Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything.

Mr Gupta’s lawyers referenced Ms Webster’s notes from her estate planning meeting with Mr Gupta, which showed he had a net worth of $84m, $38m in a trust and $11.2m in cash.
He also received $700,000 for serving on the Goldman board and made $6m from McKinsey in 2008.

1. Regulatory uncertainty. Prez/Congress are using class warfare rhetoric to argue that every business decision should be disclosed, reported, and scrutinized. It is not clear to anyone just how deep the "crucify them" antagonism goes. So far, no one has seen the bottom. The people the O-bam has appointed are all largely professional activists and cranks, with no conception of what it takes to run a business or create jobs. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash, and the 2008 enthusiasm for Obama has evaporated. He just straight lied about being interested in, or even capable of, bipartisanship.

2. Health care. Republicans in the House and Senate are using class warfare rhetoric to blame poor for needing health care. It doesn't really matter what happens to O-care in the court. In fact, the best thing would be if O-care is found to be unconstitutional. The problem is that real WAGES have stayed flat over the past two decades. But real TOTAL COMPENSATION has skyrocketed, and has stayed the same, basically, as a percentage of GDP. So, workers (the ones who are employed) have no extra income to spend on consumption. But an employer trying to hire (if there were any) has to pay not just the wage, but also that giant wedge of health insurance. So, no new hiring, no new consumption spending.

3. Deficit. Republican in the House and Senate, and the states, and the woodpile, have this amazing ideology that we can't raise taxes. Well, you are DAFT: Deficits are Future Taxes. Conservatism once meant two things: (a) question spending. (b) ensure fiscal responsibility, so that we pay for what we do spend. Sometime around 1980, the Republicans figured out that it worked much better electorally to do THESE two things: (a) question spending (although not really, since spending increases as fast under Republicans as under Democratic administrations) (b) cut taxes. Doesn't matter what the question is, the answer is cut taxes. This is worse than class warfare, this is time machine warfare. We are taking money out of the college funds of children who haven't been born yet. They certainly can't vote. So, while spending is too high, and both the Dems and Repubs share blame for that, taxes are too low, given our level of spending (especially on wars started by Republicans).

My beta indices showed the value of low volatility equity strategies, as the previously high-flying high beta stocks were crushed in May, and so now lag the S&P500 year-to-date.  Low beta strategies, meanwhile, crept up and overtook the basic S&P500 benchmark.   Above is a total return chart for daily data.

These beta portfolios consist of the the top/bottom beta 100 non-etf, non-ADR, non-REIT equities that were in the top 2000 market cap stocks in the US.  Beta was measured using daily data over the prior year as of December 31, 2011.

There may be an argument for taxing fat; but there is no argument for taxing foods that fat people might eat.

The lowest price is usually available only if patients don't use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.

The True Cost of Healthcare

A View of Healthcare Costs from the Inside

By David Belk MD
1. Introduction

  -Almost all prices in health care are hidden from both doctors and patients. Any cost that’s hidden or confusing is easy to inflate.

Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature,  sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an elite movement, recruiting among the upper castes and patronized by kings and magnates. We will argue that these believers are right, while the neo-Buddhists in India and outside enthusiasts in the West are wrong.

Co-author of acclaimed book "Breaking India", Aravindan Neelakandan has worked for the past decade with an NGO in Tamil Nadu serving marginalized rural communities in sustainable agriculture. He is also a popular science writer in Tamil and is part of the editorial team of highly popular Tamil web portal www.tamilhindu.com.

Cities with the Most College-Educated Residents
Share of residents with college degrees in the 100 largest metro areas, based on data from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

Jewish-Americans have a long history of finding role models who broke barriers, accomplished great things, or engaged in more mundane acts of heroism. Jewish religious schools are full of discussions of athletes like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, or the legions of Jewish entertainers and scholars, as ways to demonstrate the accomplishments of American Jews.

But in all those stories many of us heard growing up, one set of brave heroes was never mentioned: the Schechter brothers of New York City. The Schechters were kosher butchers operating in the 1930s who stood fast to their commitment to the dietary laws of kashrut in the face of ferocious pressure and prosecution by a powerful government. They eventually took their case to the highest court in the land—and won—defeating one of the most popular and powerful administrations in American history.

