Here are my more laid-back holiday link suggestions I’ve come across during my blogging – only a few of these have been featured in my links. With this curated list I wish all my readers happy holidays and decency among humans. All feedback is much appreciated, it is always nice to hear what I am doing right or wrong with this blog.
Yours Truly,
MoreLiver
Christmas Special – The Economist
The “special” articles are good. Really good.
ECONOMICS
Charts of the year
Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011 – BBC
2011 Charts of The Year – Thomson Reuters
Economic experts explain 2011 in charts – Wonkblog / WP
The Most Important Graphs of 2011 – The Atlantic
Invention Is the Mother of Economic Growth – Nathan Myhrvold / BB View
How Business Schools Got to Be the Way They Are – economicprincipals.com
…and how that shaped businesses. Review of the book The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools after the Second World War, by Mie Augier and James G. Mar.
The Seekers, Or How Mainstream Economists Have Defended Their Discipline Since 2008
Bah, Humbug … The Value of a Child's Gift – The Psy-Fi Blog
An economist, though, sees it differently: adulthood is the moment your child’s spending on Christmas gifts exceeds the value of those they receive. Bah, humbug. The creep of economics out of its natural domains, finance and resource management, into other areas has a name: economic imperialism.
FINANCE
Global market repercussions of euro area sovereign debt crisis – BIS
From the BIS Quarterly Review Dec 2011
In Wall Street’s Back Offices, Loyalty Is Lost – Richard Sennett / BB View
A Former Treasury Adviser On How To Really Fix Wall Street – The New Republic
Any serious program for Wall Street reform should start with two words: “term out.”
PSYCHOLOGY
Octopus intelligence (old)
Deep Intellect: Inside the mind of the octopus – Orion Magazine
How Smart Is the Octopus? – Slate
Are octopuses smart? – SciAm
Through the Eye of an Octopus – Discover
Behind the meme: Secrets of octopus intelligence – boingboing
Soft-headed intellectuals – boston.com
Smoke Screening – Vanity Fair
As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts.
How Does the Brain Perceive Art? – Wired
We want to believe that pleasure is simple, that our delight in a fine painting or bottle of wine is due entirely to the thing itself. But that’s not the way reality works
Exploring Your Inner Neophiliac I – Winifred Gallagher / BB View
If you could spend a few minutes watching a gang of monkeys play, you’d soon identify the cautious “neophobes,” fearful of all things new, who peek at you from behind a barrier.
Man Invents Curiosity, Then Boredom II – Winifred Gallagher / BB View
Neophilia, our genius for dealing with all things new, enabled early humans to adapt to droughts and floods, experiment with new technologies and venture into unknown territory in search of resources. By 10,000 years ago, however, many of our ancestors had become farmers in settlements.
No matter what specific chores they perform, all of our smart electronic tools produce novelty. From its beginnings, the Information Age has been about better, easier access to new data, more and more kinds all day long and wherever we go.
HARD SCIENCE
The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith – Harper’s Magazine
by Alan Lightman, a physicist and novelist. Science is breaking down as we know it.
Horizon: Richard Feynman - No Ordinary Genius – Youtube
Full-length (90 minutes) BBC documentary
CRIME
Crime Never Pays – Can Turtles Fly
Most criminals, like Bernie Madoff or Kenneth Lay, appear to get caught in a trap with a small lie, that snowballs into a big one.
FBI Runs ‘Perfect Hedge’ to Nab Inside Traders – BB
“It was reminiscent of that scene in ‘Jaws’ where they get their first look at the shark,” Chaves said. He told Carroll, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
“It was reminiscent of that scene in ‘Jaws’ where they get their first look at the shark,” Chaves said. He told Carroll, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
Corzine Another Victim of the Alpha-Male Curse – William D. Cohan / BB View
For years, I have wondered why, for some people, enough is never enough. For example, what could have possibly motivated Jon Corzine -- a respected former senator, governor and Wall Street big shot with hundreds of millions in the bank -- to take the top job at MF Global Holdings Ltd (MF) in the first place?
POLITICS
The Connection Between George Orwell and Friedrich Hayek – reason.com
Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by the consequences awaiting them. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently.
“Gangs and politics have always gone together in this city,” says John Hagedorn, a gang expert and professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It’s a shadowy alliance, he adds, that is deeply ingrained in Chicago’s political culture: “You take care of them; they’ll take care of us.”
The strange triumph of liberal democracy – Foreign Affairs
Any intelligent observer of Europe in the 1930s would have been hard-pressed not to feel that its future belonged to either communism or fascism.
NORTH KOREA
Alone In the Dark (2003) – The New Yorker
Very long but very timely article on North Korea.
No Ordinary Counterfeit (2006) – NYT
Very good story on how North Korea counterfeits dollars – and does a lot of other things to keep the elite’s perks in place.
North Korean Prison Camp Escapee Tells of Horrors (2008) – WP
OTHER
The future: Too old to care about tomorrow – Free exchange / The Economist
I've become far less confident about our ability to accurately describe possible outcomes more than a decade out.
The Promise: Two wealthy men set out to transform the lives of 59 fifth-graders – WP
In 1988, the promise of a college education, paid for by two wealthy businessmen. Suddenly, the 11-year-olds were part of an ambitious social experiment being tried across the country, one that brought together rich benefactors and needy kids in a largely untested but intimate style of philanthropy aimed at lifting entire families out of poverty.
The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 – FlowingData
Steve Jobs - Billion Dollar Hippy – BBC / Youtube