Finance India

  <p>I spend 8 hours every Sunday putting this together…<em>If you like this roundup kindly include a reference to<strong> <a href="../http:/www.simoleonsense.com/category/http:/www.simoleonsense.com/category/">SimoleonSense.com</a> .</strong>Thanks!</em><br /> <strong> </strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Weekly Cartoon (Via Google ):</strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://hotoptionbabe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/stock-market-cartoon-pic.jpg"><img class="aligncenter" src="http://hotoptionbabe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/stock-market-cartoon-pic.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="370" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Weekly Joke (Via Econosseur):</strong></p> <p>Q:  What do you get when you cross the Godfather with an economist?</p> <p>A:  An offer you can&#8217;t understand.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Most Important Article(s) Of The Week!!!!!!!</strong></p> <p style="text-align: left;"><strong>Attention All Blackswaners!!! <a href="http://www.weforum.org/documents/riskbrowser2010/risks/#">World Economic Forum Creates Tool To Visualize Risks</a>- </strong>Highly Recommended!</p> <p style="text-align: left;"><strong><a href="http://www.weforum.org/documents/riskbrowser2010/risks/#"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-7092" title="WEF" src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/WEF-300x194.jpg" alt="" width="491" height="317" /></a><br /> </strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><br /> </strong></p> <p><strong><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/">Divided Attention &#8211; In an age of classroom multitasking, scholars probe the nature of learning and memory</a></strong>: &#8211; Via Chronicle &#8211; Imagine that driving across town, you&#8217;ve fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You&#8217;re so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn&#8217;t there.</p> <p><a href="http://www.oecd.org/document/58/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_44417722_1_1_1_1,00.html"><strong>The High Cost of Low Educational Performanc</strong>e</a> &#8211; Via OECD &#8211; While governments frequently commit to improving the quality of education, it often slips down the policy agenda. Because investing in education only pays off in the future, it is possible to underestimate the value and the importance of improvements. This report uses recent economic modelling to relate cognitive skills – as measured by PISA and other international instruments – to economic growth, demonstrating that relatively small improvements to labour force skills can largely impact the future well-being of a nation.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/07/government-data-world">Free: Searchable World Government Data</a></strong> &#8211; Via Guardian &#8211; Governments around the globe are opening up their data vaults – allowing people to check out the numbers for themselves. Now The Guardian has created one single interface to rule them all.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Miguel’s Weekly Favorites:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/we-feel-therefore-we-learn-neuroscience-social-emotion-daniel-siegel-2220"> <strong>Video: We feel, therefore we learn: The neuroscience of social emotion. Daniel Siegel </strong></a>- Via SlowTv -<br /> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="400" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="bgcolor" value="111111" /><param name="src" value="http://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/all/themes/monthly2/flowp/FlowPlayerLight.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethemonthly%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fthemes%2Fmonthly2%2Fflowp%27%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffile%2Fget%2FSlowtv%2DWeTfeelThereforeWeLearnTheNeuroscienceOfSocialEmotionD998%2Eflv%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%270xFFFFFF%27%7D" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="400" src="http://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/all/themes/monthly2/flowp/FlowPlayerLight.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethemonthly%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fthemes%2Fmonthly2%2Fflowp%27%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffile%2Fget%2FSlowtv%2DWeTfeelThereforeWeLearnTheNeuroscienceOfSocialEmotionD998%2Eflv%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%270xFFFFFF%27%7D" allowfullscreen="true" bgcolor="111111"></embed></object></p> <p><strong><a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1472892">Andrew Lo&amp; Robert Merton, Systemic Risk and the Refinancing Ratchet Effect </a></strong>- Via SSRN &#8211; The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market &#8211; rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities &#8211; led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur simultaneously, as they did over the past decade, they impose an unintentional synchronization of homeowner leverage. This synchronization, coupled with the indivisibility of residential real estate that prevents homeowners from deleveraging when property values decline and homeowner equity deteriorates, conspire to create a “ratchet” effect in which homeowner leverage is maintained or increased during good times without the ability to decrease leverage during bad times. If refinancing-facilitated homeowner-equity extraction is sufficiently widespread &#8211; as it was during the years leading up to the peak of the U.S. residential real-estate market &#8211; the inadvertent coordination of leverage during a market rise implies higher correlation of defaults during a market drop. To measure the systemic impact of this ratchet effect, we simulate the U.S. housing market with and without equity extractions, and estimate the losses absorbed by mortgage lenders by valuing the embedded put-option in non-recourse mortgages. Our simulations generate loss estimates of $1.5 trillion from June 2006 to December 2008 under historical market conditions, compared to simulated losses of $280 billion in the absence of equity extractions.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x17273.xml">Behavioral Finance: Shlomo Benartzi Save More Tomorrow Plan Boosts Retirement Contributions</a></strong> &#8211; via UCLA</p> <p><strong><a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/a-story-about-motivation.html">A Story About Motivation</a></strong> &#8211; Via Harvard &#8211; Because when we consider whether to do something, we subconsciously ask ourselves a simple question: &#8220;Am I the kind of person who . . ?&#8221; And money changes the question. When the lawyers were offered $30 an hour their question was &#8220;Am I the kind of person who works for $30 an hour?&#8221; The answer was clearly no. But when they were asked to do it as a favor? Their new question was &#8220;Am I the kind of person who helps people in need?&#8221; And then their answer was yes.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/neuroplasticity-and-use-it-or-lose-it-brain-michael-valenzuela-2231">Video: Neuroplasticity and the &#8216;use it or lose it&#8217; brain.</a></strong> &#8211; Via SlowTv -<br /> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="400" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="bgcolor" value="111111" /><param name="src" value="http://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/all/themes/monthly2/flowp/FlowPlayerLight.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethemonthly%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fthemes%2Fmonthly2%2Fflowp%27%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffile%2Fget%2FSlowtv%2DNeuroplasticityAndTheUseItOrLoseItBrainMichaelValenzue913%2Eflv%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%270xFFFFFF%27%7D" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="400" src="http://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/all/themes/monthly2/flowp/FlowPlayerLight.swf?config=%7Bembedded%3Atrue%2CbaseURL%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ethemonthly%2Ecom%2Eau%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fthemes%2Fmonthly2%2Fflowp%27%2CvideoFile%3A%27http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffile%2Fget%2FSlowtv%2DNeuroplasticityAndTheUseItOrLoseItBrainMichaelValenzue913%2Eflv%27%2CcontrolBarBackgroundColor%3A%270xFFFFFF%27%7D" allowfullscreen="true" bgcolor="111111"></embed></object></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123228093/abstract?CRETRY=1&amp;SRETRY=0">The decoy effect as a covert influence tactic</a></strong> &#8211; Via JBDM &#8211; The purpose of this research was to determine whether individuals could use the decoy effect to influence others&#8217; choices. In study 1, undergraduates (n = 50) and executive master&#8217;s of business administration (EMBA) students (n = 24) read an employee selection scenario in which they were randomly assigned to prefer one of two candidates that were equal in overall attractiveness, but that had different strengths and weaknesses. They were then asked to choose one of three inferior candidates to add to the choice set that would make their preferred candidate more likely to be chosen by other decision makers. The correct inferior candidate was asymmetrically dominated &#8211; dominated by one of the two existing candidates, but not the other. Participants chose the correct decoy candidate at better than chance levels. In study 2, undergraduates and EMBA students (total n = 66) completed a set of four decision tasks, in which they were asked to choose from potential decoy alternatives that would highlight their preferred job candidate or the product they preferred to sell to a customer. Participants again chose the correct option at better than chance levels. When participants provided free-response reasons for their choices, these responses indicated a fairly strong recognition of the influential nature of creating a dominating relationship. Implications for understanding this effect and how it may be used by hiring managers, sales personnel, and others who attempt to influence others people&#8217;s decisions at work, are discussed.</p> <p><a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123228128/abstract"><strong>Loss aversion in the eye and in the heart: The autonomic nervous system&#8217;s responses to losses</strong> </a>- Via JBDM &#8211; The common view in psychology and neuroscience is that losses loom larger than gains, leading to a negativity bias in behavioral responses and Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activation. However, evidence has accumulated that in decisions under risk and uncertainty individuals often impart similar weights to negative and positive outcomes. We examine the role of the ANS in decisions under uncertainty, and its consistency with the behavioral responses. In three studies, we show that losses lead to heightened autonomic responses, compared to equivalent gains (as indicated by pupil dilation and increased heart rate) even in situations where the average decision maker exhibits no loss aversion. Moreover, in the studied tasks autonomic responses were not associated with risk taking propensities. These results are interpreted by the hypothesis that losses signal the subjective importance of global outcome patterns.</p> <p><a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/lawyers-guns-and-money"><strong>Lawyers, Guns, and Money: How big banks, powerful lobbyists, sneaky attorneys, and a host of businessmen funnel dirty cash into the US.</strong> </a>- Via Motherjones &#8211; Among Bank of America’s 50 million customers, Pierre Falcone was far from ordinary. An infamous global arms dealer who unlawfully sold weapons to Angola for its civil war and an international fugitive, Falcone was convicted of tax fraud and illegal arms dealing in 2007 and 2009 and is currently serving six years behind bars. Yet for nearly two decades, Falcone and his relatives freely used 29 different bank accounts to funnel at least $60 million into the US from secretive havens like the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Singapore, and from shell corporations and secret clients. Despite his criminal record and worldwide notoriety, Bank of America essentially treated him like any other depositor.</p> <p><a href="http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/economists_cris.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29"><strong>Economists, Crises and Cartoons</strong> </a>- H/T Paul Kedrosky Via SSRN &#8211; Economists have occasionally noticed the appearance of economists in cartoons produced for public amusement during crises. Yet the message behind such images has been less than fully appreciated. This paper provides evidence of such inattention in the context of the eighteenth century speculation known as the Mississippi Bubble. A cartoon in The Great Mirror of Folly imagines John Law in a cart that flies through the air drawn by a pair of beasts, reportedly chickens. The cart is not drawn by chickens, however, but by a Biblical beast whose forefather spoke to Eve about the consequences of eating from the tree of the knowledge. The religious image signifies the danger associated with knowledge. The paper thus demonstrates how images of the Mississippi Bubble focused on the hierarchy of knowledge induced by non-transparency. Many of the images show madness caused by alchemy, the hidden or &#8220;occult.&#8221;<br /> <a href="http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2010/1/28/how-will-you-manage-video.html"><br /> <strong>Video: How Will You Manage Employment/Unemployment </strong></a>- via Cool Infographics &#8211; Loaded with labor statistics, How Will You Manage? is a new infographic video put together by XPLANE for Kronos Workforce Management. Using a mix of statistics, illustrations and some infographics the video does a good job of looking at our changing workforce, and the challenges faced by both companies and employees.<br /> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="344" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kY3AgpmQ6ZU&amp;color1=0xb1b1b1&amp;color2=0xcfcfcf&amp;hl=en_US&amp;feature=player_embedded&amp;fs=1" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kY3AgpmQ6ZU&amp;color1=0xb1b1b1&amp;color2=0xcfcfcf&amp;hl=en_US&amp;feature=player_embedded&amp;fs=1" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Exclusive Features : (The Must Reads)</strong></p> <p><strong><a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/five-things-you-should-know-about-climate-change.ars">Five things you should know about climate change </a>-</strong> via Ars Technica &#8211; Writing about vaccines, evolution, and even dark matter has ended up setting off contentious discussions here at Ars. But no area seems to bring out impassioned arguments as reliably as climate change. Covering the latest scientific results can bring forth cries of scientific fraud, conspiracies, and denialism; considering policy implications can be even worse. It can be really difficult for anyone not well-versed in the debate to get any sense of the science at all, something that&#8217;s clear from the huge gap between the scientific community&#8217;s acceptance of climate change and the public&#8217;s wariness about the topic. So it&#8217;s probably useful to step back from the latest findings, and look at science&#8217;s basic understanding of how greenhouse gasses can force climate change, which often gets lost in the arguments.<br /> <strong><a href="http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/02/paying-credit-cards-before-mortgage.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CalculatedRisk+%28Calculated+Risk%29"><br /> People are Deciding to Paying Credit Cards before Mortgage </a></strong>- Via Calculated Risk &#8211; The percentage of consumers current on their credit cards but delinquent on their mortgages first surpassed the percentage of consumers up to date on their mortgages but delinquent on their credit cards in the first quarter of 2008, according to TransUnion.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&amp;id=24798">Is a Sovereign Debt Crisis Looming?</a></strong> &#8211; Via Carnegie Endowment- This US article argues that sustaining growth—not withdrawing stimulus—should remain most countries’ top priority if they are to break the debt spiral</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57108/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewsFromTheScientist+%28News+from+The+Scientist%29">The Counterfeiter: The story of how one of pharma’s biggest enemies was nabbed in Houston, Texas </a></strong>- Via TheScientist &#8211; Drugs can pass through a dozen or more hands on the way to the pharmacy and a consumer’s medicine cabinet. The patchiness of the drug distribution network and the absence of a proper paper trail, as investigative journalist Katherine Eban revealed in her 2005 book Dangerous Doses, has allowed unscrupulous middlemen to launder counterfeit medications within the legitimate supply chain that leads to a local pharmacy. Foreign-produced drugs are also illegally “diverted” into the domestic supply chain.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://bigthink.com/ideas/18585">Black Swans, Male Strippers and Uncertainty </a>-</strong> Via Big Think &#8211; &#8220;This too, shall pass.&#8221; Folk tales say this was engraved on a ring given to King Solomon, who had demanded a gift that would make him sad when he was happy, and happy when he was sad. I recall it whenever I&#8217;m confronted with the claim that history has a positive direction&#8211;that, by and large, we&#8217;re progressing toward a more peaceful, just and prosperous future. And conversely, too, when I hear someone say we&#8217;re on an inevitable path of decline and doom.