Welcome to Your Viral World | The Loom | Carl Zimmer for Discover Magazine
...Line up all the viruses on Earth end to end (go ahead, I’ll wait), and they’ll stretch over 10 million light years....Is this conceivable? I know our planet is a seething ball of virii, but even a single light year is a very great length.
E.T. voted greatest ever children's film
1. E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial
2. Toy Story
3. Mary Poppins
4. Lion King
5. Wizard of Oz
6. Bambi
7. Back to the Future
8. Shrek
9. Finding Nemo
10. Labyrinth
11. 101 Dalmatians
12. Aladdin
13. Beauty and the Beast
14. The Goonies
15. The Jungle Book
16. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
17. Alice in Wonderland
18. Home Alone
19. Ice Age
20. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
21. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
22. Annie
23. Cinderella
24. Monsters Inc
25. Madagascar
26. Sound of Music
27. Wallace and Gromit – The Wrong Trousers
28. Mrs Doubtfire
29. Babe
30. Beethoven
31. Beetlejuice
32. Black Beauty
33. The Little Mermaid
34. The Railway Children
35. A Bug's Life
36. Dumbo
37. Wall-E
38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
39. A Little Princess
40. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
41. Jurassic Park
42. Kung-Fu Panda
43. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
44. Billy Elliot
45. Lady and the Tramp
46. Neverending Story
47. Short Circuit
48. Sleeping Beauty
49. An American Tail
50. Chicken Run
Burton Malkiel wrote “A Random Walk down Wall Street” in 1973. He believed the prices of publicly traded assets reflected all publicly available information. John Bogle, influenced by Malkiel, created index funds to reduce the risks of random market fluctuations and to profit from this rational pricing.
Peter Lynch wrote “One up on wall street” in 1989. He didn’t agree with Malkiel; he felt that “local knowledge” and personal experience could detect under and overpriced shares.
I suspect each was more or less right for his era. That is, I suspect share prices in the mid to late 1960s were more or less rationally priced. I suspect share prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not rationally priced, and that the anomalies were potentially discoverable by a rational investor with limited resources.
Of course by the time each person wrote their book, their era had passed.
Which brings me to our current era.
Since Lynch’s book we have experienced 20 years of economic turbulence fundamentally driven, I suspect, by the commercialization of the microprocessor and the industrialization of what we once knew as the third world. As a side-effect of these fundamental changes, including the collapse of the fourth estate, we have shifted towards the upper end of the historic scale of corporate and governmental corruption.
So what is the rational small investor strategy of today?
Of course I don’t know. My only personal insight is that I don’t yet see much short term correlation between share prices and the value of most of the goods and services I buy. Companies that deliver lousy value seem to track with their industry. The exceptions are a few companies that are intensely monitored (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc); I think they are rationally priced but they are, of course, very volatile.
This would suggest we’re still in a Lynch era, where one should be able to use local knowledge to detect anomalies and profit from them. Over the past 10 years though you couldn’t detect the anomalies using the “local knowledge” he described – you had to be an insider who was able to sniff out fraud and corruption. In the past decade some have done very well detecting evidence of corruption and de facto fraud, and shorting companies like Lehman.
Of course by the time people like me decide shorting corrupt corporations is a good strategy, its time has passed.
I where are we today? I’m guessing that we’re in transition back to a Malkiel era. So for a few years shorting corruption might still work, but increasingly share prices will be a random walk. Even if index funds were a crummy investment over the past decade (everything was, except shorting fraud), this might be their time again. I wouldn’t mind some 1960s style dull dividend paying companies though.
Of course by the time anyone writes the “Random walk” or “One up” book of our era, that strategy will have passed into history.
Oh, and if you take investment advice from me, you totally deserve your impending financial ruin.
This Is Your Faulty Brain, On a Microchip - Memory forever - Gizmodo
... Starting in your 20s—not old age—behavioral evidence suggests that you enter a linear cascade of general cognitive decline....The Gizmodo article, clearly written by a young chap, imagines we'll outsource our recall and declining cognition to an onboard chip (vs., say Google). Sure.
This decline is notably seen in tasks that are highly mentally demanding, like speed of processing (how quickly you handle incoming information), attention, working memory (how well you manipulate and keep information active in your mind), and, of course, long term memory.
In real life, these effects are seen in everything from how long it takes to learn a new skill to how quickly you can recall a factoid....
