The Blog University

Database Basics

2011-09-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Some textbooks used in Database basic courses;

A First Course in Database Systems (3rd edition) by Ullman and Widom
Database Management Systems (3rd edition) by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke (R/G)
Fundamentals of Database Systems (6th edition) by Elmasri and Navathe (E/N)
Database System Concepts (6th edition) by Silberschatz, Korth, and Sudarshan (S/K/S)

Related; Database Systems

Non-Fiction Author Blog of the Day

2011-09-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

Sonya Huber

Chocolate and Chess- Book Recommendation

2011-09-06T08:14:00.000-07:00

Alex Bandy: Chocolate & Chess - Unlocking Lakatos

Maths and Engineering high in demand

2011-09-03T02:57:00.000-07:00

NYT special issue on graduate education;

Dr. Carnevale concludes that grad school is “the best place to ride out a recession” for those who can afford it and are young enough (under 35) to reap the long-term benefit, or who are in fields like health or social work where a master’s or certification is critical to advance. For new college graduates, he says, entering the current job market with a diminished starting salary and job description could compromise a lifelong career and earnings trajectory.

Think of grad school as a 40-year investment, Dr. Carnevale says. Over time, it can move you out of the rank and file into elite positions. The key is determining where the jobs and compensation are. Consider, in your calculation, these variables: institutional quality, tuition costs, debt incurred, and the economic outlook over all and for particular specialties. So-called opportunity costs — lost wages and possible career advancement had you stayed in the job market — also change the cost-benefit picture...

The rule of thumb for borrowing, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of finaid.org, is that debt should never exceed starting salary. Ideally, he adds, it should be half that.

“I’d be the last person to say not to pursue a dream,” Mr. Kantrowitz says. “But do it with your eyes open.”

Telling Students Expectations about the Course before hand

2011-08-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

Think the following is a good idea to implement;

Students in the class are co-producers of class discussions and collective learning. For this to happen, class members need to listen carefully to one another and build on or critique prior comments. Many of you have worked in some of the companies we will be discussing or have worked with the relevant technologies. If past experience is any guide, each of you has unique insights and experiences that can help your classmates better understand the issues we are discussing. The discussion should be a conversation in which all participants recognize that they have an obligation to advance our understanding of the issue at hand. Your contributions to this learning process will be appraised in addition to the specific content that you contribute.

Because this course relies heavily on class participation for its success, class norms and expectations regarding class behavior are very important. Attendance at every class is required. Also, please come to class fully prepared to discuss the readings. I create a reading guide for each session with questions that you should review in advance and should be ready to answer.

Students who are thoroughly prepared for each session will benefit the most from this class. What's more, they add to the learning of their classmates. Hence, if you don't feel comfortable with these expectations, then this is not a good course for you to take this semester.

Free IT Courses at Stanford

2011-08-27T00:51:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Databases

What background do I need?
The course does not assume prior knowledge of any specific topics, however a solid computer science foundation -- a reasonable amount of programming, as well as knowledge of basic computer science theory -- will make the material more accessible

Machine Learning

What are the pre-requisites for the class?
You should be able to program in at least one programming language and have a computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) with internet access.

Artificial Intelligence

The Economics of Information Technology

2011-08-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

Interesting course from MIT OCW ;The Economics of Information: Strategy, Structure and Pricing;
Shapiro, Carl, and Hal Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic to the Network Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780875848631.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Adam Saunders. Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is Reshaping the Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780262013666.

Saloner, Garth, and A. Michael Spence. Creating and Capturing Value: Perspectives and Cases on Electronic Commerce. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. ISBN: 9780471410157.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Brian Kahin, eds. Understanding the Digital Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780262523301.

Liebowitz, Stan. Re-Thinking the Network Economy: The True Forces that Drive the Digital Marketplace. New York, NY: American Management Association, 2002. ISBN: 9780814406496.

Varian, Hal, Joe Farrell, and Carl Shapiro. The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780521605212.