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2010/02/british_library_to_offer_free_ebooks.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29">British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks</a> -</strong> Via OpenCulture &#8211; More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Finance &amp; Investing:</strong></p> <p><strong><a href="https://www.nyu.edu/ipk/files/docs/events/Calhoun_Merton_Appadurai_Draft.pdf">Nobel Winner: Robert Merton Lectures &#8211; A Functional Perspective on Financial System Design with Observations on Issues from the Financial Crisis </a> </strong>- Via NYU &#8211; The entire structure you see globally, of the financial system, is largely driven by the fact there&#8217;s a true uncertainty. Non-predictability, and it&#8217;s significant. And if you look at the most modern parts of finance, or at least what&#8211;it&#8217;s not so modern anymore, but it&#8217;s finance&#8211;the whole derivatives area and all the applications that have come out of it, that model succeeded, not just intellectually but in practice, precisely because what it didn&#8217;t have is an input.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.colonyinc.com/chairmanscornerblog_feb10.htm?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tombarrackchairmanscorner+%28Tom+Barrack+-+Chairman%27s+Corner%29#020610">Tom Barrack&#8217;s Latest: Real Estate is Cyclical but the American Dream is Not </a></strong>- Via Colony Capital &#8211; Today, the dream has turned into a nightmare and our children and our children&#8217;s children will inherit tens of trillions of dollars in debt. We are not concerned with dreaming the dream and working to get there &#8212; we are concerned with &#8220;living the life&#8221; and making sure someone gives it to us. We are in the midst of a populist revolution, which is shifting incentive from opportunity to entitlement. We are having a hard time separating heroes from villains. Yet through it all, the underlying foundation stone of everyone&#8217;s dream &#8211; be it opportunity or entitlement &#8211; revolves around the dream or hope of prosperity, self-fulfillment and ownership. Real estate has always been an inherent part of the American Dream ñ the dream to own a home, a house, a gas station, a bakery, an office, a store. Through good times or bad times, the pureness of the desire has remained steadfast. Only the belief and conviction in how to get it and preserve it has faltered.</p> <p><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/insight/closeout-sale.html"> <strong>More Retail Closures Likely</strong> </a>- Via Bloomberg</p> <p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/business/economy/07gret.html?ref=business"><strong>This Crisis Won’t Stop Movin</strong>g </a>- Via NYT &#8211; YOU know we’re in trouble when we’re told that the economic problems in Greece, Portugal and Spain, the most indebted countries in the euro zone, are likely to remain safely contained in those nations.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.boeckhinvestmentletter.com/newsletters/Volume%202.1%20Global%20Disequilibria%20Feb%203%202010.pdf">Boech Investment Letter: Global Disequlibria: Don’t expect lasting stability </a></strong>- Our basic view remains unchanged;<br /> we remain positive on equity markets, credit spreads and most commodities because liquidity flows are still very positive and key indicators discussed below are supportive. However, we still are very concerned about the artificial nature of the economic recovery and financial markets and when the relatively benign environment might change for the worse.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020501445.html?wprss=rss_print/outlook">Five myths about how to create jobs</a> </strong>- Via Washington Post &#8211; With the unemployment rate in the United States lingering just below 10 percent and the midterm elections just nine months away, job creation has become the top priority in Washington. President Obama has called for transferring $30 billion in repaid bank bailout money to a small-business lending fund, saying, &#8220;Jobs will be our number one focus in 2010, and we&#8217;re going to start where most new jobs do, with small business.&#8221; The fund is among several measures &#8212; tax incentives, infrastructure projects, efforts to increase exports &#8212; that the White House has proposed to help boost employment. As Americans consider the various approaches, we must have realistic expectations. We need to debunk some myths about what it takes to stimulate job growth.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/article/contagion">Contagion: From Foreign Exchange Research, Barclays Capital</a></strong> &#8211; Via Zero Hedge &#8211; The key lesson from the ERM crisis of 1992 and the Asian crisis of 1997 is that contagion can emerge quickly and often in unpredictable ways. Unwinding of leveraged positions by distressed market participants, herding behaviour among investors, and loss of liquidity that gives way to general flight to quality can all lead to heightened correlations between markets and, in extremely circumstances, set off a self-filling crisis on a regional/global scale. There have been clear signs over the past week that the distress in the Greek government bond market is increasingly being felt in other euro area countries such as Spain and Portugal. The most likely explanation of this development is the “demonstration effect” – the Greek crisis is likely to have caused investors to re-evaluate the fundamentals of these countries. Spain and Greece may not have strong financial or economic links, but their fundamentals have a lot in common.<br /> <a href="http://www.shadowstock.com/ss_020510.html"><br /> <strong>Weekly List of Insider Transactions </strong></a>- Via Shadow Stock</p> <p><strong>Video: <a href="http://www.financialpost.com/video/index.html?category=Financial+Post&amp;video=_NGQPaFjVR4EyolDreA4BP30dBlAvZ9i">Value Investor Vito Maida Says Canada Is Fully Valued </a>-</strong> Via Financial Post:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Videos &amp; Media:</strong></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/26237737/Fixed-to-Flexible-The-Ebook">Four Simple Lessons About Cost, Price, Maring and The Options Available To Businesses in the 21st Century</a> -<br /> <a style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;" title="View Fixed to Flexible - The Ebook on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/26237737/Fixed-to-Flexible-The-Ebook">Fixed to Flexible &#8211; The Ebook</a></strong> <object id="doc_154015920765861" style="outline: none;" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="499" height="602" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="name" value="doc_154015920765861" /><param name="data" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /><param name="wmode" value="opaque" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="FlashVars" value="document_id=26237737&amp;access_key=key-1pitadx14vsaobnkslnf&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=slideshow" /><param name="src" value="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" /><param name="flashvars" value="document_id=26237737&amp;access_key=key-1pitadx14vsaobnkslnf&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=slideshow" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed id="doc_154015920765861" style="outline: none;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="499" height="602" src="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" flashvars="document_id=26237737&amp;access_key=key-1pitadx14vsaobnkslnf&amp;page=1&amp;viewMode=slideshow" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" bgcolor="#ffffff" wmode="opaque" data="http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf" name="doc_154015920765861"></embed></object></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.ideasproject.com/content.webui?id=4697">When Real-Time Isn&#8217;t Fast Enough: The Future Of the Web (LeWeb 2009)</a> &#8211; Via Ideaslab -</strong><br /> <object id="utv361244" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="386" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="name" value="utv_n_263914" /><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2833304" /><embed id="utv361244" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="386" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2833304" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="autoplay=false" name="utv_n_263914"></embed></object></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6868&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CatoEventVideos+%28Cato+Institute+Event+Videos+%28Full%29%29#950">Lecture: From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity</a></strong> &#8211; Via Cato &#8211; The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world. What they left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advanced technology that propel economies forward. They also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. From Poverty to Prosperity narrates and explains the revolutionary reorientation of economics in recent decades toward a new focus on understanding the huge differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. Mixing interviews with the world&#8217;s most important economists with their own clear and insightful analysis, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have produced an illuminating and thought-provoking guide to what they call &#8220;Economics 2.0.&#8221;<br /> <a href="http://videolectures.net/multimedia09_delft/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+videolectures+%28VideoLectures.Net+-+latest+scientific+conferences+%28powered+by%3A+VLNmedia.net%29%29"><br /> <strong>Lecture: MultiMedia at Your Fingertips 2.0 &#8211; Boosting the Multimedia Knowledge Transfer: From Research to Products</strong> </a>- Via Video Lectures &#8211; Opinions, experiences and visions regarding the trends and challenges in multimedia research and knowledge transfer will be presented by internationally well-known academic and industrial experts. A Multimedia knowledge market will concentrate on the demonstrators of multimedia research from TU Delft and its scientific and industrial partners, both national and international ones, and will provide a venue for networking, discussions, meetings and creating new collaborations.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Academic Papers:</strong></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.policypointers.org/Page/View/10664">Why Does Spain not Have a Policy for Latin America? </a></strong>- Via Policy Pointers &#8211; Spanish policy brief argues that since the region is not a priority for the EU, Latin America offers an excellent platform for Spain to develop an independent policy and influence the European agenda</p> <p><strong><a href="http://rfs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/hhp126v1?rss=1">Staying, Dropping, or Switching: The Impacts of Bank Mergers on Small Firms</a></strong> &#8211; Via Oxford &#8211; Assessing the impacts of bank mergers on small firms requires separating borrowers with single versus multiple banking relationships and distinguishing the three alternatives of &#8220;staying,&#8221; &#8220;dropping,&#8221; and &#8220;switching&#8221; of relationships. Single-relationship borrowers who &#8220;switch&#8221; to another bank following a merger will be less harmed than those whose relationship is &#8220;dropped&#8221; and not replaced. Using Belgian data, we find that single-relationship borrowers of target banks are more likely than other borrowers to be dropped. We track postmerger performance and show that many dropped target-bank borrowers are harmed by the merger. Multiple-relationship borrowers are less harmed, as they can better hedge against relationship discontinuations.</p> <p><a href="http://rfs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/hhp114v3?rss=1"><strong>Insider Trades and Demand by Institutional and Individual Investors</strong> </a>- Via Oxford Journals &#8211; There is a strong inverse relation between insider trading and institutional demand the same quarter and over the previous year. Our analysis suggests a combination of factors contribute to this relation. First, institutional investors are more likely to provide the liquidity necessary for insiders to trade. Second, insiders are more likely to buy low valuation and low lag return stocks while institutions are attracted to the opposite security characteristics. Last, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that insiders are more likely to view their securities as overvalued (undervalued) following a period when institutions were net buyers (sellers).</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2470/rf.v2009.n5.3">The Dynamics of a Financial Dislocation: The Panic of 1907 and the Subprime Crisis </a> &#8211; </strong>Via CFA</p> <p><strong><a href="http://eme.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/2/127?rss=1">The Current Financial Crisis</a> </strong>- Via Sage &#8211; It is now clear that the global economy is facing the worst economic and financial crisis since the Second World War. The crisis manifested itself initially in the subprime mortgage market in the US, but quickly spread to Europe; in the breakdown in the market for credit default swaps—a huge, unregulated and thoroughly opaque market; and in the general collapse of the markets for securitised instruments across the global financial system. It was aggravated, most analysts agree, by the initial policy missteps in handling the crisis, including in dealing with the problems at Lehman Brothers, which effectively froze the interbank market.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/abs/10.2469/op.v2006.n1.4379">How Central Bank Policies Affect Global Economies and Markets </a> </strong>- Via CFA &#8211; The world is more interconnected now than ever before, and as a result, central bank policy affects not only the country’s domestic economy but also the economies of other nations. To have an edge in this environment, investment professionals need to pay attention to global (not just U.S. or even European) central bank policies with an eye, in particular, on Japan, China, and India.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Other Very Interesting Articles:</strong></p> <p style="text-align: left;"><strong><br /> </strong> <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100203084254.htm?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29"><strong>Brain Dopamine Receptor Density Correlates With Social Status</strong> </a>- Via Science Daily &#8211; People have typically viewed the benefits that accrue with social status primarily from the perspective of external rewards. A new paper in the February 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier suggests that there are internal rewards as well.</p> <p><strong><a href="http://drdeborahserani.blogspot.com/2010/02/power-of-kindness-week.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ResearchBloggingAllEnglish+%28Research+Blogging+-+English+-+All+Topics%29">Power Of Kindness </a></strong>- Via Dr Deb &#8211; Research says that witnessing simple acts of everyday kindness, such as one person giving up a seat on the bus, holding a door open for another, or helping someone pick something that dropped to the floor can promote altruism. This pychological phenomenon that makes us feel great, lifts our emotions and motivates us to do good is called elevation. Witnessing an uplifiting act inspires us to do the same for others. In essence, kindness is contagious. -</p> <p style="text-align: left;"><strong><a href="http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/index.php?name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=17044">World in Chaos and Market Meltdowns, Too Costly To Bear </a> -</strong> Via Marketoracle &#8211; Though this piece was originally released via our paid research publication – The Investor’s Mind – in September 2006, if not timeless, its contents are certainly applicable to our current markets and economic environment. While we have taken the liberty of updating some of the charts, it is largely unchanged:<br /> <strong> </strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Infographics:</strong></p> <p><strong><br /> </strong></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.tableausoftware.com/files/global-brand-interest-2.gif">Mapping Global Brand Interest</a> -</strong> Via Tablaue Software &#8211; <strong>Highly Recommended</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.tableausoftware.com/files/global-brand-interest-2.gif"><img class="alignnone" src="http://www.tableausoftware.com/files/global-brand-interest-2.gif" alt="" width="500" height="700" /></a></p> <p><strong><a href="http://www.paydayloans.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/PL-BillionsandBillions_v5.jpg">Payday Loans vs Starbucks vs McDonalds</a> &#8211; Via Payday loans</strong><br /> <a href="http://www.paydayloans.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/PL-BillionsandBillions_v5.jpg"><img class="alignnone" src="http://www.paydayloans.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/PL-BillionsandBillions_v5.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="1875" /></a></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7091&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 07, 2010 09:49 PM · permalink

