The US markets were closed today. Europe is very scarry.
The kick in the European markets probably is money in search of safety.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11899865
 |
Dax Index
Last Updated at 16 Jan 2012, 11:36 ET *Chart shows local time| value | change | % |
|---|---|---|
| 6220.01 | + +76.93 | + +1.25 |
Top winner and loser | ||
Daimler AG | ||
| 39.35 | + +1.38 | + +3.62 |
HeidelbergCement AG | ||
| 33.96 | - -1.19 | - -3.37 |
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11899868
|
Cac 40 Index
Last Updated at 16 Jan 2012, 11:35 ET *Chart shows local time| value | change | % |
|---|---|---|
| 3225.00 | + +28.51 | + +0.89 |
Top winner and loser | ||
ST Microelectronics | ||
| 5.32 | + +0.36 | + +7.15 |
Lafarge | ||
| 28.41 | - -0.73 | - -2.51 |
|
FTSE 100 Index
Last Updated at 16 Jan 2012, 11:36 ET *Chart shows local time| value | change | % |
|---|---|---|
| 5657.44 | + +20.80 | + +0.37 |
Top winner and loser | ||
GKN | ||
| 202.70 p | + +6.40 | + +3.26 |
Carnival | ||
| 1878.00 p | - -370.00 | - -16.46 |
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/
I bristle at a great deal of what he says.
His economics are from 1913.
He is very good at seeing the real events.
GREEK CRISIS: LUCAS PAPADEMOS – CONFIDENCE TRICKSTER
Papademos and Lagarde….empty-handedSix days on from last Tuesday’s ‘confirmation’ of a bondholder agreement, and Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos is confident once again.
“There is a little pause in these discussions. But I am confident that they will continue and we will reach an agreement that is mutually acceptable in time,” Papademos told CNBC at the weekend.Well The Slog is sorry to rain on his parade two weeks running, but this too is vacuous bollocks.
First up, this is no longer just about Hedge Funds. As Friday drew to a close, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde gave the go-ahead for her press office to formally announce the outfit’s decision to accept that Greece is a dead parrot. Der Spiegel and many other sites have since run the ‘news’ that the IMF believes the ongoing free fall of the Greek economy has made the troika’s plan the save Greece obsolete.
The Fund believes that the Hellenic economy will shrink by 6% (not 3%), and an internal note concluded mid last week that the private creditors will have to bear much larger haircuts than the 50% currently envisaged….or the EFSF (aka Germany) will have to significantly increase the planned bailout.
As I posted later last week and also over the weekend, Hedge Fund bondholders are holding out for less than a 50% haircut – not more. And the German opinion leadership is now rapidly grasping what a fine mess Angela Merkel has landed them in.
If anything, the bondholder deal is further from an agreement today than it was last Tuesday. Not only has Papademos nothing at all to be confident about, his Troika just lost a prong – and the second prong is a busted bazooka.
As usual, the MSM are skirting round this gigantic elephant in the potting shed. But talking to Der Spiegel today, senior banker Hans-Werner Sinn spoke for many others when he confirmed German fears about lost influence at the ECB. “All those nice words that the ECB works according to the Bundesbank model and that Germany as the biggest country keeps a special role are empty and hollow“, Sinn thundered. Twelve days ago, the Central Bank board redistributed portfolios, and the Belgian board member inherited the chief economist post from Jürgen Stark.
Meanwhile, Bild am Sonntag yesterday reported that not-well-thought-of finance eurocrat Klaus Regling is to increase the guarantees to foreign investors in the EFSF to 30%. Meaning this as a sweetener to indirectly boost bondholder confidence, Klaus is on the wrong page of his hymn-book here: investors are already demanding a much higher Eurozone guarantee as a precondition for their participation. And to date, the EFSF has attracted, um, no foreign investors at all.
