"Unfortunately for the orange hordes of Dutch fans, that is exactly what their team did in June 2013. If they hadn't played that game they would be one of the top seeds, not Switzerland, who played fewer friendlies than most teams in the final 12 months that counted towards World Cup qualifying ranking points."
"Who needs humans, anyway? That question, in one rhetorical form or another, comes up frequently in discussions of automation. If computers’ abilities are expanding so quickly and if people, by comparison, seem slow, clumsy, and error-prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation? The technology theorist Kevin Kelly, commenting on the link between automation and pilot error, argued that the obvious solution is to develop an entirely autonomous autopilot: “Human pilots should not be flying planes in the long run.” The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla recently suggested that health care will be much improved when medical software—which he has dubbed “Doctor Algorithm”—evolves from assisting primary-care physicians in making diagnoses to replacing the doctors entirely. The cure for imperfect automation is total automation."
Magnus Carlsen's Win in Chess Championship Shows Powerful Role of Computers - WSJ.com: "The last chess match to get as much publicity as Mr. Carlsen's triumph was the 1997 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov and International Business Machines Corp.'s Deep Blue computer in New York City. Some observers saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an "early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come," wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled "The Brain's Last Stand.""
"But the point at which passive investing becomes self-defeating is a bit like the point at which the gradient of the Laffer curve turns negative, and tax hikes cause revenue losses rather than revenue gains: both points are far beyond any state of the world that obtains in real-life America. Passive investors are still a minority of all stock-market investors — and, what’s more, they could easily become a majority without doing any harm to the markets’ price-discovery abilities. The only thing that matters is that there’s a reasonably large number of active marginal price-setters. Since there always will be a reasonably large number of active marginal price-setters, no one ever need fear that the rise of passive investing is going to become self-defeating."
Poisson distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The distribution was first introduced by Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) and published, together with his probability theory, in 1837 in his work Recherches sur la probabilité des jugements en matière criminelle et en matière civile (“Research on the Probability of Judgments in Criminal and Civil Matters”).[3] The work focused on certain random variables N that count, among other things, the number of discrete occurrences (sometimes called "events" or “arrivals”) that take place during a time-interval of given length. The result had been given previously by Abraham de Moivre (1711) in De Mensura Sortis seu; de Probabilitate Eventuum in Ludis a Casu Fortuito Pendentibus in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, p. 219.[4]"
"No high-street bank comes close to this clarity, and an unauthorised overdraft may cost far more than the loan that prevents that overdraft. Outcompeted on convenience, on comprehensibility and perhaps even on price by the likes of Wonga, Britain’s banks should hang their heads in shame."
"Having only ever played with Latent Dirichlet Allocation using gensim in python, I was very interested to see a nice example of this kind of topic modelling in R. Whenever I see a really cool analysis done, I get the urge to do it myself. What better corpus to do topic modelling on than the Enron email dataset?!?!? Let me tell you, this thing is a monster! According to the website I got it from, it contains about 500k messages, coming from 151 mostly senior management users and is organized into user folders. I didn’t want to accept everything into my analysis, so I made the decision that I would only look into messages contained within the “sent” or “sent items” folders."
Inequality: Labour's share lost | The Economist: What is behind the fall in labour share of income?
"Part of the decline, especially in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, is attributable to labour-market liberalisation. Some of the decline, especially in America in the 2000s, can instead be attributed to exposure to imports from big emerging markets. But across the whole of the period and all countries (including emerging markets like China) technology seems to be the most important factor. Technology has gotten better and much cheaper over the past generation, and that has allowed firms to substitute capital for labour across a broad range of occupational categories. In the 1980s and 1990s technology had its greatest effect in production activities, in automation of routine physical tasks. From the 1990s on the impact of technology became more apparent in information-processing roles. Highly skilled workers mostly benefited from these technological shifts, as new technologies (especially in information and communication technology) have been complementary to their abilities. Owners of capital have also prospered. But middle-skill workers have done poorly, as have low-skill workers, thanks to increased competition from those displaced from middle-skill work"
"ADAM SMITH is known as the father of economics. Most people think of him as the archetypal free-marketeer. But Smith is often misquoted. This post will give a few examples of how people have misinterpreted Smith’s ideas—and show what he really meant.
Smith sowed the seeds of his own problems. He tended to write pithy soundbites that left his ideas open to distortion. One of his best-known quips:"