One would think this story of Jewish heroism and commitment to Jewish values would be inspirational for generations of young American Jews. But the Schechter brothers were up against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Fortress Investment Group has launched an Asia-focused volatility hedge fund helmed by a pair of former Artradis Fund Management hands.
The Fortress Convex Asia Fund debuted on May 1 with US$55 million in initial assets. The new fund invests in stock, interest rate and currency options, as well as Asian volatility instruments, Fortress said in a document obtained by Dow Jones Newswires. It will seek "to deliver non-correlated returns in normal markets and out-sized returns in stressed or dislocated markets, providing 'Tail Risk' protection," Fortress said.
"Specifically, a general state of negative real interest rates across the region is fueling asset prices and inflation in Asia. These same low interest rates are highly destructive to the largest pool of savings in the world today, and are prompting Asian savers to take additional risks in order to generate satisfactory rates of return," it added. "We believe this imbalance of risk and return may present interesting opportunities on a sustained basis for a volatility-based investment strategy."
Convex Asia is managed by David Dredge and Andrew Wong. The two formerly worked at Artradis Fund Management, once Singapore's largest hedge fund, which closed last year. Dredge and Wong remain based in the city-state.
The fund charges 1.5% for management and 20% for performance. Like other funds at publicly-listed Fortress, it will publicly report its monthly returns beginning next month.

Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software.

Here are some of the items in a growing library of decelerating growth models.

Policy actions have become increasingly discretionary. Moreover, the financial crisis and associated policy responses have left many central banks operating with their policy rate near the zero lower bound; this means that they are no longer following a systematic rule, if they ever were. Given that central bankers are, in fact, acting in a discretionary manner, whether it is because they are at the zero bound or because they cannot or will not commit, how are we to interpret policy advice coming from models that assume full commitment to a systematic rule? I think this point is driven home by noting that a number of central banks have been openly discussing different regimes, from price-level targeting to nominal GDP targeting. In such an environment where policymakers actively debate alternative regimes, how confident can we be about the policy advice that follows from models in which that is never contemplated?

The Lucas critique, named for Robert Lucas' work on macroeconomic policymaking, argues that it is naïve to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data.[1]

The basic idea pre-dates Lucas' contribution (related ideas are expressed as Campbell's Law and Goodhart's Law), but in a 1976 paper Lucas drove home the point that this simple notion invalidated policy advice based on conclusions drawn from large-scale macroeconometric models. Because the parameters of those models were not structural, i.e. not policy-invariant, they would necessarily change whenever policy (the rules of the game) was changed. Policy conclusions based on those models would therefore potentially be misleading. This argument called into question the prevailing large-scale econometric models that lacked foundations in dynamic economic theory. Lucas summarized his critique:

"Given that the structure of an econometric model consists of optimal decision rules of economic agents, and that optimal decision rules vary systematically with changes in the structure of series relevant to the decision maker, it follows that any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models."[2]
The Lucas critique suggests that if we want to predict the effect of a policy experiment, we should model the "deep parameters" (relating to preferences, technology and resource constraints) that govern individual behavior. We can then predict what individuals will do, taking into account the change in policy, and then aggregate the individual decisions to calculate the macroeconomic effects of the policy change.[3]

The Lucas critique was influential not only because it cast doubt on many existing models, but also because it encouraged macroeconomists to build microfoundations for their models. Microfoundations had always been thought to be desirable; Lucas convinced many economists they were essential. Real Business Cycle economists, starting with Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, focused their research on using microfoundations to formulate macroeconomic models. Contemporary macroeconomic models microfounded on the interaction of rational agents are often called dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models.[citation needed]

I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. In particular, Wilson now rejects “kin selection” (I shall explain this below) and replaces it with a revival of “group selection”—the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms.

how to do stuff in r. two minutes or less.

You know the drill. They try to board us by groups, but people are smashing on the plane like it's the New Delhi train station. When the plane is half full, the overhead bins fill up. Then people start dragging massive bags all the way upstream for gate checks. On and on it goes, tempers frazzling and  a few hundred million dollars of plane, costly crew, and my not so free time sitting idly on the ground.

So I have long wondered: why in the world do airlines charge $25 for checking bags, and not $25 for bringing huge bags on the plane? 

I finally found out the answer, here

Two years ago, [New York Senator Charles] Schumer got five big airlines to pledge that they wouldn’t charge passengers to stow carry-on bags in overhead bins. The promise came after Spirit Airlines became the first U.S. carrier to levy such a fee.
The article is actually about Sen. Schumer's latest great idea, to force airlines to seat families together even if said families don't want to pay the $25 fee for advance seat selection.

Next time you miss your connection because people took too long to stow their steamer trunks in the bins, you know who to thank.

Of course the larger picture is not the silliness of one individual, but the hubris of the Federal Government to try to regulate such things in the first place. 

Kent:

Macedonia Brook State Park

159 Macedonia Brook Road, Kent. (860) 927-3238; ct.gov/dep. Open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset, and for overnight camping. Free admission; outhouse by trailhead.

Millstone Bakery

14 North Main Street, Kent. (860) 592-0500; themillstonecafe.com. Closed Tuesdays.

Hamden/New Haven:

Sleeping Giant State Park

200 Mount Carmel Avenue, Hamden. (203) 287-5658; sgpa.org. Open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset. Parking fee on weekends and holidays; restrooms and water spigot near trailhead.

