seminal paper

pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

Symbols 169-176 breakthroughs needed in, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Waiting for a Breakthrough by mathematicians, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Experience clean design, Programming by Example compared to library design, Language and Design debugging considerations for, Theory and Practice designer’s preferences influencing, Theory and Practice environment influencing, Language and Design errors reduced by, Theory and Practice for handheld devices, Power or Simplicity for system programming, Power or Simplicity formalisms for mathematical, Language Design usefulness of, Unix and Its Culture implementation affecting, Language Design implementation considerations for, Designing a New Language, Theory and Practice implementation related to, Language and Design improvements to process of, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language influencing program design, Language Design inspiration for, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns personal approach for, Elementary Principles prototypes for, Designing a New Language scientific approach for, Designing a New Language, Theory and Practice, Growing a Language starting with small core set of functionality, Growing a Language, Proofreading Languages syntax choices for, Theory and Practice teams for democratic nature of, Feedback Loop user considerations, Language Design utility considerations, Language Design A A Note on Pattern Matching: Where do you find the match to an empty array (Falkoff), Elementary Principles A Programming Language (Iverson), Paper and Pencil abstraction in functional programming, A Functional Team in SQL, Feedback and Evolution agents, Beyond Informatics Aho, AWK Aho-Corasick algorithm, Computer Science automata theory, Computer Science command-line tools, Unix and Its Culture compilers course taught by, The Role of Documentation–The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation data size handled by AWK, The Life of Algorithms debugging, Language Design, The Role of Documentation documentation leading to better software design, The Role of Documentation–The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation domain, Unix and Its Culture file concept applied to Internet, Unix and Its Culture formalizing semantics of languages, Unix and Its Culture graphical interfaces, Unix and Its Culture hardware availability, The Life of Algorithms hardware efficiency, Unix and Its Culture improving programming skills, Language Design knowledge required to use AWK, Language Design large programs, The Life of Algorithms lex, Language Design portability of Unix, Unix and Its Culture programming, The Role of Documentation programming language design, Language Design programming languages, Unix and Its Culture purposes appropriate for use of AWK, The Life of Algorithms, Unix and Its Culture research in computer science, Computer Science role in AWK development, The Life of Algorithms security and degree of formalism, Unix and Its Culture teaching programming, Language Design theory and practice as motivation, Unix and Its Culture utility of programming language, Language Design yacc, Language Design Aho-Corasick algorithm, Computer Science algebraic language, The Goals Behind BASIC allocated memory, Compiler Design API design, Expedients and Experience, Feedback Loop, C# APL, APL character set for, Paper and Pencil, Elementary Principles collections in, Parallelism design, Elementary Principles design history of, Paper and Pencil, Elementary Principles general arrays in, Elementary Principles implementation on handheld devices, Paper and Pencil learning, Paper and Pencil lessons learned from design of, Legacy namespaces, Parallelism parallelism with, Parallelism–Legacy, Parallelism, Parallelism, Legacy, Legacy regrets about, Legacy resources used efficiently by, Paper and Pencil standardization of, Elementary Principles syntax for based on algebraic notation, Paper and Pencil, Elementary Principles simplicity/complexity of, Paper and Pencil, Elementary Principles, Elementary Principles teaching programming with, Elementary Principles APL\360, Paper and Pencil arbitrary precision integers, The Pythonic Way architects, Be Ready for Change aspect orientation, Learning and Teaching Aspect-Oriented Software Development with Use Cases (Jacobson; Ng), Learning and Teaching asymmetrical coroutines, The Power of Scripting asynchronous operation, Hardware audio applications, Language Design automata theory, Computer Science automatic code checking, Designing a Language AWK, AWK, The Life of Algorithms compared to SQL, Bits That Change the Universe initial design ideas for, Bits That Change the Universe large programs good practices for, The Life of Algorithms improvements for, Theory and Practice longevity of, Theory and Practice programming advice for, Designing a New Language programming by example, Programming by Example–Programming by Example, Programming by Example, Programming by Example, Programming by Example, Programming by Example, Programming by Example regrets about, Bits That Change the Universe AWT, Power or Simplicity B backward compatibility, Formalism and Evolution for potentially redesigned UML, Layers and Languages with Java, Power or Simplicity with JVM, Language and Design with UML, Language Design BASIC, BASIC comments, Language and Programming Practice compiler one pass for, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC two passes for, The Goals Behind BASIC design of considerations for, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC holding up over time, Language Design encapsulation, The Goals Behind BASIC hardware evolution influencing, The Goals Behind BASIC large programs, The Goals Behind BASIC lessons learned from design of, Language Design libraries, Language Design number handling, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC performance of, The Goals Behind BASIC teaching programming using, The Goals Behind BASIC True BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC variable declarations not required in, Compiler Design bitmap fonts, Designed to Last Booch, UML backward compatibility with UML, Language Design benefits of UML, UML body of literature for programming, Training Developers business rules, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns complexity and OOP, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns complexity of UML, UML concurrency, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns constraints contributing to innovation, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns creativity and pragmatism, Language Design design of UML, UML implementation code, UML language design, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns language design compared to programming, Language Design language design influencing programs, Language Design legacy software, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns OOP influencing correct design, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns percentage of UML used all the time, UML, Language Design redesigning UML, UML simplicity, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns standardization of UML, Language Design–Training Developers, Language Design, Language Design, Training Developers training programmers, Training Developers–Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns bottom-up design with Forth, The Forth Language and Language Design with Python, The Good Programmer Boyce, SQL, A Seminal Paper brown field development, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns bugs in language design, The Theory of Meaning business rules, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns C C as system programming language, Power or Simplicity longevity of, Legacy Culture Objective-C as extension of, Engineering Objective-C performance of, Power or Simplicity signedness in, Waiting for a Breakthrough size of code, Project Management and Legacy Software C#, C# as replacement for C++, Growing a Language debugging, C# design team for, C# evolution of, C# formal specifications for, C# Java as inspiration for, Designing a Language longevity of, Growing a Language user feedback for, Language and Design, C# C++ backward compatibility with C, Legacy Culture C# as replacement for, C# compared to Objective-C, Engineering Objective-C, Objective-C and Other Languages compatibility requirements of, The Pythonic Way complexity of, Engineering Objective-C concurrency support in, OOP and Concurrency evolution of, Growing a Language future versions of, Future lessons learned from design of, Future multithreading in, Designing a Language pointers in problems with, Designing a Language popularity of, Engineering Objective-C C++ 2.0, Future C++0x, OOP and Concurrency, Future Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), The Soundness of Theorems CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems), The Soundness of Theorems Celes, Lua Chamberlin, SQL complexity of SQL, Feedback and Evolution concurrent data access in SQL, The Language declarative nature of SQL, The Language design history of SQL, A Seminal Paper–A Seminal Paper, A Seminal Paper, A Seminal Paper, A Seminal Paper design principles of SQL, The Language determinism, Feedback and Evolution Excel compared with relational database systems, Feedback and Evolution external visibility of, Feedback and Evolution injection attacks on SQL, Feedback and Evolution knowledge required to use SQL, Feedback and Evolution languages, A Seminal Paper popularity of SQL, Feedback and Evolution scalability of SQL, Feedback and Evolution standardization of SQL and XQuery, XQuery and XML usability tests on SQL, Feedback and Evolution user feedback on SQL, Feedback and Evolution users of SQL, Feedback and Evolution views in SQL, The Language XML, XQuery and XML XQuery, XQuery and XML character set, Paper and Pencil, Elementary Principles class system, The Haskell Language classes, Project Management and Legacy Software closure in Lua, The Power of Scripting in SQL, The Language Codd, SQL, A Seminal Paper code browsing, The Pythonic Way code examples in programming manuals, Breeding Little Languages code reuse, Compiler Design collections design implications of, Parallelism large unstructured, Parallelism operations on each element of, Elementary Principles color, Designed to Last colorForth, The Forth Language and Language Design command line AWK used with, Unix and Its Culture compared to graphical interface, Designing a New Language composing programs on, Unix and Its Culture limitations of, Bits That Change the Universe resurgence of, Legacy Culture tools for, Unix and Its Culture comments, Application Design, The Theory of Meaning in BASIC, Compiler Design in C#, C# role of, Experience communication among interactive agents, Beyond Informatics role in informatics, Beyond Informatics compilers quality of code in, Application Design writing, The Forth Language and Language Design, Compiler Design, The Role of Documentation completeness, The Language complex algorithms, The Life of Algorithms components, Objective-C and Other Languages, Objective-C and Other Languages, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Growing a Language computer science current problems in, The Future of Computer Science future of, Interfaces to Longevity problems of, Beyond Informatics, Components, Sand, and Bricks research in, Beyond Informatics role of mathematics in, Elementary Principles, Computer Science, Experience, Beyond Informatics whether it is a science, Experience, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon computer science education approaches for, Bits That Change the Universe, Spreading (Functional) Education beginning programming, The Pythonic Way, Elementary Principles, The Goals Behind BASIC, Compiler Design functional languages, Spreading (Functional) Education multiple languages, Language and Programming Practice, Breeding Little Languages teaching languages, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC, Language and Design teamwork in, Unix and Its Culture–The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation topics needed in, Education and Training, Be Ready for Change concurrency, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns adding to language, Language and Design analyzing concurrent systems, The Soundness of Theorems approaches for, Hardware challenges of, The Future of Computer Science, The Future of Computer Science design affected by, Concurrency framework handling, The Future of Computer Science functional languages and, A Bit of Reusability in C++, OOP and Concurrency in C++0x, OOP and Concurrency in Lua, The Power of Scripting in Python, Multiple Pythons in SQL, The Language language design affected by, The Future of Computer Science network distribution and, OOP and Concurrency OOP and, OOP and Concurrency, Objective-C and Other Languages, A Bit of Reusability pattern matching using, Computer Science requirements for, Concurrency conditionals, Application Design consistency, Feedback and Evolution constraints, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns cooperative multithreading, Hardware Corasick, Computer Science Cox, Objective-C components, Objective-C and Other Languages, Components, Sand, and Bricks–Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon concurrency and OOP, Objective-C and Other Languages configurability, Objective-C and Other Languages educational background of, Education encapsulation, Components, Sand, and Bricks garbage collection, Objective-C and Other Languages lessons learned from design of Objective-C, Objective-C and Other Languages, Components, Sand, and Bricks lightweight threads, Components, Sand, and Bricks multiple inheritance, Objective-C and Other Languages namespaces not supported in Objective-C, Objective-C and Other Languages Objective-C as extension of C and Smalltalk, Objective-C and Other Languages, Objective-C and Other Languages Objective-C compared to C++, Objective-C and Other Languages OOP increasing complexity of applications, Objective-C and Other Languages quality of software, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Education security of software, Components, Sand, and Bricks single inheritance in Objective-C, Objective-C and Other Languages superdistribution, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Education trusting software, Components, Sand, and Bricks CPAN, Community, Community creative arts, Training Developers creativity as role of programmer, Growing a Language importance of, Learning and Teaching in programming, Language Design necessity of, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns opportunity to use, Knowledge stimulating in programmers, Bits That Change the Universe tension from, Language Design customer vocabulary, The Forth Language and Language Design D Dahl, An Inspired Afternoon data models, A Seminal Paper data sizes, Programming by Example debugging code C#, C# design considerations for, Designing a Language ease of, Language Design, Designing a New Language functional programming and, Trajectory of Functional Programming language design considerations for, Theory and Practice, Growing a Language Lua, Language Design PostScript, Interfaces to Longevity Python, Multiple Pythons debugging languages, The Pythonic Way declarations, Parallelism Design by Contract, An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon design patterns, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Gamma; Helm; Johnson; Vlissides), Layers and Languages determinism, Feedback and Evolution Dijkstra, An Inspired Afternoon documentation of programming language, Breeding Little Languages documentation of programs comments, Application Design, Experience, C# content of, The Theory of Meaning importance of, Programming by Example leading to better software design, The Role of Documentation programmers writing, C# domain-driven design, The Forth Language and Language Design, Language Design, Language Design, Unix and Its Culture, Concurrency domain-specific languages (DSL), Growing a Language disadvantages of, Language and Design, Growing a Language existence of, C# growth of, Breeding Little Languages Lua used as, Language Design moving to general-purpose, Language programs as, Elementary Principles UML redesigned as set of, UML, UML dynamic languages benefits of, The Good Programmer security and, The Good Programmer dynamic typing, The Pythonic Way E ECMA standardization for C#, C# economic model of software, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon Eiffel, Eiffel adding features to, Managing Growth and Evolution backward compatibility for, Managing Growth and Evolution evolution of, Managing Growth and Evolution–Managing Growth and Evolution, Managing Growth and Evolution, Managing Growth and Evolution, Managing Growth and Evolution, Managing Growth and Evolution extensibility of, Reusability and Genericity forward compatibility for, Managing Growth and Evolution history of, An Inspired Afternoon–An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon information hiding, Reusability and Genericity proofs in, Proofreading Languages reusability of, Reusability and Genericity streaming serialization, Proofreading Languages embedded applications Forth for, The Forth Language and Language Design emergent systems, Layers and Languages encapsulation, Components, Sand, and Bricks advantages of, Language Design in BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC engineering links to informatics, Beyond Informatics programming as, Learning and Teaching error messages in Lua, Language Design quality of, Theory and Practice errors handling, Trajectory of Functional Programming language design reducing number of, Theory and Practice reduced by language design, Theory and Practice Excel, Feedback and Evolution extensibility, The Language F Falkoff, APL collections, Parallelism, Parallelism, Parallelism computer science, Elementary Principles design of APL longevity of, Paper and Pencil language design, Elementary Principles language design influencing program design, Elementary Principles parallelism, Parallelism–Legacy, Legacy Perl influenced by APL, Legacy pointers not used in APL, Parallelism programmers, Paper and Pencil relational database design influenced by APL, Parallelism resources, Paper and Pencil The Design of APL, Paper and Pencil Figueiredo, Lua comments, Experience design of Lua, Experience dialects of users, Language Design environments changing design of Lua, Language Design error messages in Lua, Language Design hardware availability, Experience limited resources, Language Design local workarounds versus global fixes in code, Language Design mathematics, Experience mistakes in Lua, Experience programming in Lua, The Power of Scripting programming language design, Language Design–Language Design, Language Design, Language Design, Language Design, Language Design, Language Design, Language Design regrets about Lua, Experience security capabilities of Lua, The Power of Scripting success, Experience teaching debugging, Experience testing Lua, Language Design VM for Lua, Language Design file, Unix and Its Culture file handling, Parallelism first-class functions, The Power of Scripting font scaling in PostScript, Designed to Last for loop, Experience formal semantics benefits for language design, A Seminal Paper not used for PostScript, Designed to Last usefulness of, Formalism and Evolution–Formalism and Evolution, Formalism and Evolution, Formalism and Evolution, Formalism and Evolution formal specifications for C#, C# for languages, Language Design necessity of, Designing a Language Forth, Forth, The Forth Language and Language Design application design with, Application Design–Application Design, Application Design, Application Design, Application Design, Application Design, Application Design asynchronous operation, Hardware comparing to PostScript, Designed to Last conditionals in, Application Design design of longevity of, The Forth Language and Language Design error causes and detection, The Forth Language and Language Design, Application Design for embedded applications, The Forth Language and Language Design I/O capabilities of, Hardware indirect-threaded code, The Forth Language and Language Design loops in, Application Design maintainability of, Application Design minimalism in design of, The Forth Language and Language Design porting, Hardware programmers receptive to, The Forth Language and Language Design programming in, Application Design readability of, The Forth Language and Language Design, The Forth Language and Language Design reusable concepts of meaning with, The Soundness of Theorems simplicity of, The Forth Language and Language Design, The Forth Language and Language Design, Application Design syntax of small words, The Forth Language and Language Design, The Forth Language and Language Design word choice in, Application Design fourth-generation computer language, The Forth Language and Language Design frameworks, Knowledge functional closures, The Haskell Language functional programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming–The Haskell Language, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, The Haskell Language abstraction in, Trajectory of Functional Programming concurrency and, A Bit of Reusability debugging in, Trajectory of Functional Programming error handling in, Trajectory of Functional Programming longevity of, Trajectory of Functional Programming parallelism and, Trajectory of Functional Programming popularity of, Trajectory of Functional Programming Scala for, Concurrency side effects, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming usefulness of, Bits That Change the Universe functions first class, The Power of Scripting higher-order, The Soundness of Theorems G garbage collection, Objective-C and Other Languages in JVM, Designing a Language in Lua, The Power of Scripting in Objective-C, Objective-C and Other Languages in Python, Multiple Pythons general arrays, Elementary Principles general-purpose languages, Growing a Language generic programming as alternative to OOP, OOP and Concurrency generic types, The Haskell Language genericity, Reusability and Genericity generics in Java, The Haskell Language Geschke, PostScript bugs in ROM, Designed to Last computer science, Research and Education concatenative language, Designed to Last design team for PostScript, Designed to Last hardware considerations, Designed to Last, Interfaces to Longevity history of software and hardware evolution, Research and Education Imaging Sciences Laboratory, Research and Education kerning and ligatures in PostScript, Designed to Last longevity of programming languages, Interfaces to Longevity mathematical background, Designed to Last popularity of languages, Interfaces to Longevity PostScript as language instead of data format, Designed to Last programmer skill, Designed to Last two-dimensional constructs, Designed to Last web use of PostScript, Standard Wishes Gosling adding to Java, Feedback Loop array subscript checking in Java, Power or Simplicity AWT, Power or Simplicity backward compatibility with Java, Power or Simplicity C stacks, Designing a Language C# inspired by Java, Designing a Language complexity, Power or Simplicity complexity of Java, Power or Simplicity computer science, Designing a Language concurrency, Concurrency–Designing a Language, Designing a Language debugging, Designing a Language documentation, Designing a Language error prevention and containment in Java, A Matter of Taste, Designing a Language formal specifications, Designing a Language freeing source code to Java, Feedback Loop garbage collection, Designing a Language Java EE, Power or Simplicity JIT, Power or Simplicity JVM satisfaction with, A Matter of Taste language design affected by network issues, Power or Simplicity language design influencing software design, Designing a Language language designed for personal use of, Designing a Language languages designed by, A Matter of Taste Moore’s Law, Concurrency performance, A Matter of Taste pointers in C++, Designing a Language programmers, Designing a Language references in Java, Designing a Language Scala, Concurrency, Designing a Language simplicity and power, Power or Simplicity system programming languages, Power or Simplicity user feedback for Java, Designing a Language virtual machine for Java, A Matter of Taste GOTO statements, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC graphical interface limitations of, Unix and Its Culture H half-toning for color, Designed to Last Halloween problem, The Language handheld devices, Power or Simplicity hardware availability of, The Life of Algorithms, Breeding Little Languages, Programming by Example computational power of, Hardware considerations for, Designed to Last innovation driven by, Interfaces to Longevity predicting future of, Engineering Objective-C, Engineering Objective-C requirements for concurrency, Hardware viewing as a resource or a limit, Hardware Haskell, Haskell class system for, The Haskell Language competing implementations of, Formalism and Evolution evolution of, Formalism and Evolution–Formalism and Evolution, Formalism and Evolution, Formalism and Evolution influencing other languages, The Haskell Language list comprehensions, The Haskell Language team designing, A Functional Team–Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming type system for, The Haskell Language, The Haskell Language, The Haskell Language, The Haskell Language, The Theory of Meaning Hejlsberg, C# backward compatibility with JVM, Language and Design comments in C#, C# computer science, The Future of Computer Science debugging, Growing a Language domain-specific languages, Growing a Language, The Future of Computer Science dynamic programming languages, The Future of Computer Science higher-order functions, Language and Design, The Future of Computer Science implementing and designing languages, Language and Design language design, Growing a Language leveraging existing components, Growing a Language personal themes in language design, Language and Design programmers, The Future of Computer Science programming language design, Language and Design–Growing a Language, Language and Design, Language and Design, Language and Design, Language and Design, Language and Design, Growing a Language, Growing a Language safety versus creative freedom, Growing a Language simplicity in language design, Growing a Language teaching languages, Language and Design higher-order functions, The Future of Computer Science higher-order functions in ML, The Soundness of Theorems Hoare, An Inspired Afternoon HOPL-III: The development of the Emerald programming language, OOP and Concurrency HTML, Standard Wishes Hudak functional programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming–The Haskell Language, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, The Haskell Language Haskell’s influence on other languages, The Haskell Language language design influencing software design, The Haskell Language teaching programming and computer science, Spreading (Functional) Education Hughes functional programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming–The Haskell Language, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, The Haskell Language hybrid typing, The Pythonic Way I I/O, Hardware Ierusalimschy, Lua closures in Lua, The Power of Scripting code sharing with Lua, Language Design comments, Experience computer science, Experience concurrency with Lua, The Power of Scripting debugging Lua, Language Design extensibility of Lua, Language Design feature set complete for Lua, Language Design first-class functions in Lua, The Power of Scripting fragmentation issues with Lua, Language Design implementation of language affecting design of, Language Design limitations of Lua, The Power of Scripting limited resources, Language Design number handling by Lua, The Power of Scripting programmers, Experience simplicity of Lua, Language Design success, Experience upgrading Lua during development, Language Design user feedback on Lua, Language Design VM for Lua, Language Design implementation, An Inspired Afternoon indirect-threaded code, The Forth Language and Language Design informatics definition of, Beyond Informatics inheritance, Compiler Design injection attacks, Feedback and Evolution intelligent agents for programming, Knowledge interface design, Expedients and Experience, Transformative Technologies Internet as representation of agents, Beyond Informatics Iverson, APL J Jacobson, UML benefits of UML, UML, UML complexity of UML, UML, UML computer science, Learning and Teaching designing UML, UML DSLs, UML Ericsson, Learning and Teaching future possible changes to UML, UML implementation code, UML legacy software, The Role of the People Object-Oriented Software Engineering, Learning and Teaching programming, Learning and Teaching, Knowledge programming approaches in different parts of the world, Learning and Teaching programming knowledge linked to languages, UML programming methods and processes, The Role of the People SDL influencing improvements to UML, UML simplicity, Knowledge size of project determining usefulness of UML, UML social engineering, The Role of the People teams for programming, Learning and Teaching use cases, Learning and Teaching Java, Java AWT and, Power or Simplicity Java EE, Power or Simplicity Javadoc tool, Designing a Language JavaScript, Interfaces to Longevity, Standard Wishes JIT, Power or Simplicity Jones formal semantics, Formalism and Evolution functional programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming, Trajectory of Functional Programming teaching computer science, Spreading (Functional) Education JVM new languages built on, Designing a Language popularity of, A Matter of Taste K kanji characters, Designed to Last Kemeny, BASIC Kernighan, AWK backward compatibility versus innovation, Legacy Culture C, Legacy Culture C++, Legacy Culture command line, Legacy Culture domain-specific languages (DSL), Breeding Little Languages hardware availability, Breeding Little Languages implementation considerations for language design, Legacy Culture language design style of, Language Design large systems, Designing a New Language learning programming languages, Computer Science little languages, Legacy Culture OOP, Designing a New Language programmers, Breeding Little Languages programming first interest in, Breeding Little Languages programming language manuals, Breeding Little Languages programming languages, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language rewriting programs, Legacy Culture success, Breeding Little Languages Tcl/Tk, Transformative Technologies teaching debugging, Breeding Little Languages testing, Transformative Technologies upgrading, Transformative Technologies user considerations in programming, Breeding Little Languages Visual Basic, Transformative Technologies writing text, Breeding Little Languages kerning, Designed to Last knowledge transfer, Learning and Teaching, The Role of the People, Knowledge, Be Ready for Change, Be Ready for Change Kurtz, BASIC algebraic language, The Goals Behind BASIC comments in BASIC, Language and Programming Practice compilers, Compiler Design debugging code, Language Design design of BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC, Compiler Design encapsulation, Language Design language design influencing program design, Language and Programming Practice learning programming, The Goals Behind BASIC libraries, Language Design, Language Design mathematical formalism, Language Design OOP, Language and Programming Practice polymorphism, Compiler Design productivity when programming, Work Goals programming languages, Language and Programming Practice simplicity of languages, The Goals Behind BASIC single-pass compiler for BASIC, Compiler Design success in programming, Work Goals teaching programming, Compiler Design True BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC users, Work Goals, Work Goals visual and audio applications, Language Design Visual Basic, Language Design Visual Basic as object-oriented language, Language Design words used in languages, Language Design L language toolkit, The Forth Language and Language Design lazy evaluation, Trajectory of Functional Programming, The Haskell Language LCF, The Soundness of Theorems limits of, The Soundness of Theorems legacy software, Bits That Change the Universe, Theory and Practice approaches for, Project Management and Legacy Software, The Role of the People, Training Developers preventing problems of, Project Management and Legacy Software, Components, Sand, and Bricks problems of, Hardware less is more philosophy, Expedients and Experience levels of abstraction, Using UML lex as transformative technologies, Transformative Technologies lexical scoping, Language libraries as method for extending languages, Unix and Its Culture design of, Unix and Its Culture ligatures, Designed to Last lightweight threads, Components, Sand, and Bricks line numbers in BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC, Language Design Lisp level of success of, Waiting for a Breakthrough list comprehensions, The Haskell Language little languages, Growing a Language loops alternatives to, Elementary Principles in Forth, Application Design Love, Objective-C appropriate uses of Smalltalk, Engineering Objective-C classes, Project Management and Legacy Software distributed teams, Project Management and Legacy Software hardware, Engineering Objective-C, Engineering Objective-C languages new, Growing a Language legacy software, Project Management and Legacy Software maintaining software, Project Management and Legacy Software managers understanding of languages, Project Management and Legacy Software Objective-C as extension of C and Smalltalk, Growing a Language Objective-C compared to C++, Engineering Objective-C programmers advice for, Project Management and Legacy Software programming, Engineering Objective-C real-life experience, Education and Training simplicity in design, Project Management and Legacy Software success of a project, Project Management and Legacy Software teaching complex technical concepts, Education and Training uses of Objective-C, Engineering Objective-C Lua, Lua, The Power of Scripting feedback from users regarding, Language Design platform independence of, Language Design resources used by, Experience testing features of, Language Design VM choice of ANSI C for, Language Design debugging affected by, Language Design register-based, Language Design M M language, Language Design, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns Make utility, Transformative Technologies mathematical formalism in language design, Language Design pipes used for, Unix and Its Culture mathematicians, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Experience mathematics importance of learning, Theory and Practice role in computer science, Elementary Principles, Computer Science, Bits That Change the Universe, Experience, Beyond Informatics metalanguages for models, The Soundness of Theorems Méthodes de Programmation (Meyer), An Inspired Afternoon Meyer, Eiffel analysis required before implementation, Proofreading Languages concurrency and OOP, An Inspired Afternoon Design by Contract, An Inspired Afternoon, An Inspired Afternoon genericity, Reusability and Genericity information hiding in Eiffel, Reusability and Genericity language design, Proofreading Languages languages influencing programs, An Inspired Afternoon mathematical versus linguistic perspective for programming, Proofreading Languages multilingual background of, Proofreading Languages objects, An Inspired Afternoon philosophies of programming, An Inspired Afternoon program provability, Proofreading Languages reusability, Reusability and Genericity seamless development, Proofreading Languages small versus large programs, Proofreading Languages specification and implementation, An Inspired Afternoon structured versus OO programming, Proofreading Languages microprocessors, Application Design millenium bug, The Theory of Meaning Milner, ML bugs, The Soundness of Theorems communication among agents, Beyond Informatics computer science, Beyond Informatics concurrent systems, The Soundness of Theorems defining as informatic scientist, Beyond Informatics informatics, Beyond Informatics language design, The Theory of Meaning language design influencing program design, The Soundness of Theorems languages specific to each programmer, The Theory of Meaning levels of models, The Soundness of Theorems logic expressed by ML, The Soundness of Theorems mathematics, Beyond Informatics paradigms, The Theory of Meaning programs, The Theory of Meaning purpose of ML, The Theory of Meaning structural problems in programs, The Theory of Meaning teaching theorems and provability, The Soundness of Theorems theory of meaning, Beyond Informatics ubiquitous systems, Beyond Informatics undecidability in lower levels of models, The Soundness of Theorems minimalism, The Forth Language and Language Design ML, ML formal specification of, The Theory of Meaning role of, The Soundness of Theorems type system for, The Theory of Meaning model-driven development, Proofreading Languages models for systems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, Beyond Informatics Moore, Forth concurrency, Hardware elegant solutions, The Forth Language and Language Design indirect-threaded code in Forth, The Forth Language and Language Design language design, Application Design legacy software, Application Design operating systems, The Forth Language and Language Design parallel processing, The Forth Language and Language Design resuming programming after a hiatus, The Forth Language and Language Design stack, Hardware teamwork in programming, Application Design words, The Forth Language and Language Design, The Forth Language and Language Design, Application Design Moore’s Law, Concurrency multicore computers, Application Design multiple paradigms in Python, The Pythonic Way multithreading as precursor to parallel processing, The Forth Language and Language Design cooperative, Hardware Java frameworks for, Concurrency mathematical software and, Concurrency problems in C++ with, Designing a Language synchronization primitives for, Concurrency music, Education and Training, Growing a Language, Training Developers N namespaces in APL, Parallelism Objective-C not supporting, Objective-C and Other Languages National Instruments Lab View, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns NetBeans, Designing a Language networked small computers, Application Design networks distribution of, OOP and Concurrency influencing software design, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon SOAs and, Components, Sand, and Bricks superdistribution and, Components, Sand, and Bricks Ng, Learning and Teaching number handling in BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC in Lua, The Power of Scripting in Python, The Pythonic Way O object-oriented programming (OOP) concurrency and, OOP and Concurrency, A Bit of Reusability correct design influenced by, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns generic programming as alternative to, OOP and Concurrency good design using, OOP and Concurrency limited applications of, Growing a Language objects handled outside of language, An Inspired Afternoon reusability and, A Bit of Reusability scalability of, A Bit of Reusability, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns success of, A Matter of Taste usefulness of, Language and Programming Practice, Designing a New Language uses of, Proofreading Languages using well, A Matter of Taste with Visual Basic, Language and Programming Practice Objective-C, Objective-C single inheritance, Objective-C and Other Languages objects, Theory and Practice open source model, Quality As an Economic Phenomenon open source projects, Interfaces to Longevity open standards, Interfaces to Longevity operating systems, The Forth Language and Language Design, Hardware Oracle, A Seminal Paper orthogonality, Feedback and Evolution P parallel processing, The Forth Language and Language Design parallelism in APL, Elementary Principles–Legacy, Parallelism, Parallelism, Parallelism, Legacy uses of, Components, Sand, and Bricks parser for Lua, Language Design patch utility, Transformative Technologies pattern matching algorithms for, Computer Science evolution of, The Life of Algorithms pattern movement, Be Ready for Change, Layers and Languages patterns, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal), The Pythonic Way performance of BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC practical implications of, A Matter of Taste Perl, Perl APL influencing, Parallelism community participation in, Community–Evolution and Revolution, Community, Community, Community, Evolution and Revolution context in, Language–Language, Language, Language, Language CPAN for, Community dual licensing, Community evolution of, Language, Language, Evolution and Revolution, Evolution and Revolution, Evolution and Revolution, Evolution and Revolution human language principles influencing, The Language of Revolutions, Language multiple ways of doing something, The Language of Revolutions purposes of, The Language of Revolutions scoping in, The Language of Revolutions syncretic design of, Language transition from text tool to complete language, The Language of Revolutions version 6, The Language of Revolutions, Evolution and Revolution, Evolution and Revolution Peters, The Pythonic Way, The Good Programmer physical processes, The Soundness of Theorems pi calculus, The Soundness of Theorems Pike, Breeding Little Languages pointers compiler handling, Compiler Design polyglot virtual machines, Language and Design polymorphism, Compiler Design postfix operators, The Forth Language and Language Design, The Forth Language and Language Design PostScript, PostScript as concatenative language, Designed to Last design decisions for, Designed to Last fonts, Designed to Last for Apple graphics imaging model, Designed to Last for NeXT graphics imaging model, Designed to Last formal semantics not used for, Designed to Last future evolution of, Designed to Last JavaScript interface, Interfaces to Longevity kerning in, Designed to Last print imaging models, Designed to Last purposes of, Designed to Last writing by hand, Designed to Last pragmatism and creativity, Language Design productivity of programmers language affecting, Growing a Language programmer quality affecting, Project Management and Legacy Software programming language affecting, Theory and Practice when working alone, Work Goals productivity of users, The Language, Feedback and Evolution, Feedback and Evolution programmers all levels of, The Pythonic Way good, The Pythonic Way, Application Design, Research and Education hiring, The Good Programmer improving skills of, Bits That Change the Universe knowledge of, Knowledge, Be Ready for Change paradigms influencing, The Theory of Meaning productivity of, Programming by Example recognizing good, Experience, Education and Training teams of Design by Contract helping, An Inspired Afternoon distributed, Project Management and Legacy Software education for, Designing a Language effectiveness of, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns importance of, Application Design in classroom, Unix and Its Culture, The Role of Documentation, The Role of Documentation skills required for, Education and Training users as, Knowledge, Be Ready for Change programming analysis in preparation for, Compiler Design, Proofreading Languages approaches to, Learning and Teaching as engineering, Learning and Teaching by example, Theory and Practice, Programming by Example, Programming by Example compared to language design, Theory and Practice compared to mathematical theorems work, Bits That Change the Universe, Programming by Example compared to writing text, Breeding Little Languages components in, Objective-C and Other Languages, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks hardware availability affecting, Programming by Example linguistic perspective of, Proofreading Languages mathematical perspective of, Proofreading Languages nature of, Hardware resuming after a hiatus, The Role of Documentation users, Breeding Little Languages programming language design, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Designing a New Language, Legacy Culture programming languages adding features to, Language and Design evolution of, Future, The Pythonic Way, Language Design, Engineering Objective-C, Growing a Language, Growing a Language, Growing a Language, Growing a Language, Growing a Language experiments of, Language extensibility of, Expedients and Experience, Unix and Its Culture, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Growing a Language families of, The Theory of Meaning general-purpose, Designing a New Language, Waiting for a Breakthrough growth of, Feedback Loop implementation of, Experience interface for, Transformative Technologies linguistics as influence on, Language little making more general, Legacy Culture, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Growing a Language resurgence of, Legacy Culture longevity of, Unix and Its Culture new, Growing a Language number of in use, Growing a Language productivity affected by, Theory and Practice, Growing a Language safety of, Growing a Language size of, Unix and Its Culture strengths of, Designing a New Language teaching languages, Language and Design testing new features of, Designing a New Language theory of meaning for, Beyond Informatics usability of, Using UML validating, Beyond Informatics programs as domain-specific languages, Elementary Principles beauty or elegance of, Language Design complexity of, A Bit of Reusability, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns computer’s ability to state meaning of, The Theory of Meaning legacy, Project Management and Legacy Software local workarounds versus global fixes, Bits That Change the Universe maintainability of, Bits That Change the Universe, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Education and Training, Project Management and Legacy Software performance of, Programming by Example problems in, Programming by Example revising heavily before shipping, Transformative Technologies rewriting, Waiting for a Breakthrough size of, Designing a New Language written in 1970s, Hardware protocols, Objective-C and Other Languages provability, The Soundness of Theorems, The Soundness of Theorems proving theorems, The Soundness of Theorems, The Theory of Meaning, The Theory of Meaning Python, Python adding features to, The Pythonic Way, The Pythonic Way, The Pythonic Way bottom-up versus top-down design, The Good Programmer concurrency with, Multiple Pythons design process using, The Good Programmer dynamic features of, The Good Programmer elegance philosophy for, The Pythonic Way, The Good Programmer experts using, The Pythonic Way garbage collection, Multiple Pythons lessons learned from design of, Expedients and Experience macros in, Multiple Pythons maintainability of, The Good Programmer multiple implementations of, Multiple Pythons–Multiple Pythons, Multiple Pythons, Multiple Pythons, Multiple Pythons multiple paradigms in, The Pythonic Way new versions of, The Pythonic Way novices using, The Pythonic Way prototyping uses of, The Good Programmer searching large code bases, Expedients and Experience security of, The Good Programmer simple parser used by, Multiple Pythons strict formatting in, Multiple Pythons type of programmers using, The Pythonic Way Python 3000, The Good Programmer Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP), The Pythonic Way Pythonic, The Pythonic Way Q Quill, Feedback and Evolution R RAD (rapid application development), Future readability, The Forth Language and Language Design refactoring, OOP and Concurrency Reisner, Feedback and Evolution relational databases, Parallelism research groups, Research and Education, Research and Education resilience, Feedback and Evolution resources limited, Experience reusability, Reusability and Genericity and OOP, A Bit of Reusability, A Bit of Reusability and SOA, A Bit of Reusability rule-based technology, Knowledge Rumbaugh, UML background of, Be Ready for Change benefits of UML, Using UML change, Symmetric Relationships communication facilitated by UML, Using UML computer science, Be Ready for Change concurrency, A Bit of Reusability implementation code, Using UML lessons learned by design of UML, Be Ready for Change pattern movement, Layers and Languages programming, Be Ready for Change programming knowledge linked to languages, Be Ready for Change purposes of UML, Using UML redesigning UML, Layers and Languages, Layers and Languages reusability and OOP, A Bit of Reusability security, Symmetric Relationships simplicity, Using UML simplifying UML, Using UML size of project determining usefulness of UML, Using UML SOA, A Bit of Reusability standardization of UML, Layers and Languages universal model/language, Using UML S Scala, Concurrency, Designing a Language SCOOP model, An Inspired Afternoon scoping, The Language of Revolutions SDL, UML, UML, UML seamless development, Proofreading Languages security of software formalisms of language affecting, Unix and Its Culture importance of, Symmetric Relationships language choice affecting, Theory and Practice multilevel integration affecting, Components, Sand, and Bricks with dynamic languages, The Good Programmer with Lua, The Power of Scripting with Python, The Good Programmer SEQUEL, A Seminal Paper service-oriented architecture (SOA), Components, Sand, and Bricks shared variables, Parallelism shell scripts, Unix and Its Culture simplicity advice for, Bits That Change the Universe of Forth, Application Design relationship to power, Power or Simplicity sketching tools, Expedients and Experience Smalltalk browser for, The Future of Computer Science incorporated in Objective-C, Growing a Language social engineering, The Role of the People Software and the Future of Programming Languages (Aho), Unix and Its Culture space insensitivity, The Goals Behind BASIC, Language Design specialization in programming, Layers and Languages specialization of labor, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Education specifications distinct from implementation, An Inspired Afternoon SQL, SQL, A Seminal Paper–A Seminal Paper, A Seminal Paper, A Seminal Paper influencing future language design, The Language updates on indexes, The Language stack management, Application Design stack-based design, Designed to Last stack-based subroutine calls, The Forth Language and Language Design standardization of APL, Paper and Pencil of C#, C# of UML, Layers and Languages problems with, Standard Wishes static typing, The Pythonic Way statically checked interfaces, OOP and Concurrency Stroustrup academic pursuits of, Future C++0x FAQ, Future concurrency, OOP and Concurrency concurrency and network distribution, OOP and Concurrency creating a new language, Future industry connections of, Teaching lessons from design of C++, Future structured programming, Proofreading Languages Structured Programming (Dahl; Dijkstra; Hoare), An Inspired Afternoon superdistribution, Components, Sand, and Bricks, Education symmetric relationships, Symmetric Relationships–Symmetric Relationships, Symmetric Relationships, Symmetric Relationships System R project, A Seminal Paper systems wider not faster, Concurrency T tables, The Power of Scripting Tcl/Tk, Transformative Technologies teams of programming language designers, Bits That Change the Universe, A Functional Team, A Functional Team, A Functional Team, Feedback Loop, C#, UML, Designed to Last templates, OOP and Concurrency test cases, Learning and Teaching testing code, Experience Python, Multiple Pythons writing code to facilitate, Transformative Technologies The Design and Evolution of C++ (Stroustrup), Future The Design of APL (Falkoff; Iverson), Paper and Pencil The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan), Breeding Little Languages The Formal Description of System 360 (Falkoff; Iverson; Sussenguth), Paper and Pencil The Practice of Programming (Kernighan; Pike), Breeding Little Languages theorems proving as purpose of ML, The Theory of Meaning with LCF and ML, The Soundness of Theorems with type system, The Theory of Meaning working on, Bits That Change the Universe, Programming by Example transformative technologies, Transformative Technologies–Transformative Technologies, Transformative Technologies, Transformative Technologies True BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC, The Goals Behind BASIC, Language Design type checking, The Forth Language and Language Design type systems decidability of, The Soundness of Theorems in ML, The Theory of Meaning U ubiquitous systems, Beyond Informatics UML (Unified Modeling Language), UML, UML, UML backward compatibility with, Layers and Languages persuading people of benefits of, UML, UML, Using UML, UML purposes of, UML removing elements from, UML semantic definitions in, UML Unix, Unix and Its Culture use cases, Learning and Teaching user-created and built-in language elements, Elementary Principles users considering when programming, Language Design, Work Goals, Breeding Little Languages V van Rossum, Python dynamic typing, The Pythonic Way garbage collection in Python, Multiple Pythons interface or API design, Expedients and Experience learning Python, The Good Programmer macros in Python, Multiple Pythons programmers, The Pythonic Way recognizing good, The Good Programmer Pythonic, The Pythonic Way resuming programming, Expedients and Experience skills of, The Good Programmer static typing, The Pythonic Way testing Python code, Expedients and Experience visual applications, Language Design Visual Basic limitations of, Language Design usefulness of, Transformative Technologies visual programming languages, Creativity, Refinement, and Patterns W Wadler class system in Haskell, The Haskell Language language design influencing software design, The Haskell Language Wall, Perl complexity of languages, Language CPAN, Community languages compared to tools, Language languages moving from specialized to general-purpose, Language transition of Perl from text tool to complete language, The Language of Revolutions Warnock, PostScript font building for PostScript, Designed to Last web, Standard Wishes website resources C++ Standards Committee, Future Weinberger, AWK AWK compared to SQL, Bits That Change the Universe C, Waiting for a Breakthrough creativity in programmers, Bits That Change the Universe error messages, Theory and Practice extensible languages, Waiting for a Breakthrough functional programming, Bits That Change the Universe general-purpose languages, Waiting for a Breakthrough implementation affecting language design, Theory and Practice language design, Theory and Practice, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Waiting for a Breakthrough, Programming by Example large programs in AWK, Waiting for a Breakthrough learning new things on Internet, Bits That Change the Universe Lisp, Waiting for a Breakthrough little programs, Bits That Change the Universe mathematics, Bits That Change the Universe mistakes made by, Bits That Change the Universe objects compared to system components, Theory and Practice problems in software, Programming by Example programming, Bits That Change the Universe programming by example, Theory and Practice programming language design, Theory and Practice, Theory and Practice programs rewriting, Waiting for a Breakthrough security, Theory and Practice simplicity, Bits That Change the Universe success, Waiting for a Breakthrough teaching debugging, Bits That Change the Universe teaching programming, Theory and Practice whitespace insensitivity, Language Design WYSIWYG editors, Language Design X X Window system, Legacy Culture XML, XQuery and XML XQuery, XQuery and XML Y yacc as transformative technology, Legacy Culture Yahoo!

