An interesting talk.



Although some of the feedbacks on Amazon are somewhat less than positive (
Economic Naturalist: Explanations Everyday Enigmas).

One of the podcast I enjoy a lot listening to lately is the UC Berkeley History 7B by Professor Jennifer Burns.

This course covers US History from Civil War to the present days. Some stories are amazing, some stories make your blood boiled. In about 40 lecture audio (usually about 1 hour in length), one will be able to walk through the path that USA as nation has taken to become what she is today in last 150 years, without the stress of examination and tutorial. Isn’t it a good deal?

I have learn a lot of interesting thing from this series of podcast. For example, since the Reconstruction, industries in the North started moving to the South to take advantage of the cheap labor and land cost there. The seeking of cheaper production cost is obviously not a recent phenomenas. Coupled with today’s technology, the shift of production base has a even wider and farther reaches. No longer confined within a national/cultural border, production process are either continuing to move South to Mexico or relocated to overseas (such as China) altogether.

Now, after 20 years of development, the production cost of China finally starts to rise. The factory owners immediately respond to it and moving the plants to other cheaper location such as Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Public sentiment in developed countries, without exception, always blames ‘Other People’ for ‘stealing’ their jobs. The blame is laid on the wrong subjects.

One should not invest for the sake of “being in the market” or “Income”. When one is making stock selection, he/she should take both income and potential of appreciation into account.

The only way to begin is learn by doing. An investor can invest in a handful of stock. The situation of the market will force the investor to think about buying, selling or holding. It is much better than “paper transactions” that many tyros indulges, because the real holdings test the investor’s psychological reactions.

And this imply that one must invest time to study investments.

This initial experience fund should be very small, ideally not over 1o% of one’s asset. And time. If time is an issue, then you may be better off delegate the investment decision to the professional. This exercise also help you to discover if you are cut out for trading.

The author argues that beginner should do more short-term investing. Some people believe that there is more peace of mind if one simply keeps a stock for a long pull. Experience seems to contradict this claim. It is because many ‘long term’ investors ignore change of market condition. They may be correct in short term, but may pay a dear price in the long run.

Short term method requires the closing of a trade for a good reason. If the condition changes again, then one can choose to re-establish a position again.



Quick link to The Battle for Investment Survival by Gerald M. Loeb

Python is used widely in academia, open source projects and start-up. However, when it comes to the corporate world, it seems to me it is not making a lot of inroad. At least this is true in the finance industry, which I am more familiar with.

A quick check on the python.org’s success stories, only two companies are listed as Fortune 500, and none of them is in the finance.

Occasionally there are ads looking for people with python skill in the financial sector, but the positions are usually of support or operation nature, not application development.

From first glimpse, it is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: there is not enough skillful python programmers out there to fill the jobs, it is difficult to start new projects in python. However, if python programming job market is weak, there is little incentives for students or programmers to pick up this non-mainstream language.

But there is something more than just supply-demand. I believe a common perception that, somehow, dynamic scripting languages are not for large scale projects and is difficult to maintain also make people shy away from using Python.

The not for large scale projects argument is a not too hard to counter. We just need to find some good examples of high visibility. For example, Google Groups and mercurial.

However, there may not be a clean-cut answer to the question of maintainability. First of all, we have a generation of programmers who have used to statically typed languages and their accomplishing IDEs (such as Java and Eclipse). To this group of audience, the idea that one can build a full-fledged application using just API documentation, command line tools and vi/emacs is beyond imagination. It is easy to conclude that, without IDE support, it is difficult to refactor the code base, which is an essential step in keeping the application in good heath.

Secondly past experience may still leave a bad taste. If you have done maintenance of legacy applications written in perl, some of them could make you feel like you have just visited a programmer’s hell. Cryptic code and inconsistent style are everywhere. (But it’d still be way better than tcl. Luckily I have not come across any such programs yet). This bad memory certainly make people think twice before embracing dynamic scripting language in general, Python in particular.

A disclaimer I must make: what I wrote above is based on my experience only, and your organization may be free of the above issues, especially if yours is relatively smaller in scale (so it is relatively easier to innovate) or relatively young (so there are less legacy applications). But today in most of the giant, multinational financial institutions that inspire to be a “financial supermarket” for all, the decision markers, especially the “professional manager” type, have a total different mind-set. First of all they will not be benefited much, personally, by giving green light to the use of non-mainstream technology/language that promise better result and higher productivity. On the other hand, they have everything to lose if the brave decision does not deliver. Java (or C# if it is a MS Window shop) is always a safe bet, even though it means one need an army of programmers to get thing done. In essence, it is an agency problem.

It is an absolutely fascinating talk by Craig Venter.

Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention

Very well worth your 1 hr 45 min of your life.

Craig has actually covered a lot of subjects. A board outline here will not do justice to the brilliant talk, but I do it anyway:

Craig first recounted his oceanic expedition in which he sailed around the world and collected micro-organism in seawater every 200 miles for genome sequencing. On his way he has met French who jealously guarded their “genetic heritage” in French Polynesians territory, and even detained by British navy for a while.

The result is an astonishing proof of the richness and diversity of our eco-system.

Each local area has its own set of unique, diverse micro-organism. But due to modern logistic, these micro-organism are transported to different part of the world by our vessels. When anchoring in destination ports, large container ships discard sea waters which they have pumped up from, possibly, another part of the world far far away. Imagine the magnitude of the evolution challenge to the local species when millions of new, alien micro-organism are being released, along with the sea water, into the local environment on a regular basis.

Craig also described the mechanism to build a custom-design chromosomes. He emphasized that the scientists are not playing God. The technique is only possible because the microbial has invented the underlying mechanism through 3.5 billion years of evolution.

Lastly he introduced the vision of the 4th Generation Biofuel, a fuel that is generated by engineered bacteria using solely CO2 and solar energy (whereas the 2nd and 3rd generations of technology still require sugar as input to the process). It is a better solution because, comparing ethanol solution, the generated fuel can contain more energy per unit, does not absorb water and will not bid up the food price.