The Rundown November 25, 2019

• “A Novel Cross-Disciplinary Investment Strategy“ from Bullk & Moon:”Bull & Moon provides high level analysis of the general favorability of investments into publicly traded stocks based on the calculated astrological compatibility between the individual investor and the corporate entity invested in.”

• Investing in Bitcoin: The Asset Allocator’s Perspective - “For a typical asset allocator — an institution trying to own a basket of assets with favorable risk-adjusted returns — the right cryptocurrency allocation is close to zero, but nonzero.”

• Online dating increases inter-age competition, making the dating “market” more efficient.

• Bitcoin's fatal flaw - “limited adoption constitutes an endogenous characteristic of not only Bitcoin but also Proof-of-Work (PoW) payments blockchains more generally“

• A book review of all therapy books - “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?”

The Rundown November 16, 2019

• How Elizabeth Warren Is Reviving the Concession Theory of the Corporation - “[C]orporations are granted special privileges such as perpetual legal personality (and associated rights such as the right to sue and to be sued, have property rights separate from its shareholders etc.) and limited liability by the state, and they should thus serve a public purpose in exchange.”

• The men who still like Fight Club - “It’s kind of, like, Yeah, if his favorite author is Bret Easton Ellis, his favorite movie is ‘Fight Club,’ and he wants to talk about Bitcoin or Jordan Peterson—these are all warning signs.”

• China has a bubble of glass-bottomed bridges.

• An oral history of Limewire.

• Cryptogeeks discuss - Is blockchain dead?

Notes for Big Data Class, November 11, 2019

I’m going to start posting notes of the papers and books I am writing, as well as the lessons I’m planning. At the very least, I can have a low-stakes way of mapping out the idea, documenting it for any claim of priority. Maybe it will even get some feedback, who knows.  

Right now I’m designing the toolchain for the Big Data course I’m teaching next year. Just installed Jupyter, which allows me to intersperse notes with running code and visualizations. It will be the default way to demonstrate and document each lesson (and the way students can turn in exercises). Kaggle also looks interesting. It has some data sets, and can host Jupyter notebooks.The next problem is what language/execution environment to use and embed to the notebooks - R? Python? Octave? Right now I am partial towards Ovtave. And then there’s Anaconda, which offers a way to have all these tools in one convenient package, with environments and dependencies automatically managed. 

The Rundown November 4, 2019

• Empathy on the margins - “Any problem you can express in capital, you can probably express in software nowadays”;

• Aggregation theory - “This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be commoditized leaving consumers/users as a first order priority.” (See also Defining aggregators);

• NoCode - A gallery of tools, examples, and other resources for building apps without coding;

• Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music - finally, I can know the difference between Techno and House;

• I don’t know why a trailer for a video game would tear me up, but it does:

The Rundown November 2, 2019

• Brain-reading wearable tech from Facebook will require implants - Because this is exactly what the world needs right now. Facebook in the brain;

• These photographs of mathematicians’ blackboards are so beautiful;

• Good use of footage, computerized models, and a forensic approach to architecture to help solve a crime.

• Sesame Street tackles the opioid crisis. The Batibot version will be so much more hearbreaking - Where is my father, Manang Bola? What is tokhang?

• REBUS and the anarchic brain - “psychedelics…decrease the influence of top-down prediction-making and increase the influence of bottom-up sense data.”

Back from Warsaw

I’m not sure if it was the weather (gray skies, raining half the time), the architecture (a lot of Soviet-style apartment complexes and government buildings), or the history of the place - but man, Warsaw was bleak. But deeds needed getting done, so I went there to present a paper I co-authored with Dr. Umali, about “Torre de Manila and the politics of heritage conservation”, before a linguistic conference. The language of the law and the language of space in constructing social realities. We need to do a better job of recognizing these understructures.

The Rundown September 27, 2019

• Fourth Amendment crop top - “The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations”;

• The Dere Types wiki;

• A more intuitive restatement of the Monty Hall Problem;

• Sony Walkman 40th Anniversary Exhibit - I remember having a couple of these. - a hand-me-down of the blue original and a black one with recording capabilities;

• An introduction to Fourier transforms.

August Sneaked Out Like A Corrupt Politician

No posts for the entire month of August. Classes have restarted in UP Diliman and we were just able to make a workable LL.M. program just as the semester was about to open. It was like latching on the wing on a jumbo jet just as it was taxiing to the runway.

Spent almost two weeks in Singapore, attending the ASEAN Law Academy. A lot of content packed into those days. There was no time to see the city - every day, it was up and down Orchard Road between the hotel where I stayed and the hotel where they held the seminars. I think it was worth it and would recommend it to my colleagues. Best takeaway though - a validation of the simulation-based approach. I’ve written a couple of training scenarios. Now I need to expand it into a framework that can be used regardless of subject matter - modularizing and gamifying the whole thing. This looks like a good place to start.

The Rundown July 29, 2019

• Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life - Judges already feel that as it is, Photoshop makes presentation of digital photos…problematic. How are we supposed to cope with AI-generated deep fakes?

• Another argument for the Rawls-ian veil. - chance, not smartness is why people are rich.

• Steve Rogers, PR disaster. Watching The Boys. Forget the Homelander. Captain America will not translate well into Twitter.

• 3D Hologram Helmet - “Because the helmet is portable, you can walk around the city ​​while projecting super futuristic images in front of you.“ (Original page in Japanese)

• Decoding the tech bros.

Back from Spain

Greetings from Manila, where I am back and still dealing with jet lag after a couple of weeks in Malaga and then Bilbao, attending conferences, eating tapas, and acculturating to beer and wine at 2 in the afternoon, all while trying  to keep my work streams coherent through a six-hour time difference.

UP was well represented in the 5th Scientific  Congress between Spanish and Philippine legal scholars. Faculty members and students presented. The Dean and Professor Balane made opening remarks.  I was there to document, and take note of arrangements because we will be hosting this thing in Manila next year.

Despite all the work, the trip was enjoyable. Interesting architecture and great food. I missed my rice, though. I like that the Basque country has an attitude - towards Spain, towards its place in history.