"On the impossibility of informationally efficient markets" (Grossman and Stiglitz)

"The computational complexity of two classes of market mechanisms is compared. First the Walrasian interpretation in which prices are centrally computed by an auctioneer. Recent results on the computational complexity are reviewed. The non-polynomial complexity of these algorithms makes Walrasian general equilibrium an implausible conception. Second, a decentralised picture of market processes is described, involving concurrent exchange within transient coalitions of agents. These processes feature price dispersion, yield allocations that are not in the core, modify the distribution of wealth, are always stable, but path-dependent. Replacing the Walrasian framing of markets requires substantial revision of conventional wisdom concerning markets."

I disagree on the Daenerys analogy, though -- should be Cersei instead.

"If the log likelihood is approximately quadratic with constant Hessian, then the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is approximately normally distributed. No other assumptions are required. We do not need independent and identically distributed data. We do not need the law of large numbers (LLN) or the central limit theorem (CLT). We do not need sample size going to infinity or anything going to infinity.

The theory presented here is a combination of Le Cam style involving local asymptotic normality (LAN) and local asymptotic mixed normality (LAMN) and Cramér style involving derivatives and Fisher information. The main tool is convergence in law of the log likelihood function and its derivatives considered as random elements of a Polish space of continuous functions with the metric of uniform convergence on compact sets. We obtain results for both one-step-Newton estimators and Newton-iterated-to-convergence estimators."

Now this is one review of "Lords of Chaos" that I somehow had missed.

Yet another EPIC FAIL: "The "new research" is described in Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman, "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, in press." Make it stop, make it stop! Shannon fhtagn!

"This paper presents exploratory techniques for multivariate data, many of them well known to French statisticians and ecologists, but few well understood in North American culture. We present the general framework of duality diagrams which encompasses discriminant analysis, correspondence analysis and principal components, and we show how this framework can be generalized to the regression of graphs on covariates."

A dilemma: wait for the treeware to arrive in the mail or read online right now?

Philosophy of Science, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), 1-32

"Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead."