Information Processing

I think the article , which discusses the new books by Woit and Smolin, is very fair, and it ends with a surprisingly mature recapitulation ...

Kindler, gentler hedge fund manager Barry Ritholz writes about the Amaranth blowup. He puts some of the blame on investors, for not underst...

I was in Berkeley over the weekend and saddened to learn that the Telegraph Ave location of Cody's Books has closed after 41 years. I sp...

Income inequality in the United States is at historic highs, after significant increases in the last decade. For example, in 2003-2004 the ...

The Times reports on nouveau riche parents in China and the special classes and activities lavished on their kids, such as private golf les...

Bloomberg is reporting that Citadel, another mega fund started by former physics major (Harvard) Ken Griffin, is negotiating to take over Am...

Shades of Long Term Capital Management! $5B gone in one month thanks to leverage. Please ignore that the trader responsible was a 32 year ol...

I just received the following press release (?!?) from S.T. Yau's attorney (actually, via a public relations firm, presumably retained b...

Very nice article in the New Yorker summarizing recent research. Your inner lizard brain is loss averse and reacts emotionally to unfair ba...

Stevie Cohen is profiled in this long WSJ article . He's had an uncanny intuition for predicting short term market movements. But he see...

I'm back in Eugene, and very jetlagged. Quite disorienting, the past week. I went from a physicist enclave in a mediterranean walled cit...

Stopped in NYC on the way home. Great to be back in the states. Perhaps I am being unfair but Europe looked a bit backward and run down by c...

The Erice meeting has ended, but I'm still here for a couple of days. Yesterday I rented a car with two colleagues and drove to Agrigent...

The Landscape lectures at Erice are over. I'm not very optimistic about the anthropic principle --- for example, see my paper with Grae...

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...