Eric Mazur on Teaching

2011-08-08T12:53:00.000-07:00

In 1991, Mazur began designing an instructional strategy for teaching called peer instruction. In 1997, he published a book called Peer Instruction: A User's Manual which provides details on this strategy.

Peer Instruction (PI) has been found to be more beneficial than class-wide discussion or lecture. In fact, according to an article in the March/April 2009 edition of Complexity, over 90% of instructors who have tried PI plan to continue to use it and incorporate it more into teaching.[1] The seating arrangement plays an important role in the outcome of this method. For example, when low-performing students are seated in the front, their chance to do better increases. Meanwhile, the results of high-performing students who are seated in the back are not affected. In addition, when high-performing students are seated in the outer four corners of the classroom, the performance of the class as a whole increases.

Want to study AI under Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig

2011-08-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Hurry up and sign up before the deadline.

Stanford has been offering portions of its robotics coursework online for a few years now, but professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are kicking things up a notch (okay, lots of notches) with next semester's CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. For the first time, you can take this course, along with several hundred Stanford undergrads, without having to fill out an application, pay tuition, or live in a dorm

Marketing Plans- very basics

2010-11-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

How to do a Marketing Plan for a Marina

Marketing Plan Checklist

View more presentations from Richard Graves & Associates.

What's Payback Period?

2010-11-15T14:42:00.000-08:00

Basics of Accounting Lessons- Payback Period

Payback period intuitively measures how long something takes to "pay for itself."

Related:
Solar Panels Payback Period

The Era of Digital Art

2010-11-11T23:22:00.000-08:00

Data Journalism Basics-how do you get a story from the data

2010-11-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

via Statistical Graphics

Related:
datajournalism.stanford.edu

Torrenting Textbooks

2010-09-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

Is this legal?

Torrent my Textbooks

Elementary Maths Teaching Resources Assorted

2010-08-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

Interactive Maths Puzzles

100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb

Maths Projects

Maths for America

The Coming Revolution in Language Learning

2010-07-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

See this post over at BH

A Portrait of Paul Erdös

2010-07-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

Random Lecture- Dynamic Programming

2010-07-23T14:43:00.001-07:00

Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing

2010-07-23T06:23:00.000-07:00

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

India's answer to MIT OpenCourseWare?

2010-07-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

Excellent set of videos from Indian IITs- National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.

Basics in Mathematics, Science and Engineering

Management Information System

Leadership

Management Science I

Mathematics 01 (Rating 10 out of 10)

Link to YouTube channel

The Creator of THE 99- Comics for Tolerance

2010-07-22T01:55:00.000-07:00

Dr. Naif A. Al-Mutawa

I grew up in a part of the world where George Orwell's Animal Farm was banned. It was also banned in the former Soviet Union. The Kremlin banned it because as a totalitarian regime, it did not want democratic messages to be spread within its borders. The censors in the USSR chose to go beneath the surface of the allegory, understand the message in the book and ban it accordingly. In my neck of the desert, it was banned because there was a pig on the cover. Go figure.

The Holy Qur'an was revealed in an Arabia that was alive with the richness of Jahiliya (pre-Islamic) period poetry. The miracle of the Qur'an was not only in its message, but also in the complexity of the syntax used to communicate that message. Its prose is unmatched in the history of the Arabic language. It is an absolute shame that the Qur'an continues to be held hostage by those who favour the idolatry of words over the depth of their meaning and the elasticity of the human intellect.

Bill Gates kids use Khan Academy videos

2010-07-20T12:34:00.000-07:00

An Ad of Soccer Greats

2010-07-18T04:14:00.000-07:00

First the Grip, Ready Position, Footwork, and then the Strokes

2010-07-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

Badminton Tip of the Day;

The most important skill to learn for beginners is the grip. This is the fundamental to stroke selection and the direction/trajectory of the shuttlecock. After the grip, the ready position. After that is the basic footwork to 4 corners and the return to the centre base. Lastly is the strokes.

