Archive for January, 2008

I’m trying to decide which one is dumber, this article by Anne Applebaum on why there are only beautiful women in Russia post-Soviet Union, or this rock-stupid article in the NYT Times about how economists understand repugnance. While we can attribute the dumb in the former to a single person, the valuelessness in the...
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As always, Technology Review provides a great glimpse at the innovations coming down the pike. In this case, by innovation, I mean the continued ascendancy of sociological insight wrapped up in physics, taken up by engineering, and brought forward as the ‘next big thing’: you can actually identify people’s social networking in real-time and...
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Before the new U2 3d drives us all into fits of discussion over the relationship between art and commerce, let’s just take a step back to 1981, shall we? Note to self: shimmery droplets of water effects=good.
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While partaking in a stupendous lunch, the conversation turns to the question of how do people know what they like? Drinking deeply from his Effervecense de Pomme, PL chimes: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must...
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Dave Egger’s last book is about one of the ‘lost boys’ of the Sudan, and its title is an inspiration: God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last...
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Jeremy Grantham, principal of GMO, makes an interesting point about quants in his 4th quarter letter to investors (free registration required): The good old days of the domination of the first generation quant models, where you simply show up with three concepts – value, momentum, and discipline – are over. But, even more critically...
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I suppose I’m not the first to make this point, but it seems to me that this argument comes up quite a bit: If “capitalism” is taken to mean business administration, wealth accumulation, finance — “bulls . . . bears . . . people from Connecticut!”, as Seinfeld once put it — then one can...
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I don’t have much to add to this post by Grant McCracken, other to say that you could do worse than reading the whole thing.
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An anthropologist attempts to explain variation in how investment banks fared in the current credit crisis. Gilian Tett argues that three elements account for it: 1) successful firms have hands-on management (meddlers); 2) successful firms have management who rose through the ranks via trading desks rather than sales or legal; 3) successful firms have...
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Well, this was bound to happen. I mention an article tells us there haven’t been enough data points for airline crash investigators, and a plane crashes. As usual, it was a mix of tech and happenstance – apparently, on-board computers sent a demand for more power to the engines, but they did not...
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In discussion with a colleague about how to strategically manage life in an organization, I was drawn into thinking about how cultural institutionalism would motivate a strategy. Most organizations have pretty positive stories to tell about themselves – if they didn’t, they have organizational commitment issues. My advice is simple: 1) Learn what the story...
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Via the Washington Post comes an interesting article on data mining and the airline industry. Apparently, airplanes are not crashing enough for the airlines to be able to determine the sources and causes of accidents. That is, there is not enough variability in the outcomes (the last crash was August 2006) to do forensic...
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I’ve been thinking a lot about institutions lately, in light of my earlier post on check-lists and medical practices. I originally had in mind a post about how the Berger and Luckmann version of institutionalization at the more marco-level is about the crystallization of practices. So what check-lists are theoretically are the same as...
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That’s Tourettes without Regrets. But of course that’s not the punchline, it’s MC Jelly D that I want you to know about.
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The New Yorker has a great article on the effects of technology in emergency medical care, with findings that are worth drawing out more carefully. In particular, the article is about intensive care units, where extraordinary measures are taken to keep patients alive. The question the author asks is, what happens when increased organizational...
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Well, if we’re going all sociological and stuff, we may as well have Veblen stick his thoughts in the mashed potatoes…
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Now that’s a rival good.
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This is a bit far afield of my own expertise, but I’m curious: if I predict that an event in the future is a causal outcome, but it was an event that has already occurred that was causal, how can I be proven correct or wrong? I’m thinking about Obama and the Democratic primary,...
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I’ve noticed that whenever a site fails to load, it’s almost invariably because it’s hung trying to connect to Google analytics. I know there’s blog visitor-porn, but it is seriously obnoxious. Does it really matter how many people are visiting your site? Really? Really really?
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