Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Beating MIT OpenCourseWare- an interesting idea
Then, two years ago, Magliozzi started up a side project called Finalsclub.org. The site bills itself as “the premier Web portal for interactive education,” allowing Harvard students to join online study groups and read annotated versions of the Great Books. But its most notable characteristic is that it pays Harvard students to post their lecture notes online.
The website’s name was borrowed from the school’s Final Clubs - insular all-male social clubs reputed to keep old lecture notes on file to help their less diligent members cram for exams. And just like the Final Clubs’ files, the site serves as a crutch for students who haven’t bothered to attend class or take their own notes.
Magliozzi, however, insists that there’s a higher purpose. He is taking the substance of Harvard courses, information previously sequestered within the ivory tower, and offering it free to anyone with an Internet connection.
“I’m a big believer that educational resources should be free, or as free as possible, and in a sense I would like to do it not only at Harvard but at every top institution in the world,” he says.
Finalsclub is not the first website to offer elite university course notes, for free, to a wider audience - other universities, most prominently MIT, have set up so-called open courseware sites of their own, and the largest dwarf Finalsclub’s offerings. Nor is the site the first to publish student lecture notes: A mini-industry of lecture note vendors has long existed around the campuses of large state universities, and it has migrated online in recent years.
But in combining the two - by relying on students, rather than professors, for material and then posting it for free - Finalsclub, along with a few larger sites like GradeGuru and StudyBlue, raise issues of their own. Because the site does not charge, the material Finalsclub posts is widely available, and, unlike with open courseware programs like MIT’s, Harvard has little say in the process.
-Does anyone own what universities teach?
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Science Podcast of the Day
THE DISCOVERY OF RADIATION;
Further Reading;
Al-Khalili, Jim, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed (Phoenix, 2004)
Al-Khalili, Jim, and Bizony, Piers, Atom (Icon, 2008)
James, Frank (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (Institute of Engineering and Technology, 2009)
Close, Frank, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Marion, Jerry B. and Heald, Mark A., Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (Thomson Learning; 3rd Revised edition 1994)
Maxwell, James Clerk, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Vol 1 & 2 (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, 1998)
Lützen, Jesper, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's 'Principles of Mechanics' (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Today the word ‘radiation’ conjures up pictures of destruction. But in physics, it simply describes the emission, transmission and absorption of energy. And the discovery of how radiation works has allowed us to identify new chemical elements, treat cancer and work out what the stars are made of.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, physicists from Thomas Young through Michael Faraday to Henri Becquerel made discovery after discovery, gradually piecing together a radically new picture of reality. They explored the light beyond the visible spectrum, connected electricity and magnetism - and eventually showed that heat, light, radio and mysterious new phenomena like 'X-rays' were all forms of 'electromagnetic wave'.
In the early twentieth century, with the discovery of radioactivity, scientists like Max Planck and Ernest Rutherford completed the picture of the 'electromagnetic spectrum'. This was a cumulative achievement that transformed our vision of the physical world – and what we could do in it.
Further Reading;
Al-Khalili, Jim, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed (Phoenix, 2004)
Al-Khalili, Jim, and Bizony, Piers, Atom (Icon, 2008)
James, Frank (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (Institute of Engineering and Technology, 2009)
Close, Frank, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Marion, Jerry B. and Heald, Mark A., Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (Thomson Learning; 3rd Revised edition 1994)
Maxwell, James Clerk, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Vol 1 & 2 (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, 1998)
Lützen, Jesper, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's 'Principles of Mechanics' (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Borrowing Brilliance
BORROWING BRILLIANCE: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Kord Murray
Where did Dave borrow the idea for this website from?
First he went to the sites of some of his favorite authors. He looked at the Heath brothers site www.madetostick.com and got some ideas for overall structure and layout. He looked at Laura Reis’s site and how she effectively used video’s to present herself and her ideas at www.ries.com. He liked the way the authors of Freakonomics made their site look very similar to their book, so he borrowed ideas from www.freakonomics.com, too. Then he went to the site www.hulu.com which is a new site that shows streaming television and movies and borrowed how they present these videos to the user. These and other things were combined and put together by his designer, Chris LaValle at www.dacapoco.com.
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
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
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
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Passion at Work
Passion at Work: How to Find Work You Love and Live the Time of Your Life
1. Why Do You Work So Hard?
2. We Aren't Cats.
3. What Is the End Game?
4. The Magic Bullet.
5. A Process Overview.
6. The First P: Passion.
7. The Second P: Proficiencies.
8. The Third P: Priorities.
9. The Fourth P: Plan.
10. The Fifth P: Prove.
11. How Do I Prepare Myself for This Change?
12. Looking for Your Life's Work.
Father of the Analysis of Algorithms
In the fall of 1999, Donald was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science, during which he touched upon such topics as the interaction of randomization and religion, language translation, art and aesthetics, and the 3:16 project. During his talk at Google, Donald will similarly be focusing on the interactions between faith and science.