But the technical skill of badminton takes years to learn. There are many scenarios, shot selection, guile, movements and most important maintaining dynamic balance, to be able to retrieve any shots quickly.

via blog Badminton Research

ACCA and CIMA on You Tube

2010-07-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

Richard Clarke Academy Belfast

I like the use of Mind Maps in the videos.

Artist of the Day - Norman Rockwell, the Buddhist Painter !

2010-07-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

Norman Rockwell;

“To me the most important part of Rockwell’s work is that it illustrates compassion and caring about other people,” the filmmaker George Lucas, who lives in Marin County, Calif., said recently. “You could almost say he was a Buddhist painter.”

Sunday Badminton Tips

2010-06-27T03:13:00.000-07:00

Assorted
Badminton Town
smashingmark

Badminton Life
Badminton Central

The Badminton Bible

Badminton tips by Prospeed Cheong Weng Kwai

Effective Collaboration with Google Wave

2010-06-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Educator’s Guide to Google Wave

Using Google Wave in the Foreign Language Classroom

Google Wave Available for Everyone

Google Wave Available for Teachers in Thailand

We have competition!

2010-06-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.

-College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube

I envy the Accountants

2010-06-12T01:52:00.000-07:00

An interesting source of free accounting resources- Open Tuition;

Our site was officially launched on 12 February 2008. At the moment we feature free materials for ACCA, AAT and also free Accountancy tutorials for Non-Accountants.

OpenTuition.com is dedicated to providing all accountancy students throughout the world with the resources they need to study for the major accountancy qualifications, completely free of charge. Providing high quality study materials, believing that your success is our success!

The Great Brain Race

2010-05-20T04:20:00.000-07:00

How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

The Charms of Mathematics and Assorted

2010-05-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

Random OCW course- The World of Mathematics, Tokyo University

Open Courseware Seach

2010-05-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

OCW Search- Economics

Mathematics

Physics

Statistics

Business Idea of the Day

2010-05-01T01:42:00.000-07:00

very, very rich people stay in reasonably small spaces on luxury yachts, and very, very rich people travel in extremely small spaces on Learjets

-Cool Minimalist Hotels

William Farr- the inventor of medical statistics?

2010-04-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

via NYT

The following bit about him was also interesting;

There was a major outbreak of cholera in London in 1849 which killed around 15000 people. Early industrialisation had made London the most populous city in the World at the time, and the River Thames was heavily polluted with untreated sewage. Farr subscribed to the conventional theory that cholera was carried by polluted air rather than water - the miasmic theory.

As a result of studying this outbreak, the physician John Snow proposed what is now known to be the actual mechanism for transmission - that people were infected by swallowing something and that it multiplied in the intestines.

There was another epidemic in 1853, and Farr gathered statistical evidence to try to support the miasmic theory. He demonstrated statistically that cholera was spread by polluted air by showing that the likelihood of dying of the disease was linked to the height that the victims lived above the River Thames. He interpreted this as support for the miasmic theory - the air at lower altitudes being dirtier. However he also obtained details of where different water companies drew their water, and generated statistics on the number of deaths per water company. He discovered that people supplied with water from two companies in particular- the Southwark & Vauxhall and the Lambeth water companies - which drew their water directly from the Thames were particularly likely to suffer. Although he did not agree with Snow's waterborne theory, he gave him a great deal of help in collecting data to support it; in particular by providing the addresses of people who had died.

There was a further epidemic in 1866, by which time Snow had died. Farr had by now come around to believe Snow's explanation. He produced a monograph which showed that mortality was extremely high for people who drew their water from the Old Ford Reservoir in East London.

We recommend the The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

Jiggling Atoms and more from Richard Feynman

2010-03-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

Games and Education

2010-02-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

What will interactive electronic media mean for personal identity and society over the next hundred years?

Maths Podcast of the Day

2010-02-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

In his book The Mathematician's Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it was this field which played a major role in the work of his younger colleague, Alan Turing, as he worked first to crack Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and then on one of the first computers.

