Quotations and comments from "Tiger Woman on Wall Street" - Winning Business Strategies from Shanghai to New York and Back by Junheng Li
"My conviction that the market is not efficient < > contradicts one of the great canons of modern finance theory: < > Inefficiency exists because accurate information takes time to travel and surface .."
" .. China is essentially caught in a prison of its own success: the staggering and unprecedented achievement of lifting 500 million people out of poverty in a bit more than 30 years."
"By shorting a stock you are effectively expressing your opinion that the business has a risk or flaw that the rest of the market doesn't yet see."
" .. there are two types of short candidates: hypes and frauds."
"In 2009 < > to stave off the impact of the global financial crisis, China pulled its stimulus trigger and released a $4 trillion package for large fiscal projects."
"The world was impressed, < > Commentators everywhere forecast the decline of America, and some even went as far as to make the case that state capitalism should be the new model for the modern era." China was relatively untouched by the 2008 financial crisis and following recession. However, Junheng Li goes into considerable detail in describing China's social problems that she believes will prevent China from taking world leadership completely away from the United States.
"Changes in a stock's market value are typically driven by expectations of a company's earnings - profits distributable to shareholders - quarter by quarter."
Towards the end of her book Junheng Li recounts the very informative history of KFC{Kentucky Fried Chicken} in China. This history includes a description of China's traditional 100-day yellow free range chickens and America's 45-day white "shoebox" chickens. Although America seems to exceed China in numerous "human rights" issues, this "chicken history" would be disquieting for more sensitive animal rights advocates.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Experimental Blog # 179
Quotations and comments from "You Are Here" - From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray and "Dragnet Nation" - A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin
From "You Are Here":
"As I read the street map on my smartphone, the map also read me, broadcasting my movements < > Its server computers timed my footsteps, noted my detours < > A permanent record of our movements over days, months and years, these maps can reveal the most salient details of our lives - political and religious beliefs, suspicious friendships, bad habits."
" ...every cell phone is a little homing beacon that gives the phone company a rough idea of the phone's location. < > it was the decision to build GPS into hundreds of millions of commonplace phones that transformed the technology from a costly curiosity to an everyday necessity < > anybody could own a cheap device that would tell her exactly where she was and exactly how to get where she wanted to go."
" .. GPS was born of the US military's Cold War quest to deliver devastating firepower to exactly the right spot, anywhere on earth."
"Skyhook works where GPS can't - in urban canyons or inside thick concrete walls < > Skyhook markets a hybrid service that combines GPS and Wi-Fi data, offering whichever will give the most accurate result at a given moment."
Our location by latitude, longitude, and altitude is identified by the Internet protocol{IP} addresses of our internet connected devices, sometimes "static" and other times "dynamic".
"For centuries people have been able to disappear. < > the twentieth century made it nearly impossible to live the anonymous life."
"Thanks to our mastery of location, we may never be truly invisible again."
From "Dragnet Nation":
"Dragnets that scoop up information indiscriminately about everyone in their path used to be rare: < > But technology has enabled a new era of supercharged dragnets that can gather vast amounts of personal data with little human effort."
"The rise of indiscriminate tracking is powered by the same forces that have brought us the technology we love so much - powerful computing on our desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones."
"The combination of massive computing power, smaller and smaller devices, and cheap storage has enabled a huge increase in indiscriminate tracking of personal data."
From "You Are Here":
"As I read the street map on my smartphone, the map also read me, broadcasting my movements < > Its server computers timed my footsteps, noted my detours < > A permanent record of our movements over days, months and years, these maps can reveal the most salient details of our lives - political and religious beliefs, suspicious friendships, bad habits."
" ...every cell phone is a little homing beacon that gives the phone company a rough idea of the phone's location. < > it was the decision to build GPS into hundreds of millions of commonplace phones that transformed the technology from a costly curiosity to an everyday necessity < > anybody could own a cheap device that would tell her exactly where she was and exactly how to get where she wanted to go."
" .. GPS was born of the US military's Cold War quest to deliver devastating firepower to exactly the right spot, anywhere on earth."
"Skyhook works where GPS can't - in urban canyons or inside thick concrete walls < > Skyhook markets a hybrid service that combines GPS and Wi-Fi data, offering whichever will give the most accurate result at a given moment."
