Doyne Farmer is pretty much a genius. And a very engaging speaker. This is a talk he gave a couple of months ago, reviewing ten years of physicists’ work on finance. I saw Farmer speak at one of the first conferences that I went to, on econophysics in Canberra – and he was absolutely captivating. […]
I’ve written about Lilia Efimova’s excellent PhD research before, and now she’s written another really good post. It’s structured around this table: This is a really nice taxonomy, and there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added to it. I suppose I take a bit more of an evolutionary view of academic blogging. […]
Peter Klein just blogged about his favourite quote at the DRUID Summer Conference, from Sid Winter. One of my favourite quotes at the conference came from Peter himself, when he was discussing the three papers on eco-innovation – that people making innovation policies have to be aware of ‘the Hayek problem – can policies be […]
There’s an interesting post from the political blog The Monkey Cage, which describes a recent scandal with an open access academic journal. Here’s the key part of the story: Using pseudonyms, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, claiming to be researchers at the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (in case you don’t recall what phrenology […]
I generally hate blog posts about blogging, so I guess I’ll hate this one. Mainly, I just want to share this terrific article from American Scientist. The main point of the article is that researchers learn their craft better by writing about it, specifically, by explaining their work to people that don’t work in their […]
I just finished reading Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt by Sean Safford. It’s a very good book. Safford compares the histories of Youngstown, Ohio and Allentown, Pennsylvania in an effort to discover why Allentown has been able to recover economically from the collapse of its primary industry […]
The data from Hans Rosling & gapminder.org is finally available to have a play with yourself! (go to the gapminder site and click the link that says ‘gapminder world’) First off, if you haven’t seen Rosling’s first TED talk, you should watch this first: The basic idea is that you can chart a whole range […]
I hope everyone is enjoying doing whatever it is that we’re supposed to do to commemorate the Queen’s birthday. Here are a few things I’ve run across so far today: The potato gatling gun demonstrates again the difference between invention and innovation. It’s a cool thing to make, but I suspect it’ll be a while […]
There was an article in this weekend’s Australian Financial Review reviewing a book about myspace. The reviewer kept stressing that myspace did not invent any new technology, the implication being that the firm was not innovative. So how did it wipe out friendster? The answer, which wasn’t explored by AFR is that myspace developed a […]
