The winners of the seventeenth annual awards, organised by Improbable Research, include:

• Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre, Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin (a vanilla flavouring) from cow dung

• Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal about the occupational hazards of sword-swallowing

• Peace: the Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other (the “gay bomb”)

• Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters

• Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup

All that leaves me feeling surprisingly peckish. For further details of a special commorative ice-cream, designed especially for the occasion (yes, you guessed – vanilla, but with a twist!), plus a series of FREE lectures tomorrow (Saturday 6th October), head straight for the horse’s mouth. Neither treat will be accessible to you if you are outside Massachusetts, unfortunately.

I don’t want to take full credit for coining the term “Magoo Finance”, because others have already attached the name to the person of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan well before I did (see earlier). But I wonder if it might now serve as a useful shorthand for my colleagues in Big Media to characterise the kind of blind or short-sighted risk-taking that has been a feature of the past several years.

I thought it was noteworthy that the expression Value at Risk yields no useful information when punched into the BBC news archive, The [London] Times, or Daily Telegraph. The Guardian, Independent and New York Times all make mention of it, but in no systematic way, normally simply in relation to bank earnings. (The NYT yields a review of Taleb’s second book Fooled by Randomness, that is less than complementary.)

VaR is used by the banks to determine how much the bank would lose in a given day on its assets under management given a certain fall in the markets. Banks use it to calibrate their risk management. It is a pillar of the modern banking regulatory regime. Continue reading ‘magoo finance III’

Update Whoops, looks like we lost a paragraph in the original edit.

The good people at TED, who run conferences for very clever people about even more clever people who can do presentations without Powerpoint, are promoting a great project called Pangea Day that is all about citizen film-making, or ordinary people making films. The objective is world peace through video. Easy.

Anyway, Pangea Day wants to bring together a whole bunch of video-makers in a big celebration next May aimed at reducing cultural disconnects by empowering real people to tell real stories through film. This is a global do-good thing, not a comedy gangsta rap thing (see below). The celebration looks like being a Live Aid/YouTube mashup.

So the people at TED have asked that we help this video go viral. Go here to view, comment and recommend Pangea Day on YouTube. For more information on how to participate and the full presentation from the project’s founder — documentary-maker and TED prize-winner Jehane Noujaim — visit the Pangea Day website.

And if that’s too serious for a Friday, here is that gangsta rap video on the subject of fresh fruits.This video is slightly rude, so if you are more arch than the Knackered Hack, don’t go there. To protect your limbic from the offensive material — which has generated a rather dubious lawsuit against the two brothers who made the video — here is the refrain:-

It’s all about the produce produce, we don’t like to kid
It’s the lower middle portion of the food pyramid.”

And here’s one for the evolutionary fitness crowd .

They call me razor blade because I cut veggies with precision and skill.
I cut the roots off arugula, Italian parsley, and sometimes dill”

Knackered Downunder is knackered by running

As I discovered while training for the annual Sydney City to Surf run, what’s important is not only what advice fellow weekend athletes may give you, but equally — and often more crucially — what they don’t say. And what they don’t do themselves. The run, which took place last August 12, is 14 kilometers and starts from Sydney’s Hyde Park and ends at the iconic Bondi Beach. It normally attracts some 60,000 participants.

I had started training with 8km runs, but two weeks before the event had injured my knees and was forced to withdraw. Before the injury, I had discussed the schedule with other athletic types and no one seemed to have any problem. In fact, they were all very encouraging. But after the injury — which has since mended — I discovered that many of those who were most supportive don’t actually run, in fact strenuously avoid it.

The sporty types, who included swimmers, golfers, hikers and cyclists, all confessed that they thought running was, as one put it, “actually bad for you.” All had incurred at one time some form of injury from running, and consequently avoided it like the proverbial plague; hence their enthusiasm for their own sports. One even conceded that he thought running on pavement was “crazy.” Thank you.

The injuries included damage to the knees, calf muscles, feet and ankles. The list was exhaustive. The only person of the group who still ran did so in the safety of a gym on a treadmill, where he said there was little strain.

Another who signed up for the City to Surf said — after I informed him of my injury — that his intention was always to walk it. And in an article in my local newspaper, a veteran of 19 runs said that this year — his 20th — would be his last. His next stop was a knee-reconstruction operation.

The moral is: when swapping tips with other athletes, be sure to ask them if they actually practice the advice they are dispensing. And check on their own training schedules. Do they include the activity you are talking about? And more importantly, if they don’t do it, would they?

Blogging orthodoxy seems to dictate that short posts of regular frequency represent the best strategy for maintaining a loyal readership. But here at the Knackered Hack we just keep “doing the opposite,” to quote Scott Page and Seinfeld’s George Costanza. It has indeed been a long time since the last (very short) post about memory. Sorry about that. It was not that I forgot — I’m not that dogmatic.

In a nutshell, I’ve been away. And a little busy. And also thinking hard. Now I’m back, both literally and metaphysically. So, “normal” service can now resume. But please be prepared for wide variations in post length, frequency and variety, and possibly more inclusions of pictures and other things to delight your limbic, as I get more of a handle on this Web 2.0 malarkey. Rather than a woeful lack of structure and organisation, I would frame this as a necessary preservation of playfulness and spontaneity in what might otherwise become a predictable yet likely unreadable blog.

Even less frequent a blogger is Nassim Taleb, the Knackered Hack’s favourite interviewee. He does not really have a blog in the terms understood above, but you can go here to see what he had to say about the current credit crunch. He is more regular with his home page notes, where he has an interesting item about fruits and their sweetness. (Hat tip to Paul Wilmott, whose company hosts the Taleb “blog”, while it is Art de Vany who highlights the discussion on the history of sweetness in fruits.)

In a future post I’m going to write about figs, which is connected with what Taleb is talking about. Here is a picture that includes figs, just to be going along with. Underneath all the basil is some parma ham – a delightful partner to fig.

Meanwhile, de Vany says this in response to Taleb:-

The process for producing sweetness and tenderness is selective breeding, as you [Taleb] note, and selection for neotony, the retention of juvenile traits in the adult. Ah, it seems that is true of people these days as well. Many fail to achieve adulthood. On the other hand, humans evolved a form of neotony and retain their juvenile traits of playfulness and pleasure longer than chimps and other animals. It was an advantage for our large-brained, highly social species to retain aspects of youthfulness.”

Prior to this comment, de Vany’s emphasis on play has been having a quite profound effect on Knackered Hack thinking, and much of the Knackered Family’s time away from blogging has been spent head-scratching on that particular issue. Lots more on that in future posts. And, of course, de Vany is echoed in a slightly different context by today’s news, reported in a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a group of scientists, educationists, authors, and other advocates about toxic childhood and the declining quality of children’s play in the UK.

Compelling examples [of research supporting this view] have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.”