Knuth has been called the father of the Analysis of Algorithms and he explains his decision to embark in this particular field. He says, "If I consider the entire class of all interesting algorithms, then it's bound to be full of problems just as interesting as queuing and hashing...So that's why, right at that point, I said 'Hmm, that wouldn't be bad...to spend a lifetime on it, because you have a huge number of problems, not only do they have beautiful mathematical structures that tie together, you know, hang together in nice patterns, but also there are customers out there; so that when you solve the problem, the people say, 'Hey, thanks for solving the problem, Don.' So it's a great field to embark in."
Some books recommended by Knuth;
* Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec (perhaps the greatest 20th century novel)
* Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers (captures Oxford high-table small-talk wonderfully)
* An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (also Oxford but in the 1660s)
* Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard (who is at his best in short stories like these)
* The Haj by Leon Uris (great to read on a trip to Israel)
* Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (in-depth characters plus a whole philosophy)
* On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (applied biochemistry in the kitchen)
* Food by Waverley Root (his magnum opus, a wonderful history of everything delicious)
* The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (the Great California Novel, entirely in 14-line sonnets)
* The Age of Faith by Will Durant (volume 4 of his series, covers the years 325--1300)
* Efronia by Stina Katchadourian (diaries and letters of a remarkable Armenian woman)
* The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel (biographies of Ramanujan and Hardy)
* Hackers by Steven Levy (incredibly well written tale of our times)
* The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (one of their brilliantly Swedish detective novels)
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Management Reading for the Day
"A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," Administrative Science Quarterly 17, no. 1 (March 1972): 1-25., by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Examined Life
Then it occurred to her that her talking heads should walk and talk. She had just read “Wanderlust,” a discursive study of the history of walking by Rebecca Solnit, and was reminded of the figure of the peripatetic philosopher, from Aristotle (who paced the Lyceum while teaching) to Kierkegaard (a proponent of thinking while walking, which he frequently did in the Copenhagen streets) to Walter Benjamin (the embodiment of the Paris flâneur). She realized that putting her subjects in motion would elicit a different kind of interview than if they were seated behind their desks in offices. This conceit became a guiding principle for a film that would attempt to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and affirm its place in the flux of everyday life.
“My intention was to show the material conditions out of which ideas emerge,” Ms. Taylor said. “People often think of philosophy as cold, analytic, abstract, disconnected from the real world, and I really want to say that’s not the case.”...
With “Examined Life” Ms. Taylor set out to make a pedagogical documentary that is less a lecture than a call to cerebral action — a film that, as she put it, “creates a space for thought.” Still, the end result differs from her initial conception in one significant respect. “I thought it was going to be this sort of slow-paced philosophical ramble, but it actually really moves along,” she said. “It’s because they’re philosophers. These are intense people with intense ideas.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Free read chapters- Banking and Finance
Saturday, February 28, 2009
The Two Cultures asscociated with Wine and Beer
Grape vs. Grain- A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer
Why is wine considered more sophisticated even though the production of beer is much more technologically complex? Why is wine touted for its health benefits when beer has more nutritive value? Why does wine conjure up images of staid dinner parties while beer denotes screaming young partiers? Charles Bamforth explores several paradoxes involving these beverages, paying special attention to the culture surrounding each. He argues that beer can be just as grown-up and worldly as wine and be part of a healthy, mature lifestyle. Both beer and wine have histories spanning thousands of years. This is the first book to compare them from the perspectives of history, technology, nature of the market for each, quality attributes, types and styles, and the effect that they have on human health and nutrition.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Development Lecture of the Day
Jeffrey D. Sachs - "Achieving Global Cooperation on Economic Recovery and Long-term Sustainable Development"
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
The Super-Organism
The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies;
Ants and other social insects are good at what they do, and they get better by means of cooperative labor. Their behavior fulfills principles of ergonomic efficiency embodied in the Barlow-Proschan theorems. When individual competence is low, the first theorem says, the reliability of a system of individuals acting together is lower than the summed competence of the individuals acting singly; but when individual competence is high, above a certain threshold level, the reliability of the system based on cooperation is greater. According to the second theorem, one redundant system, whose parts that can be switched back and forth (as in colony members), is more reliable than two identical systems with no such backup parts.
Monday, January 26, 2009
How can you know when someone is bluffing?
Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
Alex (Sandy) Pentland
How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.
Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The Economics of Life
Random course of the day;
Economic Analysis of Major Policy Issues
Book used;
Gary S. Becker and Guity N. Becker, The Economics of Life,
Economic Analysis of Major Policy Issues
This course will introduce students to the economic analysis of public policy issues. The interface between public policy and business is broad. Effective business leadership often requires the ability to analyze and/or direct public policy. Economic analysis provides a powerful tool for analyzing public policy from both a positive (i.e. predictive) and normative (i.e. evaluative) perspective. Economic theory provides a framework for: (1) understanding and predicting the incentives of businesses, consumers and government officials, (2) formulating reasonable policy objectives and methods for achieving these objectives, and (3) quantifying the likely effects of policy choices. The basic premise of the course is that a sound understanding of a relatively small number of fundamental economic principles and methods can be of tremendous value in making sound judgments on policy issues. The first three weeks of the course will cover the fundamental principles that guide the analysis. The next five weeks will use these concepts to analyze major public policy issues that are important to business such as: (a) the public and private sector responses to environmental problems, (b) the provision of health care, (c) antitrust enforcement, (d) intellectual property rights, (e) energy supply, (f) discrimination and anti-discrimination regulations, and (g) deregulation of industries. The final 3 weeks will be used for the presentation and analysis of class projects.
Book used;
Gary S. Becker and Guity N. Becker, The Economics of Life,
Assorted Finance Lectures
History of the Theory and Evidence on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis- Eugene F. Fama
Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes: Social Policy, Informality and Economic Growth in Mexico
Trade and the Diffusion of the Industrial Revolution- Lucas
Post-Communist Transition in a Comparative Perspective
The Credit Crisis: A Lecture Series
Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes: Social Policy, Informality and Economic Growth in Mexico
Trade and the Diffusion of the Industrial Revolution- Lucas
Post-Communist Transition in a Comparative Perspective
The Credit Crisis: A Lecture Series
Can we anticipate future correlations?
Anticipating Correlations: A New Paradigm for Risk Management
Robert Engle
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction vii
Chapter 1: Correlation Economics 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 How Big Are Correlations? 3
1.3 The Economics of Correlations 6
1.4 An Economic Model of Correlations 9
1.5 Additional Influences on Correlations 13
Chapter 2: Correlations in Theory 15
2.1 Conditional Correlations 15
2.2 Copulas 17
2.3 Dependence Measures 21
2.4 On the Value of Accurate Correlations 25
Chapter 3: Models for Correlation 29
3.1 The Moving Average and the Exponential Smoother 30
3.2 Vector GARCH 32
3.3 Matrix Formulations and Results for Vector GARCH 33
3.4 Constant Conditional Correlation 37
3.5 Orthogonal GARCH 37
3.6 Dynamic Conditional Correlation 39
3.7 Alternative Approaches and Expanded Data Sets 41
Chapter 4: Dynamic Conditional Correlation 43
4.1 DE-GARCHING 43
4.2 Estimating the Quasi-Correlations 45
4.3 Rescaling in DCC 48
4.4 Estimation of the DCC Model 55
Chapter 5: DCC Performance 59
5.1 Monte Carlo Performance of DCC 59
5.2 Empirical Performance 61
Chapter 6: The MacGyver Method 74
Chapter 7: Generalized DCC Models 80
7.1 Theoretical Specification 80
7.2 Estimating Correlations for Global Stock and Bond Returns 83
Chapter 8: FACTOR DCC 88
8.1 Formulation of Factor Versions of DCC 88
8.2 Estimation of Factor Models 93
Chapter 9: Anticipating Correlations 103
9.1 Forecasting 103
9.2 Long-Run Forecasting 108
9.3 Hedging Performance In-Sample 111
9.4 Out-of-Sample Hedging 112
9.5 Forecasting Risk in the Summer of 2007 117
Chapter 10: Credit Risk and Correlations 122
Chapter 11: Econometric Analysis of the DCC Model 130
11.1 Variance Targeting 130
11.2 Correlation Targeting 131
11.3 Asymptotic Distribution of DCC 134
Chapter 12: Conclusions 137
Related;
FT Business School: Global Financial Volatility
Why are current risk measures so low, when we think there are serious financial risks? Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Engle, professor of finance and director of the Centre for Financial Econometrics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, presents how volatility can be used to assess risk. He explains how ARCH and GARCH can measure time-varying volatility.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
International Conference on Thinking
The International conference on Thinking is a major conference with a twenty two year history and is coordinated by an International Standing Committee led by Prof Dr David Perkins of Harvard University, USA. The conference has been previously held by many countries including Fiji, Singapore, USA, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Sweden.
