Latest Stories

• Readings: VCs, Salmon, Risk, Bubbles, etc.
• China’s Empty City
• TED Talks: Living with Data
• Bill Joy: The Promise of Green Technologies
• Weekend Reading: Tesla, Cycles, Chinese Real Estate, Credit, etc.

 

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

• Venture Funds Sweeten Terms to Attract Investors (WSJ)
• Anything but 0.01% (Gross/PIMCO)
• Many casualties in aftermath of bursting bubbles (FT)
• Information obesity (Source)
• Return Free Risk - A Merger Arb Anecdote (Kid Dynamite) 
• British Columbia's salmon: Socked (The Economist)
• Courting convulsion in America (Kunstler)

 

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.

Read the rest of this entry »  

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

A few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column:

• Electric-car maker Tesla said to be planning stock offering (LA Times)
• China may re-export copper because of stockpiles (Bloomberg)
• Riding the waves of market cycles (TIME)
• The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery (WSJ)
• Like New Yorkers, Chinese people just can't stop talking about real estate (Slate)
• Car plate prices closer to record (Shanghai Daily)
• Credit Booms Gone Bust: Monetary Policy, Leverage Cycles and Financial Crises, 1870–2008 (NBER)  
• How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world (Daily Mail)
• Rhodes scholar running low on money, despite recent exodus of graduates to Wall Street rather than academia (Bloomberg)

 

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

[via Thomson]

 

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

• Zipf law in the popularity distribution of chess openings (arXiv)
• Losing Rhodes scholars to Wall Street's siren call (WashPost)
• China and the U.S. lecturing each other on trade (Pettis)
• Staking out the middle ground on energy supply (Peak Watch)
• Animated county-by-county map of U.S. unemployment (AO)
• Latest issue of Chance for we probability and stats geeks (Chance)
• Where the Wild Things Were: Declining wildness and its consequences (Foreign Policy)
• Permafrost thaw threatens Russia oil and gas complex (AFP)

 

Readings: Lawyers, Wealth, and Rare Earths

• How Much Is Enough? (Skidelsky)
• Rare earth: The New Great Game (BBC)
• Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be...Lawyers (SSRN)

 

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

 

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

• Coxe on the power of zero (ZeroHedge)
• Vermeer forgeries and AD shocks (Money Illusion)
• The Fate of the Yeast People (Kunstler)
• Climate change catastrophe took just months (Times)

 

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

• A debtor-friendly bankruptcy system is better for innovation (Review of Financial Studies)
• Short-selling bans around the world in 2007-09: All bad (CEPR)
• How Creative Should Creators Be To Optimize the Evolution of Ideas? A Computational Model (arXiv)
• On the Efficiency of Underground Systems in Large Cities (arXiv)
  

 

Readings: Chocolate, Trends, Trade, and Roger Federer

• U.S. Import Trends for chocolate (Panjiva)
• The World in 2010: forecasting the year ahead (Economist)
• South African gold on final deathwatch as top grade scientist finds residual gold is more than 90% less than claimed (Mineweb)
• Roger Feder on loving winning vs. hating losing (Times)
• Tear down this wall: The Berlin Wall as a natural experiment in trade (Voxeu)

 

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