week 2 and 3
Ctr F
see perusall (below)
cherchez la femme
follow the money
cui bono?
Adani and Hindenburg
Companies that have been the subjects of their reports include Adani Group, Nikola,[7] Clover Health,[8] Kandi,[9] and Lordstown Motors.[10] These reports also feature defenses of the practice of short-selling and how they "play a critical role in exposing fraud and protecting investors" while holding short positions in the company before publishing reports.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_Research
Adani Hindenburg
hedge funds … predict the future?
Price of pork- pork futures, dependent on geopolitics and the weather- crops, food
or insider tradung
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-20-biggest-hedge-funds-2022/
Steve Cohen
Steve Cohen founded the former SAC Capital, and is now at Point 72 Asset Management, a family office located in Stamford, Conn.1 Despite the conviction of several former SAC employees on account of their insider trading, Cohen was not criminally charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission.2
He was estimated to have a net worth of almost $12 billion in 2021, according to Bloomberg. Although banned from 2016 to 2018 from managing external assets, Cohen still manages the assets of his family and employees, which are substantially less than the billions managed at SAC, though they're still a significant amount.34
George Soros
George Soros started his first fund in 1969 and became the unofficial founding father of hedge funds. Opening his first hedge fund in 1973, Soros Fund Management, Soros later launched the philanthropic Open Society Foundations in 1979.5 He still remains the chair of Soros Fund Management LLC.6
Although the firm no longer manages external assets, he continues to be intimately involved in his family fund. He has become a teacher to many and will always be known for his philanthropic endeavors, financial savviness, and his famous shorting of the British pound, which earned him the moniker “the man who broke the Bank of England.” Soros was worth an estimated $8 billion in 2021 and has donated more than $30 billion to charitable causes throughout his tenure.67
James Simons
James Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, is perhaps the most well-known mathematician of the group. The flagship Medallion fund is also among the most elusive and secretive of his funds, and it makes consistent returns. Renaissance focuses on quantitative investing with other funds and is invite-only for new investors. Simons, a retiree like Soros, continues to be involved in the firm and benefit from its success.8
9
Daniel Loeb
Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point Capital, has been nicknamed “the activist” for his dogged way of going after companies. He is not content with simply owning or shorting stocks but wants a chance to influence companies from appointed board positions.10
Loeb's net worth is estimated at $4.2 billion, and he has served on five publicly traded boards: Ligand Pharmaceuticals, POGO Producing Co., Massey Energy, Sotheby’s, and Yahoo. He is also philanthropically active in education reform and Alzheimer's research.1011
Carl Icahn
Carl Icahn is one of the most influential investment minds in the world. If Loeb is considered “the activist” then Icahn could be nicknamed the “father of activism.” He has both a powerful presence and the confidence to make large bets based on his convictions. He is also a famous contrarian investor, often buying shares of companies that nobody else seems to want.
In the 1980s, Icahn created a name for himself as a corporate raider or a vulture capitalist, taking large equity positions in public companies and demanding extreme changes to their corporate governance. Since then, his philanthropy efforts have gone toward advancement in medicine, supporting education by opening seven charter schools, and establishing the Children's Rescue Fund.12
John Paulson
John Paulson of Paulson and Co. has made many good calls in his career, but the most well known is probably his bet against the subprime housing market before it imploded. In 2007, he famously used credit default swaps (CDS) to effectively sell the U.S. subprime mortgage lending market short. His firm boasts several funds, and he also has a highly sought-after merger arbitrage strategy.17
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042015/10-most-famous-hedge-fund-managers.asp
Insider trading
presumption of innocence
Benefits and limits of « presumption of veracity » in the judicial treatment of sexual and gender-based violences".
Lie to me
microexpressions
Greta and Harry and Bill,
populism:
a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
feedback
All Vaclav wants is for people to look at all the areas of emissions—producing electricity, manufacturing, transportation, and so on—and propose realistic, economically viable plans for reducing emissions in each one.
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs Marketing Lesson #7: Find an Enemy
Think about Coca Cola versus Pepsi and all their media battles over time. Make it clear who the enemy is, and try to get people to take a side.