  <p>&#8220;It was in the course of crunching all that information that he found the strangely inverse relationship between the number of hands won and the amount of money lost. <strong>He also noticed that it was novice players who lost the most</strong>.&#8221;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1953205,00.html"><strong>Click Here To Read: How Winning At Poker Causes Greater Risk: Winning Can Mean Losing in Poker and Life</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via Time)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>You can learn a lot about gambling if you&#8217;re willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don&#8217;t have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you&#8217;re likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.</p> <p>Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Lessons (Via Time)<br /> </strong></p> <blockquote><p>So what does this have to do with you if you don&#8217;t gamble? It&#8217;s the wrong question because, actually, you do. Investing, driving, buying a house and merely crossing the street are all acts that involve discernible risks and uncertain rewards. The more small returns you get from your small investments in stocks, the likelier you are to make — and lose — a big investment. The more times you get behind the wheel and speed a little bit, the likelier you are to speed a lot — with deadlier consequences.</p> <p>&#8220;These kinds of calculations are made every day,&#8221; says Siler. &#8220;Adultery is another good example. People get away with it countless times but they get caught just once and they lose everything.&#8221;</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Most Important Lesson(via Time)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Organizational malfeasance in general depends on this kind of risk analysis,&#8221; says Siler. &#8220;Look at a place like Enron. People took a lot of small chances and won, then took big chances and lost big.&#8221; Indeed, Siler points out, during the recent financial crisis, an entire nation — Iceland — went bankrupt in a similar way, trusting high-risk, high-reward investments that quit paying off.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1953205,00.html"><strong>Click Here To Read: How Winning At Poker Causes Greater Risk: Winning Can Mean Losing in Poker and Life</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7089&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 07, 2010 07:04 PM · permalink

