The Blog University

Borrowing Brilliance

2009-09-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

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.

The King of Vodka

2009-06-13T04:23:00.000-07:00

The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov & the Upheaval of an Empire

Random Course

2009-06-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Aircraft Systems Engineering

Economic History blog of the Day

2009-05-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Economic History Blog

History of Finance- a great series of lectures

2009-05-02T03:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Myron Scholes assorted

2009-05-01T08:56:00.001-07:00

Four Paths of Investment

Related;
History of Finance

The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan

2009-04-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

Dread!

2009-04-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu
by Philip Alcabes

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Philip Alcabes

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

First 100 Days

Uranium

2009-04-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Tom Zoellner

comedycentral.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

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.

Conference of the Day

2009-04-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

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)

Podcast of the Day -Guillermo A. Calvo

2009-04-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Calvo on Systematic Sudden Stops, Phoenix Miracles and current financial crisis impact on emerging economics.

Google finally does it

2009-03-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/edu

Assorted Intellectual Tresspassing

2009-03-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Civil Heretic

Open Culture

We recommend the blog Simoleon Sense

Free, yes, Free Text Books

2009-03-28T05:45:00.000-07:00

Flat World Knowledge;

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.

The Very Basics Lecture- Making Sense of the Dollar

2009-03-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

Anne Krueger

How Ukraine Became a Market Economy

2009-03-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy by Anders Åslund

Good Money

2009-03-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821
by George Anthony Selgin

How Pirates Created Constitutional Democracy

2009-03-27T19:48:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

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