The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov & the Upheaval of an Empire
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
History of Finance- a great series of lectures
Links to streaming videos of edited versions of interviews with Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Paul Samuelson, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes and Jack Treynor are posted below.
From American Finance Association.
From American Finance Association.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Dread!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Uranium
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Tom Zoellner | ||||
| ||||
Uranium by Tom Zoellner;
Uranium’s history is a geological ugly duckling tale. Aside from occasional use as a dye, the ore was most often seen as trash — its German name, Pechblende, meant “bad-luck rock,” Zoellner says — and silver miners who found the greasy gray uranium dirt just left it in piles nearby. It was only with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium in uranium ore that people started to take notice — the Curies, after all, touted their find as a cure for cancer. Experiments on radium led in 1932 to the discovery of the neutron, which the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard grasped might be able to set off catastrophically powerful chain reactions. The rest, more or less, is history.
Which is a bit of a problem for Zoellner. The genre of pop microhistory into which his book fits — “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” and “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World” — is predicated on the idea that these are not things people normally understand to be world-changing. Nuclear weapons, however, are not in this category. As a result, large portions of the story Zoellner tells have been explored in more depth in other popular accounts.
Perhaps to address this, Zoellner intersperses the history with descriptions of his own globe-trotting, from the Congo to Mongolia, from the American West to Eastern Europe to Australia. He pokes around in old mines and tours a uranium refining plant. He calls at the offices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the World Nuclear Association, in London. He interviews the Yemeni minister of electricity, is almost kidnapped on the way to a mine in Niger and knocks back Chechen grappa with border guards responsible for keeping black-market uranium from being smuggled from Russia into Georgia.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Conference of the Day
Second Look at the Great Depression and New Deal, (audio and video available)
Recommended;
A Second Look at the Great Depression and New Deal, Session Four: Keynote - Why a Second Look Matters (Lucas)
Recommended;
A Second Look at the Great Depression and New Deal, Session Four: Keynote - Why a Second Look Matters (Lucas)
Podcast of the Day -Guillermo A. Calvo
Calvo on Systematic Sudden Stops, Phoenix Miracles and current financial crisis impact on emerging economics.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Free, yes, Free Text Books
Flat World Knowledge;
and more
Money and Banking
Risk Management for Corporations and Individuals
and more
A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Good Money
How Pirates Created Constitutional Democracy
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter T. Leeson
During summer 2007, the University Press approached Leeson about a writing a book on the economics of piracy. He decided the book was the perfect opportunity to propose to his then-girlfriend, Ania Bulska, by printing the proposal on the dedication page.
“After I was approached to write the book, after a week or two, the idea hit me — I don’t know how to describe it,” Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, said. “I thought it was innovative, different, perfect for her.”
For the Press, keeping Leeson’s planned proposal secret presented several unfamiliar challenges, employees said.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone propose to anyone in a book,” said Press senior editor Seth Ditchik, who worked with Leeson on the book. “Everyone really got behind it and made sure that anything we did for the book didn’t ruin the surprise for his then-girlfriend and now fiance.”
Expert Political Judgment
The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.
“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote....
Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right....
So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!
-Learning How to Think
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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