Information Processing

I'm at Caltech this weekend, for the wedding of one of my college roommates and to give a seminar (Monday) on monsters and black hole e...

This Economist article summarizes the current situation nicely. Notice the doomsday scenario in which bond insurers suffer a ratings reduct...

Since the Larry Summers debacle I've kept my eye out for relevant data on gender differences in mathematical ability. Finally I've ...

From the comments on the previous post More mark to model : It’s worse than you think. Even the top brass at the big C (our nations largest)...

Exactly what will certified accountants say about the balance sheets of Citi, Merrill, et al. at the end of the year? We may need a modifica...

Below are profiles of two serial entrepreneurs, Avi Rubin and Max Levchin. These are guys who have succeeded before but are still at it, sti...

Why the rough markets in August? Why the big losses for certain quant funds? This paper claims the following: 1) many funds are pursuing th...

Livestock cloning operations in the heartland! :-) Note even genetically enhanced male progeny display larger variance than female progeny. ...

My former PhD advisor gives an interdisciplinary lunch talk at the Berkeley faculty club and gets immediately blogged by Brad Delong! More ...

This NYTimes article describes the creation of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a $12.5B endowment from Ki...

From Slashdot . I don't know if there is AI (machine intelligence) involved, but it would be easy to set up that way... At Foo Camp I to...

The Times reports on a recent dinner hosted by Institutional Investor. NYTimes : Not since Michael Milken’s Predators’ Ball in the 1980’s h...

Via Calculated Risk , this Moody's data suggests that outright fraud is one of the main causes of high default rates on recent subprime ...

Congratulations to Bobby (Piyush) Jindal, govenor-elect of Louisiana. Does this photo remind you of Bobby Kennedy? NYTimes : A Son of Immigr...

Note: save your firm millions (billions) of dollars by using this free CDO price calculator. WSJ covers the origin of SIVs and the current ...

A special report from the Economist on innovation. Economist : JOHN KAO is an innovation guru described as “Mr Creativity” by this newspape...

Our seminar speaker yesterday was A.P. Balachandran, a distinguished theorist from Syracuse University. During lunch I asked him what the ef...

Shades of LTCM -- a big rescue operation organized in the background by the Treasury. NYTimes : Several of the world’s biggest banks are in ...

This morning I heard this interview on NPR with the author of The Indian Clerk , a fictionalization of Ramanujan's story. Since the aut...

Some economists view the equity risk premium as a major theoretical puzzle. US equities have significantly and consistently outperformed bo...

Many people lack standard cognitive tools useful for understanding the world around them. Perhaps the most egregious case: probability and s...

I'm in a New Scientist article entitled Universe explained by quantum randomness . I can't access the entire thing, since I don...

Here's an interesting paper by some Australian researchers. I wouldn't take all of their conclusions too seriously. For example, te...

I've had both of these on my shelf for some time, but haven't found time to write detailed reviews. Google's PageRank and Beyond...

The following is a real posting from Craigslist. The guy who replied is a VP at JP Morgan. I remember not so long ago the big thing for mone...