Writing Systems; Miss Korea and facial analysis

In a blog post, the relationship between the complexity of writing systems and its associated culture is discussed. While I do not agree with some arguments, it opens an interesting perspective.

On another note, there is an interesting (mathematical) analysis of the top 20 Miss Korea contestants and the similarity of their faces.

Auctioneers and High Performance

There is an interesting article/blog post on the architecture of the LMAX exchange. They prefer a single thread model with event sourcing over an actor driven model. Betfair, a company related to the LMAX owners, at least for a while, used an actor, in memory model for sports betting. These issues are only relevant when handling very high volumes of trades, but certainly might become increasingly interesting for exchanges handling crypto currencies like bitcoin, litecoin or ppcoin.

Quick permutations

itertools for python are fun:

import itertools

partb= list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), itertools.combinations('aApe',3)))
parta = list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), itertools.permutations('gRrAet!1',5)))

print '\n'.join(list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), (itertools.product(parta, partb)))))

But in the end, this post is just to test out the syntax highlighting feature in javascript.

On Animal Intelligence, Human Behaviour and Econometrics

Quite a while since the last post; here a few things I read in the meantime

On animal intelligence:

• Crows can 'reason' about causes, a recent study finds
• Hyenas Might Be As Intelligent As Some Primates

On humans:

• Xerox optimizes hiring of its telephone support staff by evaluating a questionnaire on potential candidates' personality aiming at keeping them on the job long enough to make the training pay out
• some tricks/guidelines on human interaction mostly regarding conversations

Moreover, there is a free course on computational economics (course material, coursera videos), mostly pretty basic stuff with support of MS Excel as well asR.I'm also working through a book on econometric analysis by William Greene which offers a better insight into analysing markets and their driving factors.

JP Morgan

Recently, JP Morgan reported rather biggish losses due to only a few trades/positions. According to rumors, hedgefunds and speculators already took a piece of the cake, since positions are not closed yet. It's not completely known which these are, but apparently they involve the the IG9, a credit default swap index including 125 american companies. You can find more information on it at markit CDX and their product description page. Basically, it's one of the largest and most liquid CDS products. You would want to buy these products to hedge risk on bonds issued by the companies included in the index. Conversely you sell it, if you want to bet on the solvency of the companies. In this case, you get some money up front for selling it and a continuous payments during the contract period (10 years). As soon as a company fails to meet its liabilities, the total loss on the company is calculated, e.g. if the company recovers at 30% after filing for bancrupcy, the 70% loss is mutliplied by the weight of the company in the index (all have 0.8%) gives the amount of money you need to pay to cover for the losses.
Moreover, these products create a leverage and thus opens the possiblity to hedge delta trades by buying on the index. Apparently, this kind of trade caused the problems at JP Morgan. As far as I know, there is no easy access to these products using your everyday discount broker.

List of links to news regarding JP Morgans trade:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577412613778263918.html

A bit of Computation, Math and Psychology

• Some statistics: Verbal intelligence by demographic: blog post
  
• An implementation of reversible computation gates using crabs: article and paper
• blog post on the optimal base for a number system w.r.t to number of digits in base and length of numbers
• High performance correlation techniques for time series (watch out, .ppt file)

Models for Cognition: Belief vs Connectionism; links on writing style

There's an interesting article about the consequences of connectionist models for the theory of beliefs. I think it's interesting that one counterexample is taken as a proof for the non-existence of beliefs, whereas a lot of further contraints (for biological and evolutionary reasons) might apply to require the construction to be more uniform/unique.

Another set of links regarding style of writing papers/thesis: Nine cirlces of latex hell, essential guide to latex and a rant on Strunk's Elements of Style.