Choosing sides is part of human behavior and was introduced as an idea by the French social psychologists Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon. The herd mentality or mob mentality is what happens when the collective consciousness occurs in a group of people influenced and pressured by the masses to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase products. The desire to belong and to explain the disorder of the world makes consumers feel better about belonging to the ideology of a brand that matches their own thoughts and values. If you don’t stand up for what you believe in, you’ll go unnoticed.
https://postcron.com/en/blog/10-amazing-marketing-lessons-steve-jobs-taught-us/
The economy
“The firms manage funds invested by large institutions like pension funds and university endowments as well as those for companies and, in some cases, individual investors like me and perhaps you, too. Their holdings are colossal. BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments. Vanguard has $8 trillion, and State Street has $4 trillion. Their combined $22 trillion in managed assets is the equivalent of more than half of the combined value of all shares for companies in the S&P 500 (about $38 trillion). Their power is expected to grow. An analysis published in the Boston University Law Review in 2019 estimated that the Big Three could control as much as 40 percent of shareholder votes in the S&P 500 within two decades.
John Coates, a professor at Harvard Law School, has written that the growth of indexation and the Big Three means that in the future, about a dozen people at investment firms will hold power over most American companies. What happens when so few people control so much? Researchers have argued that this level of concentration will reduce companies’ incentives to compete with one another. This makes a kind of intuitive sense: For example, because Vanguard is the largest shareholder in both Ford and General Motors, why would it benefit from competition between the two?
Einer Elhauge, also of Harvard Law School, has written that concentrated ownership “poses the greatest anticompetitive threat of our time, mainly because it is the one anticompetitive problem we are doing nothing about.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/opinion/vanguard-power-blackrock-state-street.html
How many times is a barrel of oil traded?
4.04 1k and 10K
0.5 to 1.1
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/where-all-oil-going-part-2
“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
Fight club
Keynes 1923 publication, The Tract on Monetary Reform. The fuller quote is “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”
https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/how-long-long-run
Zero Hedge maintains financial views/theories which are considered conspiratorial, and/or hard-to-prove or unprovable;[71][24] notable views include:[h]
Price manipulation by high-frequency trading ("HFT"). The belief that investment banks/funds use HFT/"dark pools" to manipulate prices;[i]
Precious metals manipulation. The belief that investment banks manipulate precious metals prices to suit their derivative books;[j]
Plunge-protection-team ("PPT"). The belief that central banks intervene in markets on a frequent, almost daily basis, to support prices;[k]
U.S banks front running the U.S. FED. The belief that U.S. investment banks, most profitable of all global investment banks, have knowledge of PPT trades;[l]
Market illiquidity. The belief that market liquidity, when HFT and PPT flows are taken out, is low, implying prices are artificial;[m]
Chinese fraud. The belief that Chinese economic data is made-up, and that many Chinese companies are fraudulent (called "fraudcaps" by the site);[n]
Manipulation of house prices. The belief that central bankers, Mark Carney as most typical,[o] use houses as stimulus, by loosening mortgage terms.[p]
from wikipedia
Trainspotting choose life
Orwell- Violence?
***********
How to learn a language? Improve level?
Mistakes, Performance errors,
six pack, bar of chocolate
Analogies- sport, fitness, musical instrument
Just do it- speak.
Grammar Mcnuggets
Murphy
science
fake results- power posing -
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/10/18/beyond-power-pose-using-replication-failures-better-understanding-data-collection-analysis-better-science/
**********************
How do you measure empathy or being a nicer person?
"Being bilingual might also make you a nicer person. There is, says Chung-Fat-Yim, some connection between bilingualism and a theory of mind — the ability to attribute mental states to other people. Bilingual children must know that, say, speaker A can understand both languages, but speaker B can understand only one. The bilingual person has to have “an awareness that different people can hold different mental states about the same event,” she says. The authors of a 2016 study on theory of mind and empathy in bilinguals think that it’s likely that bilinguals also develop greater empathy.
Having a second language can also help to prevent — or at least delay — cognitive decline. “There is a consistent finding that bilinguals are able to stave off symptoms of dementia for about four to six years compared to monolinguals,” says Grundy. And that’s pretty impressive considering the best medications we have can postpone the symptoms for only about a year or
so."
