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}.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Experimental Blog #177
Notes and quotations from "Day of Empire - How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - And Why They Fall" by Amy Chua
" ...every single world power in history - was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. < > tolerance simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society - even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons."
"Because tolerance is a relative matter, even tolerated groups may be subject to harshly inequitable treatment."
"History shows that hyperpowers can survive only if they find ways to command the allegiance or at least the acquiescence of the foreign populations they dominate .."
"Achaemenid Persia was the first world-dominant power in history."
Other empires described at great length are: Imperial Rome, China's Tang Empire, the Great Mongol Empire, the Dutch Republic, China's Ming Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire{Muslim rulers with Hindu subjects}, and the British Empire.
"Whereas Achaemenid Persia was essentially just a war machine, Rome was also an idea. Inhabitants from the farthest reaches of the empire wanted to be - and became-"Roman." Along the empires remarkable 53,000-mile net work of paved roads and bridges that linked Britons to Berbers, one could find thousands of Roman baths, amphitheaters, and temples, built to the same specifications and filled with toga-clad Roman citizens."
"The Dutch are famous for many things - but these days it's often forgotten that the Dutch once presided over the world's preeminent maritime trading empire .."
"Nevertheless, the contributions of the Jews, Huguenots, and Scots - which would not have been possible without Britain's turn to tolerance - were not only disproportionate but pivotal."
Amy Chua's descriptions of Britain's relations and treatment of Ireland and India are quite stark and grim; as are many other details in this remarkable book.
" ...every single world power in history - was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. < > tolerance simply means letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society - even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons."
"Because tolerance is a relative matter, even tolerated groups may be subject to harshly inequitable treatment."
"History shows that hyperpowers can survive only if they find ways to command the allegiance or at least the acquiescence of the foreign populations they dominate .."
"Achaemenid Persia was the first world-dominant power in history."
Other empires described at great length are: Imperial Rome, China's Tang Empire, the Great Mongol Empire, the Dutch Republic, China's Ming Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire{Muslim rulers with Hindu subjects}, and the British Empire.
"Whereas Achaemenid Persia was essentially just a war machine, Rome was also an idea. Inhabitants from the farthest reaches of the empire wanted to be - and became-"Roman." Along the empires remarkable 53,000-mile net work of paved roads and bridges that linked Britons to Berbers, one could find thousands of Roman baths, amphitheaters, and temples, built to the same specifications and filled with toga-clad Roman citizens."
"The Dutch are famous for many things - but these days it's often forgotten that the Dutch once presided over the world's preeminent maritime trading empire .."
"Nevertheless, the contributions of the Jews, Huguenots, and Scots - which would not have been possible without Britain's turn to tolerance - were not only disproportionate but pivotal."
Amy Chua's descriptions of Britain's relations and treatment of Ireland and India are quite stark and grim; as are many other details in this remarkable book.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Experimental Blog # 176
Quotations and comments from "The Triple Package - How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld
"Indian Americans have the highest income of any Census-tracked ethnic group, almost twice the national average. Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans are not far behind."
"America's 5 to 6 million Mormons represent just 1.7 percent.{of the U.S. population} Yet a stunning number have risen to the top of America's corporate and political spheres."
"The U.S. Census Bureau used to compile data on religion, but this was largely discontinued after World War II, and today the Census is barred by law from asking mandatory questions about individuals' faith. < > But the fact is that Jews{who are apparently not Census-tracked} are the quintessential successful minority."
"Because the Census does not track religion, there's no authoritative measure of overall Jewish income."
"A few groups in America are not upwardly mobile because they don't want to be. The roughly two hundred thousand Amish living mainly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana are prime examples."
The "three unlikely traits" that the authors call "The Triple Package" are: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control. The authors also write about the superior economic group performances of the Cuban Americans of Miami and the more recent immigrants from the West Indies and Africa.
"Indian Americans have the highest income of any Census-tracked ethnic group, almost twice the national average. Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans are not far behind."
"America's 5 to 6 million Mormons represent just 1.7 percent.{of the U.S. population} Yet a stunning number have risen to the top of America's corporate and political spheres."
"The U.S. Census Bureau used to compile data on religion, but this was largely discontinued after World War II, and today the Census is barred by law from asking mandatory questions about individuals' faith. < > But the fact is that Jews{who are apparently not Census-tracked} are the quintessential successful minority."
"Because the Census does not track religion, there's no authoritative measure of overall Jewish income."
"A few groups in America are not upwardly mobile because they don't want to be. The roughly two hundred thousand Amish living mainly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana are prime examples."
The "three unlikely traits" that the authors call "The Triple Package" are: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control. The authors also write about the superior economic group performances of the Cuban Americans of Miami and the more recent immigrants from the West Indies and Africa.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Experimental Blog #175
Quotations and notes from "Like a Virgin" - How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex by Aarathi Prasad
" ..the Y chromosome, < > now has only around forty-five genes of the 1400-odd genes with which it began the human species."
"Most mutations, those mistakes in the combined DNA, arise in sperm."
"Recent estimates show that the rate of mutations in males compared to females is < > ten times higher in our primate, humans .."
"So even though the mother's genome still contains all the genes it takes to grow a complete baby from one of her eggs, only some of them are allowed to function. The same is true for some of the father's genes."
" .. many of these genes that are imprinted{only about 80 of the 23 thousand genes can be locked-up} dictate not what we will look like, but are able to manipulate the growth and nutrition of the foetus in the womb."
"It seems that sperm do more than just deliver packets of DNA into eggs - they regulate pregnancy itself."