…

That’s the fundamental idea behind the relational model, invented by E. F. (Ted) Codd. SQL is the most visible implementation of the relational model—a declarative language where you describe what you want, not how to do it. Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce developed SQL based on Codd’s ideas. A Seminal Paper How was SQL designed? Don Chamberlin: In the early 1970s, integrated database systems were just beginning to be widely deployed. Trends in technology and economics were making it possible for the first time for businesses to view their data as a corporate resource to be shared among many applications.

pages: 447 words: 104,258

Mathematics of the Financial Markets: Financial Instruments and Derivatives Modelling, Valuation and Risk Issues by Alain Ruttiens

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, passive investing, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Satyajit Das, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Figure 4.16 Effect of Fj on ri, proportional to sensitivity factor βij In particular, at point B, Fj = 0 → ri = E(ri). Choice of Factors Fj There is no objective rule governing the choice of the factors Fj. Because of the principle of parsimony, their number m must remain small enough: the higher m, the higher the sum of estimation errors. In one of their seminal papers, 7 Roll and Ross proposed: F1 = change in expected inflation; F2 = change in expected industrial production; F3 = unanticipated risk premium variation; F4 = unanticipated yield curve move.7 so that the i term of Eq. 4.5 would represent the impact of these factors over the period of time covered by the ex-post regression.

…

William F. SHARPE, Investors and Markets – Portfolio Choices, Asset Prices, and Investment Advice, Princeton University Press, 2006, 232 p. 1. A detailed presentation of the market efficiency and its various forms (weak, semi-strong, strong) is beyond the scope of this book. See for example the seminal paper by E. FAMA, ‘Efficient capital markets: a review of theory and empirical work’, Journal of Finance, 25(1), 1970, pp. 383–417, and its sequel, E. FAMA, Efficient capital markets: II, Journal of Finance, 46(5), 1991, pp. 1575–1617. For a more recent state of the theory, see, for example, M. BEECHEY, D.

…

A way to select the best combination is by optimizing their ratio – see Chapter 14. 3. Also called idiosyncratic. 4. For further details about utility functions, see, for example, H. GERBER, G. PAFUMI, “Utility functions: from risk theory to finance”, North American Actuarial Journal, 2(3), 1998, pp. 74–100. 5. In his seminal paper, W.F. SHARPE, ‘Capital Asset prices – A theory of market equilibrium under conditions of risk’, Journal of Finance, vol. XIX, no. 3, September 1964, pp. 425–442. 6. Actually, Sharpe's theory covers a wider range than just stocks, that is, the set of all risky assets traded on markets. However, practically speaking, the financial community restricts the market portfolio on the subset of traded stocks.

pages: 449 words: 123,459

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

For Salam and Ward especially, there was supreme irony: Unknown to them, at Imperial College that summer, three colleagues—Tom Kibble, Gerry Guralnik, and Dick Hagen—had found the missing link in attempts to unify the weak and electromagnetic interactions. The Marriage of Weak and Electromagnetic Forces—to 1964 123 Within three weeks of Salam and Ward’s manuscript being completed, the team of Guralnik, Hagen, and Kibble submitted their seminal paper on “Hidden Symmetry,” early in October 1964, explaining how gauge bosons could become massive while maintaining gauge invariance. This paved the way for the eventual solution to the Inﬁnity Puzzle for the weak interaction. But it seems that in the summer of 1964, when Salam and Ward had stumbled on SU2 × U1 while down the corridor their colleagues had found how to escape the straitjacket of massless gauge bosons, no one at Imperial College put two and two together.

…

Anderson had now built on this with his proposal that the Goldstone Boson, by being absorbed within the photon, provides the “missing” longitudinal oscillation for a massive vector particle. Although Anderson had identiﬁed the way forward, he had not actually identiﬁed any ﬂaws in Goldstone’s argument.34 The complete solution had to be found. There is some irony to the fact that the key to the answer was already in one of Nambu’s seminal papers. Foreshadowing even Anderson’s insight, in 1961 Nambu, and his collaborator Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, had remarked that in superconductivity there would have been Nambu-Goldstone Bosons “in the absence of Coulomb [electrostatic] interaction.”35 In effect, this recognizes that the Goldstone theorem applies only if there are no long-range forces, such as electromagnetic forces, present.

…

Regrettably, no copy is currently available of that letter.”67 As the GHK team, including Hagen, had not completed their paper until after the appearance of Higgs’s original papers, and as Higgs had built on this further during 1966, with a study of how the massive boson decays, Lee’s assessment at that time is perhaps not unreasonable. In any event, Hagen’s letter seems to have had little effect. As we shall see in the next chapter, the following year, Steven Weinberg produced his seminal paper, which uses these ideas to build what is now conﬁrmed as a viable theory of the weak and electromagnetic forces.68 Weinberg’s paper, which cites Higgs prominently in pole position, eventually became the most highly quoted paper in theoretical particle physics. Within the community of particle physicists it is Higgs’s name that is freely associated with the “Boson that has been named after [him].”

pages: 130 words: 32,279

Beyond the 4% Rule: The Science of Retirement Portfolios That Last a Lifetime by Abraham Okusanya

asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, high net worth, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market design, mental accounting, Paul Samuelson, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, tail risk, The 4% rule, transaction costs, William Bengen

Retirees may sacrifice some lifestyle and legacy goals to secure their essential income Upside • Flexibility • Higher income and legacy if market turns out to be favourable Essential income not subject to vagaries of the market Retirement income product • Diversified investment portfolios • Annuity for essential spending • Investment-linked annuity • Diversified portfolios only used for discretionary spending Risk profile Medium to high Low to medium Flexibility to income adjustment Medium to high Low to medium Maintenance High Low Difficulty Complex Simple Modern Portfolio Theory vs. Modern Retirement Theory The empirical foundation for the probability-based school is the seminal paper published in the Journal of Financial Planning in 19945 by engineer-turned-financial planner, William Bengen. A key aspect of Bengen’s work is the idea of optimal asset allocation for a retirement portfolio. This draws on the Modern Portfolio Theory, pioneered by Harry Markowitz in 1952. It explores how a portfolio of multiple assets maximises returns for a given level of risk.