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-learning-a-language-changes-your-brain
the Hawthorne effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02rz5r8
More or less tim harford
From .30 to 3.50 automaton
5.55 to empirical fact to 7.24
Feynman on Millikan-
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
Thornbury and Grammar McNuggets
“What I wanted to capture was not just the discrete-item nature of the grammar syllabus, but the way that this is exploited, particularly by publishers, for the purposes of the global marketing of EFL. To do this, I drew on a construct, familiar to students of cultural studies, and first developed by Stuart Hall, called “the circuit of culture”. The circuit of culture is a construct for the analysis of cultural artefacts that has been applied to a range of objects, including the Sony Walkman. Du Gay (1997), for example, argues that
to study the Walkman culturally one should at least explore how it is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use. (p. 3)
Applying this model to pedagogical grammar, I was curious to see how grammar is represented (e.g. in publishers’ catalogues), how it is produced — or better — reproduced, how it is consumed in the classroom, how it is regulated (e.g. by exam boards), and who identifies with it (e.g. what ideas and values are associated with an allegiance to grammar teaching).”
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/g-is-for-grammar-mcnuggets/
Adrian Underhill
As Scott implies (“……grammar is artificially packaged into bite-sized chunks for the purposes of teaching …”) a critical look at pedagogic grammar could unpack a host of power structures and vested interests keeping it all in place and telling us as much about ourselves, its constructors, as about grammar.
2. In my case the need for a holistic approach to grammar teaching and learning has been much inspired by Gattegno’s approach, which is to let go of the traditional grammatical categories, start (nearly) anywhere with what engages the student and from there track and facilitate learning wherever it may lead, while exercising subtle guidance to keep the growth bushy. This of course does not work with a presentation-practice model, and requires a quite different set of teaching / learning techniques to service it. In fact it works rather badly with off-the-shelf direct method or communicative methodology. My point is that content and teaching method exert a pull on each other, with grammar McNuggets being matched by activity McNuggets
“The grammar we teach is way downstream from the phenomenon it purports to describe…”
Scott
That’s a great image, Adrian, which I will immediately appropriate! In fact, it’s not dissimilar to the claim made by emergentists, to the effect that grammar is a kind of precipitate that, over time, ‘falls to the bottom’ and solidifies. Or, as Hopper puts it:
“Grammar is seen as … the set of sedimented conventions that have been routinized out of the more frequently occurring ways of saying things…”
Steve Brown https://stevebrown70.wordpress.com/tag/efl/
power
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/p-is-for-power/ feedback
Where are the women in ELT? talk, it’s available now https://genderequalityelt.wordpress.com/where-are-the-women-in-elt-iatefl-talk/
https://genderequalityelt.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/the-research/
Nicola Prentis says on Decentralised Teaching blog (final comment): http://decentralisedteachingandlearning.com/iatefl-calling/
1 Il s'agit du meilleur cours de langue auquel j'ai assisté de ma vie. Le professeur était vraiment là pour nous faire progresser, d'un point de vue collectif mais également en individuel. Les exercices correspondaient complètement à mes attentes et m'ont fait progressé, tout en me redonnant confiance en mon anglais. Le professeur s'investissait vraiment dans chacun des cours, notamment en adaptant totalement le cours en fonction des retours des élèves (sujets, exercices proposées, mais également formats, outils numériques...). 2 Les cours étaient très captivants. Monsieur Wiffin est très pédagogue et attend beaucoup de participation, ce qui est très bien pour un cours de langue. 3 Professeur dynamique et enjoué. 4 Professeur très sympathique bien que très orienté. Les sujets abordés étaient intéressants, parfois très complexes et difficiles à appréhender en anglais et à une heure aussi tardive (lundi 19h). Je suis particulièrement reconnaissant pour les correction très rapide et en particulier pour mon dernier devoir rendu hors délai 5 Beaucoup de vidéos. 6 - Les exercices demandés (2 essays) étaient plutôt cohérents, et les sujets intéressants. 7 Professeur très sympathique et engagé dans sa matière. 8 - I appreciated the organisation of the class (lots of debates, short presentations with discussions) - The topics we discussed were quite unusual, it was fine - I also think that the essays we had to write were a good way to evaluate us, it helped me to progress on some points. The worload was well-balanced. - A fun and dynamic class, even though it was at the end of the day and we were sometimes a bit tired, Mr. Wiffin made it very dynamic and not boring at all, which was great ! 