Alan Jacobs, the author of this book is an English Professor at Wheaton College, Illinois. Given his position as a professor, his students and other people often ask him, “What are the 10 best books on literature that every educated person must read", “Dear Prof, Can you suggest some books to read this summer?”, This book is written to answer all such questions. So one might think this book is basically a recommendation type / instructional / didactic guide to reading.

Via BayesianBiologist : An excellent explanation of the fallacy that most people have about, P-value What we really want is the probability of hypotheses given our data (written as P(H | D) ), which we can obtain by applying Bayes rule. What we get from a p-value is the probability of observing something as extreme or more than our data, under the null hypothesis ( written as P(x>=D | Ho) ).

In the Feb 2012 issue of “Advanced Trading” magazine , I found these points worth noting down : 2011 was an extremely bad year for hedge funds, with Asia seeing the maximum number of fund closures. Hedge fund managers have quoted random volatility as a major reason for leaving business. The top performer in 2012 will be Commodity managers who have inside information about an underlying commodity — it is legal for them to utilize that, as opposed to equities, in which insider information is illegal.

This book contains most of the productivity hacks that one comes across in various articles/blogs/books. In one sense, this book is a laundry list of hacks that one can try out to increase productivity. A big font size for the text and rich images scattered through out the book, makes it a coffee table book. Some of the hacks that I found interesting are, On a daily basis, Try to use pen and paper at least a few minutes to work something out , be it a math problem or a back of the envelope calculation of something or simply draw images that capture whatever you are working on.

_“Unless one is happy, one cannot bestow happiness on others. Happiness is born of Peace and can reign only when there is no disturbance. __Disturbance is due to thoughts, which arise in the mind. _When the (thinking) mind is absent there will be perfect Peace.” -– Ramana Maharshi