The battle of the sexes: Face off | The EconomistSo non-geeks really do need to destroy civilization. This explains the GOP.
... Mating preferences, too, vary with a society’s level of economic development. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Ben Jones and Lisa DeBruine of Aberdeen University, in Scotland, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine, themselves a married couple, examined what might be called the Deianira paradox. Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess—his jealous wife, Deianira, accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful. Deianira’s predicament is a woman’s ultimate dilemma. In a man, the craggy physical characteristics associated with masculinity often indicate a strong immune system and thus a likelihood of his producing healthier offspring than his softer-featured confrères will. But such men are also more promiscuous and do not care as much about long-term relationships, leaving women to raise their kids alone.
Nowadays, sound parenting is often more important to the viability of a man’s offspring than Herculean strength. That, some researchers suspect, may be changing the physical traits that women look for in a mate, at least in some societies. A study carried out in 2004, for example, discovered that women in rural Jamaica found manly types more desirable than did women in Britain, which led to questions about whether those preferences were arbitrary or whether women in different parts of the world might be adapting to circumstances that place different emphasis on manliness in the competitive calculus.
Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine therefore looked to see if there is an inverse relationship between women’s preference for masculine features and national health. Sure enough, they found one. In environments where disease is rampant and the child-mortality rate is high, women prefer masculine men. In places like America and Britain, where knowing how to analyse health-care plans is more important than fighting off infection, effeminate men are just as competitive...
... Neither wealth nor mating pattern had much impact on women’s preferences for manly men. Disease rates, by contrast, seemed to be directly related to how they went about choosing a mate—the healthier the society, the less women valued masculinity. Hygiene and wimps, it seems, go hand in hand....
Under the current system of incentives, only demonic health insurance companies can prosper…
Demons And Demonization - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
The usual suspects have been attacking Obama for “demonizing” insurance companies; but saying that people do terrible things isn’t demonization if they do, in fact, do terrible things.
And health insurers do, because they have huge financial incentives to act in an inhumane way — most obviously, by revoking coverage when people get sick, using whatever rationale they can devise.
Read this report by Murray Waas on Assurant Health (previously called Fortis), which used a computer algorithm to identify every client with HIV, then systematically revoked coverage on the flimsiest of grounds — and appears to have systematically hidden any paper trail showing how it made its decisions…
… the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of rescissions, not just at Assurant but across the board, are, in fact, without justification…
… And to repeat what I and other have repeatedly explained, you need the whole package to make this work. You can’t end discrimination based on medical history unless you require that health as well as sick people have insurance, to broaden the risk pool. And you can’t mandate coverage unless you provide aid to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
Right now, we have a system that creates huge incentives for bad, one might say demonic, behavior: Assurant made $150 million by revoking coverage, almost always without cause…
In this system of incentives and a competitive marketplace, a virtuous corporation will lose out to one that follows the incentives. The virtuous corporation must either abandon virtue or die. Soon, only the demonic survive.
The same incentives, of course, apply in education. If a provider is judged by educational outcomes, the most successful strategy is to use “recission” to get rid of low performing students. Only the demonic survive.
We need to change the system.
Incidentally, it’s typical that the very first (asinine) comment on Krugman’s post is by someone who didn’t read the second to last paragraph. Eliminating patient discrimination while allowing patient choice on coverage timing is a recipe for bankrupting insurance companies. At that point,the patients are demonic.
We need the entire package.
Editorial - Rewriting History in Texas - NYTimes.comClearly a loss for Reason in Texas, but, really, there wasn't much to lose. Publishers have been anticipating this, textbooks are being designed so that Texas-specific editions can be inexpensively created.... The Texas Board of Education, notorious for its past efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools, has now moved to revise the social studies curriculum to portray conservative ideas and movements in a more positive light and emphasize the role of Christianity in the nation’s founding.
Breaking the Climate Debate Logjam: Scientific American
... The Wall Street Journal leads the campaign against climate science, writing editorials charging that scientists are engaged in a massive conspiracy. I have made repeated invitations to the Journal editors to meet with climate scientists publicly for an open discussion or debate, but all have been rebuffed...When the WSJ closes up, will their climate change dismissal and denial be seen as the fatal turning point? The moment at which tribal ideology made them worse than irrelevant?
... France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people's patterns of energy use. The tax is US$24 per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years...