And finally, The Slog is getting some as yet unconfirmed reports this morning that UK Prime Minister David Cameron is wondering whether he will, after all, simply not take further part in IMF fund-boosting. There is a 2% chance this is because he read my piece about Greek arms contracts being fulfilled, and a 90% chance that the 1922 Committee told him they and other likeminded MPs across the piece would humiliate the Coalition if they tried to give Fifi LaGarde any more spending money. So there’s another nice crisis bubbling away offstage.
I confess to being at a loss to understand what or who can now solve this impasse; but my water tells me that Merkozy (and also quite probably Mario Draghi) will eventually have to get personally involved.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/do-thrifty-brains-make-better-minds/?ref=opinion
Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?
By ANDY CLARKMight the miserly use of neural resources be one of the essential keys to understanding how brains make sense of the world? Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input. That same story suggests, intriguingly, that perception, understanding and imagination, which we might intuitively consider to be three distinct chunks of our mental machinery, are inextricably tied together as simultaneous results of a single underlying strategy known as “predictive coding.” This strategy saves on bandwidth using (who would have guessed it?) one of the many technical wheezes that enable us to economically store and transmit pictures, sounds and videos using formats such as JPEG and MP3.
In the case of a picture (a black and white photo of Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, to activate a concrete image in your mind) predictive coding works by assuming that the value of each pixel is well predicted by the value of its various neighbors. When that’s true — which is rather often, as gray-scale gradients are pretty smooth for large parts of most images — there is simply no need to transmit the value of that pixel. All that the photo-frugal need transmit are the deviations from what was thus predicted. The simplest prediction would be that neighboring pixels all share the same value (the same gray scale value, for example), but much more complex predictions are also possible. As long as there is detectable regularity, prediction (and hence this particular form of data compression) is possible.
Leif ParsonsSuch compression by informed prediction (as Bell Telephone Labs first discovered back in the 1950s) can save enormously on bandwidth, allowing quite modest encodings to be reconstructed, by in effect “adding back in” the successfully predicted elements, into rich and florid renditions of the original sights and sounds. The basic trick is one we can use in daily life, too. Suppose you make a plan with your friend Duke by saying that if you don’t call him, then all is “as expected” and that he should therefore meet your plane at Miami airport next Wednesday at 9 a.m. local time. Your failure to call is then (technically speaking) a tiny little one-bit signal that conveys a large amount of neatly compressed information! The trick is trading intelligence and foreknowledge (expectations, informed predictions) on the part of the receiver against the costs of encoding and transmission on the day.
A version of this same trick may be helping animals like us to sense and understand the world by allowing us to use what we already know to predict as much of the current sensory data as possible. When you think you see or hear your beloved cat or dog when the door or wind makes just the right jiggle or rustle, you are probably using well-trained prediction to fill in the gaps, saving on bandwidth and (usually) knowing your world better as a result.
Neural versions of this predictive coding trick benefit, however, from an important added dimension: the use of a stacked hierarchy of processing stages. In biological brains, the prediction-based strategy unfolds within multiple layers, each of which deploys its own specialized knowledge and resources to try to predict the states of the level below it.
This is not easy to imagine, but it rewards the effort. A familiar, but still useful, analogy is with the way problems and issues are passed up the chain of command in rather traditional management hierarchies. Each person in the chain must learn to distil important (hence usually surprising or unpredicted) information from those lower down the chain. And they must do so in a way that is sufficiently sensitive to the needs (hence, expectations) of those immediately above them.
In this kind of multilevel chain, all that flows upward is news. What flows forward, in true bandwidth-miser style, are the deviations (be they for good of for ill) from each level’s predicted events and unfoldings. This is efficient. Valuable bandwidth is not used sending well-predicted stuff forward. Why bother? We were expecting all that stuff anyway. Who in corporate headquarters wants to know that the work of Jill/Jack proceeded exactly as expected? Instead, that expensive bandwidth is used only to flag what may more plausibly demand attention: outcomes that gloriously exceeded or sadly fell short of expectations. Things work similarly — if the predictive coding account is correct — in the neural incarnation. What is marked and passed forward in the brain’s flow of processing are the divergences from predicted states: divergences that may be used to demand more information at those very specific points, or to guide remedial action.