  <p>Makes me think of Haiti.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.santafe.edu/research/videos/play/?id=84512122-3282-4aef-a081-88f4d39477d0"><strong>Click Here To Access: Forecasting Natural Disasters in the Chaotic and Complex Earth</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via St.Fe.edu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>In the recent past we have seen the December 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami; the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; and the Pakistan earthquake in October 2005. Other, less catastrophic disasters include a multiplicity of landslides, flooding, wildfires, tornadoes, and epidemics. For many of these events, vast quantities of satellite data are opening new horizons to better understanding them. Using space-time patterns and information about the dynamics of these high-dimensional nonlinear earth systems, it is often possible to construct numerical simulations that can be used to make predictions about the evolution of the system and the possible occurrence of extreme events.</p> <p><a href="http://www.santafe.edu/research/videos/play/?id=84512122-3282-4aef-a081-88f4d39477d0"><strong>Click On Image To Access Video (or here for our subscribers)</strong></a></p> <p><a href="http://www.santafe.edu/research/videos/play/?id=84512122-3282-4aef-a081-88f4d39477d0"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7086" title="talkjpg" src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/talkjpg.jpg" alt="" width="319" height="219" /></a></p></blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7085&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 08:27 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/05/santa-fe-institute-e.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader"><strong>Click Here To Read: Santa Fe Institute economist: one in four Americans is employed to guard the wealth of the rich</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via BoingBoing)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Here&#8217;s a fascinating profile on radical Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, an empiricist who says his research doesn&#8217;t support the Chicago School efficient marketplace hypothesis. Instead, Bowles argues that the wealth inequality created by strict market economics creates inefficiencies because society has to devote so much effort to stopping the poor from expropriating the rich. He calls this &#8220;guard labor&#8221; and says that one in four Americans is employed to in the sector &#8212; labor that could otherwise be used to increase the nation&#8217;s wealth and progress.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Favorite Excerpt (Via Santa Fe Reporter)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>And so here, in plain English, is the implication of Bowles’ basic ideas: The US and New Mexico will keep falling behind until they learn to share the wealth.</p> <p>More numbers, for your consideration:</p> <p><strong>45.7</strong></p> <p><strong>23</strong></p> <p>The first number is the “Gini coefficient” for New Mexico. The Gini is an expression economists use to measure equality or inequality in a society.</p> <p>Zero describes the ultimate level playing field, a nonexistent land in which everyone has all the same stuff. A completely unequal society, in which one person has sole control of literally everything, would have a Gini of 100. New Mexico’s Gini score (45.7) reveals this state is more unequal than most. Utah is the most egalitarian state (with a 41.3 Gini), while the District of Columbia (53.7) is the most economically polarized, according to the most recent Census report, from 2006.</p> <p>The second figure, 23, is the Gini for Sweden, the world’s most egalitarian country. Whereas most of Europe, Canada and Australia have Ginis in the low 30s, the US has over the past several decades developed inequalities usually found only in poor countries with autocratic governments.</p> <p>So what? Isn’t inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?</p> <p>“That’s almost certainly false,” Bowles tells SFR. “Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it’s sand in the wheels.”</p> <p>Bowles can take some credit for that shift, but he hasn’t won the battle. Many economists don’t study things empirically—that is, by looking at things in the real, physical world. Instead, they stay safely within the land of theory.</p> <p>Theoryland may be the only place the “equality-efficiency trade-off” really works. Just to prove it wrong, Bowles charts the concept on a whiteboard at SFI.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/05/santa-fe-institute-e.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader"><strong>Click Here To Read: Santa Fe Institute economist: one in four Americans is employed to guard the wealth of the rich</strong></a></strong></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7083&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 07:21 PM · permalink

