Category: Web/Tech

1. Brasilia photos, via Yana

2. The singularity is far

3. Lots of job market advice, with links

4. Chart of what Presidents have done in their first 100 days

1. New World Bank blog on the financial crisis

2. Geithner or Summers?

3. How ants avoid traffic jams

4. 96 pt. type and day-after newspaper arbitrage

Last year China banned the sale of virtual currency in an effort to
shut down "gold farmers" — businesses that hire young Chinese to play
video games all day and sell the proceeds (in the form of game currency
or magic items) on eBay (EBAY) or online.
The Chinese government did nothing to enforce its own ban, so it
remains to be seen whether Beijing follows up with its latest edict:
Gamers who sell virtual goods for a profit will be taxed at 20% of the
proceeds, the same rate applied to profits on real estate or other
transactions.

In December 2005 the New York Times estimated 100,000 Chinese were employed full-time
in the gold farming industry, and consulting group iResearch says the
virtual currency trade is a $1.4 billion dollar industry growing at 15
to 20% a year.

Here is the story and thanks to Alex Rosen for the pointer.

1. How to Make a Difference blog (by Tim Harford’s wife)

2. Le Clezio overview

3. Making health insurance competitive across state lines: how much would be saved?  I don’t agree completely with this analysis but it is one place to start.

4. Best sports pieces ever written? (via Craig Newmark)

Employees said they were told Thursday that most of Portfolio’s Web
site staff would be dismissed and that much of the content unique to
the site would be dropped.

Please keep him, we need him (and Zubin too).  I hold out hope in that word "most."  Here is the story.  Media, like new library books, are being hurt by the downturn and the slowing of advertising dollars.  I fear that the non-independent blogosphere may be in for a bit of a financial bloodbath.  So often the bloggers were an "investment in long-term name and image" rather than a profit center.

Update: So far, so good.  Felix lives!

1. The new Princeton University Press blog

2. Here is a good paper on how structured finance went wrong.

3. Robert J. Samuelson, The Great Inflation and its Aftermath.  It’s remarkable that no other major book to date has covered this critically important topic.

1. What consumers do in a downturn: surging vs. dwelling

2. CIA coups and insider trading

3. When do people root for the underdog?

4. Maybe asking people to vote doesn’t increase turnout (via Kottke)

5. Graph for commercial paper outstanding

1. Yale course on game theory, on-line

2. New blog on Austrian economics

3. Stunning pictures of slime mold

4. What happens at age 10?

5. New blog (?) about derivatives

1. Jeff Hummel blames Bernanke and Paulson for what has happened.  I don’t agree but we are committed to passing along many different points of view.

2. My favorite Greg Mankiw column so far.

3. Dividends vs. share repurchases: an excellent post.

4. New blog on cognition and culture, via Razib.

Here is a good piece rebutting the Minneapolis Fed study.  One point made is this:

…there is the inconvenient matter that the Federal Reserve and
the Treasury went out and did all that stuff they did in order to prevent a
massive breakdown in lending to the real economy. … Now this does
allow sceptics to say, "Well, how do we know things would have collapsed"? We
don’t, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that current lending takes
into account massive government intervention to make sure that lending
continued. The latter therefore can’t be used to argue that the former wasn’t
necessary.

On these questions I am more of a pessimist than is Alex.

1. Reused and recycled women

2. Life under extreme scarcity

3. How to scare a kid

4. I enjoyed this sentence: "Lady, I know I’m in jeans and you’re all throwing that scarf around over your suit, but two years of blogging has left me pretty confident that my thought is rigorous."

From The Brokers With Hands on Their Faces blog.  Where else?

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

1. Price Fishback on New Deal mortgage aid

2. Using the placebo effect for health care policy

3. Finger-tapping speed peaks at age 39 for men

4. Markets in everything: betting on Turing machines

Find it here.  One of my favorite moments of the London trip was when Alex, in a luncheon full of highly intelligent British people, referred to "the wisdom of crowds."  There was a brief moment of silence.  Then one such Brit cleared his throat and corrected him to the notion of "wisdom *for* crowds"…