February 2012
45 posts
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U.S. Home Prices Drop Again: S&P Case-Shiller...
According to Standard & Poor’s, and Case-Shiller too (their housing market research partner), U.S. housing market prices are down for the third straight month, based on data through November 2011. The complete PDF with details of the latest release, hot off the press as of today 31 January 2012, is now available on the Housing Views website.
For more details on the housing market, past...
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Wall Street Prepares to Take a Sharp Pay Cut
Pay cuts are less than company operating losses on a percentage basis. Is that significant? I’m not certain. Seems like it could be, although a thorough financial statement analysis would be needed to say that with confidence.
Shareholders of Wall Street firms don’t seem to be any better off than shareholders of non-Wall Street companies.
Employees of Wall Street firms,...
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EFF is trying to help MegaUpload users retrieve...
bitshare:
If you are one of the MegaUpload users that had files uploaded to the site before the federal indictment and shut down and have lost complete access to those files, there may be something you can do about it to get those files back.
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January 2012
76 posts
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“liked 2001 posts: a tumblr odyssey”
– hackedy
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Politics of odd numbers and odder taxes
Could this be an application of Benford’s Law for detecting political bias or worse? Maybe.
The terms weren’t obvious to me at first, so let me explain what is meant by “odd pricing”. In stores in the U.S.A., and elsewhere (the study below used municipal tax data from Denmark), prices for goods and services marketed and sold to consumers are often priced with 9 endings,...
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Reign of Art at Casa Mollino
reignofartonline:
Photographs of the Casa Mollino by Johannes Kersting
A few years ago Johannes Kersting visited the Casa Mollino in Turino, Italy and took pictures. His photographs were recently published in the magazine “Weltkunst” by the Zeit publishing house. The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino is famous for his organic design with erotic influences. This year his work was...
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Clearing Over-the-Counter Derivatives →
Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the over-the-counter derivatives market was not required to “clear” transactions. This changed with the signing of the new financial reform legislation, the Dodd–Frank Act on July 21, 2010. Going forward, most OTC derivatives will be cleared through a particular set of institutional arrangements: a regulated clearinghouse. This article provides an overview...
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Stock Scams Go Social
usagov:
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently charged a man with trying to sell $500 billion worth of fake securities on social network LinkedIn.
Be suspicious of unsolicited offers.
The old rule about too good to be true still stands. Compare promised returns with well-known stock indexes. [Beware] of guaranteed returns.
Tighten your privacy settings…. “Don’t you...
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XSL Stylesheet for for Encoded Archival...
tingletech:
tingletech/ead_basic_xslt - GitHub
generic XSLT 1.0 + EXSLT for EAD.
Based on the XSLT for http://www.oac.cdlib.org/
Sample output is
http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/
I tried it. I’m not sure though. I did the following:
Went here: http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/
Selected this: …cjh.org/YiddishTeachersUnion.html
Got this:
...
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Sub i, sub j →
isomorphismes:
I hope I can say this in a way that makes sense.
One kind of mathematical symbology your eyes eventually get used to is the “Σum over all individuals” concept:
Yes, at first it’s painful, but eventually it looks no more confusing than the oddly-bent Phoenician-alphabet letters that make…
This was the most fun I’ve had in awhile, reading about math, statistics,...
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“Dotcom’s lawyer argued that his credit cards are mostly expired, and that his...”
– Imp Of The Perverse: Azzal érveltek a dotcom ügyvédjei, hogy túl kövér ahhoz, hogy észrevétlenül elszökjön új-zélandból
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Preparing for the worst: Managing risk in light of... →
According to FactSet Research Systems, there isn’t any effective way to hedge against a Euro breakup scenario. Recommended risk mitigation would be to buy German bonds and U.S. Treasuries.
And one more thing: If Greece leaves the EU:
all assets would have to be re-priced in the Drachma which would likely result in heavy losses.
Sarcasm time
Wow! None of this would ever have occurred to...
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Abstract Sunday: On Hold →
A story in doodles.
This is a lovely blue ballpoint pen drawing.
