From an article in the New York Times quoting George Dyson: Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary [...]
Is it just me, or are these logos clearly like Hebrew letters? They are supposed to be icons for Exchange, Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. But they have very little connection to that. They are NOT supposed to be connected to hebrew letters – pei, kuf, shin, and alef. But they are identical to that…
Here is an interesting article about the new frontier of automated trading. Algorithms tracking and reacting to market moves are no longer ‘fast enough.’ Increasingly, algorithms aggregate raw sentiments from newspapers and blogs and issues orders based on them, bypassing human interpretation. The system may indeed be at the cutting edge, but it is dangerously [...]
Amr Hamzawi provided an unusually frank self-admonition in Al Ahram Weekly about writing what his audience wanted to read, rather than what he truly felt, resorting to common scapegoats (ie, the West) rather than piercing through tougher truths. This problem is particularly acute amongst Arab academicians and commentators, but it plagues all societies to some [...]
Besides the fact that Jeff Sachs (the uber-economist) is a smart and good guy, I just realized he looks like Mark Wahlberg’s older brother (or young Dad). If you don’t believe me, watch him on the Fareed Zakaria GPS interview of Oct 12. But in the meantime this will have to do as proof:
You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight." – Warren Buffett Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos
From an email I got from my sister: Spirituality is a direct measure of how much joy we experience in our lives…It is not how much we pray, meditate, prostrate ourselves; it is in direct connection to how much joy we give to others that surround us, and how much joy we experience ourselves." – [...]
I just learned from Daniel Sachs about this think tank – the Glasshouse Forum – to encourage serious thinking towards a more enlightened version of capitalism, one that reflects on the dangers of rampant consumerism (same which we can now witness more clearly with the current financial crisis, not to mention related environmental consequences from [...]
From San Antonio Express News on the business of peace: Yvan Cournoyer, business development manager for H-E-B, said the South Texas grocer had known of Kind bars for some time and began selling them in select stores in 2002. “The bar became more prominent in the energy bar segment,” Cournoyer said. “Last year, it was [...]
Eytan Heller’s creative video to inspire people to visualize what could be in the Middle East in 2018 (part of our Imagine 2018 campaign) has been nominated as one of 24 finalists (out of several hundred contenders) for the Viral Video Awards. Check it out and vote for it. http://www.viralvideoaward.com/