Emblematic

BDSM emblem. (source)	HST emblem. (source) (HST imprint is on the other side of the frisbee.)

Coincidence? I think not.

(One wonders what the New Pathway emblem looks like…)

02:06 EST | permalink | /academics/harvard

Time decay

Some uplifting thoughts on graduate study from Emanuel Derman’s My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance:

…[A]s a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.

23:22 EST | permalink | /academics

Zing!

William Easterly on aid to Africa:

Letting total aid money stand for accomplishment is like the Hollywood producers of Catwoman, recently voted the worst movie of 2004, bragging about their impressive accomplishment of spending $100 million on its production.

That reminds me of the wisdom of taking lines-of-code-written as a proxy for the usefulness of a piece of software.

20:42 EST | permalink | /issues/foreign-aid

Press hit

The article on how the UN wants to 0wn the Intarweb that Carlos and I wrote is posted.

13:08 EST | permalink | /computers/internet

Preventing genocide

The average Glenn Reynolds post is about 0.8 sentences long – which makes it all the more pleasant to see a piece like this.

00:41 EST | permalink | /issues/genocide

And you thought the debaters were nerdy

I used to think that my high-school resume made me a nerd. But I had nothing on these people:

Victoria JC, Nanyang Girls’ High win inter-school blogging contest

SINGAPORE : Victoria Junior College and Nanyang Girls’ High School have won the first National Inter-school Blogging Championship.

The event is jointly organised by SingTel and the Ministry of Education.

Victoria JC and Nanyang Girls’ High ‘outblogged’ 51 other Singapore schools to emerge champions in the ‘Junior College/Centralised Institute’ and ‘Secondary School’ categories respectively.

It’s even more interesting that a blogging contest would be held in a country so well-known for stomping on press freedom.

Update: Amit emailed to point out the web site of the blogging contest, which the Yahoo story hadn’t included.

22:01 EST | permalink | /world/singapore

Next time, take Econ 101 first

The background of MIT’s home page features a different “spotlight” group or event every day. Today’s is a promotion of “fair trade” coffee.

Now, I have no objection to people who voluntarily pay more than the going market rate for a commodity. (The bottled-water industry thanks the Lord every day for those people.) But this “fair trade” campaign is (of course) run by a group that also opposes “sweatshop” labor.

There’s a big honking picture of Noam Chomsky at the top of the group’s website, which should give you some idea of how much careful thought went into the “anti-sweatshop” campaign. Maybe this gang should consider reading up on what another MIT professor (who’s since moved to greener pastures ) has to say about the subject.

I’m tempted to launch a campaign to help create jobs for the third-world (and for the poor in America) by shopping only at Wal-Mart.

Update: David emailed to note that “fair-trade” coffee programs tend to ignore non-Latin American coffee growers–namely, the #2 exporter, Vietnam– so the “socially responsible” dollars miss a big segment of the downtrodden growers.

The MIT website doesn’t mention particular countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were strictly Latin American. Latin American socialists have historically enjoyed far better marketing than their counterparts in Asia. You can’t spend five minutes on a university thoroughfare without spotting a Che or two, but when was the last time you saw a Ho Chi Minh t-shirt? I blame the beefcake factor: why else would a fair-trade site have a muscular, shirtless Dominican spreading his legs on the front page? (If the site has changed, the original is here. ) WASP coeds of the feeling-guilty-about-Dad’s-money set go ga-ga over Latins – the North Vietnamese just don’t have the same sex appeal.

23:41 EST | permalink | /issues/economy

LKY interview

Belmont Club links to a translation of an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, in which the Singaporean leader speculates upon China’s long-term ambitions. Well worth a read.

19:53 EST | permalink | /world/singapore