
Too Big to Fail Sorkin 20 .03
The Sellout Gasparino 10 .02
The Greatest Trade Ever Zuckerman 2 .01
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown Morris 0 0
This Time is Different Reinhart/Rogoff 0 0
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