  <p>A very big thanks to<a href="http://valueinvestingresource.blogspot.com/2010/02/united-kingdom-paper-19th-century-was.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ReflectionsOnValueInvesting+%28Reflections+on+Value+Investing%29"> Shai Dardashti @ Reflections On Value Investing &#8211; its a bit of an older piece but makes me think of Jim Rogers.</a></p> <p>I wonder what Chanos would say.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559133/Why-China-REAL-master-universe.html">Click Here To Read: Why China Is The Real Master Of The Universe</a></strong></p> <p><strong>Introductoin (Via Dailymail)</strong></p> <blockquote><p> It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government&#8217;s failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.</p> <p>The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.</p> <p>The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.</p> <p>The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated.</p> <p>Last month, an Indian company, Tata, bought up what was once the cream of British manufacturing &#8211; Jaguar and Land Rover.</p></blockquote> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559133/Why-China-REAL-master-universe.html">Click Here To Read: Why China Is The Real Master Of The Universe</a></strong></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7080&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 07:12 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/consumers_value_expert_opinion_when_it_comes_health"><strong>Click Here To Read: Consumers Value Expert Opinion When It Comes To Health </strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via Scientific Blogging)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>According to a study of how people evaluate and act on online health advice, information written by a doctor is considered more credible when it appears on a Web site than on a blog or a homepage. The findings, published in the Journal <em>Communication Research</em>, highlight the relative importance of different online sources to people who seek health information on the Internet.</p> <p>&#8220;Most people look for health information online by keying disease symptoms into various search engines,&#8221; said S. Shyam Sundar, distinguished professor of communications, Penn State. &#8220;But the results of that search could range from experts at the Mayo Clinic to somebody&#8217;s personal blog.&#8221;</p> <p>Researchers found that study participants were more likely to believe &#8212; and make use of &#8212; information on a website from a source identified as an expert than from a layperson. Health information from the websites of TV, radio, and newspapers was not included in the study.</p> <p>Participants also believed that editors and moderators help websites present accurate and complete information. Blogs, homepages, and social networking sites were seen as lacking such gatekeeping.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Related Research <a href="http://crx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/1/105">(Via Scientific Blogging)</a></strong></p> <blockquote><p>Online health information comes from a variety of online sources.Based on a typology of online sources, this research examinesthe direct and combined influences of original sources (doctorsvs. laypersons) and selecting sources (Web sites vs. bulletinboards vs. blogs vs. personal home pages vs. Internet) on perceivedcredibility of—and behavioral intentions toward—healthinformation. A large 2 (message) <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">x</span> 2 (original source) <span style="font-family: arial,helvetica;">x</span> 5 (selectingsource) full-factorial online experiment revealed that respondents(<em>N</em> = 555) were more likely to take action based on the informationsourced from a Web site than from a blog or a personal homepage. The effect was mediated by perceived level of gatekeepingand perceived information completeness. The analysis also yieldeda three-way interaction between message, original source, andselecting source on perceived credibility, suggesting the operationof an appropriateness heuristic when evaluating source combinationsfor less relevant health topics. Theoretical and practical implicationsare discussed, leading to the proposal of a new online sourcetypology.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/consumers_value_expert_opinion_when_it_comes_health"><strong>Click Here To Read: Consumers Value Expert Opinion When It Comes To Health </strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7077&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 07:06 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4568"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Mystery of Chinese Savings (Rates)</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Summary (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>What is the connection between China’s one-child policy and its savings glut? This column provides a pioneering explanation. China’s surplus of men has produced a highly competitive marriage market, driving up China’s savings rate and, therefore, global imbalances.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Introduction (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Much attention has been directed toward China’s high savings rate (Broda et al. 2009, Prasad 2009, Reisen 2009). Not only is the savings rate disproportionately high compared to virtually any other country, but it directly impacts China’s current account surplus and the US consumer debt and trade deficit. When national savings exceeds investment, the excess savings becomes China’s current account surplus.</p> <p>Given its far-reaching effects, both private sector analysts and policymakers have attempted to trace the causes of China’s high savings rate and to predict how long it will last. Some have attributed the savings primarily to Chinese corporations. Others point to a precautionary savings motive – as Chinese are worried about costs of healthcare, education, and old-age pensions and are unsure about how much these costs might change over time, they save more.</p> <p>But these explanations may not be the most important part of the story. For example, while the Chinese corporate savings rate is high, the pattern is consistent with many countries. For example, Korea and Japan always have an even higher corporate savings rate than China. In fact, corporate savings rates in most countries have experienced a steady rise in the recent decades. In research with Tam Bayoumi and Hui Tong (2009), we show that to understand why China’s national savings rate is so high, the corporate sector is the wrong place to start.</p></blockquote> <p><strong><br /> Interesting Finding (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>None of the discussion about global imbalances has brought family-planning policy or women’s rights to the table, because many do not see these issues as related to economic policy. Our research suggests that this is a serious omission. You can only implement the right policy when you have the appropriate diagnosis, and fruitful policy dialogue has to include discussion on these issues.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4568"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Mystery of Chinese Savings (Rates)</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7074&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 06:26 PM · permalink