" .. those eighty genes that are subject to imprinting{depending on whether they come from the father or the mother} have an important say in the development of our brains."
"Recent molecular analysis has shown that among people who carry defects or mutations in genes that are supposed to be imprinted, there is a surprisingly large incidence of cognitive, behavioural, neurological, and psychiatric conditions."
" ..the Y chromosome, < > now has only around forty-five genes of the 1400-odd genes with which it began the human species."
"Most mutations, those mistakes in the combined DNA, arise in sperm."
"Recent estimates show that the rate of mutations in males compared to females is < > ten times higher in our primate, humans .."
"So even though the mother's genome still contains all the genes it takes to grow a complete baby from one of her eggs, only some of them are allowed to function. The same is true for some of the father's genes."
" .. many of these genes that are imprinted{only about 80 of the 23 thousand genes can be locked-up} dictate not what we will look like, but are able to manipulate the growth and nutrition of the foetus in the womb."
"It seems that sperm do more than just deliver packets of DNA into eggs - they regulate pregnancy itself."
" .. those eighty genes that are subject to imprinting{depending on whether they come from the father or the mother} have an important say in the development of our brains."
"Recent molecular analysis has shown that among people who carry defects or mutations in genes that are supposed to be imprinted, there is a surprisingly large incidence of cognitive, behavioural, neurological, and psychiatric conditions."
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Experimental Blog #174
Quotations and notes from "The Quantum Ten" - A Story of Passion, Tragedy, Ambition, and Science by Sheilla Jones and "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics" - A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World by James Kakalios
From "The Quantum Ten":
"By the 1960s, the fruitfulness of the math-driven theory and experimentation began to wane. There have been no new fundamental laws of nature discovered since the 1970s ..."
" ... modern physicists would say mathematical logic is truth. Indeed, no idea in modern physics can be considered credible until it is validated by mathematical logic."
" ... this fundamental incomprehensibility of quantum physics has become the proverbial elephant in the living room."
"Enter Louis de Broglie. His wave theory assumed that if a wave could be a particle, a particle could also be a wave. And not only did light exhibit properties of wave/particle duality, so did matter."
"He{Einstein} wanted a physical theory that was based on an objective and visualizable external world, not one that was fundamentally probabilistic, acausal, and random."
" .. matrix mechanics precluded visualization ..."
"He{Schrodinger} believed that physics, at the microscopic and macroscopic levels, was intelligible .."
"{Heisenberg} espoused the view that a mathematical truth was the same as a physical truth, and that metaphors or images were to be shunned."
From "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics":
"There are three impossible things that we must accept in order to understand quantum mechanics:
Light is an electromagnetic wave that is actually comprised of discrete packets of energy.
Matter is composed of discrete particles that exhibit a wavelike nature.
Everything - light and matter - has an "intrinsic angular momentum," or "spin," that can only have discrete values."
"The Schrodinger equation plays the same role in atomic physics that Newton's laws of motion play in the mechanics of everyday objects."
"The Schrodinger equation requires us to know the forces that act on the atomic electrons in order to figure out where the electrons are likely to be and what their energies are."
"What Schrodinger discovered was the quantum analog of Newton's force={mass}x{acceleration}."
"In 1926 Schrodinger was able to mathematically translate one approach{his} into the other{Heisenberg's}, demonstrating that the two descriptions are in fact equivalent."
"Anything bigger than an atom or a small molecule has such a large mass that its corresponding de Broglie wavelength is too small to ever be detected."
"The quantum descriptions of Schrodinger and Heisenberg accurately account for the properties of a single atom ..."
From "The Quantum Ten":
"By the 1960s, the fruitfulness of the math-driven theory and experimentation began to wane. There have been no new fundamental laws of nature discovered since the 1970s ..."
" ... modern physicists would say mathematical logic is truth. Indeed, no idea in modern physics can be considered credible until it is validated by mathematical logic."
" ... this fundamental incomprehensibility of quantum physics has become the proverbial elephant in the living room."
"Enter Louis de Broglie. His wave theory assumed that if a wave could be a particle, a particle could also be a wave. And not only did light exhibit properties of wave/particle duality, so did matter."
"He{Einstein} wanted a physical theory that was based on an objective and visualizable external world, not one that was fundamentally probabilistic, acausal, and random."
" .. matrix mechanics precluded visualization ..."
"He{Schrodinger} believed that physics, at the microscopic and macroscopic levels, was intelligible .."
"{Heisenberg} espoused the view that a mathematical truth was the same as a physical truth, and that metaphors or images were to be shunned."
From "The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics":
"There are three impossible things that we must accept in order to understand quantum mechanics:
Light is an electromagnetic wave that is actually comprised of discrete packets of energy.
Matter is composed of discrete particles that exhibit a wavelike nature.
Everything - light and matter - has an "intrinsic angular momentum," or "spin," that can only have discrete values."
"The Schrodinger equation plays the same role in atomic physics that Newton's laws of motion play in the mechanics of everyday objects."
"The Schrodinger equation requires us to know the forces that act on the atomic electrons in order to figure out where the electrons are likely to be and what their energies are."
"What Schrodinger discovered was the quantum analog of Newton's force={mass}x{acceleration}."
"In 1926 Schrodinger was able to mathematically translate one approach{his} into the other{Heisenberg's}, demonstrating that the two descriptions are in fact equivalent."
"Anything bigger than an atom or a small molecule has such a large mass that its corresponding de Broglie wavelength is too small to ever be detected."
"The quantum descriptions of Schrodinger and Heisenberg accurately account for the properties of a single atom ..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)