All this, if true, has much more than merely engineering significance. For it suggests that perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of “controlled hallucination” (Ramesh Jain) in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel.
The basic effect hereabouts is neatly illustrated by a simple but striking demonstration (used by the neuroscientist Richard Gregory back in the 1970’s to make this very point) known as “the hollow face illusion.” This is a well-known illusion in which an ordinary face mask viewed from the back can appear strikingly convex. That is, it looks (from the back) to be shaped like a real face, with the nose sticking outward rather than having a concave nose cavity. Just about any hollow face mask will produce some version of this powerful illusion, and there are many examples on the Web, like this one:
The hollow face illusion illustrates the power of what cognitive psychologists call “top-down” (essentially, knowledge-driven) influences on perception. Our statistically salient experience with endless hordes of convex faces in daily life installs a deep expectation of convexness: an expectation that here trumps the many other visual cues that ought to be telling us that what we are seeing is a concave mask.
You might reasonably suspect that the hollow-face illusion, though striking, is really just some kind of psychological oddity. And to be sure, our expectations concerning the convexity of faces seem especially strong and potent. But if the predictive-coding approaches I mentioned earlier are on track, this strategy might actually pervade human perception. Brains like ours may be constantly trying to use what they already know so as to predict the current sensory signal, using the incoming signal to constrain those predictions, and sometimes using the expectations to “trump” certain aspects of the incoming sensory signal itself. (Such trumping makes adaptive sense, as the capacity to use what you know to outweigh some of what the incoming signal seems to be saying can be hugely beneficial when the sensory data is noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete — situations that are, in fact, pretty much the norm in daily life.
This image of the brain (or more accurately, of sensory and motor cortex) as an engine of prediction is a simple and quite elegant one that can be found in various forms in contemporary neuroscience. For useful surveys, see Kveraga et al (2007), Bubic et al (2010), and for my own favorite incarnation, see Friston (2010). It has also been shown, at least in restricted domains, to be computationally sound and practically viable. Just suppose (if only for the sake of argument) that it is on track, and that perception is indeed a process in which incoming sensory data is constantly matched with “top down” predictions based on unconscious expectations of how that sensory data should be. This would have important implications for how we should think about minds like ours.
First, consider the unconscious expectations themselves. They derive mostly from the statistical shape of the world as we have experienced it in the past. We see the world by applying the expectations generated by the statistical lens of our own past experience, and not (mostly) by applying the more delicately rose-nuanced lenses of our political and social aspirations. So if the world that tunes those expectations is sexist or racist, future perceptions will also be similarly sculpted — a royal recipe for tainted evidence and self-fulfilling negative prophecies. That means we should probably be very careful about the shape of the worlds to which we expose ourselves, and our children.
Second, consider that perception (at least of this stripe) now looks to be deeply linked to something not unlike imagination. For insofar as a creature can indeed predict its own sensory inputs from the “top down,” such a creature is well positioned to engage in familiar (though perhaps otherwise deeply puzzling) activities like dreaming and some kind of free-floating imagining. These would occur when the constraining sensory input is switched off, by closing down the sensors, leaving the system free to be driven purely from the top down. We should not suppose that all creatures deploying this strategy can engage in the kinds of self-conscious deliberate imagining that we do. Self-conscious deliberate imagining may well require substantial additional innovations, like the use of language as a means of self-cuing. But where we find perception working in this way, we may expect an interior mental life of a fairly rich stripe, replete with dreams and free-floating episodes of mental imagery.
