Author Archive

Eye-opening stuff from Andy Xie in his latest, this time using reported (and then denied) Chinese electrical data to suggest that things are fairly surreal in Chinese residential real estate:Measuring the size of the property bubble in China by refer...
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Two venture capital colleagues and I opined in the WSJ today on the trouble with software patent fetishism. You can read it here.
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The latest from Indeed's tracker of job postings across all services shows that things are up and to the right, especially in transportation and manufacturing. I'm sure there is bad news in here somewhere, however, and someone will remind me.Indust...
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A few links from my weekly Weekend Reading column :BP installs fully functioning BOP on Macondo Japan Has More Than Just a Yen Crisis The Deal Is Simple. Australia Gets Money, China Gets Australia F-Bombs, Vanishing Billions Spice Rattner's Inside...
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Intriguing paragraph from recent doctoral thesis on the merits of native plant and seed collectors: ... the problem of the loss of biodiversity faces significant challenges in gaining the public’s attention. For example, cities not only threaten bi...
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A colleague of mine is giving a talk soon on economic growth and immigration. He recounted to me today how in telling the organizer about his intended talking point -- that there is money lying on the sidewalk for the first U.S. state to open up to imm...
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There is a well-known paper from a few years ago (Action Bias Among Elite Soccer Goalkeepers: The Case of Penalty Kicks, by Eli, et al.) that argues soccer goalies have an action bias when in a penalty kick situation. They jump one way or the other, wh...
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I am fascinated with how we don't notice that much of the past is still with us, that it's so evenly distributed as to be invisible. I often talk about this in the context of urban fire departments, and the small percentage of their calls that are act...
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Immigration wave in the U.S. (Source) How I Learned to Love Farmed Salmon (Source) Ecologists fear Antarctic krill crisis  (Source) Landowners Shout `Bingo' on Property Boom in West Australia Mining Towns (Source) Warmer temperatures in China to redu...
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From a friend, an actuarial brain-teaser:My friend Josh (55) and his wife Ericka (48) asked another couple to be their guardians if both of them die.  According to actuarial tables, Josh has a 1/125 chance of dying this year and Ericka has a 1/358 c...
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