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**Books I'm Reading**
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer
by Tracy Kidder
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - by Sam Harris
Contents Copyright © 2003-2008 by Brent Zupp — All Rights Reserved.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - IBM Talk
Nassim Nicholas Taleb joined a discussion at IBM about his book The Black Swan. Here are my notes from the discussion. I've added my own comments and explanations (based on his books).
As an author, Taleb tries to be universal and not customize his message to the audience. (I think he's talking about the ideas he's espousing, not the method of communicating. Your communication style HAS to consider the audience or your won't be heard.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Investment Advice
In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb teases us with the idea that we can take advantage of black swan events in our life and in our investments. I say tease because he's very short (pardon pun) on specifics in my reading. I want to try to flesh out the ideas as best I can.
Jump Start Your Business Brain - by Doug Hall
Unusually Placid Doug Hall
Jump Start Business - Doug Hall - Entertaining and provides a great, easy-to-remember model for evaluating a business idea, product, or service. At Hall's consulting firm at Eureka! Ranch, he offers workshops that focus on answering the following three questions: What is your product's...
- Overt Benefit
- Real Reason to Believe
- Dramatic Difference
BTW, Hall was a judge in the first season of American Inventor.
Long Tail - Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
Having a discussion about Anderson's book at work. Will place notes here.
Creating demand on developer sites that fit down the curve.
We're living the long tail, in terms of content and traffic. People find out content without us focusing on that. But not intentionally. What can we do with niches, what we
linking, 80% based off links to your site, 20% the content,
specialize it? PHP general, then specialize: PHP for DB2
4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris
Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss - Status-quo shattering book. I read it through once, and am starting over. The concepts are simple. Deferred living (retirement) is the worst kind of insurance. Live now. Forget abstract goals. Go for what excites you. In fact, go for specific, unreasonable goals that excite you. There's too much competition for the mediocre goals. Less competition for the unreasonable goals (John Nash was wrong; in a pick-up bar, everyone is pursuing the 8's, not the 10's.)
Ferriss makes a four hour workweek seem attainable. It takes discipline. It takes a low information diet and focusing on two principles or laws...
Fooled by Randomness - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb - Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a mind-blowing book! Totally contrarian and terrifically clear in explaining the fallacies followed by journalist, investors, traders and, sadly, many scientists.
Example: Failing to notice the difference between probability and expectation, famous commodity trader/investor Jim Rogers made this astounding statement.
Rogers confused probability with expectation.
Black Swan - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Had Nassim Taleb been born in any other period, he would have certainly been put to death.
~ Carine Chichereau, co-translator of TBS.
Black Swan and Nassim Taleb - Listened to Nassim Taleb on KQED's Forum program, and the ideas about randomness and luck drove me to his recent book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
A read it once, then started over, this time going a bit slower, trying to commune with his counter-intuitive ideas and wonderfully illustrative thought experiments. This books is such a colorful pallet of ideas that somehow connect without falling into a grand theory or trite advice. Indeed, that's part of the Taleb's message in The Black Swan. That theories are contrived and can lead us to a false sense of security or doom. Skeptical empiricism reigns over theory, narrative, and other often misguided simplifications.
8 Steps to Take If Identity Stolen
Looks like some common sense but helpful tips. I've updated #1 in the cache because others advise that you can't trust credit reporting agencies to cooperate--inform all of your situation, not just one agency.
PEG Ratio - Price/Earnings to Growth
What does PEG mean? A PEG ratio is used to determine a stock's value while taking into account earnings growth. The calculation is as follows:
PEG is a widely used indicator of a stock's potential value. It is favored by many over the price/earnings ratio because it also accounts for growth. Similar to the P/E ratio, a lower PEG means that the stock is more undervalued.
Keep in mind that the numbers used are projected numbers and, therefore, less accurate. Also, there are many variations using earnings from different time periods (i.e. one year vs five year). Be sure to know the exact definition your source is using.
Jim Cramer's Mad Money - Stock Worksheet
Jim Cramer's Mad Money
Watch TV, Get Rich
Jim Cramer Mad Money Stock Worksheet - It's embarrassing to admit, but I really get a kick out of Jim Cramer. While he's totally nuts on his CNBC TV show, Mad Money, he was much saner on his Real Money radio program. Unfortunately, the radio program is no longer on the air, though archives exist. In its place is a very good video on demand program where Cramer is interviewed by a columnist from his own TheStreet.com. Very insightful stuff with a reasonable delivery.
But about Cramer's Stock Worksheet in Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich. The book is short (less than 230 pages) and perhaps the best part is the Stock Worksheet, which outlines his approach to researching stocks -- or as he likes to refer to it, The Homework.
Web 2.0 According to O'Reilly
Soccer Kid Video
Soccer Kid - Totally cute video I found on YouTube titled Soccer Kid. Works in any language. No translation required...
Smashing The Work Clock
Found this article on Best Buy's flexible time program...looks interesting.
Best Buy smashes the clock: Inside Best Buy's radical reshaping of the workplace
If link dies, read cached copy below.
Why Understanding Economics Is Hard
Top Ten Things I Love Most About Woz By Guy Kawasaki
Dilbert's 9 Point Financial Plan
Dilbert creator Scott Adams claims this is "everything you need to know about personal investing":
- Make a will
- Pay off your credit cards
- Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
- Fund your 401k to the maximum
- Fund your IRA to the maximum
- Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
- Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
- Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
- If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
Scott Adams calls it his Unified Theory of Everything Financial.
He might be right.
Jeremy Siegel's "Noisy Market" Hypothesis
Below is Siegel's article, Noisy Market Hypothesis. I've highlighted many of the important points I found. Hope to discuss further.
By JEREMY J. SIEGEL
Although the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average approached its all-time high in early May, the large capitalization-weighted indexes—such as the S&P 500 or the Russell 3000—in which most investors hold their "indexed" investments are still substantially below their tech-bloated peaks reached in March 2000. Those of us who have linked our portfolio returns to these popular indexes wonder whether there is a better way to capture the market's return without enduring the wild swings that characterized the last bubble.
Don't get me wrong. Capitalization-weighted indexation has been one of the great innovations in the last quarter-century. It has allowed millions of investors to capture the return on the market at a very small cost, and has outperformed most actively managed mutual funds. The $5 trillion invested in portfolios tracking cap-weighted indexes speaks to its popularity.
Fritjof Capra's Management Lessons
Lesson #1
A living social system is a self-generating network of communications. The aliveness of an organization resides in its informal networks, or communities of practice. Bringing life into human organizations means empowering their communities of practice.
Lesson #2
You can never direct a social system; you can only disturb it. A living network chooses which disturbances to notice and how to respond. A message will get through to people in a community of practice when it is meaningful to them.
Lesson #3
The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.
Lesson #4
In addition to holding a clear vision, leadership involves facilitating the emergence of novelty by building and nurturing networks of communications; creating a learning culture in which questioning is encouraged and innovation is rewarded; creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes.