Finally, perception and understanding would also be revealed as close cousins. For to perceive the world in this way is to deploy knowledge not just about how the sensory signal should be right now, but about how it will probably change and evolve over time. For it is only by means of such longer-term and larger-scale knowledge that we can robustly match the incoming signal, moment to moment, with apt expectations (predictions). To know that (to know how the present sensory signal is likely to change and evolve over time) just is to understand a lot about how the world is, and the kinds of entity and event that populate it. Creatures deploying this strategy, when they see the grass twitch in just that certain way, are already expecting to see the tasty prey emerge, and already expecting to feel the sensations of their own muscles tensing to pounce. But an animal, or machine, that has that kind of grip on its world is already deep into the business of understanding that world.
I find the unity here intriguing. Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package?
Now there’s a deal!
References
Bubic A, von Cramon DY and Schubotz RI (2010) Prediction, cognition and the brain. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 4:25: 1-15
Friston K. (2010) The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 11(2):127-38.
Helmholtz, H. (1860/1962). Handbuch der physiologischen optik (Southall, J. P. C. (Ed.), English trans.),Vol. 3. New York: Dover.
Kveraga, K., Ghuman, A.S., and Bar. M. (2007) Top-down predictions in the cognitive brain. Brain and Cognition, 65, 145-168
Andy Clark is professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He is the author of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension” (Oxford University Press, 2008).
In the case of a picture (a black and white photo of Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, to activate a concrete image in your mind) predictive coding works by assuming that the value of each pixel is well predicted by the value of its various neighbors. When that’s true — which is rather often, as gray-scale gradients are pretty smooth for large parts of most images — there is simply no need to transmit the value of that pixel. All that the photo-frugal need transmit are the deviations from what was thus predicted. The simplest prediction would be that neighboring pixels all share the same value (the same gray scale value, for example), but much more complex predictions are also possible. As long as there is detectable regularity, prediction (and hence this particular form of data compression) is possible.
Leif ParsonsA version of this same trick may be helping animals like us to sense and understand the world by allowing us to use what we already know to predict as much of the current sensory data as possible. When you think you see or hear your beloved cat or dog when the door or wind makes just the right jiggle or rustle, you are probably using well-trained prediction to fill in the gaps, saving on bandwidth and (usually) knowing your world better as a result.
Neural versions of this predictive coding trick benefit, however, from an important added dimension: the use of a stacked hierarchy of processing stages. In biological brains, the prediction-based strategy unfolds within multiple layers, each of which deploys its own specialized knowledge and resources to try to predict the states of the level below it.
This is not easy to imagine, but it rewards the effort. A familiar, but still useful, analogy is with the way problems and issues are passed up the chain of command in rather traditional management hierarchies. Each person in the chain must learn to distil important (hence usually surprising or unpredicted) information from those lower down the chain. And they must do so in a way that is sufficiently sensitive to the needs (hence, expectations) of those immediately above them.
In this kind of multilevel chain, all that flows upward is news. What flows forward, in true bandwidth-miser style, are the deviations (be they for good of for ill) from each level’s predicted events and unfoldings. This is efficient. Valuable bandwidth is not used sending well-predicted stuff forward. Why bother? We were expecting all that stuff anyway. Who in corporate headquarters wants to know that the work of Jill/Jack proceeded exactly as expected? Instead, that expensive bandwidth is used only to flag what may more plausibly demand attention: outcomes that gloriously exceeded or sadly fell short of expectations. Things work similarly — if the predictive coding account is correct — in the neural incarnation. What is marked and passed forward in the brain’s flow of processing are the divergences from predicted states: divergences that may be used to demand more information at those very specific points, or to guide remedial action.
All this, if true, has much more than merely engineering significance. For it suggests that perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of “controlled hallucination” (Ramesh Jain) in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world. This in turn underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel.
The basic effect hereabouts is neatly illustrated by a simple but striking demonstration (used by the neuroscientist Richard Gregory back in the 1970’s to make this very point) known as “the hollow face illusion.” This is a well-known illusion in which an ordinary face mask viewed from the back can appear strikingly convex. That is, it looks (from the back) to be shaped like a real face, with the nose sticking outward rather than having a concave nose cavity. Just about any hollow face mask will produce some version of this powerful illusion, and there are many examples on the Web, like this one:
The hollow face illusion illustrates the power of what cognitive psychologists call “top-down” (essentially, knowledge-driven) influences on perception. Our statistically salient experience with endless hordes of convex faces in daily life installs a deep expectation of convexness: an expectation that here trumps the many other visual cues that ought to be telling us that what we are seeing is a concave mask.
