On the bright side, if this catches on it will be much quieter for us folks sticking to economy class.
US transport officials demand answers after a man sends himself as air cargo from New York to Texas. [BBC World]
Latest Stories
When you absolutely, positively have to have yourself there overnight
By · September 9, 2003 · ·
Monocultures in markets
By · September 8, 2003 · ·
Thoughtful piece from Jon Udell on monocultures in markets elicited thoughtful responses:
You can’t turn Windows’ installed base on a dime, but you can turn it eventually. In four or five years, the true nature of the struggle between the methodologies of Microsoft and the open source community may finally begin to emerge. My hunch is that both strategies will produce reliable and secure software, and that competition between them will benefit everyone. Neither strategy will deliver perfect security, of course, because no such thing exists. We’ll always be assessing risks and making trade-offs. [http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/09/05/35OPstrategic_1.htm]Last week’s column provoked more than the usual number of responses. Here are some of them.
[Full story:
Monoculture, competition, and security
]
John Griffin, Jeffrey Harris, and
By · August 27, 2003 · ·
John Griffin, Jeffrey Harris, and Selim Topaloglu (2003), “The Dynamics of Institutional and Individual Trading,” Journal of Finance (December).
Abstract: We study the daily and intra-daily cross-sectional relation between stock returns and the trading of institutional and individual investors in NASDAQ 100 securities. Based on the previous day’s stock return, the top-performing deciles… is 23.9% more likely to be bought in net by institutions… than… the bottom performance decile. Strong contemporaneous daily patterns can largely be explained by net institutional (individual) trading positively (negatively) following past intra-day excess stock returns (or the news associated therein). In comparison, evidence of return predictability and price pressure are economically small.
Sobig and SARS: China as virus ground zero
By · August 23, 2003 · ·
Various reports making clear that one of the reasons Sobig.F grew so quickly was China. Not because it started there — it looks like it started in a posting to a Usenet porn group — but because so many Chinese computer users don’t know the basics of online self-protection. According to this AFP story, 30% of Chinese Internet users were infected, amounting to 20-mm computers in total. This created a storm of Sobig emails that flooded the region, and, eventually, leaked back into North America. It also explains, in part, why during the outbreak’s initial stages traffic reports showed the worst network responsiveness in SE Asia.
British Columbia drought leading to catastrophe
By · August 23, 2003 · ·
The record drought in British Columbia has spawned a fire near Kelowna that has destroyed more than 200 homes — so far. While this is terrible, it could very well be happening in Vancouver, not Kelowna, and the costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars
About 203 homes have been lost overnight, as B.C. fire crews assess the exact damages Saturday morning from a roaring forest fire that continues to threaten Kelowna, B.C.
One argument why university IP should be free
By · August 23, 2003 · ·
From Brad DeLong’s site:
John Quiggin: Patently right: There’s an interesting piece in today’s Fin (subscription required) about Uni of NSW Vice-Chancellor Rory Hume, who says universities should give away (nearly all) the research they produce rather trying to make money out of intellectual property. I think he’s right for a number of reasons. First, despite some impressions to the contrary, the returns to universities from commercialising research have been very poor, even in the US where this has been going on for a long time. The Australian Research Council did a study on this and found that the returns from commercialisation were about 2 per cent of the cost of research. In fact, if unis fully costed their commercialisation outfits, including land and administrative overheads, I suspect that the true figure would be negative. Second there’s the standard public good argument. The social benefits are greater if the results are free to use.
Third, the university’s intellectual “property” has already been bought and paid for–by the donors in the case of a private university, and by the citizens in the case of a public university.
Just the Sobig.F that matters
By · August 22, 2003 · ·
The Grey Lady is down; the Grey Lady is down
The New York Times today asked employees at its landmark midtown headquarters to shut down their computers because of “system difficulties.” [NYT Business]
Buffett disclosing some holdings
By · August 20, 2003 · ·
Even Warren Buffett can’t use the rules to keep all his holdings quiet:
Warren E. Buffett lost a bid for confidentiality from the S.E.C., meaning that the public may learn more about which stocks Mr. Buffett was buying last fall. [NYT Business]
A hill of beans just isn’t what it used to be
By · August 18, 2003 · ·
Inflation may not be a hill of beans, but a hill of beans is certainly inflating:
A worldwide increase in tomato paste prices has forced up the price of baked beans, says Heinz. [BBC Business]
The Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action
By · August 18, 2003 · ·
Facinating new Harvard Press book out next month arguing that discrimination plays little part in reducing the number of minority professors working in universities. Instead, it is affirmative action itself that it is at the root of the problem:
Many universities are trying hard to recruit black, Hispanic, and American Indian professors, says the book. But they end up fighting over the same insufficient pool of minority Ph.D.’s. That group is small primarily because most minority undergraduates don’t earn grades good enough to get into graduate school or even to convince themselves that they are academically suited for careers in the professoriate. The crux of the problem, according to the book: Affirmative action has steered many minority undergraduates to selective colleges where they do poorly.