…

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1969021 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1969021 CHAPTER 4 Safe withdrawal rate: how safe? The key framework for managing sequence risk from a drawdown portfolio originated from Bill Bengen. Bill was an engineer who later became a financial adviser. His seminal paper in 1994 transformed the conversation around retirement income planning. The paper has been peer-reviewed and referenced by both academics and practitioners. Sadly, the SWR framework has been misinterpreted and misapplied far too often. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Bill would be cringing if he read some of the nonsense that’s been written.

pages: 252 words: 75,349

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

Much as squeezing an inflated balloon doesn’t make the balloon any smaller but instead merely displaces the air into new bulges, anti-spam campaigns that succeed in shuttering one partnerka or a major component of that operation often result in the most successful affiliates simply shifting their spam traffic to competing partnerkas. As Dmitry Samosseiko, a security expert with SophosLabs Canada, noted in his seminal paper, “The Partnerka—What Is It, and Why Should You Care?”, all partnerkas are in strong competition with each other. “Allegiance is earned through more generous commission rates, shorter ‘hold’ periods, support for a wider range of payment systems, higher quality promotional material, better support, etc.,” Samosseiko wrote.

…

(The winner of that competition, a hacker nicknamed “Engel,” was the Russian man allegedly behind the “Festi” spam botnet, an extremely virulent and powerful spam-spewing machine, as detailed in Chapter 7. Incidentally, Engel and his botnet would eventually catapult Vrublevsky and himself toward a dangerous collision with the law, as we’ll see in Chapter 12.) In their seminal paper, “PharmaLeaks: Understanding the Business of Online Pharmaceutical Affiliate Programs,” researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the International Computer Science Institute, and George Mason University examined caches of data tracking the day-to-day finances of GlavMed, SpamIt, and Rx-Promotion, which collectively over a four-year period processed more than $170 million worth of orders from customers seeking cheaper, more accessible, and more discreetly available drugs.

…

The section that references a letter from the FDA to Vrublevsky’s alleged partner in Rx-Promotion refers to a letter dated October 8, 2010, and addressed to one “Jorge Smark” at the email address hellmanh@gmail.com. See www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/ucm229010.htm. Chapter 6: Partner(ka)s in (Dis)Organized Crime The inspiration for this chapter came principally from the seminal paper on partnerka programs “The Partnerka—What Is It, and Why Should You Care,” by Dmitry Samosseiko of SophosLabs Canada. This chapter also relies heavily on data gathered by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute, and George Mason University.

pages: 174 words: 56,405

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

On the other hand, research in computational linguistics was blooming during the same period for speech as well as for written text: the 1960s and 1970s saw major developments in parsing (automatic syntactic analysis), semantics, and text understanding for example, as suggested in the 1966 ALPAC report (see chapter 5). The 1990s saw the advent of a new approach based on statistics and very large bilingual corpora. This trend clearly derived from a series of seminal papers written by a research group working at IBM in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These papers had a considerable impact, along with the development of statistical and empirical approaches in natural language processing. The most popular translation systems nowadays (Google and Bing translation) are all based on a variant of this approach.

…

It is important that the data used for training be similar to the data used for testing in order for the system to produce satisfactory results. As one can imagine, the key point lies in the quality of the information accumulated during the training step, which essentially entails analyzing a very large aligned corpus at word and sentence levels. The seminal paper from IBM in 1993 described five alignment models, each of which is a modification of the previous model. Different Approaches for Lexical Alignment: The IBM Models As we have seen, the translation approach developed within IBM in the late 1980s was essentially based on translation choices carried out at word level.

pages: 204 words: 60,319

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel

colonial rule, double entry bookkeeping, Georg Cantor, high-speed rail, offshore financial centre, seminal paper, Y2K

Emptiness was the door from nonexistence to existence, in the same way that zero was the conduit from positive to negative numbers, one set being a perfect geometrical reflection of the other along the number line. But I now had to find the lost Eastern zero—if indeed it still existed. I knew that in 1931, George Cœdès was able to destroy Kaye’s argument in his seminal paper that employed this zero.7 In fact, Cœdès presented in his paper two newly discovered zeros: One from Palembang, Indonesia, dated to 684 CE, and the one-year-older inscription from the Khmer temple at Sambor on the Mekong. In the paper, the Sambor find was identified as inscription K-127. This K- notation, instituted by Cœdès, would become my main lead in searching for the artifact.

…

A reissue of a superb source of information on mathematical notations; it does not include the discoveries of the earliest numerals in Southeast Asia. Cantor, Moritz. Vorlesungen uber Geschichte der Mathematik. Vol. 1. Berlin, 1907. Cœdès, George. “A propos de l’origine des chiffres arabes.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies (University of London) 6, no. 2 (1931): 323–28. This is the seminal paper by Cœdès, which changed the entire chronology of the evolution of our number system by reporting and analyzing the discovery, by Cœdès himself, of a Cambodian zero two centuries older than the accepted knowledge at that time. Cœdès, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Hilo: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

But if we accept this proposition, we must ask ourselves who wrote our program? Are we trapped by the contemporary literary metaphor for life? Or is there something beyond the metaphor, a deeper insight into the nature and cause of being and becoming? Ever since British mathematician Alan Turing wrote his seminal paper on machines imitating humans, various camps in computer science, robotics and Artificial Intelligence have been demarcated by the dichotomy between materialism and idealism. We cannot possibly gain insight into Artificial Intelligence, and its potential to change our world and our civilisation, unless we understand the centrifugal ideas that dominate it.

…

They convert signals that exist in the physical world into binary representations of ‘0s’ and ‘1s’.24 In binary code ‘0’ denotes the absence of a signal and ‘1’ the presence of a signal. Every time you use your smartphone to take a picture, light captured by your phone’s camera is converted into binary digits and stored in the memory. Digital information is a long, long sequence of zeros and ones. Shannon’s breakthrough idea in his seminal paper ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’25 was to borrow the probabilistic mathematics of thermodynamics and apply them to the new field of telecommunications. Thermodynamics describes how molecules move as they heat up or cool down. The greater the heat, the more energetic the molecules become.

…

The man who demonstrated the direct connection between neurons and computers was Professor Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969), the American neurophysiologist who loved writing sonnets and laid the foundations of many contemporary brain theories. In 1943, he collaborated with Walter Pitts, a logician, on a seminal paper about the mathematics of neural cells.5 In this paper, McCulloch and Pitts tried to understand how the brain could produce highly complex patterns by using many basic cells – called neurons – that are connected together. To do so they borrowed ideas from Alan Turing. Turing’s influence has been tremendous in America, and his ideas for calculating machines (the so-called ‘Turing machines’) provided an excellent theoretical framework for McCulloch and Pitts.

pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Dubbed “sociobiology,” it applied tools associated with Darwinian analysis to animal and, more controversially, human behavior. Every week, about fifteen disciples would gather near the Harvard campus in the spacious home of Professor Irven DeVore, a baboon specialist. Often they debated, drank, and gambled into the early morning. “Basically, all of the seminal papers were written in DeVore’s living room at three a.m.,” one attendee said. Popp was a regular at these sessions. He was DeVore’s protégé, expected to be Harvard’s next baboon expert and lead the study of primates into the heyday of sociobiology. He and DeVore coauthored a paper on how male animals use aggressive behavior to maximize reproductive success.

…

With the exception of the AIDS Trojan, though, all these cryptographic methods remained purely defensive. They were designed to shield national security communications, financial records, and other valuable information from enemies and thieves, and to ensure that the data was authentic. Then, at a 1996 conference, two Columbia University researchers, Adam Young and Moti Yung, presented a seminal paper showing how to use hybrid encryption for extortion. Their idea was ingenious. Under their model, a hacker can infiltrate a computer and use a symmetric key to encrypt the victim’s files—anyone who knew the key could later decrypt the files. The symmetric key, however, is formidably protected: it is randomly generated and presumably difficult to crack; it is also safeguarded a second time when it’s encrypted by a public key embedded in the ransomware program.

…

THE MAN WHO INVENTED RANSOMWARE “would end up being a CPA”: Wally Guenther, “Neighbors Express Surprise at Arrest,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), February 3, 1990. “the most important book”: Joseph L. Popp, Popular Evolution: Life-Lessons from Anthropology (Lake Jackson, TX: Man and Nature Press, 2000), xviii. “Basically, all of the seminal papers”: Author interview with Robert Sapolsky, June 12, 2000. “greater damage”: Joseph L. Popp and Irven DeVore, “Aggressive Competition and Social Dominance Theory: Synopsis,” in The Great Apes, ed. David A. Hamburg and Elizabeth R. McCown (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1979), 323. “Life is merely an artifact”: Popp, Popular Evolution, 1–2.

pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

In the words of Fukuyama: “Certain societies can save substantially on transaction costs because economic agents trust one another in their interactions and therefore can be more efficient than low trust societies, which require detailed contracts and enforcement mechanisms.”12 James Coleman, a sociologist well known for his work on social capital, has also emphasized the ability of trust to reduce transaction costs. In his seminal paper on social capital Coleman described the transactions between Jewish diamond merchants in New York, who have the tradition of letting other merchants inspect their diamonds in private before executing a transaction. He argues that trust and the social network of family and acquaintances that implicitly enforces this trust are essential to make these interactions feasible.

…

Surprisingly, the latter critique was made famous by a sociologist, Dennis Wrong, who criticized the oversocialized view of individuals advanced by his colleagues in the early 1960s; see his “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology,” American Sociological Review 26, no. 2 (1961): 183–193. Here, however, I will use the description of both critiques presented by James Coleman in his seminal paper on social capital, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): S95–S120. There are two broad intellectual streams in the description and explanation of social action. One, characteristic of the work of most sociologists, sees the actor as socialized and action as governed by social norms, rules, and obligations.

pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

These episodes ended in spectacular busts, and it is tempting to call them bubbles after the fact. But what if the price booms were legitimate and based on economic prospects at the time? How can one prove the existence of bubbles without a doubt? In 1988 future Nobel laureate Vernon Smith and his coauthors, Gerry Suchanek and Arlington Williams, published a seminal paper on the existence of bubbles.3 The authors conducted an experiment where participants were each given an initial allotment of cash and stocks that they could trade with one another. The experiment had fifteen trading periods. At the end of each trading period, the owner of a stock received a dividend payment that could have one of four values with equal probability—0, 8, 28, and 60—for an expected value of 24 cents.

…

Of the twenty-two experiments conducted, fourteen saw a stock market “characterized by a price bubble measured relative to dividend value.” The results bore an uncanny resemblance to the “excess volatility” phenomena first documented by Robert Shiller in 1981 for the U.S. stock market.4 In his seminal paper that led to the creation of the field of behavioral finance, Shiller showed that stock prices moved too much to be justified by the subsequent movement in their dividends. This phenomenon was later succinctly summarized by Jeffrey Pontiff in 1997 when he demonstrated that closed-end mutual funds were significantly more volatile than the market value of the underlying securities.5 Closed-end mutual funds hold stocks and bonds like regular “open-ended” mutual funds.

pages: 229 words: 68,426

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

Almost twenty years ago, a researcher at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote an article—a sketch, really—setting forth the outlines of what computing would look like in a post-PC world. The researcher's name was Mark Weiser, and his thoughts were summarized in a brief burst simply entitled "Ubiquitous Computing #1." In it, as in the series of seminal papers and articles that followed, Weiser developed the idea of an "invisible" computing, a computing that "does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere." What Weiser was describing would be nothing less than computing without computers. In his telling, desktop machines per se would largely disappear, as the tiny, cheap microprocessors that powered them faded into the built environment.

…

Certainly, Mark Weiser's contingent at PARC wanted to push computation into the environment because they hoped that doing so judiciously might ameliorate some less pleasant aspects of a user experience that constantly threatened to spin out of control. As Weiser and co-author John Seely Brown laid out in a seminal paper, "The Coming Age of Calm Technology," they wanted to design tools to "encalm as well as inform." Similar lines of argument can be adduced in the work of human-centered design proponents from Don Norman onward. Much of the Japanese work along ubiquitous lines, and in parallel endeavors such as robotics, is driven by the recognition that an aging population will require not merely less complicated interfaces, but outboard memory augmentation—and Japan is far from the only place with graying demographics.

pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

He has found that in 1916 the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent. “As a consequence, top executives (the ‘working rich’) have replaced top capital owners (the ‘rentiers’) at the top of the income hierarchy during the twentieth century,” Saez and Piketty write in their seminal paper on the subject. Michael Lindsay, a professor at Rice University who has interviewed more than five hundred American leaders as part of the multiyear Platinum Study of the background and behavior of the nation’s bosses, has reached the same conclusion. Speaking at a Columbia University conference on elites in the fall of 2010, Lindsay said that nowadays most of America’s business, nonprofit, and academic chiefs hadn’t inherited their money or come from privileged backgrounds.

…

That small group of wealthy capitalists laid the foundations for America’s astonishing economic ascent in the twentieth century. But as the American economy matured, control of its private businesses began to pass from the hands of the vigorous, scheming, and resolute founders of Marshall’s age to a new generation of stewards. That shift was documented in a seminal paper published in 1931 by Gardiner Means, a New England farm boy and steely-nerved World War I pilot who’d eventually made his way to economics and the Ivy League faculty. Means showed that of the two hundred largest U.S. companies at the end of 1929, 44 percent were controlled by managers rather than by their owners.

…

The terms of the deal were undisclosed Bernard Weinraub, “Disney Settles Bitter Suit with Former Studio Chief,” New York Times, July 8, 1999. Dick Tracy cost Disney $47 million to produce. See James B. Stewart, DisneyWar (Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 111. “the stewards of a rich man” Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Section 107. a seminal paper published in 1931 Gardiner C. Means, “The Separation of Ownership and Control in American Industry,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics,1931. “the princes of industry” Adolf Augustus Berle and Gardiner Coit Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (Transaction Publishers, 1932), p. 4.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

This task of formalization began in earnest in the 1970s, when a branch of psychology, sometimes called performance psychology, began to systematically explore what separates experts (in many different fields) from everyone else. In the early 1990s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, pulled together these strands into a single coherent answer, consistent with the growing research literature, that he gave a punchy name: deliberate practice. Ericsson opens his seminal paper on the topic with a powerful claim: “We deny that these differences [between expert performers and normal adults] are immutable… Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”

…

In this sense, we should see the goal of this rule as taming shallow work’s footprint in your schedule, not eliminating it. Then there’s the issue of cognitive capacity. Deep work is exhausting because it pushes you toward the limit of your abilities. Performance psychologists have extensively studied how much such efforts can be sustained by an individual in a given day.* In their seminal paper on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson and his collaborators survey these studies. They note that for someone new to such practice (citing, in particular, a child in the early stages of developing an expert-level skill), an hour a day is a reasonable limit. For those familiar with the rigors of such activities, the limit expands to something like four hours, but rarely more.

pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

In Bigger or Better, the parlay never stops. Players don’t wait an arbitrary period of time before moving on to the next trade, and they don’t mind if the result of a trade was only a slightly more desirable object, so long as the game keeps moving. “By itself, one small win may seem unimportant,” writes Dr. Karl Weick in a seminal paper for American Psychologist in 1984. “A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.” “Once a small win has been accomplished,” Weick continues, “forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

…

For an excellent academic discussion about experimentation for entrenched businesses, see Stefan Thomke, “Unlocking Innovation through Business Experimentation,” European Business Review, http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=8420 (accessed February 17, 2014). 112 enjoy an unfair advantage over their competitors: The seminal paper on first-mover advantage was Marvin B. Lieberman, and David B. Montgomery, “First-Mover Advantages,” Strategic Management Journal, no. 9 (1988): 41–58. Lieberman and Montgomery revisited and amended their claims ten years later in “First-Mover (Dis)Advantages: Retrospective and Link with the Resource-Based View,” Strategic Management Journal 19 (1998): 1111–25.

pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

But even White originally considered the disease “part and parcel of the process of growing old,” which is what he wrote in his 1929 textbook Heart Disease, while noting that “it also cripples and kills often in the prime of life and sometimes even in youth.” So the salient question is whether the increasing awareness of the disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis. In 1912, the Chicago physician James Herrick published a seminal paper on the diagnosis of coronary heart disease—following up on the work of two Russian clinicians in Kiev—but only after Herrick used the newly invented electrocardiogram in 1918 to augment the diagnosis was his work taken seriously. This helped launch cardiology as a medical specialty, and it blossomed in the 1920s.

…

He eventually took a position with the College of Medical Evangelists in Los Angeles, which was affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and he became a senior attending physician at Los Angeles County General Hospital. But these were not institutions that bestowed credibility. Meanwhile, Newburgh’s seminal paper establishing a perverted appetite as the definitive cause of obesity was published in 1942, and Newburgh rejected the lipophilia hypothesis with the alacrity with which he rejected any explanation that didn’t implicate gluttony as the primary cause. What made the disappearance of the lipophilia hypothesis so remarkable is that it could easily be tested in the laboratory, in animal models.

…

“…this conception deserves…”: Wilder and Wilbur 1938:310–11. 1955 German textbook chapter: Bahner 1955:1023–26. References from German literature: Rony 1940; Rynearson and Gastineau 1949. Footnote. Interview, Theodore Van Itallie. Bauer’s articles in English: Silver and Bauer 1931; Bauer 1940; Bauer 1941. Newburgh’s seminal paper: Newburgh 1942. “indubitable” and “is also probably present…”: Cahill 1978. “significantly more weight”: Lee and Schaffer 1934. For a similar experiment, see Marx et al. 1942. “These mice will make fat…”: Mayer 1968:48. Benedict reported this: discussed in Alonso and Maren 1955, which reported confirmation of the observation in a different strain of mice.

pages: 260 words: 84,847

P53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Asilomar, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Kickstarter, mouse model, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell, trade route

WEINBERG, ROBERT Eminent US scientist involved since the early days of the molecular-biology revolution in uncovering the genetic basis of cancer. Best known for his discoveries of the first human oncogene (or cancer-promoting gene) and the first tumour suppressor. Weinberg has spent most of his working life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is the author, with Doug Hanahan, of a seminal paper, ‘The Hallmarks of Cancer’, which defines the key characteristics of all cancer cells. WYLLIE, ANDREW Trained as a pathologist, Wyllie was a PhD student at Aberdeen University in Scotland when ‘programmed cell death’, or cell suicide, emerged from rarefied fields into mainstream biology and was given the name ‘apoptosis’.

…

If a gene is ‘over-expressed’, it implies there is an over-abundance of protein in the cell. Gain of function: An expression used in reference to a genetic mutation that changes the gene product (e.g. protein) in such a way that it gains a new and abnormal function (see also loss of function). ‘Hallmarks of Cancer’: A seminal paper written by Robert Weinberg and Doug Hanahan in 2000 that describes the six characteristics common to all cancers, of whatever organ or origin. They revised the ‘Hallmarks’ in 2011, adding four more general principles. Large T antigen: The gene in the DNA of the monkey virus SV40 that is responsible for causing cancer in the cells of the host species it infects.

pages: 369 words: 153,018

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Benoit Mandelbrot, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwork universe, double helix, Drosophila, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, out of africa, phenotype, power law, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, stem cell, unbiased observer

Margulis was then married to the cosmologist Carl Sagan, and she took a similarly cosmic view of the evolution of life, considering not just the biology, but also the geological evidence of atmospheric evolution, and fossils of bacteria and early eukaryotes. She brought to the task a consummate discernment of microbial anatomy and chemistry, and applied systematic criteria to determine the likelihood of symbiosis. Even so, her work was rejected. Her seminal paper was turned down by 15 different journals before James Danielli, the far-seeing editor of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, ﬁnally accepted it. Once published, there were an unprecedented 800 reprint requests for the paper within a year. Her book, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, was rejected by Academic Press, despite having been written to contract, and was eventually published by Yale University Press in 1970.

…

Yet, for a long time, it looked as if surviving without a cell wall was a magic trick equivalent to pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Bacteria were believed to lack an internal cytoskeleton, and if that was the case, the eukaryotes must have evolved their complex skeleton in a single generation, or faced extinction. In fact this assumption turns out to be groundless. In two seminal papers, published in the journals Cell and Nature in 2001, Quest for a Progenitor 39 Laura Jones and her colleagues at Oxford, and Fusinita van den Ent and her colleagues in Cambridge, showed that some bacteria do indeed have a cytoskeleton as well as a cell wall—they wear a belt and braces, as Henry Fonda put it in Once Upon a Time in the West (‘never trust a man who can’t even trust his own trousers’).

…

Each complex is millions of times the size of a carbon atom, but even so they are barely visible down the electron microscope. The individual complexes are composed of numerous proteins, coenzymes, and cytochromes, Sir Hans Krebs received the Nobel Prize in 1953 for elucidating the cycle, although many others contributed to a detailed understanding. Krebs’ seminal paper on the cycle in 1937 was rejected by Nature, a personal set-back that has since encouraged generations of disappointed biochemists. In addition to its central role in respiration the Krebs Cycle is also the cell’s starting point for making amino acids, fats, haems, and other important molecules.

pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

His master’s thesis, in 1937, demonstrated how computerized mathematical circuits should be designed; this youthful piece of work not only served as the cornerstone of computer architecture from then on, but also launched a new academic discipline known as switching theory. Ten years later, as a researcher at Bell Labs, Shannon got to thinking about efficient means of electronic communications (for example, how to send the largest number of telephone conversations through a single wire). He published another seminal paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” that launched an even more important new academic discipline known as information theory; today information theory is fundamental not only in electronics and computer science but also in linguistics, sociology, and numerous other fields. You could argue that Claude Shannon was the Alexander Graham Bell of the cellular phone, because mobile communications would be impossible without the basic formulas of information theory that Shannon devised.

…

.: Princeton University Press, 1972), which is strangely organized but has the immediacy that could be conveyed only by one who was present at the creation of the modem electronic computer. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), are the first complete biographies. Von Neumann’s seminal paper “Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument” is reprinted in John Diebold, ed., The World of the Computer (New York: Random House, 1973). There are far more books than any one person could read on the inner workings of integrated circuits, microprocessors, calculators, and computers.

pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioﬀ, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Because the essence of any measurable quantity cannot depend on an arbitrary choice of units made by human beings, neither can the laws of physics. Consequently, all of these and indeed all of the laws of science must be expressible as relationships between scale-invariant dimensionless quantities, even though conventionally they are not typically written that way. This was the underlying message of Rayleigh’s seminal paper. His paper elegantly illustrates the technique with many well-chosen examples, including one that provides the scientific explanation for one of the great mysteries of life that all of us have pondered at some time, namely, why is the sky blue? Using an elegant argument based solely on relating purely dimensionless quantities, he shows that the intensity of light waves scattered by small particles must decrease with the fourth power of their wavelength.

…

As was shown in Figure 1, metabolic rate scales with body size in the simplest possible manner one could imagine when plotted logarithmically against mass, namely, as a straight line indicative of a simple power law scaling relationship. The scaling of metabolic rate has been known for more than eighty years. Although primitive versions of it were known before the end of the nineteenth century, its modern incarnation is credited to the distinguished physiologist Max Kleiber, who formalized it in a seminal paper published in an obscure Danish journal in 1932.5 I was quite excited when I first came across Kleiber’s law because I had presumed that the randomness and unique historical path dependency implicit in how each species had evolved would have resulted in a huge uncorrelated variability among them.

…

Brown, “The Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology from Genomes to Ecosystems: Towards a Quantitative Unifying Theory of Biological Structure and Organization,” Journal of Experimental Biology 208 (2005): 1575–92; and G. B. West and J. H. Brown, “Life’s Universal Scaling Laws,” Physics Today 57 (2004): 36–42. The various technical papers devoted to specific elaborations and ramifications of this framework will be cited in the appropriate places in later chapters. 15. The seminal paper detailing these results is L. M. A. Bettencourt, et al., “Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 104 (2007): 7301–6. Subsequent papers dealing with specific subtopics will be cited in the appropriate places in later chapters.

pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

A single construction worker with a backhoe can shift far more mud than several workers with shovels and wheelbarrows. If, however, the only difference between the rich and the poor countries is physical capital, the obvious question, posed by the University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert Lucas in a seminal paper in 1990, is, Why does more money not flow from rich countries to poor countries so as to enable the poor countries to buy the physical capital they need?2 After all, poor countries would gain enormously from a little more capital investment: in some parts of Africa, it is easier to get to a city a few hundred miles away by taking a flight to London or Paris and taking another flight back to the African destination than to try to go there directly.