You might reasonably suspect that the hollow-face illusion, though striking, is really just some kind of psychological oddity. And to be sure, our expectations concerning the convexity of faces seem especially strong and potent. But if the predictive-coding approaches I mentioned earlier are on track, this strategy might actually pervade human perception. Brains like ours may be constantly trying to use what they already know so as to predict the current sensory signal, using the incoming signal to constrain those predictions, and sometimes using the expectations to “trump” certain aspects of the incoming sensory signal itself. (Such trumping makes adaptive sense, as the capacity to use what you know to outweigh some of what the incoming signal seems to be saying can be hugely beneficial when the sensory data is noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete — situations that are, in fact, pretty much the norm in daily life.
This image of the brain (or more accurately, of sensory and motor cortex) as an engine of prediction is a simple and quite elegant one that can be found in various forms in contemporary neuroscience. For useful surveys, see Kveraga et al (2007), Bubic et al (2010), and for my own favorite incarnation, see Friston (2010). It has also been shown, at least in restricted domains, to be computationally sound and practically viable. Just suppose (if only for the sake of argument) that it is on track, and that perception is indeed a process in which incoming sensory data is constantly matched with “top down” predictions based on unconscious expectations of how that sensory data should be. This would have important implications for how we should think about minds like ours.
First, consider the unconscious expectations themselves. They derive mostly from the statistical shape of the world as we have experienced it in the past. We see the world by applying the expectations generated by the statistical lens of our own past experience, and not (mostly) by applying the more delicately rose-nuanced lenses of our political and social aspirations. So if the world that tunes those expectations is sexist or racist, future perceptions will also be similarly sculpted — a royal recipe for tainted evidence and self-fulfilling negative prophecies. That means we should probably be very careful about the shape of the worlds to which we expose ourselves, and our children.
Second, consider that perception (at least of this stripe) now looks to be deeply linked to something not unlike imagination. For insofar as a creature can indeed predict its own sensory inputs from the “top down,” such a creature is well positioned to engage in familiar (though perhaps otherwise deeply puzzling) activities like dreaming and some kind of free-floating imagining. These would occur when the constraining sensory input is switched off, by closing down the sensors, leaving the system free to be driven purely from the top down. We should not suppose that all creatures deploying this strategy can engage in the kinds of self-conscious deliberate imagining that we do. Self-conscious deliberate imagining may well require substantial additional innovations, like the use of language as a means of self-cuing. But where we find perception working in this way, we may expect an interior mental life of a fairly rich stripe, replete with dreams and free-floating episodes of mental imagery.
Finally, perception and understanding would also be revealed as close cousins. For to perceive the world in this way is to deploy knowledge not just about how the sensory signal should be right now, but about how it will probably change and evolve over time. For it is only by means of such longer-term and larger-scale knowledge that we can robustly match the incoming signal, moment to moment, with apt expectations (predictions). To know that (to know how the present sensory signal is likely to change and evolve over time) just is to understand a lot about how the world is, and the kinds of entity and event that populate it. Creatures deploying this strategy, when they see the grass twitch in just that certain way, are already expecting to see the tasty prey emerge, and already expecting to feel the sensations of their own muscles tensing to pounce. But an animal, or machine, that has that kind of grip on its world is already deep into the business of understanding that world.
I find the unity here intriguing. Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package?
Now there’s a deal!
References
Bubic A, von Cramon DY and Schubotz RI (2010) Prediction, cognition and the brain. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 4:25: 1-15
Friston K. (2010) The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 11(2):127-38.
