A good new series from the Financial Times
It is almost exactly a year since the European Central Bank was forced to inject €95bn into the eurozone banking system, bringing home what many had suspected – that the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis in the US was causing serious pain to global financial markets. [...]
The Q-Drum, a low cost rollable water container for developing countries.
The burden of fetching water, invariably over long distances by cumbersome and far too often, unhygienic means, is all too evident in rural Africa.
The idea of the Q-Drum originated in response to the needs of rural people for clean and potable water, as well as [...]
Originally posted on the Belgrade Foreign Visitors Club
I recently came across a new and very interesting Balkan blog by Ari Rusila, a Finn who has spent some time in the region working for European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR).
He was full of praise for the new document delivered by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar [...]
Kevin kelly follows up his New Rules of the New Economy (fee online) with the beginnings of the New Rules for the New Biology. Here are items 4, 5 and 6 from the nascent list:
4) All inovations follow a one-way migration from enhancements to normalcy.
5) One person’s biological ideal is another’s horror.
6) Understanding is not [...]
The Telegraph had a grim story this week:
Food riots. Scores of panicked people protesting, burning effigies and chanting. Shops being ransacked, supplies running out as soon as they come in, and stricken communities stockpiling rice, bread and water for fear of going without. These have happened in Haiti and Egypt in recent months as the [...]
Ever wondered what all this fuss was about “Sub-prime” mortgages, “Credit Crisis”, “Housing Crisis” and dire threats of global financial meltdown?
Wonder no more.
The amazing “This American Life” has a superb program that really explains it in a very easy to understand way.
http://publicradioredux.com/episodes/2008/05/12/355-the-giant-pool-money
Ever since I read Timothy D. Wilson’s magnificent “Strangers to Ourselves“, I have been fascinated with the fact that we often know less about ourselves than our closest friends and family (thanks probably to our many cognitive biases) .
Enter MIT’s Reality Mining Project:
[O]ur ultimate goal is to create a predictive classifier that [...]
The central tenet of those who support unrestricted mass immigration has long been its putative economic benefits.
When the social costs of mass immigration were pointed out, the Homo Economicus argument would be deployed.
I have long seen through the sham of this argument and I am on record slamming it regularly.
See or example:
Immigration sophistry debunked…again
The [...]
The happy innocent days when Serbs thought that with Slobo gone, they would be treated fairly.
I have received a number of emails from friends curious to know the inside track on the Kosovo situation from their man on the ground in Serbia.
The problem is that when one is very close to the situation, and are [...]
From Mindhacks (again!)
Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently gave a two day masterclass on his work. It’s now been made available on Edge as transcripts and video clips.
Kahneman has done a huge amount of work on cognitive biases - the quirks of mind that make us deviate from rationality, sometimes in quite surprising and [...]