Information Processing

Having a wonderful time here. The mediterranean climate and light are as wonderful as I remember from many years ago. Susskind and Douglas h...

I'm in Erice right now, so posting may (or may not) be interrupted depending on how exciting the talks are :-) hep-th/0608175 Spacetime ...

Get ready for more Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who called the tech bubble, coining the Greenspan-adopted term "irrational exuber...

The graph below may soon be infamous. Thanks to a correspondent with access to expensive analyst newsletters :-) In case you can't read ...

The New Yorker has a nice article on Perelman, his proof of the geometrization and Poincare conjectures, the politics surrounding the proof...

Bubbles last longer than you expect, and deflate faster than you expect. Has the US housing bubble finally popped? Will it be a hard, soft o...

More than you might want to know about volatility of the S&P500 index in this research article I've written with my PhD student Bria...

Asian-Americans are invisible. We're not a minority group. At least not to the politically correct intellectual contortionists at the NY...

The Times article excerpted below quotes studies questioning the value of investing in universities as engines of economic growth. It seems ...

Those funsters at Businessweek have another goofy bit about quants in their latest issue. (See their previous article Math Rules! and here ...

[ 2015: Updated information . ] I learned from the Caltech News alumni magazine that 17 Caltech alumni have won the Nobel prize, versus 25...

It looks like put/call volume ratios (suitably cleaned, subtracting market makers, etc.) have predictive value for the underlying stock. A m...

Former(?) particle theorist Michael Binger (PhD Stanford, perturbative QCD) is among the finalists at the 37th World Series of Poker in Las...

Buried in the article , which is mainly about blogging economists (and mentions a number our favorites, like the two Brads, but unfortunatel...

Brad Setser notes that China's dollar reserves will soon surpass the trillion mark, if they have not already. Where to invest all those...

From Economist's View , excerpts from a recent paper by Harvard economist Richard Freeman on how globalization is affecting worldwide la...

From Paul Kedrosky , the figure below was displayed by Microsoft's Craig Mundie at an analyst presentation. If the numbers are correct, ...

I want to recommend a book I've been reading recently, The Eighth Day of Creation by H.F. Judson. It's the most detailed intellectu...

This Times article describes controlled (should I say directed?) breeding experiments on small mammals such as foxes and rats performed by a...

Via Economist's View . I think Robert Reich's view is a bit too rosy, although his points are all well taken. Regarding point (1), t...

Some new data on genetic vs environmental influences on IQ in this recent Times magazine article. Until recently, twins studies could only e...

This Economist article describes backend problems in the rapidly growing market for credit derivatives. The idea of keeping track of billio...

Via an intrepid correspondent... the Times covers numerous areas where human "experts" are outperformed by machine intelligence. O...

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, affects a surprisingly large fraction (few percent) of the population. Those who suffer from it have diffi...

Herb Allen (of boutique investment bank Allen & Company) has traditionally run a summer retreat for the biggest movers and shakers in me...