An article from Nature,”Do Scientists really need a PhD” ? talks about BGI in Shenzen, a research center where almost no one has a PhD . Can they churn out cool stuff ? I think they will. Ken Robinson says in his TED talk that there is an academic inflation all around us. For jobs that require BA, you need to have an MA. For jobs that need an MA, you need to have a Phd and so on… So Very True!

Wonderful Piece by Andy Grove : Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto, California, restaurant introduced me to his companions: three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.

Here is an interesting peace by Michael Mauboussin @ Legg Mason. Takeaways : Two main ways to assess skill and luck are Analysis of Persistence of Performance Reversion to the mean Skill as a measure of persistence Rate of reversion as a measure of Luck Analogy of Change and No Change is a nice point where Change happens in the type of winners seen and No Change happens in the variation of performances.

Dan Ariely in his book talk :  We have an intuitive idea of stuff and we continue to work under the “spell” of our intuitions. But it is wise , despite our internal resistance, to check our intuitions from time to time. Collect data , Do a Survey , Simulate stuff , etc to empirically test your intuition and you will be amazed at the numerous ill conceived intuitions that we keep holding on to.

The book begins by giving a very quick overview of derivatives pricing, stochastic vol models, risk neutral pricing and ends the first chapter by giving couple of motivating examples where loosely coupled joined distributions given marginals , are used to price options . Chapter 2: Bivariate Copulas Copula is a type of function . But a very special function which maps marginals to joint. Hence one needs to be aware about the nature of the function and also its limitations.