Capitalogix

Here Are Some Interesting Links to Read This Weekend

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• How to Overcome Failure. The key is a flexible view of learning. (WSJ)
• The Genetics of Stupidity.  (Wiring the Brain)
• What Klout Really Measures? (BrandSavant)
• The World's 50 Most Valuable Sports Teams. Dallas Cowboys are #3. (Forbes)
• 8 Ways The World Will Change By 2052. 40 yrs from now, how much will energy cost? Will you be richer? (FastCo)

 

Trading Links:

• How To Tell When Finance is Working. (Forbes)
• Monetary Policy and the Next Crisis. (Wall Street Journal)
• Why China Can’t Adjust. Symptoms of deep institutional problems & vulnerability. (PS)
• Say Goodbye to First-Class on U.S. Airlines. (WSJ Video)
• Election Trumps Foreign Policy — White House Memo. The attempt to subordinate foreign policy to domestic politics is a quadrennial phenomenon (NYTimes)

Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading

Having just come back from the Jersey Shore, where Cheesteak sandwiches seemingly grow like grass ...

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Integrate Data into Products, or Get Left Behind. (Harvard Business Review)
• Confessions of an Ex-Mormon. (TheNewRepublic)
• How To Win an Olympic Event. Great Interactive Graphic series. (NYTimes)
• How To Win Marathons? Hint. It doesn’t involve fancy footwear. (TheGlobalMail)
• The Strongest Man in the World. A new era of strength competitions tests the limits of the human body. (TheNewYorker)

 

Trading Links:

• Was the Financial Crisis a Male Syndrome? (Businessweek)
• Why I Rarely Short Anymore. (UpsideTrader)
• Amazon ‘Robo-Pricing’ Sparks Fears. (FT)
• Is the Postal Service About to Default on Its Bills? (Wall Street Journal)
• The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia. How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy. (RollingStone)

Some Links for Your Weekend Reading

China won the first Olympic gold ... by manufacturing uniforms.

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Patent Trawler Aims to Predict Next Hot Technologies. (NewScientist)
• The 10 Things Economics Can Tell Us About Happiness. (TheAtlantic)
• In Age of Twitter, NBC Rewrites Olympic Playbook. (Wall Street Journal)
• Salt, We Misjudged You. We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt. (NYTimes)
• 'Sterilization Team' Cleans Away Madonna's DNA. Here's a diva demand you probably haven't heard before … (Newser)

 

Trading Links:

• Top 100 Respected Companies, Ranked By Investors. Apple is No. 1 (LATimes)
• Frenemies: Small Retailers Forced to Compete with Amazon on Amazon. (WSJ)
• Investors Cast Doubt on End-of-World Hedge Strategies. (Reuters)
• The Choice in 2012: Social Darwinism or a Decent Society? (RobertReich)
• Wealth Funds Step Up Their Activities. Sovereign wealth funds are becoming more active. They made investments worth 42 percent more in 2011 than in 2010. (FT)

Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading

Here is a graphic that explains how what matters changes over time.  Do you agree?

via I Love Charts.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• 6 Questions for the Man Who Invented the iPod. (Inc.)
• What is Big Data? - An Introduction to the Big Data Landscape. (O'Reilly)
• Cheetahs Attack Woman as Husband Snaps Photos.  Surprised? (Video)
• In Libya, the Captors Have Become the Captive. Strange to imagine. (NYTimes)
• The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine. (Smithsonian)

 

Trading Links:

• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. Hedge funder bets on colossal failure. (TheDaily)
• Europeans Ambivalent to the Euro, Survey Finds. (Time)
• Gold Bar Demand in China Surged 51% to 213.9 Tons In 2011. (ZeroHedge)
• Robert Shiller's Mission to Redeem Finance. (Chronicle)
• Dallas Fed Proposes Ending "Too Big To Fail", Urges Removal of Failed CEOs, Breakup of Banks. (GlobalEconomicAnalysis)

Alone Together - Instant Gratification & Shortening Attention Spans

Instant Gratification & Shortening Attention Spans.

I was showing my son a web video -- and in less than a minute he was texting someone. 

Let me make that more clear ... it was Less-Than-A-Minute! ... while he was standing with me ... and he did it without hesitation, apology, or sense that shifting his attention to the phone was in any way a bad thing.

I know "get over it".  He was probably texting before we spoke, anyway; right?

You're probably seeing similar behavior more often too.
  

 

It is scary to realize how easy it is to focus on a phone, iPad or e-mail rather than a person.

Upon reflection, we spend a lot of time alone together.

There is a difference between physical presence and being present.

 

 

Focus can be pretty fragile if it isn't a conscious choice.

To demonstrate this, here is a seemingly easy challenge ... simply listen to a favorite song.

The challenge is how you can truly do that without losing focus and having other thoughts intrude (for example, without thinking about your to-do list or other songs that you like, or who you're going to meet with later in the day, etc.)?  For me, the answer was not that long.

Sometimes it feels like modern life causes attention deficit disorder.

Attention Deficit Can Be Dangerous If You Aren't Aware of It.

Yet, losing focus while trading, in business, or even during a simple conversation - can have serious consequences.

When you are not aware of your focus, I bet it wanders.  Mine does; I get distracted easily. 