Keynote Speakers include;
Related;
The GoodWork Project
Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills
Project Zero
World Center for New Thinking
Keynote Speakers include;
Edward de Bono
Tony Buzan
Howard Gardner
Related;
The GoodWork Project
Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills
Project Zero
World Center for New Thinking
Monday, January 19, 2009
Interesting Ideas
School of Everything helps curious people find local teachers and classes in all subjects, worldwide. Sign up today to contact teachers and students near you. It's free!
If you could change your life;
If you could change your life;
I'm offering an apprenticeship/not-internship/graduate school/charm school track-changing opportunity to a few people this winter. It's free, it's fairly audacious and I hope you'll check it out. It might not be for you (in fact, it probably isn't) but I have no doubt that you know people who might be interested.
I'm convinced that there are people out there who--given the right teaching, encouragement and opportunity--can change the world. I'm hoping you can prove me right. You don't have much time and there are only a few slots, so if you're even flirting with this idea, check out the lens here.
Obama's reading style- a magpie approach to reading
More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.
Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.
His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.
What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead“ are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush....
For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home....
In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”
Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”
As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”
-From Books, New President Found Voice
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Stanford on You Tube
Another great source of learning materials from Stanford. A small sample below;
Summer Science Series
Leading-edge lectures at the School of Medicine
Geography of United States Elections
Introduction to Robotics
Modern Physics: Quantum Mechanics
Linear Dynamical Systems
[lecture notes are here]
Summer Science Series
Leading-edge lectures at the School of Medicine
Geography of United States Elections
Introduction to Robotics
Modern Physics: Quantum Mechanics
Linear Dynamical Systems
[lecture notes are here]
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Word of the Day- ternion
Who knew there were so many ways to say "group of three"? This wordmap has a few eye-openers, including ternion itself. The word is used mainly in mathematics and shares the consonants t and r that are found in that order in many words for "three" -- in English and other Indo-European languages.
via The Visual Thesaurus
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Assorted
MBA Gym;
GLobal MBA Rankings
The MBA Gym provides free, interactive online training sessions on key concepts taught on the Masters in Business Administration programme at business schools. It consists of a series of workouts, each lasting for approximately 15 minutes. Each workout focuses on a particular discipline such as Strategy or Finance and has been designed to give a brief and engaging introduction to the subject.
GLobal MBA Rankings
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
University of Behavioral Economics
Assorted Blogs on Behavioral Economics;
Nudge
Predictably Irrational
Decisions Decisions
Mind on Money
The Choices Worth Having
Nudge
Predictably Irrational
Decisions Decisions
Mind on Money
The Choices Worth Having
Dept of Chicago MBA
Random courses from Professor Christian Broda;
International Financial Policy (MBA course)
Macroeconomics (MBA course)
Latin America and the Global Economy (Executive MBA)
Overall Rating of Course Materials; Good
[Criteria: excellent, good, bad, ugly]
Related;
Free Currency Trading
International Financial Policy (MBA course)
Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics: Theory and Policy
This is a course on the economics of exchange rates, their impact on financial variables and their macroeconomic determinants. The course will cover the theory and practice of exchange rate determination, as well as extensions and applications that will enable students to operate effectively in the global marketplace. We will cover the main theories of exchange rate determination and how well they match the data; the role of the exchange rate in the macroeconomy and implications for businesses; the choice of exchange rate regimes, the European Monetary Union, and dollarization; issues related to capital flows and international financial crises such as in Argentina and other developing countries; policy issues facing China and other emerging economies and their implications to the US.
Macroeconomics (MBA course)
Text: Abel and Bernanke, Macroeconomics, Addison Wesley, . (Optional)
COURSE NOTES on Fiscal Policy
COURSE NOTES on Money
COURSE NOTES on the Fed
COURSE NOTES on Real vs Nominal Variables
Introduction to Macro Data
Latin America and the Global Economy (Executive MBA)
The lecture will start with an overview of Latin America’s recent economic performance relative to other regions of the world. (see BIS chapter III). The last few years have been characterized by strong growth around the world, and for the first time in several decades, growth has been stronger in developing countries than in developed countries.
The global imbalances in external payments among the world’s economies have provoked concern in international policy circles and anxiety in capital markets (see The Economist’s survey article below “The great thrift shift” for a background on this issue). We will assesses the implications of such risks for developing countries (also refer to the article “America’s External Balance”).
Over the past 20 years, the Chinese economy has undergone profound changes and China’s role in the global economy has increased sharply. How does China’s growth experience so far compare with previous historical episodes of rapid integration? How has China’s integration affected the rest of the world?
Overall Rating of Course Materials; Good
[Criteria: excellent, good, bad, ugly]
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