9 Un enseignant très dynamique et original dans sa façon d'organiser les cours, j'ai beaucoup apprécier traiter ces sujets d'actualité et l'importante participation orale que ça a engendré. Exercices pour l'IELTS a chaque séance sans que ça ne dure trop longtemps ! Petites classes très agréables 10 Même si le créneau n'est pas le meilleur, le cours est stimulant intellectuellement car il explore des sujets très variés, parfois surprenants et sous des angles inattendus. 11 Une approche très originale de l'actualité. J'ai beaucoup appréciée le dynamisme du professeur malgré l'heure tardive de notre classe. 12 Dynamisme Travail des compétences pour le TOEFL, notamment le speaking. Charge de travail adaptée 13 Beaucoup d'expression orale Direction de la formation initiale Quels ont été les points forts de votre expérience d’apprentissage dans cet enseignement ? / What were the strongest aspects of your learning experience in this course? 14 Beaucoup de discussions orales et de débats avec les élèves - très appréciable. 15 prof super investi et très drôle 16 un enseignement de langue intéressant, agréable et dynamique. Comment pourrait-on enrichir l’expérience d’apprentissage dans cet enseignement ? / How could the learning experience improve in this course? 1 Le seul point négatif du cours était son horaire, qui était un peu tard. Sinon, tout était super. 2 Peut-être se concentrer plus sur la préparation du TOEFL 3 Horaire tardive pour des langues vivantes. 4 Les cours manquent de dynamisme, je regrette que les élèves n'aient pas davantage d'interactions entre eux. Difficile de progresser car on n'ose pas prendre la parole et globalement le professeur parle 90% du temps. Je pense qu'il serait utile de faire davantage d'exercice type TOEFFL ou IELTS pour nous entraîner en conditions réelles. 5 Peut-être moins de vidéos cherchant à faire parler et plus de dialogues organisés entre les étudiants. 6 - J'ai trouvé le contenu du cours très faible, en termes d'enseignements grammaticaux et de vocabulaire. Il y avait très peu de temps consacré à ce genre d'éléments. - Les sujets abordés étaient particulièrement orientés politiquement et je ne me sentais pas à l'aise à exprimer mes opinions, et donc à parler anglais, dans ce cours. Des propos climatosceptiques, voire sexistes, ont régulièrement été tenus et il était compliqué d'exprimer une opinion divergente de celle du professeur. Ce dernier projetait presque toujours sa propre opinion sur nous, ce qui n'était pas un climat bienveillant pour s'exprimer. -
perusall week 2
Consider gasoline & television as drugs. After all, they give you experiences that change your consciousness which you could not achieve without them and every objection you've outlined to alcohol, tobacco and meth applies to them.
- Massive negative externalities: We're on the verge of hitting 420 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and that's definitely not nice.
- Vast amounts of time significantly impaired: Have you ever looked at someone else transfixed by a TV show and wondered how different their subjective experience is compared to getting high?
- Tens of thousands killed every year: Only a small portion of the increase in obesity in the US over the past 40 years needs to be attributable to increased TV watching before you're looking at a cause of morbidity & mortality that's on par with lung & mouth cancer.
- Heavily vested interests resist any effort to control use: Well, hell, heavily vested interests protecting their ability to extract economic rent characterizes every aspect of American life these days. How is this any different? Furthermore, now that tobacco smokers have to go outside (because the law does have a role here when it comes to direct impacts of one person's behavior on other people's lives), how do smokers' choices affect my life?
I don't believe Carl Hart when he says that he's not addicted to heroin. I don't think it's wise for people to mess with their opioid receptors for fun because each of us is likely to need those drugs for pain control in the second half of our lives. However, people do things every day that I think are stupid. The salient question is what the threshold for the law to intervene should be.
I favor taking the use of drugs out of the legal framework to a substantial degree since it's not a particularly useful frame. Addicted people need a doctor & a counselor, not a cop & a judge. However, the law should heavily punish behavior under the influence of drugs that risks other people's lives. For instance, in Germany the legal drinking age is 14 with your family and 16 on your own, but if you're caught drinking & driving they drop the hammer on you first time. That, to me, strikes the proper balance between a citizen's civil liberties and societal obligations. Raising children, as always, complicates this question of the state's proper role in the lives of its citizens considerably. I believe addiction is punishment enough and if the government can help parents get clean & sober, that seems considerably more likely to help their children than putting parents in prison.
From Michael Feltes Jun 9, 2021
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-175/comment/2148542
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
David Graeber
From http://gesd.free.fr/graeber13.pdf
All videos and texts from week 1 are here-
Presentations
Ranla 30/3
Félix 16/3
Romain 23/2
Chloé 2/2
Lorenza
Marouane 2/2
Alec 16/2
Hélène 30/3
Sakina 23/3
Jade
Thomas 9/2
Nicolas 16/2
Lily 6/4
Titouan 7/2
Zacharie 23/2
Marie 6/4
Julien 9/3
Claire 13/4