Our location by latitude, longitude, and altitude is identified by the Internet protocol{IP} addresses of our internet connected devices, sometimes "static" and other times "dynamic".
"For centuries people have been able to disappear. < > the twentieth century made it nearly impossible to live the anonymous life."
"Thanks to our mastery of location, we may never be truly invisible again."
From "Dragnet Nation":
"Dragnets that scoop up information indiscriminately about everyone in their path used to be rare: < > But technology has enabled a new era of supercharged dragnets that can gather vast amounts of personal data with little human effort."
"The rise of indiscriminate tracking is powered by the same forces that have brought us the technology we love so much - powerful computing on our desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones."
"The combination of massive computing power, smaller and smaller devices, and cheap storage has enabled a huge increase in indiscriminate tracking of personal data."
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Experimental Blog # 178
Quotations and comments from "Uncharted - Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture" by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel
" ..Google has digitized more than 30 million books. That's about one in every four books ever published."
" ..nearly all irregular verbs are very frequent. Although only about 3 percent of verbs are irregular, the ten most frequent verbs are all irregular." The authors explain that very old, but common, verbs were less subject to change when a new linguistic rule was adopted for new verbs. "The use of -ed to signify the past tense emerged in Proto-Germanic, a language spoken between 500 and 250 BCE in Scandinavia."
" ..our idea was to create a shadow dataset containing a single record{n-gram} for every word and phrase that appeared in English books." Except for those "that had been written only a handful of times." These measures are to avoid copyright infringement and "hacking".
" ..what we measure with n-grams is not fame itself but a simplification, a fame facsimile."
The authors have compiled a list of people born from 1800 to 1949 that they call the 150 valedictorians; whose full names have turned up the most number of times in their data base of 500 billion words. However, it seems that the most famous, not great and certainly not most popular, are those people who are often referred to by their last names only.
The top 10, paired with their "valedictorians" are: #1- Adolf Hitler{1889- Jawaharlal Nehru}, #2- Karl Marx{1818- with self}, #3- Sigmund Freud{1856- Woodrow Wilson}, #4- Ronald Reagan{1911- with self}, #5- Joseph Stalin{1879- Albert Einstein}, #6- Vladimir Lenin{1870- Frank Norris}, #7- Dwight Eisenhower{1890- Ho Chi Minh}, #8- Charles Dickens{1812- with self}, #9- Benito Mussolini{1883- William Carlos Williams}, and #10- Richard Wagner{1813- Henry Ward Beecher}.
" ..Google has digitized more than 30 million books. That's about one in every four books ever published."
" ..nearly all irregular verbs are very frequent. Although only about 3 percent of verbs are irregular, the ten most frequent verbs are all irregular." The authors explain that very old, but common, verbs were less subject to change when a new linguistic rule was adopted for new verbs. "The use of -ed to signify the past tense emerged in Proto-Germanic, a language spoken between 500 and 250 BCE in Scandinavia."
" ..our idea was to create a shadow dataset containing a single record{n-gram} for every word and phrase that appeared in English books." Except for those "that had been written only a handful of times." These measures are to avoid copyright infringement and "hacking".
" ..what we measure with n-grams is not fame itself but a simplification, a fame facsimile."
The authors have compiled a list of people born from 1800 to 1949 that they call the 150 valedictorians; whose full names have turned up the most number of times in their data base of 500 billion words. However, it seems that the most famous, not great and certainly not most popular, are those people who are often referred to by their last names only.
The top 10, paired with their "valedictorians" are: #1- Adolf Hitler{1889- Jawaharlal Nehru}, #2- Karl Marx{1818- with self}, #3- Sigmund Freud{1856- Woodrow Wilson}, #4- Ronald Reagan{1911- with self}, #5- Joseph Stalin{1879- Albert Einstein}, #6- Vladimir Lenin{1870- Frank Norris}, #7- Dwight Eisenhower{1890- Ho Chi Minh}, #8- Charles Dickens{1812- with self}, #9- Benito Mussolini{1883- William Carlos Williams}, and #10- Richard Wagner{1813- Henry Ward Beecher}.
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