Paul Brodsky & Lee Quaintance run QB Partners, a private macro-oriented investment fund based in New York. This month we identify the nexus of the current economic problems and propose a solution to fix them. We discuss why we think our proposal would work, why some policy makers probably alread...

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book for my birthday called Thought Contagion. I had not heard of the book or its subject matter, the science of memetics, but I was fascinated by what I read. Author Aaron Lynch explained, concisely and convincingly, how some of the most significant bel...

Blame for the global financial crisis has been cast upon government leaders, bankers, home owners, and quantitative analysts. In fact, mathematical models and formulas such as Black Scholes, Gaussian Copula, and VAR have received particular attention as culprits in this financial mess. And while the...

NY Times: ... “Options theory is kind of deep in some way. It was very elegant; it had the quality of physics,� Dr. Derman explained recently with a tinge of wistfulness, sitting in his office at Columbia, where he is now a professor of finance and a risk management consultant with Prisma Capita...

TNP Part IV Previous Post V. Distributed Representation A. A First Glance at Distributed Representation Above, when discussing the "Jets and Sharks" example, I mentioned that the hidden units represent individual people. This representation occurs not in virtue of any property or characteristic of t...

The discussion over quality in higher education and maintaining standards of academic excellence in American colleges took an ugly turn March 2nd when Harvard law professor and former Clinton Administration lightning rod Lani Guinier declared that standardized testing is racist. Guinier’s remarks ...

I was not born as a genius and not even an intelligent. It was only once in my whole life that I got 1st place in my class and it was in Standard 1. After that, I struggled a lot just to make sure I was in the top ten. Luckily, I got straight A in my UPSR. Everyone just worried with my result as I a...

I’ve finally pulled in all the old comments from the Blogspot blog. A painful process of semi-automated Atom to YAML+Textile conversion, and the resulting comments are not threaded, but they’re at least here now. As a side note, I’m really liking having my posts stored in a git rep...

Evidently, the first chord in the Beatles' "A Hard Days' Night" has proved a conundrum for musicians and music publishers for decades. You'll be relieved to know that mathematician Jason Brown has finally put this conundrum to bed . "Four years ago, Jason Brown was inspired by reading news coverage ...

It must be Google Week on Charlie Rose. Thursday, Rose interviewed product chief Marissa Mayer, and last night he had an hour-long conversation with CEO Eric Schmidt (embedded here, with a full transcript below). The wide-ranging interview touches upon everything from Google’s origins and how ...