Cosby sweaters to raise money for charity

How ‘bout someone just donate the sweaters to good will and give the charity money. Who would want one of those 80s sweaters, Cosby or no Cosby?

Will someone please tell Kirk Kerkorian that he’s an old fart. The billionaire turned 91 last Friday and he’s going after Ford. At 91 can he really have big plans for the company, or does he just like fucking with people and buying incredibly big ass shit just to blow peoples minds?

Hording gasoline qualifies as a not so great speculation.

Gas hoarding eyed as cause of Dartmouth apartment fire –SouthCoastToday.com via BoingBoing.net via Consumerist

If you want to lock in gas prices, try buying a futures contract, or you could have just bought a Chrysler.

A new book about Michelangelo has an asking price of $155,000, no original artwork, just one seriously fancy ass book.

Buffett’s big bet –Fortune

Will a collection of hedge funds, carefully selected by experts, return more to investors over the next 10 years than the S&P 500?

That question is now the subject of a bet between Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and Protégé Partners LLC, a New York City money management firm that runs funds of hedge funds - in other words, a firm whose existence rests on its ability to put its clients’ money into the best hedge funds and keep it out of the underperformers.

Wine as commodity –Gaping Void

This is a comic, but the included commentary considering the magnitude of competition in the wine business begs the of whether or not today’s wines will ever be collectible. Collectibles get that way when people don’t think to collect the item when it’s created. Stamp collectible on something and it’s sure to never be.

Panos Bethanis Went $4.5 million in the Hole to Buy Back His Company –Inc.

He had founded the company five years earlier but had sold a majority stake to a pair of venture capital firms in 2005. Now, with the company struggling, Bethanis saw an opportunity to get his company back.

For Bethanis, then 31, regaining control of DirectoryM was partly a matter of pride. Though he still had a 3 percent stake and a seat on the board, the investors had removed him from the CEO post, leaving him with no meaningful management role. In fact, he had started a new company, Interaction Media Group, or IMG, that offered a similar product. Now he wanted to combine the two companies, which he believed would speed IMG’s growth but would cost a bucket of money and pose big risks.

Lord knows I’ve been stuck in this vortex many a time.

Related reading:

Sleeping and Trading –Daily Speculations

Briefly Speaking, from Victor Niederhoffer –Daily Speculations

There are many speculators who have an inclination to trade during night hours. Such behavior exposes one to the possibility of premature death, according to a study of Penev et al “chronic circadian desynchronization…”.

Seth Roberts’ fascinating self-experiments –Boing Boing links to Aether

…for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, “a new idea in sleep research.” Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food.

Mentally Ill, or Just Tired? –Utne Reader

Missing a night’s sleep can cause people’s brains to act like they have a psychiatric illness, according to the New Scientist. The lack of sleep can disrupt the parts of the brain that control people’s emotions and fear. It’s similar to the type of brain disruption associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s Not Sleep, But It’ll Do –Utne Reader

The toughest time to fall asleep is often when you really need to. Not getting enough sleep can lead to short-term memory loss, impairing skills needed in high-stress situations. The problem is that high-stress situations can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Scientists at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute think they’ve found a way to help.

When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing –PLoS Genetics

The correct functioning of the endogenous circadian clock enables organisms to anticipate daily environmental changes and temporally modify behavioral and physiological functions appropriately. All organisms maintain a large number of physiological variables (sleep-wake cycle, locomotor activity, temperature regulation, water/food intake, and levels of circulating hormones) under control of the circadian clock. There are well-known consequences of disrupted circadian function outside of the brain; metabolism, reproduction, and even longevity can be adversely affected when the means of determining time of day are altered at a molecular level.

How One Smoker Quit -Freakonomics

A few weeks ago, we posted an item about an ad executive in Australia named James Hurman who auctioned off his smoking habit, agreeing to pay a steep fine (about $800) for every cigarette he smoked after the auction closed. He wound up selling the contract, he writes, “for NZ $300 [about US $240] to somebody at the agency where I work — someone close enough to know if I owe them!”

People will speculate on anything these days.

How Fairness Is Wired In The Brain -ScienceDaily.com

Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions.

“The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair,” Quartz says. This observation, he adds, suggests that “our basic impulse to be fair isn’t a complicated thing that we learn.”

This may explain why greedy people generally seem to be associated with the cruel and heartless, or rather the other way ’round, people lacking emotion can be greedy without concern for fairness, as there is less emotional response to unfairness. Think CEOs.

Taste for Quick Boost Tied to Taste for Risk -NYT

Health researchers have identified a surprising new predictor for risky behavior among teenagers and young adults: the energy drink.

Getting Good -Scienceblogs.com

I realized that writing is no different than any other craft or skill. It takes time and effort and the ability to tolerate lots of mistakes. You need to write lots and lots of bad sentences before you can begin to write some good sentences.

My experiment with smart drugs -Authors site

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Frankincense lowers anxiety in mice -Boing Boing

In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression.

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain -NYT

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

Video Games Can Make Us Creative If Spark Is Right -ScienceDaily.com

Video games that energize players and induce a positive mood could also enhance creativity, according to media researchers.

“You need defocused attention for being creative,” said S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State. “When you have low arousal and are negative, you tend to focus on detail and become more analytical.”

I happened on an article about black swans, as Nassim Taleb had recently been speaking at a CFA (Chartered Financial Androids) function and a reporter for the Financial Times was in attendance, blogging, not reporting, because as we all know the two are very different. I wondered with all the talk of recession, and with The Black Swan having been on the New York Times bestseller list, whether people had adopted the term. A quick search of Google News brought back several articles, but hardly a widespread adoption.

Why not? I mean this is a bestseller we’re talking about with Black Swan plastered on the cover in big, bold, black letters over a non invasive white back ground. People talked about who cut the cheese and chicken soup for at least six months, and we had to hear about the 7 Hobbits of Highly Effective People for the entire 90s. Well, Nassim doesn’t tell people what they want to hear, nor does he provide much in the way of solutions that people are agreeable to. He’s a bubble burster. Essentially, avoiding a black swan is akin to avoiding a hurricane, move to the mountains, so from the readers perspective it really says, we’re screwed. People aren’t willing to give up a little comfort today to avoid a future risk that they cannot anticipate or even identify.

In a sense, Black Swan speaks more to the people we entrust to manage our savings than to the masses. I say savings because that’s how we think of the money we put in mutual funds these days, even though the government does not classify it as such for the purposes of calculating savings rates. That’s why I think we should refer to ourselves not as savers or investors, but savestors. Black Swan says modern risk management practices suck. And they do. They suck really bad.

I know, I worked for really big insurance companies for a number of years and the people in charge of calculating risk there all had really big heads and minds shut tighter than a submarine. There’s no way anything remotely qualitative was going to find it’s way in there. Is it really any wonder so many banks and insurance companies are in financial trouble today?

For a decade Nassim and other financial thinkers have been pointing out the problems with VAR (value at risk) and other tools used by the quantitative risk management set. Did they listen? Apparently, not. Banks and insurance companies are run by risk robots and chartered financial androids information reporting up to MBA Cyborgs.

But hey, here’s a guide to getting around one possible black swan: Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. Tips include weaponry effective against zombie attacks, keeping your head as in your wits. I’m adding to this, if they are brain eating zombies then wear a helmet, duh. These techniques might also be effective on the disgruntled actuary who loses his job and his mind then decides to shoot up the office building. Since no actuary has every been laid off before, you know they won’t take it very well. That is, unless the insurance companies and banks decide they need even more actuaries and CFAs to manage their risk.

Links:

Only now are our money managers considering the not so quantitative:

After subprime fiasco, risk models may weigh human behavior


Quantitative methods remain, but social sciences added to mix

A failure to properly evaluate the risk and pricing of collateralized debt obligations and other structured debt products was one of the problems that brought turmoil to the securitization market last year.

Industry experts are now saying market participants shouldn’t rely exclusively on mathematical models but should also use the social sciences to understand behaviors—of home owners, for instance. They’re also calling for more disclosure and more transparency from market participants.

Duh

The Good Stuff: Nassim Taleb, Author Of “The Black Swan” Interview

Looking For the Black Swan

Buffett Vs. The Black Swan

Seeing the black swans coming

So if Taleb is so clever…

The market for collectibles related to the mysterious, mischievous,  and much maligned alcohol Absinthe is hot. An original Absinthe poster recently went for $18,000 on eBay. The antiques at Absinthe Originals, such as this original bistro match striker, are quite pleasing to the eye.

This one’s sold, but other equally hip items are available.

You don’t have to read French to see that this poster (asking price between $7,000 – $12,000) says if you drink wine you will be handsome and virulent, if you drink alcohol you will be haggard and unkempt, wine: your organs are plump, booze: they shrivel into prunes, wine: gently go to sleep, booze: you keel over and die.

The computer model that once explained the British economy

A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor.

Speaking of early computers I just happened on what must be the origin of the term “black box”. These stock tickers were literally black boxes.

Black Box Stock Tickers

The Black Box Ticker hit Wall Street around December of 1930.  The Teletype Corporation began developing the technology around 1927, and after the crash of October 1929, stock brokers needed a faster, more reliable machine. By 1934, The New York Quotation Company had switched almost exclusively to the black box ticker.

Venture Capital Wear

Learning from our mistakes? Flies can do it.

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

This guy Allan Snyder, sticks a magnet up to a persons head and turns them into savants, for real.

In addition to co inventing a wearable computer to predict where a roulette ball will land with an accuracy good enough to turn $1 into $1.44, way back in the 70s no less, Doyne Farmer has also done a ton of research on the markets. Also see: The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory

Investors’ mood is not key, but consumer psychology is

The Mind of Chinese Men: the Anxiety of Disorientation