Christopher Niemann (I remember him!) has an irregular spot with the New York Times now. The prior entry was nearly two months ago. But that seems appropriate, for something this whimsical.
A stream-of-consciousness mind map while waiting on the phone, on hold: Clair de Lune muzak… Mitt Romney… campaign...
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Congratulations - You Just Won MySpace
wekeroad:
We’ve just completed an eventful tour of “Charlie and The Social Networking Factory” and we’ve reached the end… I take off my rainbow-colored top hat and…
Hi! I’m ROB from NIGERIA and I’m here to let you know that you’ve just won a broken-down, bruised and demoralized Social Networking App! That’s right it’s MYSPACE!
Have fuuuuunnnnn….
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Market value discount to face value of major UK...
via alea
Chart: Market value discount to face value of major UK banks’ loan books
Accounting for bank uncertainty [PDF] Excerpt from remarks given by Andrew G. Haldane, Bank of England:
So, historically, fair value accounting principles have gained ground when the going has been good, and lost it when it has got tough. From a financial stability perspective, this is a cause for...
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A →
Human error?
Maybe the site was hacked? That is better than the other catastrophic, low probability scenarios that my long-tailed imagination conjures up.
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“The Indian sense of regret / guilty conscience is a truly remarkable piece of...”
– The Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick Maker:
Believe me, I know exactly how that feels. I wish I didn’t.
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Metaphors are in the mind →
People have known about metaphor for millennia. Until recently,
metaphor was seen as a linguistic device in which you call one thing by the name of another thing that it’s similar to.
But in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson proposed a new explanation… if metaphor is only based on similarity, then you should be able to metaphorically describe anything in...
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“Marry me? Silence. Footsteps. Tears… Kiss.”
– stolenthoughtss via 6-words
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“I used to be active on tumblr but then I took an arrow to the knee.”
– jvhszmrtn
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Checking for Bias in Random Number Generation →
cryptocatapp:
Cryptocat uses RC4 to generate random numbers. The first few kilobytes of random numbers generated by RC4 are known to be biased and unreliable. However, by discarding the first few batches of random numbers, we obtain a reliable PRNG that may be coupled with reliable sources of entropy and…
That was the 18 December 2011 entry on the Cryptocat Development Blog. They are...
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Constants Part 2
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Constants of R
adamlaiacano:
Of all of the mathematical and scientific constants, they decided to go with lower/upper case letters, month names/abbreviations, and pi.
Constants {base} R Documentation
Usage
LETTERS
letters
month.abb
month.name
pi
R has a small number of built-in constants. The following are available:
LETTERS: the 26 upper-case letters of the Roman alphabet;
letters: the 26 lower-case...
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DMCA worked well, so why do we need SOPA? →
bijan:
More than a decade ago, we got the DMCA.
Many people hated it but the content community (Hollywood) pushed very hard for it. They wanted to control what content could and couldn’t exist on the Internet.
I’m over simplifying things greatly but the basic DMCA deal was the following…
The title is my opinion.
The article is actually about a small-ish number of folks from Hollywood...
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Complexity theory redux →
A theory about why the financial system nearly collapsed in 2008 may appear too simple to be true. It was hard to find any flaws in it, by me, nor by others.
Be aware that this is an Op-Ed post from the New York Times, October 2009. It is about non-obvious causes for the disastrous financial market events of the prior year, and even those that set the stage in 2007.
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EU banks are NOT hoarding
Via alea:
High ECB reserves are not evidence of bank “hoarding”
According to some media reports, the high level of reserves – specifically the €412 billion deposited in the overnight facility… indicate that banks are “hoarding” liquidity injected by the ECB rather than lending to each other and the wider economy.
This is wrong. While an individual bank can reduce its reserves...
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Earthquakes and nuclear power
Seismic activity and U.S. nuclear power plants, data visualization app is Insight by Rhiza Labs
I don’t know if this reveals anything or not. The first (and only) thought that occurred to me was that it was a good idea that no one decided to build any nuclear power plants along the San Andreas Fault. Other than the two reactors in California, there are hardly any nuclear power plants within...
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