Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Environment, Books on
Jun 30, 2008
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Rather than point the finger at racial or ethnic differences to answer this question, Diamond focuses on environmental differences and proceeds to lay out a comprehensive case. Four sets of factors, he argues, contributed to the world as we see it today.
In Mark Twain's classic novel Tom Sawyer is white washing a fence because his aunt told him to do it. In other words, it's work. But Tom soon convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is a privilege and even gets them to pay him for a chance to try their hand at it. Twain makes the larger point that whether something is work or not is based on whether one gets paid for it. In this case work becomes a privilege when the worker has to pay to take part, as opposed to being paid for it. Based on this principle, two researchers have developed the idea of two markets: social and monetary. When you help a friend move with no mention of money it is a social market. When you get paid to mow someone's lawn it is a monetary market. Where do you expend more effort and does anything change the level of effort?
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Investing on
Jun 20, 2008
Michael Mauboussin is Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management, adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School and Trustee at the Santa Fe Institute. Unconventional thinking is his calling card. I first came across his name in this column by James Surowiecki, in what apparently was a precursor to Surowiecki's subsequently popular book, The Wisdom of Crowds.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Books, Baseball on
Jun 18, 2008
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? Fascinated by this question Lewis begins an investigation that takes him into an area of baseball that was shrouded in mystery about a decade ago. This was an area dominated by people who believed that to truly understand baseball you have to use numbers. Not just any number from a box score (such as an RBI) but those that were shown to be related to winning (such as on-base percentage).
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Game Theory on
Jun 16, 2008
Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is serious business. Serious enough to have an RPS World Championship. The next one is in October in Toronto. Why all the interest? Isn't it simply a children's game? As it turns out not only is it easy enough for a small child to play, it is difficult enough for an adult to master because of its unique nature, and complex enough for mathematicians to become interested.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Economics on
Jun 09, 2008
Emily Oster is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the University of Chicago. Her research reaches outside the traditional boundaries of economics to larger health and policy questions. Her claim to fame is her disputing the Nobel winner Amartya Sen's contention from two decades ago that there were 100 million "missing" women, quite possibly because of misogynistic attitudes in developing countries.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Cryptography, Books on
Jun 04, 2008
The Code Book - The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography, by Simon Singh
If you have any interest in the history of codemaking and codebreaking (or more accurately ciphermaking and cipherbreaking ), this would be a great place to start. Singh begins with early codebreaking ingenuity such as the Caesar shift (yes, that Caesar) where alphabets are substituted for others, and the powerful technique of frequency analysis for breaking substitution ciphers.
Posted by: Rajan Sambandam in Creativity on
Jun 04, 2008
Researchers at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the University of Waterloo have conducted some experiments with very interesting results about the impact of brands on people. They started with prior research that has shown that people modify their behavior in response to environmental cues. For example, exposure to rude words leads to people behaving rudely; exposure to elderly people made others walk more slowly. Even exposure (or priming) with a parent made people achieve more if they believed that the parent would be interested in their achievement, or if they were hoping to please the parent. The question asked by the researchers in this study was whether brands could have similar effects on people and the results turn out to be quite interesting.
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