Helmholtz, H. (1860/1962). Handbuch der physiologischen optik (Southall, J. P. C. (Ed.), English trans.),Vol. 3. New York: Dover.
Kveraga, K., Ghuman, A.S., and Bar. M. (2007) Top-down predictions in the cognitive brain. Brain and Cognition, 65, 145-168
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/reaganite-delusions-2/
Reaganite Delusions
Ah. Noah Smith goes reading in the fresh waters, and finds that people there are still claiming that there was a dramatic improvement in growth once Reagan/Friedman came along.
I’ve written about this many times, e.g. here. The great era of US economic growth was the postwar generation; even during the good years of the 90s we didn’t achieve comparable growth, and overall, the post-Reagan era was marked by slower growth than the equivalent period of time pre-Reagan. And I haven’t even gotten into the income distribution thing.
All of which makes me wonder: what goes on in these peoples’ minds? Do they never even think of actually looking at the numbers, because they know that Reagan ushered in a great boom? Inquiring minds (which they obviously don’t have) want to know.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Capitalism
I’ve written about this many times, e.g. here. The great era of US economic growth was the postwar generation; even during the good years of the 90s we didn’t achieve comparable growth, and overall, the post-Reagan era was marked by slower growth than the equivalent period of time pre-Reagan. And I haven’t even gotten into the income distribution thing.
All of which makes me wonder: what goes on in these peoples’ minds? Do they never even think of actually looking at the numbers, because they know that Reagan ushered in a great boom? Inquiring minds (which they obviously don’t have) want to know.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Capitalism
Monday, January 16, 2012
Links 1/16/12
How did a giant diamond stolen in a daring London raid end up in a Hong Kong pawnshop? Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Cartier Turns to More Discreet Watches Bloomberg
Your Storytelling Brain Big Think (hat tip reader Aquifer)
Man’s homemade canon explodes, killing him, as sons watch McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). Probably Darwin Award winner
30Yr Study: Organic Farming Outperforms Conventional, Chemical Farming FriendsEAT (hat tip reader Aquifer)
‘Yoga can damage your body’ article throws exponents off-balance Guardian. Hah. I happen to like yoga, but anyone who does not know that there are instructors (and not just newbies) who like people to push their bodies into classical poses whether or not they have the flexibility or body proportions to do it is naive. And some postures are prone to causing injuries. Some schools are better at recommending alternative postures that will stretch the same areas.
Are We Really Monolingual? NewYork
Times. This struck me as pretty desperate. Yes, using a language at home is too narrow a definition, but the author goes way too far in the other direction. It takes some doing to find Americans who are highly skilled in more than one language (and his “was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago” doesn’t cut it. I was fluent in French once, and if you don’t use it, you lose it).
NYC Startup Founder Says Schumer’s Office Told Her the Senator ‘Is In Favor of Censoring the Internet’ BetaBeat (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). Well now that’s official.
EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Bills to Stop Web Piracy Invite a Protracted Battle New YorkTimes
You Can’t Read This Book: why libel tourists love London Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
S&P is right about Europe MacroBusiness
Flag in Greece, Europe Aims to Limit Damage New York Times
Greece’s creditors seek end to deadlock Financial Times
Iran warns on output rise after sanctions Financial Times (hat tip Joe Costello)
The Navy Is Depending on Dolphins to Keep the Strait of Hormuz Open Atlantic Wire (hat tip Lambert). Cue The Cove.
Drone Disasters Nick Turse, TomDispatch
Renminbi deal aims to boost City trade Financial Times. A poke in Geithner’s eye?
Huntsman to drop out of GOP race, endorse Romney Washington Post
Stephen Colbert’s PAC Calls Romney a ‘Serial Killer’ Atlantic Wire (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
How Fares the Dream? Paul Krugman. Whoa. I’m not sure blacks would agree class is necessarily a bigger issue than race. What about the rate of black convictions and imprisonment, or the way blacks were and probably still are steered into more costly home and auto loans?