Delaney’s Tap Room and Restaurant

882 Whalley Avenue, Westville (New Haven). delaneystaproom.com or (203) 397-5494.

Ridgefield:

Bennett’s Pond State Park

572 Bennett’s Farm Road, Ridgefield. ct.gov/dep. Open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset. Free admission; no facilities.

Sagi Cucina Italiana

23 ½ Catoonah Street, Ridgefield. (203) 431-0200; sagiofridgefield.com. Closed Sundays.

Given how little thought India’s contribution to the World Wars gets in our collective historical memory, it is almost strange to think that in the First World War India made the largest contribution to the war effort out of all of Britain’s colonies and dominions. Close to 1,700,000 Indians – combatants and non-combatants – participated in WWI.

Hampi is India's Pompeii. Once home to half a million people, it was sacked in 1565 by the armies of the Bahamani sultanates. For hundreds of years, the City of Victory lay abandoned until it was rediscovered by the British in the 19th century. Now it is a place of sprawling beauty, a world heritage site of 2,000 monuments scattered across a landscape of enormous granite boulders, pulling in nearly half a million visitors a year from around the world.

But of the people who helped transform it from an overgrown ruin, who made it a living monument rather than a museum, there is virtually no sign. They have been swept away, ordered out by conservation authorities determined to restore the site to the way it looked in its medieval heyday.

Many had been there for decades, setting up home in the small stone pavilions, known as mandapas, which line the bazaar, catering for the needs of the tourists and pilgrims. But in April the Karnataka high court threw out their last legal challenge and backed the Hampi World Heritage Area Management Authority and the Archaeological Survey of India in their plans to remove all modern traces from the bazaar.

The linga (phallic emblem of Shiva) symbolizes the great generative force of the universe. It is usually the most sacred object in a temple dedicated to Shiva and is housed in the main sanctum. When plain (simply phallic), the linga represents Shiva in his most abstract form. In this example, Shiva's face has emerged from the central shaft. He is adorned with earrings and a necklace and his hair is worn in a double bun with a crescent moon on one of the buns.
This sculpture was made during the short-lived Shahi kingdom (seventh—ninth century) of eastern Afghanistan, which produced a small number of extraordinary sculptures. They were carved in a distinctive white marble and their style derived from sculptural traditions of northern India and Kashmir

I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that. To succeed, this young discipline will need to draw heavily from social science, computer science, public communications, cognitive psychology and other fields, as well as the traditional values and practices of the journalism profession.

Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.

Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those who are happy,” he said.

A new goddess has recently been born in India. She's the Dalit Goddess of English.

The above observations imply that a key finding of the paper—that child mortality fell at the treatment sites at triple the nationwide rural background rate—is incorrect. Child mortality fell at 5·9% per year at the sites versus 6·4% per year on average across all areas of the countries in question (probably more in rural areas alone) according to the available data that most closely match the project period. This difference is not significant.

May 27, 2012, marks the completion of 100 years since the hosting of the first Carnatic Music conference in the modern sense of the term. That event was not held in Madras but rightfully in Thanjavur, the heartland of South Indian music and hosting it was a Christian practitioner of native medicine – Dr. Abraham Pandithar.

Born in 1859, Abraham Pandithar had qualified as a teacher and he, along with his first wife Gnanavadivu Ponnammal, joined the Lady Napier School in Thanjavur. By 1890, the couple had quit so that Pandithar could pursue the first of his two great passions – native medicine. Purchasing a large tract of land outside Thanjavur, Pandithar converted it into a farm for growing medicinal plants.

Using 1437 samples of Ciprofloxacin from 18 low-to-middle-income countries, we aim to understand the role that regulation and distribution channel have played in signaling and ensuring drug safety. According to the World Health Organization, some poor quality drugs are deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity or source while others can have incorrect quantities of active ingredient as a result of manufacturing error or poor storage. Given the difficulty to prove “intent to deceive”, we classify poor quality drugs as counterfeit if they fail a visual check or contain zero correct active ingredient, and as substandard if they pass the visual check and contain some but less than 80% of the correct active ingredient.
Following the Global Pharma Health Fund e.V. Minilab® protocol, we find 9.88% of samples are poor quality and 41.5% of the failures are counterfeits. Both product registration and chain affiliation if retailers are strong indicators of higher probability to pass in the Minilab test and higher retail price. Conditional on quality failures, chain affiliation is more likely to indicate substandard while product registration with local government is more likely to indicate counterfeit. In other words, registered products are more likely to be targeted by counterfeiters. Furthermore, substandard drugs are priced much lower than comparable generics in the same city but counterfeits offer almost no discount from the targeted genuine version. These findings have important implications for both consumers and policy makers.