  <p>I&#8217;ve posted about this before, now here&#8217;s the full study.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/1/147.short?rss=1&amp;ssource=mfc"><strong>Click Here To Read: Wishful Seeing More Desired Objects Are Seen as Closer</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Abstract (Via Sagepub)</strong></p> <p>Although people assume that they see the surrounding environment as it truly is, we suggest that perception of the natural environment is dependent upon the internal goal states of perceivers. Five experiments demonstrated that perceivers tend to see desirable objects (i.e., those that can fulfill immediate goals—a water bottle to assuage their thirst, money they can win, a personality test providing favorable feedback) as physically closer to them than less desirable objects. Biased distance perception was revealed through verbal reports and through actions toward the object (e.g., underthrowing a beanbag at a desirable object). We suggest that seeing desirable objects as closer than less desirable objects serves the self-regulatory function of energizing the perceiver to approach objects that fulfill needs and goals.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/1/147.short?rss=1&amp;ssource=mfc"><strong>Click Here To Read: Wishful Seeing More Desired Objects Are Seen as Closer</strong></a></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7070&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 06:15 PM · permalink

  <p><strong>Introduction (WEF Via Fora.tv)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>The financial crisis has caused an economic crisis around the world.</p> <p>Drastic state measures have prevented the collapse of the economic system: governments have established rescue funds for failing banks or nationalized banks for relaunching economic growth. At the same time, central banks have intervened with important injections of liquidity and have lowered interest rates.</p></blockquote> <p><strong><a href="http://fora.tv/2010/01/28/After_the_Financial_Crisis_Consequences__Lessons">Watch The Video Below Or Click Here For Our Subscribers</a></strong><br /> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="400" height="264" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="flashvars" value="webhost=fora.tv&amp;clipid=11472&amp;cliptype=clip" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="src" value="http://fora.tv/embedded_player" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="264" src="http://fora.tv/embedded_player" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="webhost=fora.tv&amp;clipid=11472&amp;cliptype=clip"></embed></object></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7067&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 06:02 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4567"><strong>Click Here To Read: Short-selling bans in the crisis: A misguided policy</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Summary: (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p> Did the bans on short selling achieve their stated purpose of restoring order to the stock market and limiting unwarranted drops in prices? This column presents new evidence from 30 countries arguing that the effect on stock prices was at best neutral, the impact on market liquidity was clearly detrimental – especially for small-cap and high-risk stocks, and that the ban slowed down price discovery.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Introduction (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p><strong><br /> </strong><br /> On 19 September 2008 – just as the failure of Lehman Brothers had shaken investors’ confidence in banks’ solvency and sent stocks into freefall – the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prohibited “short sales” of financial companies’ stocks. The hope was that this would stem the tide of sales and help support bank stock prices.</p></blockquote> <blockquote><p>The SEC’s move sparked worldwide herding by regulators. In the subsequent weeks and months, most stock exchange regulators around the globe issued bans or regulatory constraints on short selling. Some of the bans were “naked”, i.e. only ruled out sales where the seller does not borrow the stock in time to deliver it to the buyer within the standard settlement period (naked short sales). Other bans were “covered”, ruling out also sales where the seller manages to borrow the stock (covered short sales).</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Lessons Learnt (Via Voxeu)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>The evidence suggests that the knee-jerk reaction of most stock exchange regulators around the globe to the financial crisis – imposing bans or regulatory constraints on short-selling – was at best neutral in its effects on stock prices. The impact on market liquidity was clearly detrimental, especially for small-cap and high-risk stocks. Moreover, it slowed down price discovery.</p> <p>Perhaps the main social payoff of this worldwide policy experiment has been that of generating a large amount of evidence about the effects of short-selling bans. The conclusion suggested by this evidence is best summarised by the words of the former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox on 31 December 2008: “Knowing what we know now, [we] would not do it again. The costs appear to outweigh the benefits”. We hope that this lesson will be remembered when security markets face the next crisis.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4567"><strong>Click Here To Read: Short-selling bans in the crisis: A misguided policy</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7065&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 06:00 PM · permalink

  <p>I&#8217;ve linked to Bill Gates blog before, hes maniacal about learning&#8230;and I love that about him. I too love The Teaching Company, I would the following lectures to Gates&#8217; list ; Game Theory, Modern Economics, and Complexity.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?id=111"><strong>Click Here To Read: Bill Gates: What I&#8217;m Learning: More Recommended Teaching Company Lectures</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction ( Via The Gates Notes)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>With more than 250 lectures from some of the world’s leading professors, The Teaching Company provides the opportunity to learn from great teachers who are true experts in their fields. Bill offers recommendations for some of the courses that he has enjoyed the most.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Excerpt (Via The Gates Notes)</strong></p> <blockquote><p> I wrote about some of my favorite lectures in science and in economics earlier (see Great Lectures from The Teaching Company).</p> <p>I am watching Thinking about Capitalism by Jerry Muller right now which is excellent but mostly for people who want to know the history of economics. The genius of Adam Smith was really unbelievable – he foresaw a lot of the things we still argue about today.</p> <p>I have not watched Economics 3rd Edition by Timothy Taylor but he is such a good teacher I might want to watch it.</p> <p>In the science realm the best is probably Physics in Your Life by Richard Wolfson. He explains everything very clearly and his description of how semiconductor chips work is the best I have ever seen.</p> <p>I also loved the courses on geology, starting with John Renton’s course Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology followed by How the Earth Works by Michael Wysession.</p> <p>There is a great biology course (Biology: The Science of Life by Stephen Nowicki) and a great physics course (Particle Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos by Steven Pollock) but those are pretty in-depth and designed more for people who want to learn the field.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?id=111"><strong>Click Here To Read: Bill Gates: What I&#8217;m Learning: More Recommended Teaching Company Lectures</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7061&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 05:48 PM · permalink

  <p>&#8220;We believe that the value of a business depends ultimately on the cash flow &#8211; present and future &#8211; that it produces for its owners.&#8221;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firsteaglefunds.com/downloads/news/2010.02FENews_RiskPartTwo.pdf"><strong>Click Here To Read: First Eagle Funds Releases Latest Thought Paper: How We Think About Risk Part 2</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via First Eagle Funds)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>In seeking to support our investors against impairment of capital we rely on five operational principles; (1) margin of safety, don&#8217;t over pay for assets, (2) diversification, let positive and negative surprises average out, (3) low leverage, avoid potentially catastrophic losses associated with high leverage, (4) balance, build a portfolio that is not overly exposed to any single macroeconomic risk, and (5) protection against extreme outcomes, consider assets like gold that may do well when the world falls apart. For each of the principles First Eagle has processes in place that seek to limit the risks involved in investing.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firsteaglefunds.com/downloads/news/2010.02FENews_RiskPartTwo.pdf"><strong>Click Here To Read: First Eagle Funds Releases Latest Thought Paper: How We Think About Risk Part 2</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7058&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 06, 2010 05:39 PM · permalink

