I’m happy with my iPhone, but Android is looking like a contender in apps, even if not yet in handset sales. Check out this year-end compendium. I particularly like Compare Everywhere and wish we had a barcode-scanning price comparator for iPhone.
Wikitude, a location based travel guide, also looks good … and it might be coming to the iPhone.
I get a kick out of things like this:
Pablo Triana sends me an open letter he’s written to the Swedish central bank, telling them to please stop giving out Nobel prizes in economics to “flawed, unworldly, and dangerous theoretical finance constructs”:
By that he means much of modern economics.
This is a good short video with Mohamed El-Erian of Pimco. The discussion of 2009 and the economy has the right feel to me. There was a jarring moment when an “L-shaped recovery” was first mentioned. My thought: if it’s L-shaped it’s not much of a recovery. That said, El-Erain favors the “long-term U” and I think that still is the reasonable view. As he says though, hedge for the L-shaped economy:
Click here for the article.
Found at The Big Picture
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’
From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
For those worried about opportunity costs: “And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.”
Don’t worry economists, the title is a joke. And I really only mean down with predictive economics.
Today’s link is to an essay, via Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, an evolutionary scientist’s take on economics:
But now there is a new kid on the block: “behavioral finance” takes seriously the idea that people act somewhat rationally some of the time but can spiral into downright panic at other times. The new approach draws from an interdisciplinary milieu that includes “soft” sciences like psychology and sociology, since those are the fields that tell us the most about the idiosyncrasies of human behavior. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is another science that has been inspiring economists for some time now: evolutionary biology. The old “efficient markets hypothesis” underlying classical models is being replaced by the “adaptive markets hypothesis,” where Adam Smith’s invisible hand becomes more directly analogous to natural selection.
As evolutionary biologists have found out, natural selection is not an optimizing process, but a satisficying one, meaning that it produces whatever outcome happened to be achievable at a particular historical moment and that works “well enough” for the problem at hand. Moreover, it does so while “wasting” a lot of resources and often marching straight into dead ends (just think that over 99% of the species that ever existed went extinct). The emerging picture is much more realistic than the rationalist paradigm, but it sure is a lot more messy too.
As they say, read the whole thing.
[2009.01.29: This post was the second in the casual series "The Backlash Continues"]
There is kind of a cranky article at the EE-Times called Dell and Apple: Stop bickering and get to work. It has a point though. For all their greener than thou rhetoric, both Apple and Dell only rank mid-line for green in Greenpeace’s compilation:
Nokia got the highest marks with a 6.4 out of 10 and was sited for its comprehensive take-back program. Sony Ericsson and Toshiba followed with scores of 5.9. As for Apple and Dell, both came in batting below 500.
According the GreenPeace…
“The big PC companies such as Dell, HP, Apple and Acer drop down. Dell continues to be overtaken by other companies, with an unchanged score of 4.7. Although Apple drops a place, it improves its overall score slightly to 4.3, with much better reporting on the carbon footprint of its products. Apple has also recently show leadership on removing the worst toxics substances with new iPods free of toxics brominated flame retardants and PVC. All Apple products should be free of these substances by the end of 2008, which will challenge other PC makers to follow their lead.”
Urbanspoon is a location aware restaurant guide. That was one of the first apps I looked for – what could be better than “great food near me?”
The app does pretty well. It’s backed by a fair number of user reviews and has links to editorial reviews. I’ve tested it in a couple areas I know, and the first recommendations were “known good.”. It does throw in the occaisional chain restaurant, but some people like that.
The “slot machine” interface is a little too cute, but it works.
It is a lot for a free app, but then the real value is the user community. They have to keep access open to leverage up on crowdsourcing. I’m doing my part, adding a few ratings and photos of the places I go.
Actor Jeremy Piven is suffering from mercury poisoning, apparently caused by excessive sushi consumption. This is a serious issue, shows why we should get coal burning under control, and maybe even go pro-nuke.
On a more personal level, I get to say “I told you so” to my lunch buddies. They looked at me strangely when I said “no, I’ve had sushi this month.” It’s a sad state of affairs when we have to strategize and plan our consumption of wild and natural foods. But there it is:
Recent publicity of mercury poisoning in Broadway Actor Jeremy Piven from his regular consumption of sushi highlights the prevalence and magnitude of exposure risk associated with eating certain seafood, say advocates. In a report released earlier this week by Mercury Policy Project, reported case studies document a number of similar mercury poisonings experienced by people throughout the US.
“Unfortunately, Piven’s case is not that unusual,” said Michael Bender, director of the Mercury Policy Project. “Our report shares stories of people who each ate enough tuna or other store-bought fish to suffer mercury’s effects, according to their physicians. From New Jersey to Wisconsin to California, these stories show that seafood contamination is a very real problem that should not be ignored.”
Someone said coal is the enemy of the human race. Maybe it’s true.
I have really enjoyed my readings in economics over the last few years. I think the discipline offers tremendous tools for understanding our world. It helps us create narratives which make sense. Unfortunately that last bit, the reassuring narrative, is also its great danger. As Taleb and others have pointed out, narrative understanding can easily become narrative fallacy. We can build a narrative but we can’t really know if it is true.
If we invest in the wrong narrative … [bad things happen]
The recent economic unpleasantness has highlighted that sort of risk in economics, and increasingly it is appearing as an economics backlash:
THE DEEPENING ECONOMIC downturn has been hard on a lot of people, but it has been hard in a particular way for economists. For most of us, pain and apprehension have been mixed with a sense of grim amazement at the complexity of what has unfolded: the dense, invisible lattice connecting house prices to insurance companies to job losses to car sales, the inscrutability of the financial instruments that helped to spread the poison, the sense that the ratings agencies and regulatory bodies were overmatched by events, the wild gyrations of the stock market in the past few months. It’s hard enough to understand what’s happening, and it seems absurd to think we could have seen it coming beforehand. The vast majority of us, after all, are not experts.
But academic economists are. And with very few exceptions, they did not predict the crisis, either. Some warned of a housing bubble, but almost none foresaw the resulting cataclysm. An entire field of experts dedicated to studying the behavior of markets failed to anticipate what may prove to be the biggest economic collapse of our lifetime. And, now that we’re in the middle of it, many frankly admit that they’re not sure how to prevent things from getting worse.
The best economists have always been humble about their tools and the limits to their vision. A few have been grandiose (or worse, condescending) in their dealings with the public. It’s hard not to think the latter are due for a take-down … but I suppose to rise to the occasion we should applaud the first group and admit our own uncertainty about the world.
It’s another case when the simple truth is that no one knows the future.
[2009.01.29: This post marked the start of the casual series "The Backlash Continues"]