Via Derman : If You Use a Model, You Are Short Volatility All models are analogies, and being analogies, they are limited in their scope. In physics you can describe ice, water and steam, and the phase transitions between them, with one unified theory, amazingly, and hence you can handle the extremes of freezing and boiling. In finance or economics we have nothing like that. Even beautiful Black-Scholes-Merton ignores volatility variations, illiquidity, panic, government regulations on shorting, to name just a few things that lie outside it.

Stanford professor,John Perry, distills the essence of academic life : The Academic Trough Being a Full Professor has a lot to be said for it. You are a duke or duchess in the medieval institution of the university. You receive a good salary, as big and nice an office as your department has available, first choice of class hours, and a lot of nice other perks. And there is also the wisdom and balanced judgment that comes with age.

A nice lecture explaining the infra needed to develop, maintain and release an R package

I have always wanted to write Python code for cleansing real time data. Now that I have at least a working knowledge of R, I hope the transition from R to python would be a little easier as there are a lot of similarities between them. Drew Conway from NYU gives a brief 20 min. talk on the similarities and differences between R and Python. http://static.vcasmo.com/swf/vcasmo.swf

Dan Roam, the author of popular books “The Back of the Napkin” and “Unfolding the Napkin”, has written a new book with a message that one must fuse our linear wordy based thought process with pictures/images/visuals to comprehend things in a better way. Well, this message is not something new. Presentations with visuals catch our attention rather than the boring bullet point slides. To some extent my book summaries might also be boring as they are merely words, although I try to put in some visuals to make it interesting.