…

Savings and Investment In the perfect world envisioned by economists, a country’s investments should not depend on its savings. After all, countries should be able to borrow as much as they need from international financial markets if their investment opportunities are good, and their own domestic savings should be irrelevant. So there should be a low correlation between a country’s investment and its savings. In a seminal paper in 1980, Martin Feldstein from Harvard University and Charles Horioka from Osaka University showed that this assumption was incorrect: there was a much higher positive correlation between a country’s investment and its savings than one might expect if capital flowed freely across countries.4 The interpretation of these findings was that countries, especially poor ones like Burundi and Ecuador, could not get as much foreign financing as they needed, so they had to cut their coats to fit the cloth.

pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

The second type, market diversification, covers situations where the risk involves traded investments that can go down in price (and give poor returns) rather than either surviving or defaulting. The theory behind market diversification dates back to 1952, when Harry Markowitz, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, published a seminal paper, “Portfolio Selection,” which showed that if the prices of assets behaved independently, increasing the number of investments would always reduce the variance of returns. If you argued that variance (the degree to which investment returns fluctuated around their average) was a bad thing, then adding more investments—or diversifying your portfolio—was unquestionably a good thing.

…

What started out as an arcane twist of high finance—derivatives—has now corrupted the entire financial world, and has set a hellish trap for taxpayers and their representatives that offers no way out. Appendix A timeline of some significant historical events referred to in the book, and episodes involving the book’s key characters. 1973 Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton publish seminal papers on option pricing 1974 Robert Merton publishes paper using option theory to link debt and equity 1986 Start of S&L crisis 1987 Oldrich Vasicek publishes working paper applying Merton’s work to credit portfolios Federal Reserve protects Wall Street securities firms from October stock market crash by ensuring that banks lend 1988 Basel I bank capital accord agreed Nick Sossidis and Stephen Partridge-Hicks set up Alpha Finance for Citibank 1994 VAR models protect commercial banks from market turmoil 1995 Barings Bank almost bankrupted by Nick Leeson’s rogue trading Sossidis and Partridge-Hicks set up Sigma 1996 Basel Committee agrees to incorporate VAR-based trading book rules into bank capital accord Citibank launches Centauri SIV Moody’s binomial expansion technique CDO rating model published 1997 J.P.

pages: 465 words: 103,303

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

That kind of clarity: The experiments by Avery, Hershey, and Chase, and the discovery of DNA’s double-helical structure, are described in Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, expanded ed. (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996). The seminal papers include Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, “Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types,” The Journal of Experimental Medicine 79, no. 2 (February 1, 1944): 137–58 [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2135445]; A. D.

…

., “Genetic Alterations During Colorectal-tumor Development,” New England Journal of Medicine 319, no. 9 (September 1, 1988): 525–32. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2841597] 3. “For decades now”: Hanahan and Weinberg, “The Hallmarks of Cancer” (italics added). 4. don’t necessarily have to occur through mutations: The seminal paper on epigenetics is Andrew P. Feinberg and Bert Vogelstein, “Hypomethylation Distinguishes Genes of Some Human Cancers from Their Normal Counterparts,” Nature 301, no. 5895 (January 6, 1983): 89–92. [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v301/n5895/abs/301089a0.html] For a historical overview see Andrew P.

pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Higher-beta stocks are more volatile, and should therefore offer greater returns than steadier, lower-beta securities. And thus beta became the lingua franca for the returns of the stock market as a whole, while “alpha” later emerged as the term for the extra returns generated by a skilled investor. Not only did this gain Sharpe his PhD, but it eventually evolved into a seminal paper on what he called the “capital asset pricing model” (CAPM), a formula that investors could use to calculate the value of financial securities. The broader, groundbreaking implication of CAPM was introducing the concept of risk-adjusted returns—one had to measure the performance of a stock or a fund manager versus the volatility of its returns—and indicated that the best overall investment for most investors is the entire market, as it reflects the optimal tradeoff between risks and returns.

…

Today, even fund managers who manage to beat their benchmarks are no longer safe from the revolution unleashed by John McQuown, Jack Bogle, and Nate Most. Voluminous research since the initial, inspirational spate of work in the 1960s and 1970s has kept hammering the point home that active management is for the most part still a “Loser’s Game,” as Charles Ellis termed it back in 1975. The seminal paper in the field was published in 1991 by William Sharpe, whose theories underpinned the original creation of the index fund, and was bluntly titled “The Arithmetic of Active Management.”16 This expanded on Sharpe’s earlier work, and addressed the suggestion that the index investing trend that was starting to gain ground at the time was a mere “fad.”

Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

He connects this to their economic power with respect to democracy – democrats cannot hurt previous elites if they have sufﬁcient economic strength, perhaps because taxing the elite leads to a collapse in the economy. Rogowski (1998) similarly emphasizes the impact of the ability of citizens to exit as leading to democracy – a case in which voice prevents exit. Finally, our work builds on the literature that emphasizes how political institutions can solve problems of commitment. The seminal paper is by North and Weingast (1989), and this has been a theme of a series of important papers by Weingast (1997, 1998). 7. Our Contribution The ideas presented in this book build on the framework we introduced in Acemoglu and Robinson (2000a,b; 2001, 2002). There, we placed the issue of regime transitions within a framework of redistributive conﬂict and developed the basic idea of democracy as a credible commitment by the elites to avoid revolution and derived some of the important comparative static results – for instance, the inverted U-shaped relationship between inequality and democratization.

…

In addition to a model in which political conﬂict is between the rich and the poor, we want to examine what happens when conﬂict is based on other political identities. We introduce such a model in Subsection 4.4. 4.1 The Median Voter Model of Redistributive Politics We consider a society consisting of an odd number of n citizens (the model we develop builds on the seminal papers of Romer 1975, Roberts 1977, and Meltzer 100 Democratic Politics and Richard 1981). Person i = 1, 2, . . , n has income y i . Let us order people from poorest to richest and think of the median person as the person with median income, denoted y M . Then, given that we are indexing people according to their incomes, the person with the median income is exactly individual M = (n + 1)/2.

…

Change the identity of who has political power and promises become credible. 178 Democratization We are not the ﬁrst to emphasize the commitment value of institutions. Although this theme appears in many writings and is implicit in others (e.g., the literature on structure-induced equilibrium; see Shepsle 1979; Romer and Rosenthal 1978; and Shepsle and Weingast 1984), it is probably most clearly associated with the seminal paper by North and Weingast (1989). They argued that the establishment of the constitutional regime in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 provided commitment that the Crown would not repudiate its debt, thereby increasing its borrowing capacity. This led to fundamental changes in ﬁnancial institutions and provided part of the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution.

pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Sahlins (1974) and Kelly (1995) report behaviour in surviving hunter-gatherer societies. History of transport: Wolmar (2007) for railways in Britain; Lay (1992) for the world’s roads and the vehicles that use them. General development of travel in Britain and elsewhere over the past forty years: Metz (2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). Seminal papers on the constancy of travel time are Marchetti (1994) and Schafer and Victor (2000). Cessation of growth of car travel: Puentes and Tomer (2008), Millard-Ball and Schipper (2011), Goodwin (2012a,b), Le Vine and Jones (2012), Kuhnimhof et al (2012), Puentes (2012); Gargett (2012); Dutzik and Baxandall (2013); Transport Reviews 33(3) 2013.

pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Secondly, they were incapable of integrating variables that represented microeconomic changes such as the elastic substitution of goods, the elasticity of labour supply (especially as technology replaced physical labour making economies more service oriented rather than manufacturing intensive), etc. Finally, they did not recognize that the decision-making rules of economic agents would vary systematically with changes in monetary policy. This final flaw is often referred to as the Lucas Critique. The Lucas Critique and the introduction of Rational Expectations (following a seminal paper by Muth in 1961), led to demise of neo-Keynesian models. In its stead, DSGE models came into being. The first DSGE models were known as Real Business Cycle (RBC) models were introduced in the early 1980’s and were based on the concepts detailed by Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott in 1982.

…

Transactional cost theory (TCT) is the branch of economics that deals with the costs of transactions and the institutions that are developed to govern them. It studies the cost of economic links and the ways in which agents organize themselves to deal with economic interactions. Coase realized that economic transactions are costly. In his seminal paper, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Coase noted that while economies involve plenty of planning, a large part of this planning is not coordinated by the price system and takes place within the boundaries of the firm (Hidalgo, 2015). As firms have hierarchies, most interactions within a firm are political.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The six-shooter pistol invented by Samuel Colt had a revolving cylinder, whittled out of wood, that automatically rotated the next bullet into position and allowed the gun to be fired multiple times without reloading, something that changed the face of warfare. All four of these inventors were mechanically clever; none of them would have needed higher math for their creations. Visual problem-solving is the stock in trade of the clever engineer. It’s how mechanical information has been transmitted through the centuries. In a seminal paper on visual thinking published in Science, Eugene S. Ferguson, an engineer and historian of technology, presented the visual record of technical knowledge that mushroomed with the advent of the printing press. In compiling artists’ and engineers’ notebooks, technical workbooks and manuals from the fifteenth to the twentieth century (including Leonardo da Vinci’s thousands of pages of technical drawings), Ferguson traces the record of human ingenuity in the detailed drawings of every known device and mechanism.

…

See spatial visualizers visual thinkers aha moments and, 207 description of, 9–13, 25–26 identification of, 7, 16–18, 106, 277 pairing with verbal thinkers, 145–46 recognizing talents of, 119, 238, 276, 277 screened out, 5–6, 54–55, 96, 107 studies on, 26–30, 33, 37–38 traits/skills of, 45–47, 161–62, 198–200 See also object visualizers; spatial visualizers visual thinking advantages of, 42–47, 257 associational thinking, 10, 45 bottom-up thinking of, 43–45, 129 description of, 232 seminal paper on, 88–89 skills related to, 35–38 in verbal world, 13–16, 239 visual analogies, 45–47 visual-verbal continuum, 16–21 visual vocabulary, 175, 215 Visualizer-Verbalizer Cognitive Style Questionnaire (VVCSQ), 31 Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), 39–40 vocational programs, 92, 95, 110–12 Voices Within, The (Fernyhough), 13 von Bayern, Auguste M.

pages: 150 words: 43,467

Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever Ways to (Roughly) Calculate Anything by Rob Eastaway

butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Strategic Defense Initiative, the rule of 72

The average cow produces somewhere between 200 and 500 litres of methane per day (that’s a huge figure, not one I felt qualified to estimate at all, so I looked it up – and even official sources vary hugely in the figure they quote). Cows aren’t the only creatures responsible for methane. Every living creature contributes methane as a natural part of its digestion or decomposition. That includes humans. In the seminal paper ‘Investigation of Normal Flatus Production in Healthy Volunteers’ by J. Tomlin, C. Lowis and N.W. Read (what do you mean, you haven’t read it?), the authors concluded that the average human on a diet that includes 200 g of baked beans, produces about 15 ml of methane per day. To put that in context, remember that the figure for cows is of the order of hundreds of litres per day.

pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Economists have come up with a theory of political behavior that fits better with what we actually observe. When it comes to interest group politics, it pays to be small. Gary Becker, the same University of Chicago Nobel Prize winner who figured so prominently in our thinking about human capital, wrote a seminal paper in the early 1980s that nicely encapsulated what had become known as the economics of regulation. Building on work that went all the way back to Milton Friedman’s doctoral dissertation, Becker theorized that, all else equal, small, well-organized groups are most successful in the political process.

…

Here is a remarkable figure: Only two of thirty countries classified by the World Bank as rich—Hong Kong and Singapore—lie between the Tropic of Cancer (which runs through Mexico across North Africa and through India) and the Tropic of Capricorn (which runs through Brazil and across the northern tip of South Africa and through Australia). Geography may be a windfall that we in the developed world take for granted. Development expert Jeffrey Sachs wrote a seminal paper in which he posited that climate can explain much of the world’s income distribution. He writes, “Given the varied political, economic, and social histories of regions around the world, it must be more than coincidence that almost all of the tropics remain underdeveloped at the start of the twenty-first century.”15 The United States and all of Europe lie outside the tropics; most of Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia lie within.

pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Pauling had revealed his model at a meeting at Caltech with the dramatic flair of a sorcerer pulling a molecular bunny out of a hat: the model had been hidden behind a curtain until the end of the talk, and then—presto!—it had been revealed to a stunned, applauding audience. Rumor had it that Pauling had now turned his attention from proteins to the structure of DNA. Five thousand miles away, in Cambridge, Watson and Crick could almost feel Pauling breathing down their necks. Pauling’s seminal paper on the protein helix was published in April 1951. Festooned with equations and numbers, it was intimidating to read, even for experts. But to Crick, who knew the mathematical formulas as intimately as anyone, Pauling had hidden his essential method behind the smoke-and-mirrors algebra. Crick told Watson that Pauling’s model was, in fact, the “product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning.”

…

But he was vastly more interested in DNA and soon abandoned all other projects to focus on DNA. Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 127. “A youthful arrogance”: Crick, What Mad Pursuit, 64. “The trouble is, you see, that there is”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 107. Pauling’s seminal paper: L. Pauling, R. B. Corey, and H. R. Branson, “The structure of proteins: Two hydrogen-bonded helical configurations of the polypeptide chain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 37, no. 4 (1951): 205–11. “product of common sense”: Watson, Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix, 44.

…

“It’s the magnesium”: “Albert Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science: Sydney Brenner,” Lasker Foundation, http://www.laskerfoundation.org/awards/2000special.htm. Like DNA, these RNA molecules were built: Two other scientists, Elliot Volkin and Lazarus Astrachan, had proposed an RNA intermediate for genes in 1956. The two seminal papers published by the Brenner/Jacob group and the Watson/Gilbert group in 1961 are: F. Gros et al., “Unstable ribonucleic acid revealed by pulse labeling of Escherichia coli,” Nature 190 (May 13, 1960): 581–85; and S. Brenner, F. Jacob, and M. Meselson, “An unstable intermediate carrying information from genes to ribosomes for protein synthesis,” Nature 190 (May 13, 1960): 576–81.

pages: 247 words: 43,430

Think Complexity by Allen B. Downey

Benoit Mandelbrot, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, discrete time, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Guggenheim Bilbao, Laplace demon, mandelbrot fractal, Occupy movement, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, strong AI, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%

The criteria are the following: The case study should be relevant to complexity. For an overview of possible topics, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems. Topics not already covered in the book are particularly welcome. A good case study might present a seminal paper, reimplement an important experiment, discuss the results, and explain their context. Original research is not necessary and might not be appropriate for this format, but you could extend existing results. A good case study should invite the reader to participate by including exercises, references to further reading, and topics for discussion.

pages: 182 words: 45,873

Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures by Nessa Carey

Barry Marshall: ulcers, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, CRISPR, double helix, epigenetics, first-past-the-post, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell

So, once you have gene edited plant cells successfully, it can often be fairly straightforward to propagate lots of identical plants. Plant scientists recognised very quickly that the new techniques for gene editing could revolutionise the efficiency, speed and ease of creating new plant varieties. The first gene-edited plants were created just one year after Doudna and Charpentier’s seminal paper, by a number of research groups.13,14,15 Since then, researchers have improved the techniques and extended them to a whole range of plant species. It might be tempting to wonder why we need to bother with gene editing for plants, given that we have been creating new varieties for millennia, simply by cross-pollinating ones that have features we like.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

I joined as the firm’s first “rocket scientist,” someone with extensive training in science and none in finance.2 When Richard Grinold hired me, he also invited me to sit in on the graduate seminar that he was teaching at Berkeley.3 My first months at the firm included in-depth work on a particular project, as well as a survey of seminal papers in academic finance. My project was to research an improved model for interest rate options. For example, the U.S. Treasury had long issued bonds with embedded options, allowing them to pay back investors once the bonds were within five years of maturing. Corporations issued similar bonds. If the bonds paid 12 percent interest, and rates had fallen to 8 percent, the Treasury could refinance at a lower rate.

…

He is a founding member of the board of Math for America, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of mathematics teaching in the United States. He is also a member of the board the Mathematical Finance program at University of Chicago. Dr. Chriss has published extensively in quantitative finance – including “Optimal Execution of Portfolio Transactions” a seminal paper on algorithmic trading, “Optimal Portfolios from Ordering Information,” and the book Black-Scholes and Beyond: Modern Option Pricing. Dr. Chriss holds an BS and PhD in mathematics from University of Chicago and an MS in mathematics from California Institute of Technology. Andrew Davidson is president and founder of Andrew Davidson & Co., Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the application of analytical tools to investment management.

pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

In fact, Facebook wasn’t creating social connections so much as grafting itself onto social connections that already existed—between college friends, high school buddies, and work colleagues. The tight-knit relationships among Facebook users turbocharged its local network effect. In fact, Jeffrey Rohlfs anticipated Facebook’s exact go-to-market strategy in his seminal paper. He considered the launch strategies of new services that display local network effects and suggested giving away the services to carefully selected groups of people for a limited period of time. Since, as Rohlfs writes, “an individual’s demand may depend primarily on which of his few principal contacts are users…the success of this approach may also depend on how the initial user set is selected.”

…

Travers and Stanley Milgram, “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem,” Sociometry 32 (1969); Duncan J. Watts, “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small World Phenomenon,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 493–527. Facebook recruited users within: This “group-based targeting,” incidentally, is the same go-to-market strategy advocated by Jeffrey Rohlfs in his seminal paper on network effects published in 1974 and reiterated onstage by Sean Parker in conversation with Jimmy Fallon, in reference to Facebook’s go-to-market strategy, at the NextWork Conference in 2011 (see footnote in Chapter 5). Individuals with access to scarce, novel: Ronald Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ronald Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology 110 (2004): 349–99; A.

pages: 214 words: 14,382

Monadic Design Patterns for the Web by L.G. Meredith

barriers to entry, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, finite state, functional programming, Georg Cantor, ghettoisation, higher-order functions, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, semantic web, seminal paper, social graph, type inference, web application, WebSocket

., _ ) <- d if true(c1 , ..., cn ) ) yield fn Cardelli and Gordon’s ambient calculus, take this presentation one step further and add a set of conditional rewrite rules to express the computational content of the model. It was Milner who first recognized this particular decomposition of language definitions in his seminal paper, Functions as Processes, where he reformulated the presentation π-calculus along these lines. Cover · Overview · Contents · Discuss · Suggest · Glossary · Index Section 10.4 Chapter 10 · The Semantic Web • for( _( fixpt ) <- d if (( f ) => ((x) => f (x(x)))((x) => f (x(x)))) (true) ) yield fixpt • for( a <- d if h(x) => ((Y f )x)i a ) yield a The first of these will return the expressions in “function” position applied the actual parameters meeting the conditions ci respectively.

pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

For a readable story of the four-color problem, see Robin Wilson, Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Chapter 4 The quotation from Cook is actually a paraphrase in modern terminology of the original quotation from his seminal paper. The original reads as follows: The theorems suggest that {tautologies} is a good candidate for an interesting set not in L*, and I feel it is worth spending considerable effort trying to prove this conjecture. Such a proof would be a major breakthrough in complexity theory. Steve Cook, “The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures,” in Proceedings of the Third Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (New York: ACM), 151–58.

pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Some researchers, such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, see the automatons inevitably gobbling up more and more meaningful slices of our work.9 Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne caused a tremendous stir in September 2013, when they asserted in a seminal paper that A.I. would put 47 percent of current U.S. employment “at risk.”10 The paper, “The Future of Employment,” is a rigorous and detailed historical review of research on the effect of technology innovation upon labor markets and employment. In a recent research paper, McKinsey & Company found that “only about 5 percent of occupations could be fully automated by adapting current technology.

pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

He anointed the message fragments with the slightly more Anglo name of “packets,” and the general approach “packet switching.” The metaphors stuck. Today, the vast majority of data circling around the globe comes in the form of message fragments that we still call packets. Years after both Baran and Davies had published their seminal papers, Davies jokingly said to Baran, “Well, you may have got there first, but I got the name.” In the late 1960s, packet switching became the foundation of ARPANET, the research network that laid the groundwork for the Internet. The ARPANET design relied on several radical principles that broke with existing computing paradigms.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

Instead of considering market participants as hyperrational agents obeying arguably overly elegant utility functions, they are thought of as possessing biases, prejudices, and tendencies that have real and measurable effects on markets and ﬁnancial transactions. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a seminal paper in the ﬁeld outlining what they call prospect theory, a description of individuals’ optimization outside of the classical expected utility framework. Their pioneering paper noted many 252 Investment: A History of the known behaviors that represent aberrations from expected utility theory, including lottery problems (in which individuals tend to elect a lump-sum payment up front even if that is smaller than the expected value of receiving a larger amount or zero when a coin ﬂip is involved) and probabilistic insurance (in which individuals have a more disproportionate dislike for a form of insurance that would cover losses based on a coin ﬂip more than the math suggests they should).

…

Prospect theory contends that individuals’ choices are more centered on changes in utility or wealth rather than end values; it also suggests that most people exhibit loss aversion in which losses cause more harm to one’s welfare than the beneﬁt from happiness one receives from gaining the same amount of reward.46 This theory may seem intellectually interesting, but how does it relate precisely to ﬁnance and investing? Since Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal paper, subsequent work has made many connections to markets, one of which is the “equity premium puzzle.” The equity premium puzzle was described ﬁrst in a 1985 paper by Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott.47 The central “puzzle” is that while investors should be compensated more for holding riskier equities than holding the risk-free instrument (Treasury bills), the amount by which they are compensated seems extremely excessive historically.

pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In January 1962, Sharpe first presented his results at a University of Chicago seminar. Shortly afterward he submitted the paper, titled “Capital Asset Prices: A Theory of Market Equilibrium under Conditions of Risk,” to the prestigious Journal of Finance, at the time the top academic publication in the field and also where Markowitz had published his seminal paper. Sharpe received an initial negative report from an anonymous referee. Sharpe’s assumptions, the report commented, including the important assumption that all investors would make the same predictions about the expected returns and risks of securities, were so “preposterous” that all subsequent conclusions were “uninteresting.”32 Sharpe kept trying with the Journal of Finance.