It didn't take long for me to realize that this happened to me while talking to my wife, while listening to a telephone call, even when ordering food at a restaurant. How can I lose focus on the waitress while I was ordering? Apparently, quite easily.

How about you?  When you're listening to someone talk to you, are you really listening to them - or are you checking e-mail, texting, browsing a website, watching TV, playing a game, or thinking about what you're going to say? 

Be honest with yourself; how often are you fully present?  For me, the answer was not nearly enough.

 

Related articles

• Harvard Business: The Discipline of Listening (blogs.hbr.org)
• The Need for Speed - How Impatient Are We Becoming? (capitalogix.typepad.com)
• The Twitter Generation: Teaching Deferred Gratification to College Students (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)
• What Captures Your Attention Controls Your Life (blogs.hbr.org)

Some Links for Your Weekend Reading

Interesting Thought: The new illiterate will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn ....

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Cultivating Genius. (Wired)
• Thinking vs. Knowing: When Facts Get in the Way. (PS)
• How Old Are You, Really? New Test Determines Biological Age. (TheDaily)
• Can London Afford the $14.5B Summer Olympic Games’ Price Tag? (VanityFair)
• Data Harvesting at Google Not a Mistake or a Rogue Act, F.C.C. Report Reveals. (NYTimes)

 

Trading Links:

• Is High Frequency Trading Progress of Piracy? What do you think? (IMG)
• Whose Recovery? The Recession is Over … for the Wealthy. (Economonitor)
• At CME, an Uproar Over Trading Hours. Effects of Round-the-Clock Trading. (WSJ)
• The Kauffman Report on Venture Capital. Interesting. (FD)
• Nothing Ventured. U.S. entrepreneurship drops as many abandon self-employment for salaried jobs (TheDaily)

Some Interesting Links for Your Weekend Reading

Let the Buyer Beware ...  What you see at first is not always what you'll see if you look more closely.

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Nokia Claims Apple Rigged Siri to Name iPhone Best Phone. (News)
• Everyone Has Been Hacked. Now What? via Threat Level column in Wired (Wired)
• Why Anonymous ‘Might Well Be the Most Powerful Organization on Earth’. (NP)
• Video of the Dalai Lama. "I shout and say harsh words." (Telegraph)
• The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much. The cost & consequences of unlimited first class air travel (Latimes)

 

Trading Links:

• The Commencement Address That Won't Be Given. (RobertReich)
• Economic Alert: If You’re Not Worried Yet…You Should Be. (Alt-Market)
• Japan Shrinking. It now has routinely more deaths than births per year. (WQuarterly)
• Hedge Fund Stars Have a Sixth Sense --They See Dead Countries. (Forbes)
• The Once and Future Dollar. The benefits and drawbacks to the dollar as reserve currency. (The-American-Interest)

Theory and Practice - Sometimes nothing works and no one knows why

I love the moment of discovery, when something unimaginable springs into being.

 

Sometimes frustration or seeming failure is the catalyst for something better.

 

With that in mind, I saw something that made me smile.  Here it is.

 

Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works.

Practice is when everything works, but no one knows why.

Sometimes, however, theory and practice are combined ... that's when nothing works and no one knows why.

 

Here is a Dilbert comic that pokes fun at how hard it is to stay tech savvy these days.

 

 

Here Are Some Fun Links for Your Weekend Reading

  

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• 8 Angel Investors That Entrepreneurs Should Avoid. (Fortune)
• The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say). (Wired)
• CISPA: A Guide to the 'Big Brother' Cyber Security Bill. (The Week)
• The Fiction to Reality Timeline. (AT&T)
• On Tiger Moms. Reconsidering Amy Chua's parenting advice. (ThePointMag)

 

Trading Links:

• Putin Skips G-8 Meet to Signal Displeasure with the U.S. (Bloomberg)
• Nouriel Roubini Says "Get Ready for the Spanish Bailout". (EconoMonitor)
• A Facebook Founder Renounced His U.S. Citizenship. Clever Tax Planning? (Bits)
• Why AT&T and Verizon Are Rooting for Windows Phones. (Bits)
• U.S. Economy Currents. Does the 25% decline in the wholesale price of milk warn of economic slowdown? (SeekingAlpha)

Here Are Some Fun Links for Your Weekend Reading

Election years are interesting.

Many believe that the Presidential Election Cycle affects the stock market. 

Perhaps there is an easier explanation ...

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• Rocks In Their Heads? Deep-Pockets Dreamers Pursue Asteroid Mining. (TheDaily)
• What Is Strategy? Choices made to maximize long-term value? (Strategy-Business)
• Are Superstitions Rational? Interesting. (WhyWeReason)
• A Profitable Exercise Merger – Combining Running with Walking. (HuffPost)
• Take a Moment to Watch This Rendition of “Flight of the Bumble-Bee”. Wow! (YouTube)

 

Trading Links:

• China Tells IPO Bankers to 'Like' Facebook. (CNBC)
• Stratfor's 2nd Quarter GeoPolitical Forecast. Lots of stuff to consider. (Stratfor)
• The Fed in 57 Words. (SmartMoney)
• Employers Likely to Step In If Obamacare Health Law Is Overturned. (Google)
• Does US Airways and American Need Each Other? What Are Merger Benefits? (WSJ)