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the many surprising and completely unintended uses to which mathematical discoveries have been put.

Download the podcast

Link of the Day

2010-01-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

UCTV on Nobel Laureates

Have your tail over the dashboard

2009-12-29T00:46:00.000-08:00

From a Way with Words

The Myths of Innovation

2009-12-28T00:35:00.000-08:00

Scott Berkun

Beating MIT OpenCourseWare- an interesting idea

2009-12-19T22:03:00.000-08:00

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?

Link of the Day

2009-12-07T01:38:00.000-08:00

The Learning Network- NYT

Visual Thinking Guides

2009-11-22T06:17:00.000-08:00

The Value of Visual Thinking in Social Business

View more documents from David Armano.

Science Podcast of the Day

2009-11-13T14:01:00.000-08:00

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIATION;

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)

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

Lecture of the Day- Douglass C. North

2009-03-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

Random Course Page

2009-03-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

Asian Business Environment

Game Theory Blogs

2009-03-25T03:49:00.000-07:00

Market Design

Algorithmic Game Theory

Peter Singer on Poverty

2009-03-24T03:26:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Peter Singer

comedycentral.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Mark Sanford

The Life You Can Save: Acting now to end world poverty

Andrew Gelman talk

2009-03-24T03:22:00.000-07:00

Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal

2009-03-20T10:54:00.001-07:00

Dan Ariely at TED

What Would Google Do?

2009-03-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

What Would Google Do?

Passion at Work

2009-03-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

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.

32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business

2009-03-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

Earvin "Magic" Johnson

The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America

2009-03-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America

Father of the Analysis of Algorithms

2009-03-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

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)

Improve your writing

2009-03-15T01:50:00.000-07:00

Online Writing Courses

Masonomics

2009-03-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

Management Reading for the Day

2009-03-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

"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

The History of Computing

2009-03-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small

2009-03-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

“Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small.”

Nash Equilibrium

2009-03-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Game Theory course from Yale

Link of the Day

2009-03-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

Mathematical Thinking

The Examined Life

2009-03-07T03:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Random Blogs

2009-03-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

GroundSwell

Digital Next

Buttonwood's Noteback

How We Drive

Lecture and Book Talk of the Day

2009-03-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

Animal Spirits: How Psychology Drives the Economy

Free read chapters- Banking and Finance

2009-03-02T03:44:00.000-08:00

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets

Sample Chapter 3, Asset Prices and Interest Rates (uncorrected page proof) from Ball’s Money, Banking, and Financial Markets

Sample Chapter 18, Financial Crises (uncorrected page proof) from Balls Money, Banking, and Financial Markets

See also Online Case Studies

The Two Cultures asscociated with Wine and Beer

2009-02-28T07:48:00.000-08:00

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.

How to be Persuasive

2009-02-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive.

A free read on FDI

2009-02-22T03:29:00.000-08:00

Foreign Direct Investment: Analysis of Aggregate Flows

the data are here

Random Econometrics course pages

2009-02-22T03:13:00.000-08:00

From Gary Koop;

Introductory Econometrics

A Non-technical Introduction to Regression

Analysis of Financial Data

Instructions for Empirical project
Sample Exam

Analysis of Financial Data (textbook)

A Course in Bayesian Econometrics

See more reviews of Economics books here.

The arrival of Homo Evolutis

2009-02-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

Accountancy Blogs

2009-02-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

ACCA Student Blogs

What are other good accountancy blogs?

Spreadsheet tools

2009-02-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

EditGrid

Google Docs

BadBlue

Zoho Docs

Development Lecture of the Day

2009-02-15T02:54:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey D. Sachs - "Achieving Global Cooperation on Economic Recovery and Long-term Sustainable Development"

The Super-Organism

2009-02-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

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.

The Leadership Challenge

2009-02-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

The Leadership Challenge

How can you know when someone is bluffing?

2009-01-26T05:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-25T07:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-01-25T06:26:00.000-08:00

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

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.