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This is a pretty cool video from New Scientist.  This team of modelers has come up with a way to model human mobility using data from dollar bill tracking site Where’s George? The result is a model that tracks smaller human movements, unlike airline traffic data.  These modelers have determined worst case scenarios for the [...]

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This comes from Bloomberg. Unfortunately it is pretty scary stuff:
The World Health Organization said the first pandemic since 1968 is imminent after an outbreak of swine flu spread to eight nations and 11 U.S. states.
The WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan raised the agency’s six-phase pandemic alert to 5 from 4, the second jump in three [...]

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You probably saw this one already, but a pair of suspected narcotics traffickers threw gads of money from their car window while being pursued by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in a car chase in San Diego. Basically, it was free money for any other drivers willing to risk death picking up the money [...]

Economics and finance are slowly coming to grips with the fact that human beings are simply not rational. The boom-bust cycle that we are now living gives us a front row seat to that irrationality.

Below is a video by Dan Ariely that is not about market irrationality specifically, but human irrationality more broadly. Ariely gives a wonderful demonstration of how the human mind works– and it is not at all the way Economics textbooks would have you believe.

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Here’s an interesting statistic from the OCRegister in California. What are the twenty wealthiest cities in the United States? Pleasanton, CA tops the list with a median household income of $113,345. See the chart below for the other 19. I counted nine in California, five in Texas and two in the [...]

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In reading about profit increases of some U.S. multinationals due to robust overseas business and the weak dollar, while the U.S. economy faces a protracted downturn, it has occurred to me that the divergence between U.S. worker and business interests has reached a critical juncture. Before globalization, most U.S. companies earned their business in [...]

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I happened upon an article at “The Moderate Voice” about “Conspicuous Consumption” originally posted on UPenn’s Wharton Business School’s website. It’s a great piece of research which explains nicely in part why Blacks and Hispanics tend to have less savings and spend less on education.
Blacks and whites appear to have different spending [...]

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I caught an interesting letter to the editor at the New York Times. We really need to think about which alternative energy sources we use and this letter highlights the fact.
Re “Bring On the Right Biofuels,” by Roger Cohen (column, The New York Times on the Web, April 24):
Biofuels contribute to deforestation and global [...]

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The Mainstream Media — MSM as they are known on the Internet. One of the main reasons I began blogging in the first place was to vent my frustration that the American MSM did not report on issues I cared about or felt newsworthy. During the Iraq war, I had to turn to [...]

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The city and police force that Giuliani built has done it again. They’ve acquitted the shooters of another unarmed black man. Looking to outdo the travesty from 1999 against Amadou Diallo when 41 shots were fired, the police fired 50 shots at the unarmed man, Sean Bell and his companions, who were at Bell’s [...]