…

We didn’t submit it to a finance journal because we thought this would have a broader application.”47 Shortly after the submission, Black received what is known as a desk reject, a decision by the editor of the journal to reject a submission outright rather than soliciting the views of “blind” referees. The letter indicated that their paper was too specialized for the journal and would be better suited for the Journal of Finance, where Markowitz and Sharpe had published their seminal papers. Black then sent the paper to another prestigious economics journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, founded in 1919 and published by MIT Press, and again received a prompt rejection letter. Black suspected that at least part of the reason for the prompt rejections was because it was clear from Black’s return address that he wasn’t at an academic institution, and thus the paper wasn’t taken seriously.

pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

It’s difficult to rely solely on a compelling résumé or being heard above the persistent noise of social media. We’re better off cultivating our connections and networks of people who know us, like us, and can help point us toward good opportunities. A good network is both deep and broad. Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford, best described the benefits of both in his seminal paper “The Strength of Weak Ties.”1 Our deep connections come from what he calls strong ties. They are limited in number and are the people we know best and interact with most frequently, like spouses, close friends, and current colleagues. Strong ties are important emotionally and are essential as the backbone of any fulfilling life.

pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Aid success in good policy environments Faced with mounting evidence that aid has not worked, aid proponents have also argued that aid would work, and did work, when placed in good policy environments, i.e. countries with sound fiscal, monetary and trade policies. In other words, aid would do its best, when a country was in essentially good working order. This argument was formalized in a seminal paper published by World Bank economists Burnside and Dollar in 2000. (Quite why a country in working order would need aid, or not seek other better, more transparent forms of financing itself, remains a mystery.) Donors soon latched onto the Burnside–Dollar result and were quick to put the findings into practice.

pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Carl Anderson discovered the positron in cosmic rays, confirming Paul Dirac’s prediction of the existence of antimatter. 1933: Fermi formulated a theory of beta decay that incorporated the neutrino and foreshadowed the weak force. 1937: Ettore Majorana proposed that the neutrino could be its own antiparticle. 1939: Hans Bethe published his seminal paper on energy production in stars but failed to mention neutrinos. 1946: Bruno Pontecorvo proposed that neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors and in the Sun could be detected with chlorine-based experiments. 1955–56: Researchers using the Bevatron in California identified the antiproton and the antineutron. 1956: Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan definitively detected (anti)neutrinos using a nuclear reactor as the source. 1956–57: T.

pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The giants of the Carboniferous illuminate the enduring power of Priestley’s original mint experiment, the long flame of associations and insights that came out of that original spark. Priestley and Franklin’s hunch that plant life was central to the planet’s production of breathable air first approached scientific consensus in the late 1960s, after two physicists, Lloyd Berkner and Lauriston Marshall, proposed in a seminal paper that the vast majority of atmospheric oxygen originated in photosynthesis. The “natural” level of oxygen on Earth was less than 1 percent; the 20.7 percent levels we enjoy as respiring mammals was an artificial state, engineered by the evolutionary breakthrough that began with cyanobacteria billions of years ago.

pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

What I found was a very complicated and intricate world of happiness research, much more complex than I originally thought it would be. Richard Easterlin, economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California, discussed the factors contributing to happiness in the his 1974 seminal paper ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’137. He found that the average reported level of happiness does not vary much with national income per person, at least for countries with income sufficient to meet basic needs. Similarly, although income per person rose steadily in the United States between 1946 and 1970, average reported happiness showed no long-term trend and declined between 1960 and 1970.

pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

And the political economy of public service provision in countries worldwide means that richer people are more likely to have better access to and quality of service from supposedly “universal” services where they are available at all. In Africa, for example, the richest fifth of the population benefits from 30 percent of public health expenditure while the poorest fifth benefits from only 12 percent of such expenditure.3 Wealthier countries are, unsurprisingly, healthier, according to a seminal paper by Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers. High-income countries see average life expectancies twenty years longer than those in low-income countries. Fewer than 1 percent of children die before the age of five in rich countries compared to 12 percent of children in low-income countries—a comparative toll of 100,000 children dying each year in wealthy countries compared to 10 million in the developing world.

pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

“The scientist at his or her purest is very similar to the artist,” he explained. “They have common goals; they’re both searching for the truth. The difference is that scientifc truth is external truth whereas the truth that a writer or a painter sees is inner truth.” In 1977, Shu published a seminal paper on star formation, building on previous work by Yale University astronomer Richard Larson and others. In it, he proposed a simple, yet elegant, model showing that cloud cores collapse “inside out,” frst forming a small central star onto which rest of the material falls. Because the cloud is spinning, it actually fattens into a disk as it shrinks in size, sort of like how pizza dough makes a pie as it is spun in the air.

pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The immediate effect of their actions was to reduce the amount of trash on a few market streets, but their longer-term value is not their output but their example. As they put it in a Responsible Citizens manifesto: “We wish to nurture in everyone a community spirit.” They were trying to make civic action contagious. This idea is less crazy than it sounds. In 1973 Mark Granovetter showed in a seminal paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” that people tend to find jobs through casual acquaintances rather than through close friends or family. Since then an increasing body of research has demonstrated the importance of social networks to our well-being. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, researchers at Harvard Medical School, have shown that social networks spread all kinds of behaviors: we are likelier to be obese if our friends are obese, or to exercise if they exercise, or even to be happy if they are happy.

pages: 259 words: 67,456

The Mythical Man-Month by Brooks, Jr. Frederick P.

Boeing 747, Conway's law, finite state, HyperCard, Ken Thompson, machine readable, Menlo Park, Multics, no silver bullet, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Turing machine, work culture

., "On the design and development of program families," IEEE Trans, on Software Engineering, SE-2, 1 (March, 1976), pp. 1-9; Parnas, D. L., "Designing software for ease of extension and contraction," IEEE Trans, on Software Engineering, SE-5, 2 (March, 1979), pp. 128-138. D. Harel, "Biting the silver bullet," Computer (Jan,, 1992), pp. 8-20. The seminal papers on information hiding are: Parnas, D. L., "Information distribution aspects of design methodology," Carnegie-Mellon, Dept. of Computer Science, Technical Report (Feb., 1971); Parnas, D. L., "A technique for software module specification with examples," Comm. ACM, 5, 5 (May, 1972), pp. 330-336; Parnas, D.

pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

This triﬂe, inspired at least in part by the renown of Christopher’s uncle Lytton Strachey’s 1918 portrait of a generation, Eminent Victorians, is the product of a stored program computer, and as such may well be the ﬁrst aesthetic object produced by the ancestors of the culture machine. The love letter generator’s intentional blurring of the boundary between human and nonhuman is directly related to one of the foundational memes of artiﬁcial intelligence: the still-provocative Turing Test. In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a seminal paper from 1950, Turing created a thought experiment. He posited a person holding a textual conversation on any topic with an unseen correspondent. If the person believes he or she is communicating with another person, but is in reality conversing with a machine, then that machine has passed the Turing Test.

pages: 212 words: 68,649

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

Certainly no one thinks that because the Spanish word for eye (ojo) is masculine and the word for chin (barbilla) is feminine, Spanish speakers perceive eyes as inherently macho body parts and chins as inherently ladylike ones. But toward the end of the twentieth century, linguist Suzanne Romaine determined that this relationship between grammatical and “natural” gender is not always so separate. In 1997 Romaine published a seminal* paper called “Gender, Grammar, and the Space in Between.” The same year of Princess Diana’s death and Mike Tyson’s bite fight, Romaine was blowing minds at the University of Oxford with the theory that in languages all over the world, there is some undeniable “leakage” going on between grammatical gender and how we perceive human gender in real life.

pages: 213 words: 68,363

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

Moreover, the b process can be elicited solely by environmental stimuli that promise the a process is coming—which is what happened with Pavlov’s dogs, who learned to salivate even when food was not present. Our experience (solid line) is the combined effect of the drug (a process) and the brain’s opponent response to the drug (b process). I don’t have any tattoos, but on my short list, if I decide to get one, is a figure like the one shown below, also copied from Solomon and Corbit’s seminal paper and illustrating the changes that occur in the b process as a result of adaptation. Note how the experience of the stimulus is dramatically altered, so that now there is hardly a bump in feeling state. In many ways, this figure is the theoretical heart of scientific understanding about addiction and the core of this book, depicting how the drug comes to function mainly to stave off withdrawal and craving in the face of the brain’s powerful ability to counteract perturbation.

pages: 227 words: 63,186

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

Ben Horowitz, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, data science, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, functional programming, Google Earth, hive mind, Innovator's Dilemma, iterative process, Kanban, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, pull request, Richard Thaler, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, the long tail, web application

We describe several related efforts to measure and pay down technical debt found in Google’s BUILD files and associated dead code. We address debt found in dependency specifications, unbuildable targets, and unnecessary command line flags. These efforts often expose other forms of technical debt that must first be managed. “No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering” A seminal paper from the author of The Mythical Man-Month, “No Silver Bullet” expands on discussions of accidental versus essential complexity, and argues that there is no longer enough accidental complexity to allow individual reductions in that accidental complexity to significantly increase engineer productivity.

pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

When one of his graduate students wrote him for help in raising money for a particular project, Oppie replied whimsically that such research, “like marriage and poetry, should be discouraged and should occur only despite such discouragement.” On February 14, 1930, Oppenheimer finished writing a seminal paper, “On the Theory of Electrons and Protons.” Drawing on Paul Dirac’s equation on the electron, Oppenheimer argued that there had to be a positively charged counterpart to the electron—and that this mysterious counterpart should have the same mass as the electron itself. It could not, as Dirac had suggested, be a proton.

…

The so-called “Lamb shift” correctly attributed the difference between the two energy levels to the process of self-interaction—whereby charged particles interact with electromagnetic fields. Lamb won a Nobel Prize in 1955, in part for his precise measurement of the Lamb shift, a key step in the development of quantum electrodynamics. During these years, Oppenheimer wrote important, even seminal, papers on cosmic rays, gamma rays, electrodynamics and electron-positron showers. In the field of nuclear physics, he and Melba Phillips calculated the yield of protons in deuteron reactions. Phillips, an Indiana farm girl, born in 1907, was Oppenheimer’s first doctoral student. Their calculations on proton yields became widely known as the “Oppenheimer-Phillips process.”

…

IN FEBRUARY 1944, a team of British scientists led by the German-born Rudolf E. Peierls arrived in Los Alamos. Oppenheimer had first met this brilliant but unassuming theoretical physicist in 1929, when both men were studying under Wolfgang Pauli. Peierls had emigrated from Germany to England in the early 1930s, and in 1940 he and Otto R. Frisch had written the seminal paper “On the Construction of a Superbomb,” which had persuaded both the British and American governments that a nuclear weapon was feasible. During the next several years, Peierls worked on all aspects of Tube Alloys, the British bomb program. In 1942 and again in September 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Peierls to America to help expedite work on the bomb.

pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

If the user edited this tree structure, then the structure of the corresponding printed document would change. The model was derived from a review of the literature in cognitive psychology, composition theory and the nascent field of human computer studies (which would later become Human Computer Interaction (HCI)). Bolter coauthored a seminal paper on WE in 1986 with Smith, Lansman, Stephen Weiss, David Beard and Gordon Ferguson, and contributed to its development. From the outset in the discussions this group were having, however, it became apparent to Smith that: Jay was more interested in the Macintosh hardware, and he was also interested in applying these ideas to literature and a literary context.

pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Visa and Mastercard may not have used the term multisided markets when they launched, but their operations – of connecting card users and merchants – clearly exhibited the economic characteristics of platform businesses.8 The concept of multisided markets started to be formalized by academics in 2000. Geoff Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne were among the first economists to look closely at platform business models while trying to understand how firms such as Microsoft could sustainably offer free software.9 Shortly after, JeanCharles Rochet and Jean Tirole published a seminal paper on the economics of card platforms in 2002. Their research proposed a new economic model of the price relationships used on both sides of a multisided market to better coordinate demand.10 While the main focus area of the paper was credit cards, the analysis and key findings apply more widely.

pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

When they interacted effectively, they exceeded the capability of individual members.’ 26 Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014). 27 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (Crown, 2015). 28 https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/ambpp.2017.313 29 Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend and Foe. 30 Quoted in Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success (Princeton University Press, 2015). 31 The seminal paper was written by Henrich and Gil-White, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11384884 32 Conversation with the author. 33 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56cf3dd4b6aa60904403973f/t/57be0776f7e0ab26d736060e/1472071543508/dominance-and-prestige-dual-strategies-for-navigating-social-hierarchies.pdf 34 Conversation with the author. 35 https://creighton.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/psychological-safety-a-meta-analytic-review-and-extension 36 https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/ 37 Conversation with the author. 38 Conversation with the author. 39 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beauty-amazons-6-pager-brad-porter 40 Conversation with the author. 41 Quoted in Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World (W.

pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

See Alan Fiske, “The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations,” Psychological Review 99, no. 4 (1992): 689–723. 42.Thiers is using the term “tipping point” in Malcolm Gladwell’s sense—the moment at which something suddenly starts to spread like wildfire. Scholars of two-sided networks also talk about tipping (although not tipping points), but they mean something rather different: “the tendency of one system to pull away from its rivals in popularity once it has gained an initial edge,” according to a seminal paper on network effects. See Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro, “Systems Competition and Network Effects,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 106. This kind of tipping doesn’t always occur. For example, when users can simultaneously be on two or more platforms (multihoming), a single platform need not prevail—so while SitterCity may have reached a tipping point, the matchmaking between parents and babysitters hasn’t tipped toward any one platform. 43.This statement is a corollary of the so-called Metcalfe’s Law, which postulates that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the network.

pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars. Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them. Weaver recognized the potential of computers long before most people even knew they existed. He wrote a seminal paper that laid out how computers could translate text from one language to another, sixty years before the creation of Google Translate and Babylon. While at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver also handpicked and financed a team that spent two decades developing high-yield varieties of wheat that were impervious to disease.

pages: 280 words: 85,091

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

But there’s an added ingredient, a kind of naive, childlike inquisitiveness, which is strongly reminiscent of the core “openness to experience” factor of the Big Five personality structure that we explored in chapter 2. And which psychopaths, if you recall, score very high on. “The first component [of mindfulness] involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience,” explains psychiatrist Scott Bishop in one of the seminal papers on the subject back in 2004, “thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.”

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Like all metaphysical concepts, when you try to pin it down it turns out to be just a word.15 THE POLICY CONTEXT 117 A recent report from the Centre for Holistic Studies agrees, finding that much of the policy aimlessness of recent years is the result of relying on measurement rather than judgement.16 As Funtowicz and Ravetz pointed out in a seminal paper in the related field of ecological economics, in which they ask, ‘What is the value of a songbird?’, the most valuable things in life are, quite literally, priceless. Unfortunately, this can mean that they are therefore accorded no economic value and not protected.17 The call for alternative indicators comes down to a question of how we, as citizens concerned for the well-being of others and of the planet we share, would choose to measure the well-being of a nation.

pages: 304 words: 80,965

What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us, and How to Fix It by Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, David Pitt-Watson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Admiral Zheng, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, compensation consultant, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Northern Rock, passive investing, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payment for order flow, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, WikiLeaks

After all, no one is going to take advantage of the option to sell you a stock at less than what it’s worth. But if the stock drops, the portfolio manager is obligated to buy it at the agreed-upon price, which may now be higher than the market price. As veteran investor Andrew Weisman pointed out in a seminal paper more than a decade ago, a number of hedge fund strategies are based on the same idea, although the method is more complex. Often it involves buying one security and selling another, and betting that the relationship between the two remains steady, so as to “permit a trader to collect a premium for assuming the risks associated [with] low-probability events.”23 The problem, of course, is that “low probability” is not “no probability.”

pages: 312 words: 83,998

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

"World Economic Forum" Davos, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, confounding variable, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental economics, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeremy Corbyn, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, publication bias, risk tolerance, seminal paper

And startlingly, the first set of contradictory data we’ll look at comes from Bateman’s own study. ALTHOUGH BATEMAN’S CONCLUSIONS tend to evoke images of the Playboy Mansion or well-stocked harems, it’s necessary for the time being to return to Bateman’s unsalubrious glass containers. It was only in our young century that, noticing that this (ahem) seminal paper had never been replicated, or apparently even subjected to close inspection, the contemporary evolutionary biologists Brian Snyder and Patricia Gowaty reexamined it. As they acknowledge, they returned to the study with many advantages that Bateman had lacked. These included modern computational aids, more sophisticated statistical methods and—perhaps I can dare to add?

pages: 304 words: 84,396

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success by Matthew Syed

barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, combinatorial explosion, deliberate practice, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, sugar pill, zero-sum game

THE HIDDEN LOGIC OF SUCCESS “I propose to show”: The quotes from Francis Galton are taken from Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (New York: D. Appleton, 1884). In 1991 Anders Ericsson: The study of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin is published in one of the most seminal papers in the study of expertise: K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. “There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’”: This view was based on a wide-ranging study of musical achievement: John A.

pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

In the early 1980s Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash, along with Rosbash’s graduate student Paul Hardin at Brandeis, discovered such a circadian oscillator in the fruit fly, an insect that has timekeeping gene qualities associated with clock genes in humans. Hall and Rosbash won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of the molecular processes that control circadian rhythms. In their seminal paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, they isolated the so-called Period gene (per), which cycles the amount of messenger RNA (mRNA) produced in a feedback loop, first forming and then terminating proteins made from per gene instructions.13 For clarity, let’s first briefly recall the mechanisms of mRNA and proteins.

pages: 292 words: 94,324

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

I got cavalier." As there are classic clinical maladies, there are classic cognitive errors. Alter's misdiagnosis resulted from such an error, the use of a heuristic called "availability." Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, psychologists from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explored this shortcut in a seminal paper more than two decades ago. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for work illuminating the way certain patterns of thinking cause irrational decisions in the marketplace; Tversky certainly would have shared the prize had he not died an untimely death in 1996. "Availability" means the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind.

pages: 315 words: 93,628

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

A concise but accurate summary of the claims of Lobachevsky and Bolyai for priority is given in Kline 1972. ome of Gauss’s correspondence on non-Euclidean geometry is presented in Ewald 1996. In a brilliant lecture delivered in Göttingen: An English translation of the lecture, as well as other seminal papers on non-Euclidean geometries, together with illuminating notes, can be found in Pesic 2007. Poincaré’s views were inspired: Poincaré 1891. in the first chapter of the Ars Magna: Cardano 1545. In another important book, Treatise of Algebra: Wallis 1685. A concise summary of Wallis’s biography and work can be found in Rouse Ball 1908.

pages: 713 words: 93,944

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement by Eric Redmond, Jim Wilson, Jim R. Wilson

AGPL, Amazon Web Services, business logic, create, read, update, delete, data is the new oil, database schema, Debian, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, full text search, general-purpose programming language, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, MVC pattern, natural language processing, node package manager, random walk, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Skype, social graph, sparse data, web application

for room in 1...100 # Create a unique room number as the key ro = Riak::RObject.new(bucket, (current_rooms_block + room)) # Randomly grab a room style, and make up a capacity style = STYLES[rand(STYLES.length)] capacity = rand(8) + 1 # Store the room information as a JSON value ro.content_type = "application/json" ro.data = {'style' => style, 'capacity' => capacity} ro.store end end $ ruby hotel.rb We’ve now populated a human hotel we’ll mapreduce against. Introducing Mapreduce One of Google’s greatest lasting contributions to computer science is the popularization of mapreduce as an algorithmic framework for executing jobs in parallel over several nodes. It is described in Google’s seminal paper[15] on the topic and has become a valuable tool for executing custom queries in the class of partition-tolerant datastores. Mapreduce breaks down problems into two parts. Part 1 is to convert a list of data into another type of list by way of a map function. Part 2 is to convert this second list to one or more scalar values by way of a reduce function.

pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

And sure enough, Gmeindl and Chiu found consistent places in the brain where activity occurred immediately before the shift. So is that where so-called free will lives in the brain? If so, it sure looks like plain ol’ deterministic brain activity. There is nothing special going on at all. The brain is just doing its thing. However, it isn’t that simple. The plot, as they say, thickens. In a seminal paper published in 1999, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley proposed a revolutionary idea. Instead of the traditional order of the sequence—a person decides to do something and then it happens—they maintained that things in the brain actually run backward from that. First, the theory goes, you do something, then you tell yourself later that you decided to do it.

pages: 442 words: 94,734

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Anthropocene, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

He later went on to develop the official British Standard for condoms (BS 3704). 9 This was a remarkable achievement, given the collective noun for statisticians has been said to be a ‘variance’. CHAPTER 11: Learning from Experience the Bayesian Way 1 He died with no knowledge whatsoever of his enduring legacy, and not only was his seminal paper published posthumously in 1763, but his name did not become associated with this approach until the twentieth century. 2 Some might even say I was indoctrinated. 3 Odds of 1 are sometimes known as ‘evens’, since the events are equally likely, or evenly balanced. 4 His exact words were, ‘Given the number of times on which an unknown event has happened and failed: Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies somewhere between any two degrees of probability that can be named’, which is reasonably clear, except in modern terminology we would probably reverse his use of ‘chance’ and ‘probability’. 5 Being a Presbyterian minister, he just called it a table. 6 Remember, it means that, in the long run, 95% of such intervals will contain the true value – but we can’t say anything about any particular interval. 7 But I still prefer the Bayesian approach.

pages: 324 words: 90,253

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

A lack of trust prevented a transaction from taking place. This was a classic example of market failure: all parties wanted a transaction to take place but a lack of trust meant that it was impossible to strike a deal. My experience is not so different from George Akerlof's market for lemons. In his seminal paper published in 1970,1 Akerlof investigated an obvious peculiarity associated with the value of second-hand cars. Why did the value of a brand new car immediately drop as soon as it was driven off the forecourt? The answer was simple: the seller, having owned the car, would know something about its idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses that the would-be buyer would, inevitably, be clueless about.

pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

Broadly speaking, the market impact is represented in their model and in other academic models as a smooth function, but in the case of an agent-based model, this need not be the case; there can be the sudden discontinuous drops common to phase transitions. 8. The analysis of market liquidity has generally focused on day-to-day liquidity during normal periods in equity markets. It has discussed the relationship between price impact and transactions volume. Much of this work and discussion derives from Kyle’s (1985) seminal paper, where he builds a dynamic model of trade with a sequential auction model that resembles a continuous market, where he uses three agents: a random-noise trader, a risk-neutral insider, and a competitive-risk natural market maker. By doing so he is able to create a market model by which questions about liquidity and information could be tested.

pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

In 1985 he was appointed by the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society in the world, to lead a team to evaluate the current state of attitudes toward science and technology in Britain. The Royal Society was concerned about antiscientific sentiment in Britain, seeing it as a serious risk to societal well-being. The team’s results and recommendations were published in a seminal paper, now known as the Bodmer Report. Previous research had focused primarily on measuring attitudes directly, but Bodmer and his team argued passionately for a simple and intuitive idea: that opposition to science and technology is driven by lack of understanding. Hence, by promoting better understanding of science, society can promote more favorable attitudes and take better advantage of the benefits afforded by science and technology.

pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Even if figuring out the “cause” of aging is more trouble than it’s worth, gerontologists still need a way to identify the first principles of the problem of aging. THE HALLMARKS OF AGING In 2013, a group of European scientists led by biochemist and molecular biologist Carlos López-Otín published a seminal paper entitled “The 9 Hallmarks of Aging,” which tackled this problem and gave the longevity community a way to study aging without agreeing on its root cause. An entire book could be written about these hallmarks, but for our purposes it is only important to know that each of the hallmarks meets three essential criteria set by López-Otín’s research team: they present themselves during normal aging; they speed up aging when researchers experimentally aggravate them; and blocking them in some way tends to slow down aging and/or increase lifespan.

pages: 404 words: 92,713

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data by David Spiegelhalter

Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer vision, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Edmond Halley, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, government statistician, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, Higgs boson, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, seminal paper, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, sugar pill, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Design of Experiments, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Two Sigma

Barnard was a delightful man, a pure mathematician (and Communist) before the war, when like many others he adapted his skills for statistical war work. He later went on to develop the official British Standard for condoms (BS 3704). * This was a remarkable achievement, given the collective noun for statisticians has been said to be a ‘variance’. * He died with no knowledge whatsoever of his enduring legacy, and not only was his seminal paper published posthumously in 1763, but his name did not become associated with this approach until the twentieth century. * Some might even say I was indoctrinated. * Odds of 1 are sometimes known as ‘evens’, since the events are equally likely, or evenly balanced. * His exact words were, ‘Given the number of times on which an unknown event has happened and failed: Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies somewhere between any two degrees of probability that can be named’, which is reasonably clear, except in modern terminology we would probably reverse his use of ‘chance’ and ‘probability’

pages: 1,082 words: 87,792

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

Computers now link together various stock exchanges, a practice which is helping to create a single global market for the trading of securities. The continuing improvements in technology will make it possible to execute trades globally by electronic trading systems. Interestingly, one of the oldest and most widely used algorithms is found in dynamic hedging of options. Already with the publication of the seminal papers about the pricing of European options by Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973), the algorithm, called delta hedging, was made available long before computerized and electronic trading even started. Delta hedging as a trading algorithm shows how to hedge away all market risks in a simplified, perfect, continuous model world.

pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

We instead need to account for past patterns of discrimination, the kind of horrific systemic abuses Jesus Hernandez has spent decades measuring, and in fact put our finger on the scale to compensate for it where we can. There is vital and rapid work being done on bias in AI. The researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published a seminal paper in February 2018 revealing that the top three commercial facial-recognition systems misidentified white, male faces only 0.8 percent of the time, while the same systems misidentified dark-skinned women more than 20 percent of the time. And the stakes, they pointed out, are high: “While face recognition software by itself should not be trained to determine the fate of an individual in the criminal justice system, it is very likely that such software is used to identify suspects.”5 Inspired in part by that work, a study by the federal agency charged with establishing technical benchmarks on new technology, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), found that across 189 facial-recognition algorithms from 99 developers around the world, Asian and African American faces were misidentified far more often than white faces.

pages: 335 words: 94,578

Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism by Barb Cook, Samantha Craft

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, financial independence, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, rolodex, seminal paper, sexual politics, theory of mind, women in the workforce