  <p>Dear Readers,</p> <p>I have some exciting news. My close friends, Matt Kukla, a Health Care Economics phd will be guest blogging here once  a week to teach you about the intricacies of health care reform. I hope you enjoy the posts.</p> <p>Best Regards,</p> <p>Miguel</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>An Introduction To Health Care Reform</strong></p> <p>By Matt Kukla</p> <p>Understanding the workings of health care systems can be overwhelming and complex. In a world of ideological debates and partisan politics, it&#8217;s difficult to sift through the garbage and comprehend what works and what doesn&#8217;t. As a guest columnist at Simoleon Sense, my goal is to help you become more knowledgeable and think critically about health care, both economically and through international experience. This means using your own ethical framework to determine how equitable, efficient, and effective a health system should be and ultimately use this foundation as a guide to health care reform.</p> <p>A terrific book published by several leading health experts at Harvard University (Getting Health Reform Right: A Guide to Improving Performance and Equity, Roberts et al. (2008)) discusses critical factors that may shape the direction of health care reform. It breaks down the inner workings of health policy into five control knobs, all of which can be turned independently or simultaneously to change a health care system. These include financing, payments, organization, regulation and social behavior.</p> <p>Financing health systems throughout the developed and developing world often breaks down into four categories: general revenue, self-pay, private insurance and social insurance. Each mechanism shares three primary functions: How will revenue be collected? How should contributions be pooled so as to minimize risk? How are contributions used to purchase health services?</p> <p>The V.A. hospital system is a sound example of general revenue, such that health care is paid for by the government through general tax revenues, tossed around the pot and spit back out to pay for health care services. As with the U.K. and Canada, there generally exists greater accountability and controlled spending within this system; however, funding fluctuates according to the economy and no specific organization exists to set aside taxes for health care. Administrative costs are also considerably lower, equity is greater, though efficiency is often weaker.</p> <p>Alternative forms of financing include private health insurance &amp; self-pay and represent the majority of health care financing for Americans. As will be discussed in later posts, economists promote the free market as an arena for efficiency, though strong evidence indicates that markets often fail in the health care sector. In brief, private insurance companies experience excruciatingly high administrative costs (25-35% in the U.S.) due to price negotiations among providers and hospitals. It is generally less equitable for the population, because without regulation insurers can &#8220;risk select&#8221; by choosing who they do and don&#8217;t want to cover. Nations that opt for private insurance must find ways to regulate and manage these markets and plan for high costs. Similarly, roughly 15-25% of all health care spending in developed nations is due to self-pay (cost-sharing) in the form of co-pays, co-insurance or deductibles. Evidence shows that cost-sharing limits a form of market failure called moral hazard; if insurance companies cover all health care costs, patients will over utilize unnecessary health care services.</p> <p>Social insurance systems are being implemented throughout the developing world and exist heavily in developed societies (ie. France, Germany). The model demands that citizens pay taxes which are set aside by the government specifically for health care – thus the primary difference from general revenue. When individuals pay those taxes in addition to a small, fixed yearly premium to an insurance company, they gain access to health services for free or minimal cost-sharing; additionally, most systems provide more comprehensive health benefits if individuals pay higher taxes. The poorest individuals are often exempt from paying taxes or premiums and will be compensated by other tax payers. Equity in social insurance markets is greater than private health insurance, while efficiency, like all other financing mechanisms, will inevitably depend on policy details of payment, organization and regulatory schemes.</p> <p>Interestingly, health care systems may contain any number of these financing mechanisms; the United States, for instance, has all four. All methods are unique and can work well in select scenarios to maximize equity, efficiency and effectiveness; the challenge of policymakers is to determine these settings and successfully implement and integrate them.</p> <p>The following are a few, weekly readings on the subject to peak your interest:</p> <p><a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/lehmans-last-contribution-to-society-a-lesson-on-social-insurance/">http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/lehmans-last-contribution-to-society-a-lesson-on-social-insurance/</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.who.int/health_financing/documents/whr00_ch5_en.pdf">http://www.who.int/health_financing/documents/whr00_ch5_en.pdf</a></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7050&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 11:09 PM · permalink

  <p>Nice report on (lets call it) the psychology of time.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wbur.org/npr/122322542"><strong>Click Here For: Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?</strong></a></p> <p>H/T Mindhacks</p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via NPR)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Yes, we all get older. But now, getting older has become a video fetish; all kinds of people take pictures of themselves every day for six, seven, eight years and then blend the images together into a &#8230; well, if you&#8217;ve missed the Web craze, Homer Simpson&#8217;s &#8220;Every Day&#8221; is a perfect catcher-upper.</p> <p>Not only can you see Homer switching jobs (cavalryman, Indian, king, infantryman, fisherman, fireman), you watch his body grow, swell, swag. As with all things Simpson, the physical changes are dramatic.</p> <p>But what these videos don&#8217;t show are the psychological changes, and one of the most universal changes is that as humans age, they change the way they feel about time.</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Why?</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.</p> <p>Have you noticed, he says, that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? &#8220;I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever,&#8221; he says.</p> <p>That&#8217;s because when it&#8217;s the &#8220;first&#8221;, there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that&#8217;s an illusion. &#8220;It&#8217;s a construction of the brain,&#8221; says Eagleman. &#8220;The more memory you have of something, you think, &#8216;Wow, that really took a long time!&#8217;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.wbur.org/npr/122322542"><strong>Click Here For: Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?</strong></a></strong></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7047&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 08:15 PM · permalink