Scotus set to spank 9th Circuit again McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Troubled RI city in receivership loses democracy Associated Press (hat tip Joe Costello). The Greek solution is becoming popular.
The five stages of economic grief MacroBusiness
Bank results threaten to dash US hopes Financial Times (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
JPM Chase Quietly Halts Suits Over Consumer Debts American Banker. In case you missed this last week.
Advice to a Generic Candidate Fred Reed (hat tip reader Chris M). You will enjoy this.
Antidote du jour (hat tip DCblogger). I once saw an exhibition on Indian art that featured crows, and the display included a considerable discussion of corvid intelligence. One scientist was quoted saying something like, “The stories you hear about the intelligence of most animals are exaggerated, but with corvids, they are understated.” The only anecdote I recall was a man was trying to frustrate a crow by giving him more than he could carry away (there was a reason I now forget why it was clear the crow would take any food and go). He tossed two doughnuts at him. The crow immediately stuck his beak through the hole in one, grabbed the other, and took off.n
Cartier Turns to More Discreet Watches Bloomberg
Your Storytelling Brain Big Think (hat tip reader Aquifer)
Man’s homemade canon explodes, killing him, as sons watch McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). Probably Darwin Award winner
30Yr Study: Organic Farming Outperforms Conventional, Chemical Farming FriendsEAT (hat tip reader Aquifer)
‘Yoga can damage your body’ article throws exponents off-balance Guardian. Hah. I happen to like yoga, but anyone who does not know that there are instructors (and not just newbies) who like people to push their bodies into classical poses whether or not they have the flexibility or body proportions to do it is naive. And some postures are prone to causing injuries. Some schools are better at recommending alternative postures that will stretch the same areas.
Are We Really Monolingual? New
NYC Startup Founder Says Schumer’s Office Told Her the Senator ‘Is In Favor of Censoring the Internet’ BetaBeat (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). Well now that’s official.
EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Bills to Stop Web Piracy Invite a Protracted Battle New York
You Can’t Read This Book: why libel tourists love London Independent (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
S&P is right about Europe MacroBusiness
Flag in Greece, Europe Aims to Limit Damage New York Times
Greece’s creditors seek end to deadlock Financial Times
Iran warns on output rise after sanctions Financial Times (hat tip Joe Costello)
The Navy Is Depending on Dolphins to Keep the Strait of Hormuz Open Atlantic Wire (hat tip Lambert). Cue The Cove.
Drone Disasters Nick Turse, TomDispatch
Renminbi deal aims to boost City trade Financial Times. A poke in Geithner’s eye?
Huntsman to drop out of GOP race, endorse Romney Washington Post
Stephen Colbert’s PAC Calls Romney a ‘Serial Killer’ Atlantic Wire (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
How Fares the Dream? Paul Krugman. Whoa. I’m not sure blacks would agree class is necessarily a bigger issue than race. What about the rate of black convictions and imprisonment, or the way blacks were and probably still are steered into more costly home and auto loans?
Scotus set to spank 9th Circuit again McClatchy (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Troubled RI city in receivership loses democracy Associated Press (hat tip Joe Costello). The Greek solution is becoming popular.
The five stages of economic grief MacroBusiness
Bank results threaten to dash US hopes Financial Times (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
JPM Chase Quietly Halts Suits Over Consumer Debts American Banker. In case you missed this last week.
Advice to a Generic Candidate Fred Reed (hat tip reader Chris M). You will enjoy this.
Antidote du jour (hat tip DCblogger). I once saw an exhibition on Indian art that featured crows, and the display included a considerable discussion of corvid intelligence. One scientist was quoted saying something like, “The stories you hear about the intelligence of most animals are exaggerated, but with corvids, they are understated.” The only anecdote I recall was a man was trying to frustrate a crow by giving him more than he could carry away (there was a reason I now forget why it was clear the crow would take any food and go). He tossed two doughnuts at him. The crow immediately stuck his beak through the hole in one, grabbed the other, and took off.n
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