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.

The Economics of Life

Random course of the day;

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

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.

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;

Edward de Bono
Tony Buzan
Howard Gardner

Related;
The GoodWork Project

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills

Project Zero

World Center for New Thinking

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;

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

The White Man's Burden

Water Economics

Zetland Says Bottled Water Costs Up to 10,000 Times Tap Water

Here's Zetland's blog

Course Blog of the Day- African Poverty

PLSC170: African Poverty and Western Aid

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]

Highly Recommeded

More or Less from BBC

Maths + Architecture =

Greg Lynn: How calculus is changing architecture

High Altitude Leadership

High Altitude Leadership: What the World's Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success

Have a look at their Team Assessment Toolkit

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

Assorted

MBA Gym;

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

University of Behavioral Economics

Assorted Blogs on Behavioral Economics;

Nudge

Predictably Irrational

Decisions Decisions

Mind on Money

The Choices Worth Having

Improve your language skills

Sign up for Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day.

Dept of Chicago MBA

Random courses from Professor Christian Broda;

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]

Related;
Free Currency Trading

The Best Economics Departments in the Indian Subcontinent?

Indira Gandhi Institute Of Development Research

The Delhi School of Economics

JNU

University of Hyderabad

Lahore University of Management Sciences

Please add to the list in the comments.

Development Economics University

The Best of Development Economics bloggers;

Dani Rodrik

Chris Blattman

Shanta Devarajan

Growth Commission Blog

Welcome to The Blog University

This blog is an attempt to list and aggregate bloggers from academia.