  <p>I highly recommend&#8212;&#8211;no, screw it I think its paramount that you visit Projection Point. A website dedicated to creating a risk intelligence quotient is quite a breakthrough. Fellow hedgies, quants, and portfolio managers take it and find out how you really think about probabilities.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.projectionpoint.com/">Click Here To :Test Your Risk Intelligence Quotient @ Projection Point</a></strong></p> <p><strong>Introduction (Via Projection Point)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>Risk Intelligence Quotient (RQ) is a measure of a person’s ability to estimate probabilities accurately. People with high risk intelligence tend to make better predictions than those with low RQ.</p> <p>When a banker guesses how likely it is that a customer will repay a loan; when a doctor estimates the chance that a patient has a particular disease; and when you try to figure out whether or not to take your umbrella with you when you go out for a walk – all these tasks require risk intelligence.</p> <p>High risk intelligence is quite rare. Fifty years of research in the psychology of judgement and decision making shows that most people are not very good at thinking clearly about risky choices. If risk intelligence was more common, the world wouldn&#8217;t be mired in financial crisis, since this was largely caused by unwise lending and borrowing &#8211; both of which involve risk intelligence. Too many lenders and borrowers overestimated the chances that loans would be repaid.</p> <p>We set up this website as part of a <em>private research project</em> aimed at measuring risk intelligence in the general population. Please help us by taking the short test we have designe</p></blockquote> <p><strong>Video Tour (Via Projection Point)</strong></p> <blockquote><p> <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="560" height="340" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1jZc6UQnwkE&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="340" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1jZc6UQnwkE&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="http://www.projectionpoint.com/">Click Here To :Test Your Risk Intelligence Quotient @ Projection Point</a></strong></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7044&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:55 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2470/rf.v2009.n5.2"><strong>Click Here To Read: A Riskless Society Is “Unattainable and Infinitely Expensive”</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Favorite Excerpts (Via CFA Institute)</strong></p> <p>A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money. —Popular saying, origin unknown<br /> Private vices will always thrive. Greed, envy, lust, pride, and my favorite, sloth (I can’t help thinking of the two-toed, upside-down mammal) will continue to drive human action as they always have. Some argue that greed is good. They have a point. Greed certainly makes the engine of the economy hum. Like Adam Smith, I would rather get my dinner from a merchant acting in his own interest than from one pretending to act in mine. Through the processes described by Smith, private vices are channeled in such a way as to produce public benefits.2 This transformation is well known to studentsof economics and is seeping through to the general public.3 But it does not work perfectly all the time. Private vices are restrained by what Smith called “enlightened self-interest.” If you are too greedy, you stand a chance of losing money. Regarding lust, as Danny O’Keefe sang in “Goodtime Charlie’s Got the Blues”: “you play around, you lose your wife; you play too long, you lose your life.”But private vices with no corresponding public benefits are encouraged when</p> <p>individuals are protected—or think they are protected—from any negative consequences that might arise while getting to keep the rewards. This chain of cause andeffect is what economists call “moral hazard,” a phrase that has been growing in familiarity since global capital markets began to collapse in 2007 and as the collapse intensified in 2008 and the early part of 2009. The decline in market values, amounting to 57 percent from peak to trough as measured by the daily closing value of the S&amp;P 500 Index of U.S. equity prices, revealed that once-proud financial institutions and other corporations had experienced losses on a mammoth scale.4 These losses were so large, and the institutions so interconnected through complex contracts and financial instruments, that the whole global financial system was at the point of collapse. Parts of the system actually stopped functioning: For a few weeks in September and October 2008, many healthy businesses could not obtain short-term credit at any price. Although financial conditions have improved dramatically since then, substantial long-term economic challenges remain.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2470/rf.v2009.n5.2"><strong>Click Here To Read: A Riskless Society Is “Unattainable and Infinitely Expensive”</strong></a></p> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7041&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:48 PM · permalink

  <p>&#8220;In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.&#8221;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?em"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Joy of Less</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Interesting Excerpts (via NYT)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.</p> <p>I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?em"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Joy of Less</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7039&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:44 PM · permalink

  <p>Deric Bownds has one of the best psychology blogs&#8230;.here&#8217;s his latest find.I recommend reading his post/find.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/"><strong>Click Here To Read: Our brain activity as desire collides with reason.</strong></a></p> <blockquote><p><strong>&#8220;How do we resist impulsive desires?  Apparently our anteroventral prefrontal cortex tells our nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental  areas (involved in reward and pleasure)  to chill out.&#8221;</strong></p> <p>&#8220;Human decisions are guided by &#8220;desire&#8221; or &#8220;reason,&#8221; which control actions oriented toward either proximal or long-term goals. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how the human brain mediates the balance between proximal reward desiring and long-term goals, when actions promoting a superordinate goal preclude exploitation of an immediately available reward option.&#8221;</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/"><strong>Click Here To Read: Our brain activity as desire collides with reason.</strong></a></p> </blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7036&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:38 PM · permalink

  <p style="text-align: left;">Think broken window theory&#8230;.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/0956797610361426v1?rss=1"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity</strong></a></p> <p><strong>Introduction (via APS)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>As Proust’s words so eloquently express, a familiar smell can transport one to an exact time and place in one’s past.<strong> Indeed, psychologists have found that scents can retrieve images and feelings from the deepest recesses of the mind </strong>(Chu &amp; Downes, 2000; Doop, Mohr, Folley, Brewer, &amp; Park, 2006). <strong>Smells can also influence judgment</strong> (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, &amp; Jordan, 2008) and regulate behavior: For example, Holland, Hendriks, and Aarts (2005) found that exposure to citrus cleaning scents enhanced the mental accessibility of cleaning-related constructs and led participants to maintain a cleaner environment while eating.</p> <p>Given the symbolic association between physical and moral purity, we considered a provocative possibility: In addition to regulating physical cleanliness, clean smells might also motivate virtuous behavior. Indeed, moral transgressions can engender literal feelings of dirtiness (Zhong &amp; Liljenquist, 2006). Just as many symbolic associations, such as coldness and loneliness (Zhong &amp; Leonardelli, 2008) or darkness and depravity (Frank &amp; Gilovich, 1988), are reciprocally related (Lakoff, 1987), morality and cleanliness may also be reciprocally linked. We investigated whether clean scents could transcend the domain of physical cleanliness and promote virtuous behavior.</p> <p><a href="http://pss.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/0956797610361426v1?rss=1"><strong>Click Here To Read: The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity</strong></a></p></blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7033&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:34 PM · permalink

  <p><strong>Full Press Release (<a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/ip-sif020410.php">via Eureka alert</a>)</strong></p> <blockquote><p>An approach to decision making based on soft metrics could allow problems to be solved where no definitive &#8220;yes-no&#8221; answer is possible in fields as diverse as healthcare, defense, economics, engineering, public utilities and science. Writing in the <em>International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems</em> Mihaela Quirk of Los Alamos National Laboratory explains how.</p> <p>Progress in science and technology demands logical correctness, but problems with a definitive &#8220;yes&#8221; or &#8220;no&#8221; answer are rare. Decision makers are often faced with vast quantities of information, whether epidemiological statistics on the incidence of disease, data on failure tolerances in a fleet of passenger aircraft, or conflict decisions in the defense arena.</p> <p>How can the need for logical rigor be reconciled in the face of such fuzzy information? The answer may lie in the burgeoning field of soft metrics in which shades of gray and judgments that adopt a &#8220;lesser of two evils&#8221; stance can be applied to provide a justifiable answer that is not necessarily yes or no.</p> <p>&#8220;Modern decision making challenges the human capacity to reason in an environment of uncertainty, imprecision, and incompleteness of information,&#8221; Quirk explains. Moreover, information and attention are in one sense inversely proportional &#8211; the more information the less attention can be given to each &#8220;atom&#8221; of information.</p> <p>Quirk explains that soft metrics are attributes of decision criteria that cannot be expressed numerically but nevertheless could be the core of a computational engine that is perception-based and can work with natural language rather than number crunching. For the intelligence community involved in national defense and strategy, a disproportionate number of the decisions being made represent a matter of life.</p> <p>As such, the soft metrics approach could offer them a new approach to intelligence data analysis, risk assessment, conflict resolution and strategy building that circumvents the logical need for a yes-no answer.</p> <p>Quirk cites the successful ranking of power substations in Washington DC so that protective resources can be allocated optimally as an example of how soft metrics might be used in decision analysis, ranking, and computing in NL. This ranking exercise addresses possible power outages and their mitigation, emergency responses, and homeland security issues.</p> <p>The soft metrics approach takes non-numerical information and expert opinion and creates a set of inference rules of the type &#8220;If (&#8230;) then (&#8230;)&#8221;, which can be programmed into a computer. The whole approach side-steps political and economic considerations in assessing the information in hand.</p></blockquote> <img src="http://www.simoleonsense.com/?ak_action=api_record_view&id=7030&type=feed" alt="" />

Posted by Miguel on February 05, 2010 03:29 PM · permalink