Todor Ivanov's Weblog

Nassim Taleb

ivanov — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:42:16 +0000

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Arabic: نسيم نيقولا نجيب طالب‎, alternatively Nessim or Nissim, born 1960) is a Lebanese American essayist whose work focuses on problems of randomness and probability. His 2007 book The Black Swan was described in a review by Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

He is a bestselling author, and has been a professor at several universities, currently at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Oxford University. He is also a practitioner of mathematical finance. Taleb has been a hedge fund manager, a Wall Street trader, and is currently a scientific adviser at Universa Investments and the International Monetary Fund.

He criticized the risk management methods used by the finance industry and warned about financial crises, subsequently making a fortune out of the late-2000s financial crisis. He advocates what he calls a “black swan robust” society, meaning a society that can withstand difficult-to-predict events. He favors “stochastic tinkering” as a method of scientific discovery, by which he means experimentation and fact-collecting instead of top-down directed research.

Source: Wiki

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Home Page

Books:

Videos:

David Cameron in conversation with Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb at Harvard University on social problems Part 1

Part 2

18.10.2011 Nassim Taleb: “OWS Second Generation Marxist Class Struggle”

Peter Shiff

ivanov — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:00:34 +0000

Peter David Schiff (pronounced /ˈʃɪf/; born March 23, 1963) is an American investment broker, author, financial commentator, and was a candidate in the 2010 Republican primary for the United States Senate seat from Connecticut.

Schiff is CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a broker-dealer based in Westport, Connecticutand CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC, a gold and silver dealer based in New York City. He frequently appears as a guest on CNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg Television and is often quoted in major financial publications and is a frequent guest on internet radio as well as the host of the former podcast Wall Street Unspun, which is now broadcast on terrestrial radio and known as The Peter Schiff Show.

Schiff is known for his bearish views on the dollar and dollar denominated assets, while bullish on investment in tangible assets as well as foreign stocks and currencies.

More Info!

The Schiff Report:

Dirk Müller (Mr. Dax)

ivanov — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:01:21 +0000

Dirk Müller (* 25. Oktober 1968 in Frankfurt am Main) ist ein deutscher Börsenmakler und Bankkaufmann. Er wurde international als „Mister DAX“ und „Dirk of the DAX“ bekannt, weil sein Arbeitsplatz auf dem Parkett der Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse unter der DAX-Kurstafel lag und die Medien dies nutzten, um seinen Gesichtsausdruck zusammen mit dem Kursverlauf des Index als Symbol des aktuellen Börsengeschehens darzustellen. Mehr info.

MMnews Interview:

Stéphane Hessel

ivanov — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 12:08:48 +0000

Stéphane Frédéric Hessel (born 20 October 1917) is a diplomat, ambassador, concentration camp survivor, former French Resistance fighter and BCRA agent. Born German, he became a naturalised French citizen in 1939. He participated in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.(More info)

Interviews about his book “Empört Euch!”:

2010 in review

ivanov — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:58:16 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 10 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 77 posts. There were 6 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 309kb.

The busiest day of the year was February 25th with 77 views. The most popular post that day was Cloud Computing.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.com, google.co.in, blorgh.wordpress.com, vmware.com, and google.co.th.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for cloud computing, datagridview datatable, datagridview to datatable, german sterligov, and cloud computing layers.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Cloud Computing May 2008

Binding DatagridView to DataTable Snippets July 2007

Insert/Read image from SQL Database September 2007
7 comments

View Xml in webbrowser control November 2006
3 comments

Configure SystemC with Using Visual C++ 2005 Express December 2006
4 comments

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

ivanov — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:38:26 +0000

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is professor psychology at the University of Chicago. He is the father of the notion of Flow. Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great absorption, engagement, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored. He is the author of many books among which I have read two of them:

It has been a few years since I read them , but now I came across very good interviews where he is explaining himself the concept of flow and gives examples with painters and artists. There is even a TED talk from 2004 published in 2008.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow

Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow & Performing Art

The last 2 videos are interview with him in Dutch, but still it is translated with subtitles:

FLOW – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (part 1/2)

FLOW – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (part 2/2)

Economics goes back to Nature

ivanov — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 11:07:52 +0000

I came across really interesting presentation by Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT World) presenting his recent work: Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth

In short he talks about the Risk and Uncertainty in Economics. He presents a new 5 level model with which you can better evaluate your current risk.The cool part is that he goes back to Mathematics – Physics – Chemistry – Biology – Economics – History – Philosophy – Religion in order to defince his “Spectrum of uncertainty”.

“(On explaining the title of the talk) Physics envy, is this desire to be able to explain 99% of all economic phenomenon with 3 laws. That’s what physicists can do. In fact we (economists) have 99 laws that explain maybe 3% of all phenomenon.” Prof. Andrew Lo

Thanks to David for his great post on the subject and post by Fundstrategy.co.uk - Back to nature .

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

ivanov — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:58:34 +0000

Sugar: The Bitter Truth – Lecture@University of California San Francisco (UCSF)

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.

Version with BG subtitles

Der Geist des Geldes

ivanov — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:52:55 +0000

Der Geist des Geldes Info

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 1

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 2

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 3

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 4

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 5

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 6

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 7

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 8

Der Geist des Geldes Teil 9

The Ascent of Money

ivanov — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:00:42 +0000

I came across a series of four videos about the history of money which are really educative and I strongly recommend you taking the time to watch them.The videos are produced by Niall Ferguson ,who is Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School.

The Ascent of Money part 1

The Ascent of Money part 2

The Ascent of Money part 3

The Ascent of Money part 4

Discussion about his book: “The Ascent of Money”

Globalization: A keynote presentation by Professor Niall Ferguson with an introduction by Professor John Quelch Monday, October 13, 2008