Catriona beautifully describes the historical context of understanding gender, intersectionality, and feminism. I would like to describe the historical context of autism because I think it bears strongly on all of the issues that Catriona raises. The definition of autism has broadened enormously in the last 40 years since Lorna Wing’s seminal paper in 1981 describing Asperger syndrome in English for the first time. When I started working in this area in 1993, these broader definitions of autism were not in the international diagnostic texts for understanding difference, emerging first in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Fourth Edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

But the record suggests that the majority of the extinctions on Madeira happened over the past two centuries—not under the initial colonial onslaught but later, as successive waves of foreign species and agrarian capitalism snuffed out millions of years of evolution.70 The trees, water, soil, fauna, and flora on Madeira and the sea around the island were treated as “free gifts,” transformed into a series of inputs or hindrances to production.71 In a seminal paper on overfishing, “Reefs since Columbus,” Jeremy Jackson notes how humans have extinguished life from the time that young Columbus arrived on Madeira.72 Humans under capitalism abuse the ecosystems of which we are part—and on which we depend. Capitalists are, for instance, happy to view the ocean as both storage facility for the seafood we have yet to catch and sinkhole for the detritus we produce on land.

pages: 308 words: 94,447

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

Only much later did they reach the Americas, and only many thousands of years after that did they make it to Madagascar and New Zealand. “When the chronology of extinction is critically set against the chronology of human migrations,” Paul Martin of the University of Arizona wrote in “Prehistoric Overkill,” his seminal paper on the subject, “man’s arrival emerges as the only reasonable answer” to the megafauna’s disappearance. In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: “Personally, I can’t fathom why Australia’s giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously (at least on a time scale of millions of years) precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived.”

pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

“The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s thoughts about the role computers could play in people’s lives hit a crescendo in 1960 with the publication of his seminal paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” In it he distilled many of his ideas into a central thesis: A close coupling between humans and “the electronic members of the partnership” would eventually result in cooperative decision making. Moreover, decisions would be made by humans, using computers, without what Lick called “inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.”

pages: 337 words: 89,075

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio by Victor A. Canto

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, global macro, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Phillips curve, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

A final reason for choosing this specific sample period is the bulk of the asset data is only available from 1975 on. This is the longest sample period for which I could get the data in the classifications that match the current exchange-traded funds’ (ETFs) availability to satisfy the mutual-exclusion constraint I find essential. 3. Harry Markowitz’s seminal paper (1952) marks modern financial literature’s beginning. Subsequent publications by Jensen (1968), Lintner (1965 and 1969), Sharpe (1964), and Treynor (1962) led to modern financial risk metrics’ development. 4. S&P/BARRA Indexes, Research and Indices description, BARRA.com (2005). 5. Sharpe (1992). 6.

pages: 323 words: 100,772

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

The translator, mathematician L. J. Savage, told Steve Heims: “He phoned me from someplace like Los Alamos, very angry. He wrote a criticism of these papers in English. The criticism was not angry. It was characteristic of him that the criticism was written with good manners.” All this granted, the seminal paper of game theory is without doubt von Neumann’s 1928 article, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftspiele” (“Theory of Parlor Games”). In this he proved (as Borel had not) the famous “minimax theorem.” This important result immediately gave the field mathematical respectability. THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR Von Neumann wanted game theory to reach a larger audience than mathematicians.

pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

“We have as yet no direct evidence of radio waves passing between the surface of the earth and outer space,” he noted, “[but] given sufficient transmitting power, we might obtain the necessary evidence by exploring for echoes from the moon.” I do not know that the men of Project Diana knew of Clarke’s seminal paper, but their counterparts in the US Navy did, and so did some in the press. On February 3rd 1946 the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story on the idea, noting of Clarke’s proposed Moonbounce test that “the US Army Signal Corps has just done this.” Project Diana thus showed both the feasibility of communication satellites and that the Moon could function in such a role.

pages: 340 words: 100,151

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, carried interest, cloud computing, compensation consultant, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, family office, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, index fund, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Lean Startup, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Paul Graham, pets.com, power law, price stability, prudent man rule, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, VA Linux, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

After all, we knew that, given the size of the opportunity, the market would attract multiple companies into the space. Martin Casado was the consummate founder for this business. He had spent his early career at the CIA building out the foundations for software-defined networking and then went to Stanford to earn his PhD in the same area. His doctoral thesis was the seminal paper on the topic. There couldn’t have been better founder-market fit. And so we invested in Nicira, which was ultimately acquired by VMware for $1.25 billion. And then after spending several years at VMware running the business division into which he was acquired, Martin joined Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner.

pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

And it would take another 100 years for someone to realize that Boolean logic and probability could help computers evolve from automating basic math to more complex thinking machines. There wasn’t a way to build a thinking machine—the processes, materials, and power weren’t yet available—and so the theory couldn’t be tested. The leap from theoretical thinking machines to computers that began to mimic human thought happened in the 1930s with the publication of two seminal papers: Claude Shannon’s “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and Relay Circuits” and Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” As an electrical engineering student at MIT, Shannon took an elective course in philosophy—an unusual diversion. Boole’s An Investigation of the Laws of Thought became the primary reference for Shannon’s thesis.

pages: 364 words: 102,926

What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen

correlation does not imply causation, information retrieval, intentional community, machine readable, Parler "social media", pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, statistical model, Steven Pinker, traumatic brain injury

By all accounts, McCawley was a polymath (for instance, he had several degrees in math), a prodigy (who started as a student at the University of Chicago at sixteen), and an inveterate prankster. Under the pseudonym of Quang Phuc Dong, ostensibly of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (or SHIT), he wrote several seminal papers in what he called “scatolinguistics.” The first, “English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject,” deals with the grammar of Fuck you. McCawley died in 1999 and with him a lot of the fun of linguistics. fMuch of this discussion is inspired by Fillmore, C. J. (1985). We miss you, Chuck. gOne final thing that’s interesting about this case is that the profane word (fuck or hell) looks like a noun—it follows the, as nouns are wont to do—but it doesn’t behave like just any noun.

pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

“Attitude of Waiting.” See also “A Twenty-Five Million Pool.” 2. Cooper and John (1988) have in particular emphasized the role of dual equilibria in macroeconomics. The view of confidence in this chapter goes beyond this interpretation. Our description of confidence corresponds to that presented in the seminal paper by Benabou (2008). To Benabou the notion of confidence corresponds to a psychological state in which people do not sufficiently utilize the information that is available to them. They are too trusting —a state of mind that leads to overinvestment. Blanchard (1993) takes a similar view on the nature of animal spirits.

pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Robert Goddard is bundled against the cold of a New England winter in 1926 as he stands by the launching frame of his most notable invention. The liquid fuel of this rocket was gasoline and liquid oxygen, contained in the cylinder across from Goddard’s torso. Nevertheless, the world was not quite ready for rockets. Goddard’s seminal paper from 1919, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” was ridiculed by the press and fellow scientists. An unsigned editorial in the New York Times was particularly harsh, accusing him of ignorance of the laws of physics: “. . . Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . .

pages: 296 words: 87,299

Portfolios of the poor: how the world's poor live on $2 a day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford

behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, failed state, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, M-Pesa, mental accounting, microcredit, moral hazard, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, transaction costs

The general problem is framed in Morduch’s (1999) essay on the strengths and weaknesses of informal risk sharing. He asks: “does informal insurance patch the safety net?” And answers: “yes, but not very well.” The essay also 251 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE describes the hidden costs—financial, economic, and emotional—often attached to informal risk sharing. See Townsend 1994 for the seminal paper on formal tests of village-level risk sharing, as well as Deaton 1992, 1997 for similar work in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Thailand, Morduch 2005 in India, Udry 1994 in Nigeria, Grimard 1997 in Côte d’Ivoire, Lund and Fafchamps 2003 in the Philippines, and Dubois 2000 in Pakistan. Morduch 2005 provides a critical overview of the work on South Asia, and Morduch 2006 provides an accessible introduction to the broader research program.

pages: 282 words: 89,436

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

It is like counting the number of arrangements of a set of pennies, each minted in a different year. If you distinguish them by their dates, they have many more unique configurations than if you treat them as identical. Therefore, quantum estimates of entropy are different from classical measures. Before Bose contributed his seminal paper on photons and Einstein extended his treatment to include ideal gases, many physicists were perplexed about which factors to include in expressing the entropy for quantum systems. A well-known equation for entropy contained a controversial correction term that no one, until Bose, could fully explain.

pages: 367 words: 97,136

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

His main point, I suppose, was that his judgment, given his experience and track record, was probably better than any mathematically derived estimate. One of the great misconceptions on portfolio theory is that it precludes the use of judgment and experience. It doesn’t. It’s right there in Markowitz’s 1952 seminal paper, for everyone to see, in the first paragraph: The process of selecting a portfolio may be divided into two stages. The first stage starts with observation and experience and ends with beliefs about the future performances of available securities. The second stage starts with the relevant beliefs about future performances and ends with the choice of a portfolio.

pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

Stigma among parents of children with autism: A literature review. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 45, 88–94. I have conducted a thorough literature review and found numerous studies on self-stigma reduction for people who are not actually Autistic, but merely related to someone Autistic, and the above review lists some of the most seminal papers. At the time of this writing I can find no papers on self-stigma reduction for the actual members of the stigmatized group—Autistic people ourselves. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Corrigan, P. W., Kosyluk, K. A., & Rüsch, N. (2013). Reducing self-stigma by coming out proud. American Journal of Public Health, 103(5), 794–800.

pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

Tseng had shown that all the persnickety chemical gradients, transcriptional networks, and force cues needed to orchestrate individual cells into complicated tissues could be harnessed with a comparatively simple set of electrical instructions. The genes were hardware, and they could be controlled by manipulating ion flows—the instructions from the software. Tseng and Levin soon published the seminal paper introducing their new idea: “Cracking the bioelectric code.”44 Subsequent research has yielded multi-limbed frogs and other evidence of bioelectricity’s role in regeneration. Among the most startling of these, it was possible to use bioelectric interventions to make planarians that had been chopped in half grow a second head instead of a tail.

pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Jeff Bezos drew the analogy between the Cambrian explosion and the Internet in a number of places, including an interview in Business Week (September 16, 1999), http://www.businessweek.com/ebiz/9909/916bezos.htm. Scott Page describes this experiment in “Return to the Toolbox,” unpublished paper (2002). Also see Scott Page and Lu Hong, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” Journal of Economic Theory 97 (2001): 123–63. The seminal paper is James G. March, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 2 (1991): 71–87. The quotes are from pages 86 and 79. The study of chess players can be found in Herbert A. Simon and W. G. Chase, “Skill in Chess,” American Scientist 61 (1973): 394–403. The Chase quote is from James Shanteau, “Expert Judgment and Financial Decision Making,” paper prepared for Risky Business: Risk Behavior and Risk Management, edited by Bo Green (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1995).

pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Many of the older scientists remained immune, but their influence waned as the new language became universal. After Feynman’s work on the diagrams was done, a year went by before it was published. He was willing and eager to share his ideas in conversation with anyone who would listen, but he found the job of writing a formal paper distasteful and postponed it as long as he could. His seminal paper, “Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics,”5 might never have been written if he had not gone to Pittsburgh to stay for a few days with his friends Bert and Mulaika Corben. While he was in the Corbens’ house, they urged him to sit down and write the paper, and he made all kinds of excuses to avoid doing it.

Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Merton, Merton Miller, Franco Modigliani, Myron Scholes, and William Sharpe—have won Nobel Prizes, and, if he had been alive when Scholes and Merton received * In his f ine book, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (2006), MacKenzie has characterized the process as a “cascade,” in which each innovator drew directly on his predecessors (p. 389). bern_a03fpref.qxd 3/23/07 8:43 AM Page xxi Preface xxi theirs in 1997, Fischer Black would surely have been included. Jack Treynor, very much a part of the original story, should also have won a Nobel but missed out because he never published his seminal paper on the Capital Asset Pricing Model.* Working on this project has been a great adventure and a rare privilege. Peter L. Bernstein New York, New York March 2007 * On a personal note, I owe Jack Treynor an apology. On page 184 of Capital Ideas, I wrote that Treynor “left Harvard Business School in 1955 . . . ,” giving the impression that Jack left without graduating.

pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

While people accept that equities and bonds are the two major investment asset classes, and others will accept that money market funds, real estate, precious metals, and currencies are other commonly used asset classes,4 few bother to understand what is meant by an asset class in the first place. Robert Greer, vice president of Daiwa Securities, wrote “What Is an Asset Class, Anyway?”5 a seminal paper on the definition of an asset class in a 1997 issue of The Journal of Portfolio Management. According to Greer: An asset class is a set of assets that bear some fundamental economic similarities to each other, and that have characteristics that make them distinct from other assets that are not part of that class.

pages: 369 words: 105,819

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

All tyrants share several essential features: they are predominantly men with a specific character defect, narcissistic psychopathy (a.k.a. malignant narcissism). This defect manifests in a severely impaired or absent conscience and an insatiable drive for power and adulation that masks the conscience deficits. It forms the core of attraction between him and his followers, the essence of what is seen as his “charisma.” In his seminal paper on “Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars of the 21st Century” (2015), Frederick Burkle observes that narcissism augments and intensifies the pathological features of a psychopathic character structure, making those endowed with it especially dangerous, not in the least because of their ability to use manipulative charm and a pretense of human ideals to pursue their distinctly primitive goals.

pages: 339 words: 109,331

The Clash of the Cultures by John C. Bogle

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, junk bonds, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, Occupy movement, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, post-work, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, random walk, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Agency Costs and Managerial Behavior In 1976, another pair of wise academics—Harvard Business School’s Michael C. Jensen and University of Rochester’s William H. Meckling—added another brilliant insight on corporate behavior. “America has a principal/agent problem,” as The Economist explained their seminal paper. “Agents (i.e., managers) were feathering their own nests rather than the interests of their principals (shareholders).” In “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure,” Jensen and Meckling set forth “a theory of (1) property rights, (2) agency, and (3) finance (as they relate to) the ownership structure of the firm.”

pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

Still, Marsh had been away from day-to-day operations for twelve years, and this focus on “cyber” was entirely new to him. For advice and a reality check, Marsh called an old colleague who knew more about these issues than just about anybody—Willis Ware. Ware had kept up with every step of the Internet revolution since writing his seminal paper, nearly thirty years earlier, on the vulnerability of computer networks. He still worked at the RAND Corporation, and he was a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, which is where Marsh had come to know and trust him. Ware assured Marsh that Gorelick’s report was on the right track; that this was a serious issue and growing more so by the day, as the military and society grew more dependent on these networks; and that too few people were paying attention.

pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

After graduating in 1995 with degrees in mathematics and cognitive science—the latter is the study of the mind as a machine that processes information—Bodek found work at Magnify, an Oak Park, Illinois, high-tech outfit run by Robert Grossman, a pioneer in techniques to mine giant databases for information. Bodek quickly proved his mettle at Magnify. With Grossman and several other researchers he helped write a seminal paper on predicting credit card fraud based on massive data sets. Using “machine learning,” a branch of artificial intelligence that deployed algorithms to crunch large blocks of data, the system could detect patterns of fraudulent transactions. One red flag might be a $1 credit card purchase at a gas station followed by a $10,000 splurge at a jewelry store (signaling that the thieves were testing the card before trying to make a big score).

pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

It grew out of digital computing, which was explored and developed at Bletchley Park in England during the Second World War, famously enabling the Nazis’ Enigma code to be broken. That feat is closely associated with the name of Alan Turing. Turing was also responsible for AI’s early conceptual framework, publishing in 1950 the seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” The subject was subsequently developed mainly in the USA and the UK. But it waxed and waned in both esteem and achievement. Over the last decade, however, a number of key developments have come together to power AI forward: • Enormous growth in computer processing power

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

From the beginning, he saw a combination of languages, methodologies, and machines supporting new ways to think, communicate, collaborate, and learn. Much of the apparatus was social, and therefore nonmechanical. After failing to recruit support from computer science or computer manufacturers, Engelbart wrote his seminal paper, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of a Man’s Intellect,” in order to explain what he was talking about.83 Engelbart came to the attention of Licklider. ARPA sponsored a laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the “Augmentation Research Center,” where Engelbart and a group of hardware engineers, programmers, and psychologists who shared Engelbart’s dream started building the computer as we know it today.

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioﬀ, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

When I visited US Senator Elizabeth Warren in Washington, DC, at the end of 2018, she was already contemplating a similar stance against the market leaders in many of America's industries, including technology, the pharmaceutical sector, and finance. Wu's colleague at Columbia Law School Lina Khan in 2016 wrote a seminal paper (while at Yale), taking a similar stance: “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.”33 Economists such as Gabriel Zucman, Emmanuel Saez, Kenneth Rogoff, and Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have also stated Big Tech has “too much power”34 or needs to be more strictly regulated. Leading journalists including Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired, and Rana Foroohar, associate editor of the Financial Times, favor antitrust action against Big Tech too.

pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

The lesson was clear: muscle movement was driven by chemical energy released as one substance turned into another, again, in principle, no different to combustion. The third part of Helmholtz’s strategy drew its inspiration from the steam engine. Specifically, Helmholtz employed the same assumption about the impossibility of perpetual motion that Sadi Carnot had made in his seminal paper on steam engine efficiency. If the vitalists were right and animals could generate more heat than could be released by burning carbon with oxygen, then there must be some other source of heat within them that is not subject to physical laws. That, however, would imply that animals could create some heat without consuming any food or fuel.

pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And in consistently defining the interests of others—whether they are corporate executives, labor unions, or Brazilian peasants—as outside the categories of the environment and nature, environmental and conservation leaders have failed to create a politics capable of dealing with ecological crises. 2. In 1943, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a seminal paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.”8 In it he introduced the theory that humans have a “hierarchy of needs,” a deceptively simple concept that many of us can still remember seeing as a multicolor pyramid in our high school social studies classes. At the bottom of the pyramid there were the basic material needs: food, shelter, and security.

pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

Through the mid-nineteenth century, diabetes remained a rare affliction, to be discussed in medical texts and journal articles but rarely seen by physicians in their practices. As late as 1797, the British army surgeon John Rollo could publish “An Account of Two Cases of the Diabetes Mellitus,” a seminal paper in the history of the disease, and report that he had seen these cases nineteen years apart despite, as Rollo wrote, spending the intervening years “observ[ing] an extensive range of disease in America, the West Indies, and in England.” If the mortality records from Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century are any indication, the city’s residents were as likely to die from diabetes, or at least to have diabetes attributed as the cause of their death, as they were to be murdered or to die from anthrax, hysteria, starvation, or lethargy.*1 In 1890, Robert Saundby, a former president of the Edinburgh Royal Medical Society, presented a series of lectures on diabetes to the Royal College of Physicians in London in which he estimated that less than one in every fifty thousand died from the disease.

pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

The second problem is that individual choices are often subject to social influence, or what economists call peer effects, meaning that the choice that is most desirable, or simply the most available, to one person depends on what others are doing. Individuals are bound together by complex networks, which can propagate beliefs and behavior in ways that are fundamentally at odds with common sense. In a seminal paper, Mark Granovetter (1978) showed how surprising the dynamics of networked systems can be. Granovetter imagined a hypothetical crowd of agitators on the brink of violence, where each member has some “threshold” for acting out that depends on how many others are. If one member has a threshold of zero, he will trigger without provocation.

pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

In reality, autism forms a spectrum of symptoms, from those with average or above-average intelligence – known as Asperger syndrome – to those with severe autism and significant learning disabilities like Andrew Bolte. In common to all with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are difficulties with social behaviour. It was this feature that prompted the American psychiatrist Leo Kanner to identify autism as a distinct syndrome in 1943. In his seminal paper on the topic, he described the case histories of eleven children who shared an ‘inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life’. Kanner borrowed the word autism, meaning ‘self-ism’, from the constellation of symptoms associated with schizophrenia.

pages: 423 words: 118,002

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

His argument was that the amount of oil in the world is finite and that as production increases, it will reach a peak and then begin to decline. Drawn on a graph, his forecast resembled a bell curve. In the late 1940s, he became interested in the question of how many years of oil supply could be pumped out of the earth and set out to figure it out. At the same time, he studied hydraulic fracturing and wrote a seminal paper on the new technology. The two interests were connected. If hydraulic fracturing could significantly increase the availability of oil and gas, it would make more oil available and push back the date of “Hubbert’s Peak.” But he was not impressed with Stanolind’s hydrafracs. In his famous 1956 paper outlining his ideas on peak oil, he noted that only about one-third of the oil in a reservoir was being recovered.

pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In 1937, Coase produced a conceptual breakthrough that explained why large organizations were not just rational according to a certain theory of profit-maximizing behavior but, indeed, often proved more efficient than the alternatives. It was no coincidence that, while still an undergraduate, in 1931–1932, Coase carried out the research for his seminal paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” in the United States. Earlier he had flirted with socialism, and he became intrigued by the similarities in organization between American and Soviet firms and, in particular, by the question of why large industry, where power was highly centralized, had emerged on both sides of the ideological divide.20 Coase’s explanation—which would help earn him the Nobel Prize in economics decades later—was both simple and revolutionary.

pages: 534 words: 118,459

Database Design and Relational Theory by C.J. Date

inventory management, seminal paper

Indeed, I think it’s noteworthy that Codd called his very first (1969) paper on the relational model “Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data Banks” (boldface added; see Appendix C). And his second (1970) paper, “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” (again, see Appendix C)—this is the one that’s usually regarded as the seminal paper in the field, though that characterization is a little unfair to its 1969 predecessor—was in two parts of almost equal length, the second of which was called “Redundancy and Consistency” (the first was called “Relational Model and Normal Form”). Codd thus clearly regarded his thoughts on redundancy as a major part of the contribution of his relational work: rightly so, in my opinion, since he did at least provide us with a framework in which we could begin to address the issue precisely and systematically.

pages: 419 words: 119,368

Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

cuban missile crisis, language of flowers, Malacca Straits, seminal paper, sensible shoes, South China Sea, upwardly mobile

Irene sat up at the mention of the name. Nicholas Fairbairn. Why did Dr Fairbairn mention Nicholas Fairbairn? Was it because he was his brother, perhaps? Which meant that he must be the son of Ronald Fairbairn, no less – Ronald Fairbairn who had written Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, in which volume there appeared the seminal paper, “Endoscopic Structure Considered in Terms of Object-Relationships.” “Are you, by any chance … ?” she began. Dr Fairbairn hesitated. More guilt was coming to the surface, inexorably, bubbling up like the magma of a volcano. “No,” he said. “I’m not. I am nothing to do with Ronald Fairbairn, or his colourful son.

pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

This “serves as a reminder to all our employees to consider the consequences of our actions,” Page told the Global Philanthropy Forum, which he and Brin hosted in 2007 at the Googleplex. Then he joked, “Perhaps it was a mistake—we should have said, ‘Be good.’ ” According to Google legend, when the pair first met in 1995, as computer science students at Stanford University, they were “not terribly fond of each other.” That soon changed, and they went on to write a seminal paper together, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” before founding Google, which was incorporated as a private company in September 1998. Less than six years later, the online search firm, with its mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” sold its shares to the public, instantly making the American-born Page and the Russian-born Brin billionaires several times over.

Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies by Christopher Grey

Bletchley Park, call centre, classic study, computer age, glass ceiling, index card, iterative process, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, post-war consensus, seminal paper, work culture

The relationship between organization studies and history has been somewhat limited and not always very satisfactory. Of course, there are exceptions to this, Whipp and Clark’s (1986) study of innovation in the car industry being a good example. Nevertheless, the very legitimacy of such an engagement has been questioned (Golden, 1992) and, until Alfred Kieser’s (1994) seminal paper, there was little discussion within the recent literature regarding the role and relationship of history to organization studies, unlike that which had occurred, for example and in particular, in sociology (e.g. Abrams, 1982). In that regard Kieser notes that Weber, in many ways the ‘founding father’ of organization studies, was as much historian as sociologist, believing contemporary institutions could be understood only by knowing how they developed in history.

pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Organizations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial.”15 Wald’s analysis of bullet-riddled aircraft in World War II saved the lives of dozens of brave airmen. His seminal paper for the military was not declassified until July 1980, but can be found today via a simple search on Google. It is entitled: “A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors.”16 It wasn’t until after the war that Wald learned of the murder of eight of his nine family members at the hands of the Nazis.

pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

She concluded, “His stupidity could cost him his life.” One of the reasons that the tale is so powerful is that, despite the motivated reasoning that we engage in, we never realize we’re doing it. We think we are being rational, even if we have no idea why we’re really deciding to act that way. In “Telling More Than We Can Know,” a seminal paper in the history of social and cognitive psychology, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson showed that people’s decisions are often influenced by minute factors outside their awareness—but tell them as much, and they rebel. Instead, they will give you a list of well-reasoned justifications for why they acted as they did.

pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioﬀ, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Under his stewardship, the NEJM published the first reports of the disease that would later be called AIDS. A few years later, it published the first description of the discovery of HIV and, still later, the clinical trials that demonstrated the effectiveness of AZT in treating HIV infection. Relman’s NEJM published seminal papers on new ways to treat and prevent coronary artery disease, research that led to halving the American death toll from heart attacks between 1980 and 2005. It also published major papers that proved the effectiveness of lumpectomy for breast cancer and the vaccine to prevent hepatitis B. While this is extraordinary stuff, I’d want to chat with Relman mostly about his other passion: health policy.

pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Error Locked San Bernardino Attacker’s iPhone,” New York Times, March 1, 2016. 3. US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, “A Special Inquiry Regarding the Accuracy of FBI Statements Concerning Its Capabilities to Exploit an iPhone Seized during the San Bernardino Terror Attack Investigation,” March 27, 2018, 8. 4. For the two seminal papers summarizing cryptographers’ views on the dangers of weakening encryption, see Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, et al., “Keys under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications,” Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 6, 2015; and Hal Abelson et al., “The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption,” Columbia University Academic Commons, May 27, 1997. 5.

pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

Two recent papers in the past few years have exemplified the need to consider how services are delivered and are really saying we need to move away from the strict categorization and medical model of psychiatry and paediatrics. The recent consensus paper on identification and treatment of ADHD and ASD5 and the seminal paper from Thapar, Cooper and Rutter6 both highlight the real clinical conundrum of ‘the complexity of clinical phenotypes and the importance of the social context’. A phenotype means the challenges or strengths that someone can observe in someone. They go on to argue ‘the importance of viewing neurodevelopmental disorders as traits but highlight that this is not the only approach to use’.

The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Passwords should be at least six and ideally eight characters long, and contain a mixture of numbers, letters and punctuation marks. Dictionary words and personal information should not be used as passwords. Users should have a different password on each system, and they should never reveal their passwords to anyone, including systems managers. Yet a seminal paper published as long ago as 1979 by Ken Thomson and Robert Morris found that nearly a fifth of users chose passwords consisting of no more than three characters, and that a third used dictionary words. (Robert Morris, the chief scientist at America’s National Computer Security Centre, was subsequently upstaged by his son, also called Robert, who released the first internet worm in 1988 and crashed thousands of computers.

pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

This was the beginning of the development of markets in derivative securities. It is not a coincidence that the University of Chicago was then and is today a leading centre of the study of financial economics. In the following year two members of its faculty – Fischer Black and Myron Scholes – would publish a seminal paper on the valuation of derivatives.5 Much of the growth of the financial sector in the three decades that followed would be the direct and indirect consequence of the growth of derivative markets. Futures were not the only kind of derivative. An option gave you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell – you could use an option to insure yourself against a rise, or a fall, in price.

pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

However, quantifiable indices of health status, social functioning, criminal behaviour, total opiate consumption, needle-sharing and so on are all viable and uncontroversial outcome measures, and should be comprehensively investigated for methadone and heroin. Furthermore, no indications have been found that prescribing heroin would inflict harm of a kind that might make such trials unacceptable. Perneger et al. (1998) have noted that although the Swiss trial was small, it was similar to the initial evaluations of methadone, such as the seminal paper by Dole and Nyswander (1965), which led to its widespread use in the treatment of drug addiction. It seems likely that a contributory factor was the medical profession’s emotional and moral attitudes towards drug users. However noble our intentions when we approach a clinical or social problem, we may often be confounded by extraneous factors and preconceptions, and fail in our objectivity.

pages: 476 words: 120,892

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

The fuzziness in the position of any particle allows it to leak through an energy barrier. We saw in chapter 3 how enzymes utilize quantum tunneling of electrons and protons by bringing molecules close enough together for tunneling to take place. A decade after Watson and Crick published their seminal paper, the Swedish physicist Per-Olov Löwdin, whom we met earlier in this chapter, proposed that quantum tunneling could provide an alternative way for protons to move across hydrogen bonds to generate the tautomeric, mutagenic, forms of nucleotides. It is important to emphasize that DNA mutations are caused by a variety of different mechanisms, including damage caused by chemicals, ultraviolet light, radioactive decay particles, even cosmic rays.

pages: 555 words: 119,733

Autotools by John Calcote

Albert Einstein, card file, Debian, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, don't repeat yourself, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Free Software Foundation, place-making, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Valgrind

There is a method to my madness: I've tried to use constructs that are portable to many flavors of the make utility. Now let's discuss the basics of make. If you're already pretty well versed in it, then you can skip the next section. Otherwise, give it a quick read, and we'll return our attention to the Jupiter project later in the chapter. * * * [16] Peter Miller's seminal paper, "Recursive Make Considered Harmful" (http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/books/rmch/), published over 10 years ago, discusses some of the problems recursive build systems can cause. I encourage you to read this paper and understand the issues Miller presents. While the issues are valid, the sheer simplicity of implementing and maintaining a recursive build system makes it, by far, the most widely used form of build system.

pages: 320 words: 33,385

Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance by Carol Alexander

asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate swap, low interest rates, market friction, market microstructure, p-value, performance metric, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-sum game

But an arithmetic process can become negative, whilst the prices of tradable assets are never negative. Thus, to represent the dynamics of an asset price we very often use a geometric Brownian motion which is specified by the following SDE: dSt = dt + dZt (I.3.143) St The standard assumption, made in the seminal papers by Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973), is that the parameters and (the drift and the volatility of the process) are constant. Although it has been known since Mandlebrot (1963) that the constant volatility assumption is not valid for financial asset prices, the Black–Scholes–Merton framework still remains a basic standard against which all other models are gauged.

pages: 442 words: 127,300

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, autism spectrum disorder, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, impulse control, lifelogging, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, systems thinking, the scientific method, time dilation

Lewis Terman, famous for helping construct the IQ test, dedicated his research career to the betterment of children’s education. Starting in the 1920s, Terman charted all manner of factors that promoted a child’s intellectual success. One such factor he discovered was sufficient sleep. Published in his seminal papers and book Genetic Studies of Genius, Terman found that no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were. He further found that sleep time was most strongly connected to a reasonable (i.e., a later) school start time: one that was in harmony with the innate biological rhythms of these young, still-maturing brains.

pages: 437 words: 126,860

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

If we consider only the upper Amazonian territories as viable candidates, and spread their formation equally in time across the 500 million years of that era, we find that 10 percent, or 0.5 million square kilometers, is probably less than 50 million years old; 1 percent, or 50,000 square kilometers, is probably less than 5 million years old; and 0.1 percent, or 5,000 square kilometers, has probably been active within the past 500,000 years. You don’t have to extract geothermal power from a region that is actually volcanically active now. The ground stays hot a long time after activity has subsided. In his seminal paper on Mars geothermal power, Fogg presented calculations of the temperature profiles of Martian land as a function of the time since the region was active. His results are summarized in Table 7.2. As a point of reference, the current state of the art of terrestrial drilling technology is to be able to drill down to about 10 kilometers.

pages: 561 words: 120,899

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Cornfield maintained a running argument with Fisher through the 1950s. Cornfield was already thinking deeply about the standards of evidence needed before observational data could establish cause and effect. Finally, in 1959, he raked Fisher over the coals about smoking with a common-sense, nonmathematical paper that reads like a legal brief. In that seminal paper he and five coauthors systematically addressed every one of Fisher’s alternative explanations for the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. They hurled one counterargument after another at Fisher’s hypothetical genetic factor. If cigarette smokers were nine times more likely than nonsmokers to get lung cancer, Fisher’s latent genetic factor must be even larger—though nothing approaching that had ever been seen.

pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

Armies of conservation volunteers are employed to prevent natural processes from occurring. Land is intensively grazed to ensure that the plants do not recover from intensive grazing. Woods are coppiced (the trees are felled at ground level, encouraging them to resprout from that point) to sustain the past impacts of coppicing. In their seminal paper challenging the conservation movement, the biologists Clive Hambler and Martin Speight point out that while coppicing might favour butterfly species which can live in many habitats, it harms woodland beetles and moths that can live nowhere else.30 They noted that of the 150 woodland insects that are listed as threatened in Britain, just three (2 per cent) are threatened by a reduction in coppicing, while 65 per cent are threatened by the removal of old and dead wood.

pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). n ote s to c h a P te r 3 249 43. See Dari-Matiacci et al., “The Emergence of the Corporate Form,” p. 221 with figures 10 and 11, p. 223. 44. Modigliani and Miller addressed this question in a seminal paper published in 1958. See Franco Modigliani and Merton H. Miller, “The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance and the Theory of Investment,” American Economic Review 48, no. 3 (1958):261–297. 45. See Oliver Williamson, “Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations,” Journal of Law and Economics 22, no. 2 (1979):233– 261; Sanford J.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

This sort of relationship-building enacts one of the oldest evolutionary maxims. If the word cyborg—short for “cybernetic organism”—describes the fusion between a living organism and a piece of technology, then we, like all other life-forms are symborgs, or symbiotic organisms. The authors of a seminal paper on the symbiotic view of life take a clear stance on this point. “There have never been individuals,” they declare. “We are all lichens.” * * * — DRIFTING AROUND ON the Caper, we spend a lot of time looking at sea charts. On these maps, the familiar role of sea and land are reversed.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

This issue of real-world performance versus lab experiments hovered over the battlefield, a killer beyond reckoning. It was made worse by the fact that the war was being fought on a “sensory margin” exponentially more fine than that of just ten years before. S. S. Stevens, a psychologist at Harvard, was the one who reported that story of an airman lost at sea. He was horrified. As he put it in his seminal paper “Machines Cannot Fight Alone”: The battle hangs on the power of the eyes or the ears to make a fine discrimination, to estimate a distance, to see or hear a signal which is just at the edge of human capacity. Radars don’t see, radios don’t hear, sonars don’t detect, guns don’t point without someone making a fine sensory judgment, and the paradox of it is that the faster the engineers and the inventors served up their “automatic” gadgets to eliminate the human factor the tighter the squeeze became on the powers of the operator—the man who must see and hear and judge and act with that margin of superiority which gives his outfit the jump on the enemy.5 Stevens notes that men would push this faulty equipment to its limits.

pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

“Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject,” declared the New York Times, which noted that “a historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman.”36 The paper’s principal economics commentator, Paul Krugman, wrote, “Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper—a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens.”37 The conservative Wall Street Journal acknowledged Samuelson as a “Titan of economics,” while The Economist pronounced him “the last of the great general economists.”38 The Daily Telegraph, London, wrote that “Samuelson made such diverse contributions to his field—ranging from welfare economics, theories of consumption, prices, capital accumulation, economic growth, public goods, finance and international trade—that it is hard to think of a debate to which he did not make a trenchant contribution,” and that his textbook “effectively gave the world a common language with which the complexities of world markets can be discussed and understood.”

pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In 1820, an estimated 83.9 percent of the world population lived on a daily income that, adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries, bought less than one dollar did in the US in 1985 (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002, Table 1, 731, 733). In 2002, when Bourguignon and Morrisson published their seminal paper on the history of the world income distribution, this was the World Bank’s international poverty line, typically used to define extreme poverty. The World Bank has since updated the international poverty line to a daily income corresponding to what $1.90 would have bought in the US in 2011. Using this new definition, World Bank data indicates that the share of the global population living in extreme poverty has been less than 10 percent since 2016; the COVID-19 pandemic tragically broke the long-standing trend of that percentage declining year after year, but it did not quite push it over 10 percent again (World Bank 2020).

pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

Even though everyone is using the same key to encode their data – to lock the door and secure their secret – no one can read anyone else’s encoded message. In fact, once data is encoded, customers are unable to read it, even if it is their own. Only the company running the website has key B, to unlock the door and read those credit card numbers. Public-key cryptography was first openly proposed in 1976 in a seminal paper by two mathematicians based at Stanford University in California, Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman. The duo sparked a counter-culture in the cryptographic world that would challenge the governmental agencies’ monopoly on cryptography. Diffie in particular was the archetypal anti-establishment, long-haired child of the 1960s.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Steve Lohr, the author of a fine history of computer programming, has written: “Gates, most of all, is someone with a deep understanding of software, and the foremost applied economist of the past half-century.”71 Describing the development of increasing-returns economics, Lohr continues: “One of the seminal papers in this new branch of economics research was written by Michael Katz and Carl Shapiro, ‘Network Externalities, Competition and Compatibility,’ published in 1985. While they were working on their Not Only Microsoft 265 paper, Shapiro recalled Katz saying there was a guy who had been at Harvard when Katz was an undergraduate, who was doing precisely what they were writing about at a software company outside Seattle.

pages: 582 words: 136,780

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

The Dutchman was promptly invited to the United States by a young Princeton scientist named Harry Hess; and, together with two other young men who were to go on to become rising stars in the new field, Maurice Ewing and Teddy (later to be Sir Edward) Bullard, they took off in a boat called the Barracuda to see if the Javan anomalies could be found above the submarine trenches known to exist in the Caribbean. They did, spectacularly so. The four excitedly discussed why this might be – with Harry Hess and Vening Meinesz openly speculating that they were caused by some mysterious force dragging the rocks of the seabed downwards and (as it were) dragging the gravity down with them. Hess wrote a seminal paper in 1939: Recently an important new concept concerning the origins of the negative strip of gravity anomalies… has been set forward… It is based on model experiments in which… by means of horizontal rotating cylinders, convection currents were set up in a fluid layer beneath the ‘crust’ and a convection cell was formed.

pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

But while Public Choice theory is often regarded as a laissez-faire ideology characteristic of the Thatcher-Reagan period, some of the most important contributors to this skeptical view of regulation4 were progressive advocates of strong and effective governments who were trying to develop a theory on how to improve, not jettison, public choice. Even Buchanan, although a conservative in his general political outlook, maintained that he was neither for nor against government. In one of his seminal papers, he explained how the skeptical framework of Public Choice “almost literally forces the critic to be pragmatic in any comparison of proposed institutional structures.”5 This is a perfect way to characterize the attitude to government and markets in Capitalism 4.0. The skeptical Public Choice insights about the failures of government in the 1970s and 1980s are likely to produce new conclusions under Capitalism 4.0.

Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Firefox, longitudinal study, school vouchers, seminal paper, social software, social web, sorting algorithm, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, web application

Figure 7-25. San Francisco Crimespotting In other libraries http://patternbrowser.org/code/pattern/pattern_anzeigen.php?4,231,17,0,0,252 http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Dynamic_query Both the name and the concept for Dynamic Queries originated in the early 1990s with several seminal papers by Christopher Ahlberg, Christopher Williamson, and Ben Shneiderman. You can find some of these papers online, including the following: http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/91-11/91-11.html http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/93-01/93-01.html Data Brushing Figure 7-26. BBN Cornerstone What Let the user select data items in one view; show the same data selected simultaneously in another view.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

Kindhearted naivete puts one at risk of being taken advantage of by a psychopath, which is perhaps why sweet-tempered Laci Peterson, brutally murdered by her husband while eight months pregnant with their first child, had previously dated a man who eventually received a fifteen-year prison sentence for shooting another girlfriend in the back.)3 Just as the cuckoo has found an evolutionary niche laying its eggs in the nests of other birds (taking advantage of their nurturing instincts), psychopaths and Machiavellians have found their evolutionary niche in taking advantage of the natural altruism of other humans.a.4 Such variation in human emotional outlook is bred into our very genes. Research has progressed since Mealey wrote her seminal paper in 1995. But the essential idea she reviewed and synthesized is unchanged—that is, congenitally deceptive individuals—cheaters—can thrive and reproduce in society. How much these cheaters succeed depends on how many of them there are. If their numbers are tiny, they can easily find victims to dupe, and so they thrive.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

Because Wright lived such a long life, he had the rare privilege of seeing a biography (Provine, 1986) come out while he was still alive. Provine’s biography is still the best place to learn about Wright’s career, and we particularly recommend Chapter 5 on path analysis. Crow’s two biographical sketches (Crow, 1982, 1990) also provide a very useful biographical perspective. Wright (1920) is the seminal paper on path diagrams; Wright (1921) is a fuller exposition and the source for the guinea pig birth-weight example. Wright (1983) is Wright’s response to Karlin’s critique, written when he was over ninety years old. The fate of path analysis in economics and social science is narrated in Chapter 5 of Pearl (2000) and in Bollen and Pearl (2013).

pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Be liberal in what you accept from others.14 It may seem strange that such a philosophical, perhaps even spiritual, principle should be embedded in the articulation of the Internet, but then network design, like all design, can be understood as ideology embodied, and the Internet clearly bore the stamp of the opposition to bigness characteristic of the era. Not long thereafter, three professors of computer science, David Reed, David Clark, and Jerome Saltzer, would try to explain what made the Internet so distinctive and powerful. In a seminal paper of 1984, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” they argued for the enormous potential inherent in decentralizing decisional authority—giving it to the network users (the “ends”).15 The network itself (the “middle”) should, they insisted, be as nonspecialized as possible, so as to serve the “ends” in any ways they could imagine.* What were such notions if not the computer science version of what Hayek and Jacobs, Kohr and Schumacher, had been arguing?

pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Finance was just a side interest for him, but he devised the first mathematical proof of the efficient market hypothesis and came close to solving the option-pricing puzzle. Recipient of the second Nobel prize in economics, in 1970. Leonard “Jimmy” Savage Statistics professor whose axioms for assessing data under uncertainty informed the work of his Chicago student Harry Markowitz and helped define rationality for decades. Also coauthor of a seminal paper on expected utility with Milton Friedman, and rediscoverer of the work of French market theory pioneer Louis Bachelier. Myron Scholes Classmate and friend of Michael Jensen and Richard Roll at Chicago. Devised the Black-Scholes option pricing model along with Fischer Black while teaching at MIT.

pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

These ideas build on the earlier ideas of Allyn Young (1928), and especially the work of Kenneth Arrow (1962), further developed by Karl Shell (1966, 1967). To give credit where it belongs, we should point out that Arrow’s original argument was meant to lead to the conclusion that R&D, because it produced a public good (nonrivalrous knowledge), ought to be financed by public expenditure. There is nothing in Arrow’s seminal paper, nor in his subsequent writings on the topic, that suggests he had in mind intellectual monopoly as a solution to the allocational inefficiency that he – in our view, incorrectly – detected in the production of knowledge. There is also an extensive microeconomics literature on patents that generally begins with the assumption that innovation will not take place without a patent and inquires into the optimal length and breadth of patent protection.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Now you can see why happiness-inducing AI is extremely hard! Let’s dig into the four problems and possible solutions. WHAT IS HAPPINESS IN THE ERA OF AI? Setting aside AI for the moment, let’s ask the most basic question: What does happiness mean anyway? In 1943, Abraham Maslow published his seminal paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which described what is now known as “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.” This theory is usually illustrated as a pyramid, shown below. This pyramid describes human needs from the most basic to the most advanced level. Each lower-level need must be fulfilled in order to move toward a higher-level need.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

This means that, if Satisfiability is solvable in polynomial time, then P = NP. Conversely, if any problem in NP can be proven not to have a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm, the proof will show that Satisfiability does not have a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm either. No problem is harder than Satisfiability in NP. Since Cook’s seminal paper was published, a huge number of problems have been shown to be equivalent to Satisfiability; hundreds are listed in [600], and some examples follow. By equivalent, I mean that these problems are also NP-complete; they are in NP and also as hard as any problem in NP . If their solvability in deterministic polynomial time were resolved, the P versus NP question would be solved.

…

Their contribution to cryptography was the notion that keys could come in pairs—an encryption key and a decryption key—and that it could be infeasible to generate one key from the other (see Section 2.5). Diffie and Hellman first presented this concept at the 1976 National Computer Conference [495]; a few months later, their seminal paper “New Directions in Cryptography” was published [496]. (Due to a glacial publishing process, Merkle’s first contribution to the field didn’t appear until 1978 [1064].) Since 1976, numerous public-key cryptography algorithms have been proposed. Many of these are insecure. Of those still considered secure, many are impractical.

pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

Gorer was close to the American academics involved in the development of “culture and personality” studies, and briefly associated with the analysis of Japanese behavior being conducted under the Foreign Morale Analysis Division of the Office of War Information. In addition, his theories were quickly picked up in the popular press. His seminal paper, entitled “Themes in Japanese Culture” in its original presentation, was recapitulated in Time under the heading “Why Are Japs Japs?”6 Gorer began his analysis by observing that on the surface Japan appeared to be “the most paradoxical culture of which we have any record,” illustrating this with a familiar catalog of contradictions.

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software by Michael Schwarz, Jeremy Anderson, Peter Curtis

business process, Debian, defense in depth, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, index card, indoor plumbing, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, seminal paper, SETI@home, slashdot, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, two and twenty, web application

Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens Bruce Perens created the original Open Source Definition (OSD) as the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Debian is a Linux distribution that consists entirely of software that meets these guidelines. Some Linux distributions include closed, commerical, or marginally open software. Debian never has and never will. Eric S. Raymond wrote a number of seminal papers on the phenomenon of what he and Bruce call open source development but what I think may be more generally called Internet-distributed software development. Eric tends to come to fairly far-reaching conclusions from a limited number of data points, but it doesn't change the fact that The Cathedral and the Bazaar has become what may be the single most influential essay on the whole phenomenon of free software.

pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Though LBO had become almost a term of abuse, the titans were determined to try again, so they rebranded the sector with a fancy new name: private equity.4 At the same time a new intellectual saviour appeared, in the form of a Harvard Business School professor called Michael Jensen, who had trained at the University of Chicago and had some exciting new ideas about business strategy. Normal public companies – your BPs or your Tescos, say – are owned by a diverse group of shareholders, but run by a different group, their managers. These two groups’ interests weren’t necessarily aligned, Jensen argued in a couple of seminal papers in the Harvard Business Review in 1989 and 1990. Managers didn’t have strong enough incentives to look after shareholders’ money, and this led to what he called ‘widespread waste and inefficiency’. He argued, first of all, that corporate America needed a new breed of superstar owner-managers in a financial ‘market for corporate control’ that would boost efficiency across the system.

Mastering Blockchain, Second Edition by Imran Bashir

3D printing, altcoin, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, connected car, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Debian, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, full stack developer, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, information security, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, litecoin, loose coupling, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, Network effects, new economy, node package manager, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, prediction markets, QR code, RAND corporation, Real Time Gross Settlement, reversible computing, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, single page application, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, web application, x509 certificate

This standard allows faster settlement of transactions and direct peer-to-peer transaction routing. It aims to address regulatory, security, and privacy requirements in blockchain technologies. OS1 also provides a framework for smart contract development and allows the participant to meet AML and KYC requirements easily. Smart contract standardization efforts have also started with a seminal paper authored by Lee and others, which formally defines the smart contract templates and presents a vision for future research and necessities in smart contract related research and development. This paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00771v2. Moreover, some discussion on this topic has been carried out in Chapter 18, Scalability and Other Challenges and Chapter 9, Smart Contracts.

pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

In so doing, “a predictable salary progress schedule not only should help to reduce uncertainty about future pay but also should prevent the development of false expectations. In addition it should minimize dysfunctional competition between individuals for favored treatment.” Quoted in Foulkes (1980, 186). 25. Fehr, Goette, and Zehnder (2009, 378). The literature on loss aversion and “framing” in psychology is extensive. The seminal papers are Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and Kahneman and Tversky (1984). Kahneman (2011) provides an overview of the extensive research in the field in the decades following those landmark works. 26. Slichter, Healy, and Livernash (1960) explained the common practice of uniform pay increases with job grades with minimal performance evaluation in union and nonunion facilities as an outgrowth of union avoidance and the constant problems of defending merit-based evaluations in the minds of workers.

pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

See also Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html; and John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. invented “onion routing”: Among the seminal papers by Naval Research Laboratory employees was David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson, “Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, January 28, 1999, www.onion-router.net/Publications/CACM-1999.pdf. Onion routing relays an internet connection through a series of hops, each of them encrypted, ensuring that no single network operator can see both the origin and the destination.

pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

Jonathan Schell (1982). The Fate of the Earth. The first deep exploration of the badness of extinction, and the central importance of ensuring humanity’s survival. Filled with sharp philosophical insight. Carl Sagan (1983). “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications.” A seminal paper, introducing the new-found mechanism of nuclear winter and exploring the ethical implications of human extinction. Derek Parfit (1984). Reasons and Persons. Among the most famous works in philosophy in the twentieth century, it made major contributions to the ethics of future generations and its concluding chapter highlighted how and why the risk of human extinction may be one of the most important moral problems of our time.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

Indeed, what distinguishes a Stradivarius from a factory-made cello is partly the perfection of shape which leads to a more beautiful sound. One of the intriguing problems that challenged mathematicians for some time was whether you could deduce the shape of the box from the frequencies of the waves that vibrate inside it. In a seminal paper, Mark Kac posed the question: ‘Can you hear the shape of a drum?’ For example, only a square has the particular set of frequencies that are produced by this shape. But in 1992 mathematicians Carolyn Gordon, David Well and Scott Wolpert constructed two strange shapes whose resonant frequencies were identical although the underlying shapes differed.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If you are skeptical that a yeast cell can tell us anything about cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, rare diseases, or aging, consider that there have been five Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine awarded for genetic studies in yeast, including the 2009 prize for discovering how cells counteract telomere shortening, one of the hallmarks of aging.5 The work Mortimer and Johnston did—and, in particular, a seminal paper in 1959 that demonstrated that mother and daughter yeast cells can have vastly different lifespans—would set the stage for a world-shattering change in the way we view the limits of life. And by the time of Mortimer’s death in 2007, there were some 10,000 researchers studying yeast around the globe.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

One study found that 95 out of 100 doctors estimated the probability to be between 70 and 80 percent.109 The correct answer is 7.8 percent. That’s not a typo. In this hypothetical, the probability that a woman who has tested positive for breast cancer in a routine mammography actually has breast cancer is less than 8 percent. In their seminal paper, Gigerenzer and Hoffrage find that the way in which probability problems like the breast cancer diagnosis are usually presented makes it harder to understand base rates and get the right answer. Standard probability looks like this: It’s pretty basic math but still not intuitive to most people.

pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, rather like empiricism, which it resembles, the idea of the Turing test has played a valuable role. It has provided a focus for explaining the significance of universality and for criticizing the ancient, anthropocentric assumptions that would rule out the possibility of AI. Turing himself systematically refuted all the classic objections in that seminal paper (and some absurd ones for good measure). But his test is rooted in the empiricist mistake of seeking a purely behavioural criterion: it requires the judge to come to a conclusion without any explanation of how the candidate AI is supposed to work. But, in reality, judging whether something is a genuine AI will always depend on explanations of how it works.

pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

This was also the time of significant groundwater depletion, such as the draining of “fossil water” from the Ogallala Aquifer by high-capacity pumps and center-pivot irrigation systems, while point-source pollution and the environmental impact of large dams emerged as national issues. In 1971, Wolman published a seminal paper in Science entitled “The Nation’s Rivers,” in which he pointed to how little we knew about the degradation and improvement of rivers and underscored the need for long-term data collection on which to build informed decisions. “Our science has followed [Wolman’s] pattern and needs to continue” to do so, Hirsch said, to applause from the crowd.

pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

The Charter of Maryland, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, and other colonial constitutions have been put on the Internet by Yale University’s Avalon Project, at avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century. Bakewell (2009), chap. 14, discusses the independence of Mexico and the constitution. See Stevens (1991) and Knight (2011) on postindependence political instability and presidents. Coatsworth (1978) is the seminal paper on the evidence on economic decline in Mexico after independence. Haber (2010) presents the comparison of the development of banking in Mexico and the United States. Sokoloff (1988) and Sokoloff and Khan (1990) provide evidence on the social background of innovators in the United States who filed patents.

pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As we all know, in a six-game match played in 1996, the chess master Garry Kasparov prevailed against IBM’s Deep Blue by three wins but lost in a historic rematch a year later. Relative to chess, the complexity of Go is striking. Go is played on a board that is nineteen by nineteen squares, whereas chess uses a board that is eight by eight squares. As the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated in 1950, in his seminal paper on how to program a machine to play chess, a lower-bound estimate of the number of possible moves in chess is greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and the number of possible moves in Go is more than twice that number.2 Indeed, even if every atom in the universe was its own universe and had inside it the number of atoms in our universe, there would still be fewer atoms than the number of possible legal moves in Go.

pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Yarin Gal, “Modern Deep Learning Through Bayesian Eyes” (lecture), Microsoft Research, December 11, 2015, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/modern-deep-learning-through-bayesian-eyes/. 15. Zoubin Ghahramani, “Probabilistic Machine Learning: From Theory to Industrial Impact” (lecture), October 5, 2018, PROBPROG 2018: The International Conference on Probabilistic Programming, https://youtu.be/crvNIGyqGSU. 16. For seminal papers relating to Bayesian neural networks, see Denker et al., “Large Automatic Learning, Rule Extraction, and Generalization”; Denker and LeCun, “Transforming Neural-Net Output Levels to Probability Distributions”; MacKay, “A Practical Bayesian Framework for Backpropagation Networks”; Hinton and Van Camp, “Keeping Neural Networks Simple by Minimizing the Description Length of the Weights”; Neal, “Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks”; and Barber and Bishop, “Ensemble Learning in Bayesian Neural Networks.”

pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

We are not in the Brave New World yet, but we are well along the road.”5 Even though human gene–editing technologies had not yet been devised, the battle lines had thus been defined. It became the mission of many of the scientists to find a middle ground rather than let the issue become politically polarized. Asilomar In the summer of 1972, Paul Berg, who had just published his seminal paper on how to make recombinant DNA, went to the ancient clifftop village of Erice on the coast of Sicily to lead a seminar on the new biotechnologies. The graduate students who attended were shocked by what he described, and they peppered him with questions about the ethical dangers of genetic engineering, especially the modification of humans.

pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

But a priori, Jínek reckoned there was “nothing fundamentally different or any impediment to getting it to work in mammalian cells.” On October 3, Doudna’s inbox chimed with a message that supported Jínek’s belief. The sender was Jin-Soo Kim, a leading molecular biologist in South Korea. His lab had been pursuing CRISPR editing since Doudna and Charpentier’s “seminal paper” and was preparing to submit a new report on “Genome editing in mammalian cells.” Kim generously asked if Doudna (and Charpentier) would be interested in publishing together. “I do not wish to scoop you because your Science paper prompted us to start this project,” Kim wrote. But he wasn’t interested in getting scooped, either.22 Six weeks later, Church likewise emailed Doudna and Charpentier “a quick note to say how inspiring and helpful” he had found their CRISPR paper.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Balls tunneling through the wall: Professor Stig Lundqvist of the Royal Academy of Sciences used this analogy in his speech presenting the 1973 Nobel Prize to Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, and Brian David Josephson. Boss showed no interest, powerful demotivator: Noyce, “Innovation: The Fruit of Success,” Technology Review, Feb. 1978: 24–27. Esaki’s seminal paper: Leo Esaki, “New Phenomenon in Narrow Germanium P-N Junctions, Physical Review, 1958, 109: 603. Esaki conducted his research in 1957, at roughly the same time Noyce noted his ideas. On the response to this paper: Leo Esaki, “The Global Reach of Japanese Science,” http://www.jspsusa.org/FORUM1996/esaki.html, accessed 1 Nov. 2004.

pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

How do they trade off the number of children against the resources they spend on the education of each one? Investment in human capital is still widely regarded to be of central importance to all economic development. Education and economic development are both regarded as desirable phenomena. What could be a more reassuring idea than that they were closely associated? The seminal paper on the matter (Nelson and Phelps, 1966) was published almost a half century ago. It postulated that both technological advance and technological catch-up depend strongly on the level of human capital.7 In his presidential address, Richard A. Easterlin (1981) posed the basic question: Why isn’t the whole world developed?

pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

Appendix B will make the case that cloud or distributed computing was the inevitable result of the economics of hardware. DevOps is the inevitable result of needing to do efficient operations in such an environment. If hardware and software are sufficiently fault tolerant, the remaining problems are human. The seminal paper “Why Do Internet Services Fail, and What Can Be Done about It?” by Oppenheimer et al. (2003) raised awareness that if web services are to be a success in the future, operational aspects must improve: We find that (1) operator error is the largest single cause of failures in two of the three services, (2) operator errors often take a long time to repair, (3) configuration errors are the largest category of operator errors, (4) failures in custom-written front-end software are significant, and (5) more extensive online testing and more thoroughly exposing and detecting component failures would reduce failure rates in at least one service.

pages: 667 words: 186,968

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, conceptual framework, coronavirus, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, index card, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, means of production, scientific management, seminal paper, statistical model, the medium is the message, the scientific method, traveling salesman, women in the workforce

In England in 1933, during a minor outbreak of human influenza, Andrewes, Patrick Laidlaw, and Wilson Smith, largely following Shope’s methodology, filtered fresh human material and transmitted influenza to ferrets. They found the human pathogen. It was a filter-passing organism, a virus, like Shope’s swine influenza. Had Lewis lived, he would have coauthored the papers with Shope, and even added breadth and experience to them. He would have helped produce another of the seminal papers in virology. His reputation would have been secure. Shope was not perfect. For all his later accomplishments in influenza and in other areas, some of his ideas, including some of those pertaining to influenza, were mistaken. Lewis, if energized and once again painstaking, might have prevented those errors.

pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

We released the entire 15 million images to the world and started to run international competitions for researchers to work on the ImageNet problems: not on the tiny small-scale problems but on the problems that mattered to humans and applications. Fast-forward to 2012, and I think we see the turning point in object recognition for a lot of people. The winner of the 2012 ImageNet competition created a convergence of ImageNet, GPU computing power, and convolutional neural networks as an algorithm. Geoffrey Hinton wrote a seminal paper that, for me, was Phase One in achieving the holy grail of object recognition. MARTIN FORD: Did you continue this project? FEI-FEI LI: For the next two years, I worked on taking object recognition a step further. If we again look at human development, babies start by babbling, a few words, and then they start making sentences.

pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Even after all this discussion, only a few students raise their hands. When I ask those who didn’t raise their hands why not, they sheepishly admit that they simply don’t feel comfortable doing so. This is exactly the point of the exercise, which is now called the Ellsberg Paradox, after the example in Ellsberg’s seminal paper. Thinking isn’t the same as feeling. You can think the two games have equal odds, but you just don’t feel the same about them. People have no problem taking risks in their day-to-day activities, but when there’s any uncertainty about those risks, they immediately become more cautious and conservative.

pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

See, for example, Bostrom (2017), Christian (2020), Stuart Russell (2019), and Ford (2021) on advances in artificial intelligence, and Kurzweil (2005) and Diamandis and Kotler (2014) on the economic abundance that this would create. Our discussion of routine and nonroutine tasks builds on Autor, Levy, and Murnane’s (2003) seminal paper and Autor’s (2014) discussion of limits to automation. Our interpretation that current AI still mostly focuses on routine tasks is based on the evidence in Acemoglu, Autor, Hazell, and Restrepo (2022). Frey and Osborne’s famous (2013) study also supports the notion that AI is primarily about automation; they estimate that close to 50 percent of US jobs can be automated by AI within the next several decades.

pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. A deep exploration of the modern mechanistic worldview and the possibilities for alternative ways of thinking. White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–07. A seminal paper that catalyzed a greater understanding of the ecological implications of traditional Christian cosmology. Chapter 16. Great Rats: The Story of Power and Exploitation Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: Penguin, 2007.

pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioﬀ, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

That would transform not only our economy, he said, but the way we live. 65 Neuralink 2017–2020 A monkey playing Pong using only his brainwaves Human-computer interfaces Some of the most important technology leaps in the digital age involved advances in the way that humans and machines communicate with each other, known as “human-computer interfaces.” The psychologist and engineer J. C. R. Licklider, who worked on air-defense systems that tracked planes on a monitor, wrote a seminal paper in 1960 titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” showing how video displays could “get a computer and a person thinking together.” He added, “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly.” MIT hackers used these video displays to create a game called Spacewar, which helped spawn commercial games that, in order to be easy enough for a stoned college student to play, had interfaces that were so intuitive they required almost no instructions. (“1.

pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Nobody who knew any facts was willing to go on the record or even talk to me. Martha Legg, Nash’s sister, finally broke the silence about the nature of the illness that had wrecked his life. Lloyd Shapley, another pioneer of game theory, described Nash as a graduate student in the late 1940s, when he wrote his seminal papers on game theory: “He was immature, he was obnoxious, he was a brat. What redeemed him was a keen, logical, beautiful mind. So now you know to whom I owe the title of the biography. Because Nash’s story is so familiar, I’d like to share some of the less familiar parts, including how the book came to be and some of the things that happened after the book and movie broke off.

pages: 695 words: 219,110

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

Decoherence is a widespread phenomenon that forms a bridge between the quantum physics of the small and the classical physics of the not-so-small by suppressing quantum interference—that is, by diminishing sharply the core difference between quantum and classical probabilities. The importance of decoherence was realized way back in the early days of quantum theory, but its modern incarnation dates from a seminal paper by the German physicist Dieter Zeh in 1970,14 and has since been developed by many researchers, including Erich Joos, also from Germany, and Wojciech Zurek, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Here’s the idea. When Schrödinger’s equation is applied in a simple situation such as single, isolated photons passing through a screen with two slits, it gives rise to the famous interference pattern.

pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

In the words of Croteau and Haynes, “there are three basic ways in which media audiences have been seen as active: through individual interpretation of media products, through collective interpretation of media, and through collective political action.”36 And they go on to provide a wealth of data and illustrations to support their claim of the relative autonomy of the audience vis à vis messages received from the media. Indeed, this is a well-established tradition in media studies. Thus, Umberto Eco provided an insightful perspective to interpret media effects in his 1977 seminal paper titled “Does the Audience have Bad Effects on Television?” As Eco wrote: There exist, depending on sociocultural circumstances, a variety of codes, or rather of rules of competence and interpretation. The message has a signifying form that can be filled with different meanings… So the suspicion grew that the sender organized the televisual image on the basis of his own codes, which coincided with those of the dominant ideology, while the addressees filled it with “aberrant” meanings according to their particular cultural codes.37 The consequence of this analysis is that: “One thing we do know is that there doesn’t exist a Mass Culture in the sense imagined by the apocalyptic critics of mass communications because this model competes with others (constituted by historical vestiges, class culture, aspects of high culture transmitted through education etc.).”38 While historians and empirical researchers of the media would find this statement pure common sense, in fact, taking it seriously, as I do, it decisively undermines a fundamental aspect of critical social theory from Marcuse to Habermas.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Another system that’s been proposed is to have users memorise specific points in an image, which are known to experimental psychologists working in the field of visual attention as salient points and which, as with face selections, are fairly predictable and amenable to computer processing (this is a vast and complex field with far too much material to cover here, but one of the seminal papers by neuroinformatics professor Christoph Koch, going back more than ten years, provides a good overview of initial work in the area [20]). There’s extensive ongoing work towards automatic Password Complexity 567 classification of these items for purposes such as feature extraction in image-based search, as well as less academic pursuits like automatic target identification and tracking in the military, which is a much harder task since it has to be done in real time and the salient points are trying very hard to be as non-salient as possible.

…

In addition since many of them concern flaws in deployed products it could lead to a situation where if I give you read access to the identities of contributors, their employers might apply execute access to them. Because of this I’ve only given references for openly published sources or when someone is explicitly quoted in the text. 658 PKI Certificates The pre-history of PKI goes back to Diffie and Hellman’s seminal paper on publickey cryptography, which proposed a key directory called a Public File that users can consult to find other users’ public keys [9]. The Public File protects its communications by signing them, and would today be called a trusted directory [10]. A signature on a public key was thus a one-time assertion by the public file that “this key is valid right now for this person”.

pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Huxley, "A Quantitative Description of Membrane Current and Its Application to Conduction and Excitation in Nerve," Journal of Physiology 117 (1952): 500–544. 23. W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115-33. This seminal paper is a difficult one to understand. For a clear introduction and explanation, see "A Computer Model of the Neuron," the Mind Project, Illinois State University, http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/perception/mpneuron1.html. 24. See note 172 in chapter 5 for an algorithmic description of neural nets. 25.

pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative ﬁnance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

For understanding the determinants of expected returns, I find empirically oriented models, such as that of Campbell–Sunderam–Viceira (2010), more relevant than either pure term structure models or macro-finance models (see Box 9.1). Box 9.1. Macro-finance models—a recent academic focus Unlike models that rely purely on term structure data, macro-finance models link bond yield fluctuations to macro factors in the context of a “no-arbitrage” term structure model. The seminal paper by Ang–Piazzesi (2003) uses the basic insight of the Taylor rule that a reasonable central bank policy makes short-term rates functions of real activity and inflation [2]. While the growing macro-finance literature offers promise, its practical relevance remains limited to date, perhaps due to challenges with model specification and estimation errors.

pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The description of bodies under the bridge is from Cunliffe-Jones (2010, 23). For Lagos disappearing under rubbish, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/281895.stm. The quotes from Philip Pettit come from Pettit (1999, 4–5), and see also the development of his ideas in Pettit (2014). The seminal paper on the violence of hunter-gatherer societies is Ember (1978); we refer here to the work of Keeley (1996) and Pinker (2011); see specifically the data in Pinker’s Figure 2-3 (53). On the homicide rates of the Gebusi, see Knauft (1987). All quotes from Hobbes are directly from Hobbes (1996, Chapters 13, 17–19: “continual feare,” 89; “from hence it comes to passe,” 87; “In such condition,” 89; “men live without” and “to submit their Wills,” 120).

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques: Concepts and Techniques by Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei

backpropagation, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, cyber-physical system, database schema, discrete time, disinformation, distributed generation, finite state, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, power law, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, semantic web, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, supply-chain management, text mining, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, web application

This complete set of answers to the exercises in the book is available only to instructors from the publisher's web site. ■ Course syllabi and lecture plans. These are given for undergraduate and graduate versions of introductory and advanced courses on data mining, which use the text and slides. ■ Supplemental reading lists with hyperlinks. Seminal papers for supplemental reading are organized per chapter. ■ Links to data mining data sets and software. We provide a set of links to data mining data sets and sites that contain interesting data mining software packages, such as IlliMine from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://illimine.cs.uiuc.edu

pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

In 2015 it was claimed by students of the matter that the Plague was spread from Central Asia not by flea-bearing rats but by, of all things, (flea-bearing) gerbils. 16. Alfani 2013, for example on p. 427. 17. Ross Emmett emphasizes Malthus’s notions here, Emmett n.d., p. 3. 18. Sahlins 1972 (2004). 19. Gaus 2013, p. 13. 20. Olson 1993 is the seminal paper. Thus Scott 2009, and for a West African example, from my beloved colleague the late James Searing, Searing 2002. 21. Mayshar, Moav, and Neeman 2011. 22. Weatherford 2004; Perdue 2005, Hellie 2003, McNeill 1964, Lattimore 1940. Chapter 3 1. Gerschenkron 1971. 2. Nordhaus 2004. 3.

pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Geological Survey, where he was in a permanent battle with some of his colleagues. “He was the most difficult person I ever worked with,” said Peter Rose, his boss at the USGS. Yet Hubbert also became recognized as one of the leading figures in the field and made a variety of major contributions, including a seminal paper in 1957, “The Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing.” One of his fundamental objectives was to move geology from what he called its “natural-history phase” to “physical science phase,” firmly based in physics, chemistry, and in particular, in rigorous mathematics. “King Hubbert, mathematician that he is,” said the chief geophysicist of one of the oil companies, “based his look ahead on facts, logically and analytically analyzed.”

pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Three maxims flowed from his analysis: “Who rules East Europe controls the heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”32 The importance of distance, which Mackinder saw being transformed by railways and motorized transport, was eventually affected even more by the ability of aircraft to fly over both land and sea. Surprisingly, Mackinder paid little attention to the possibilities of air power though it was only a few weeks before he gave his seminal paper in 1904 that the Wright brothers made their historic first flight. There was much that Mackinder shared with Mahan. International relations were understood in terms of relentless competition among naturally expansive great powers. What Mackinder introduced was a way of thinking about the geographical dimension that showed how the land and sea could be understood as part of the same world system, and as a source of continuity even as political and technological change affected its relevance.

pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

As Java guru Joshua Bloch says, "Design and document for inheritance, or prohibit it." If a class isn't designed to be inherited from, make its members non-virtual in C++, final in Java, or non-overridable in Microsoft Visual Basic so that you can't inherit from it. Adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP). In one of object-oriented programming's seminal papers, Barbara Liskov argued that you shouldn't inherit from a base class unless the derived class truly "is a" more specific version of the base class (Liskov 1988). Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas summarize LSP like this: "Subclasses must be usable through the base class interface without the need for the user to know the difference" (Hunt and Thomas 2000).

pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

INFORMATION NETWORKS, HYPERTEXT, AND ASSOCIATIVE MEMORY387 Kossinets- Watts 2006 Burt 2004 Burt 2000 Coleman 1988 Granovetter 1985 Feld 1981 Granovetter 1973 Travers- Davis 1963 Milgram 1969 Rapoport Milgram Cartwright- Lazarsfeld- 1953 1967 Harary 1956 Merton 1954 Figure 13.3: The network of citations among a set of research papers forms a directed graph that, like the Web, is a kind of information network. In contrast to the Web, however, the passage of time is much more evident in citation networks, since their links tend to point strictly backward in time. 388 CHAPTER 13. THE STRUCTURE OF THE WEB key ideas in the first part of this book. (At the bottom of this figure are seminal papers on — from left to right — triadic closure, the small-world phenomenon, structural balance, and homophily.) We can see how work in this field — as in any academic discipline — builds on earlier work, with the dependence represented by a citation structure. We can also see how this citation structure naturally forms a directed graph, with nodes representing books and articles, and directed edges representing citations from one work to another.

pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

In the last generation, a vast literature has challenged the conventional economic yardstick of gross domestic product (GDP) and outlined a number of alternative measures of well-being. We cannot do justice to this extensive scholarship,39 only hint at implications for the uses of time. The initial focus of research was on the tenuous link between income and happiness in affluent societies. In a seminal paper in 1974, Richard Easterlin noted that, while rich Americans were happier than their poor neighbours, Americans as a whole were no happier in 1970 than in 1946, in spite of being 60 per cent richer (in real income). Once basic human needs were met – around $15,000 a year in 1974 money – additional income ceased to buy more happiness.40 Other scholars since have been more optimistic and point out that richer countries do tend to be happier than poorer ones.

pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

., 1987). 3 For an excellent review of McClintock’s work and its subsequent impact on molecular biology, see N. V. Federoff, “Maize Transposable Elements.” Chapter 14 in D. E. Berg and M. M. Howe, eds., Mobile DNA (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Microbiology, 1989). One of McClintock’s seminal papers is B. McClintock, “The Origin and Behavior of Mutable Loci in Maize,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 36 (1950): 344–55. 4 James Watson has written four editions of his grand guide to molecular biology, each of which, since the first in 1965, has been considerably larger than its predecessor, reflecting the explosion of scientific discovery.

pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

Hahn mailed the paper and then felt the whole thing to be so improbable “that I wished I could get the document back out of the mail box”; or Paul Rosbaud came around to the KWI the same evening to pick it up.974 Both stories survive Hahn’s later recollection. Since Rosbaud knew the paper’s importance and dated its receipt December 22, 1938, he probably picked it up. But Hahn also visited the mailbox that night, to send a carbon copy of the seminal paper to Lise Meitner in Stockholm. His misgivings at publishing without her—or some dawning glimmer of the fateful consequences that might follow his discovery—may have accounted for his remembered apprehension. * * * The Swedish village of Kungälv—the name means King’s River—is located some ten miles above the dominant western harbor city of Goteborg and six miles inland from the Kattegat coast.975 The river, now called North River, descends from Lake Vanern, the largest freshwater lake in Western Europe; at Kungälv it has cut a sheer granite southward-facing bluff, the precipice of Fontin, 335 feet high.

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

By defining the integral in this manner, Lebesgue had reduced the theory of the integral to the theory of measure. If we consider the problem from a geometrical perspective, we see that Lebesgue had reduced the problem of determining the area of a two-dimensional object to the problem of determining the measure of a set of points embedded in the one-dimensional real line. In Lebesgue’s seminal paper, a large portion of which is presented here, he first addresses the topic of measuring a set of points embedded in the one-dimensional real line and then progresses to his theory of the integral. Lebesgue begins by enunciating properties a measure must have to satisfy our intuitions. • The measure of the interval [a, b] (i.e., the set of real numbers x such that a ≤ x ≤ b) is simply the value b − a