Massive Corruption + Airlines
When the airline industry took a nose dive a decade ago, executives at global carriers scrambled to find a quick fix to avoid financial ruin.What they came up with, according to federal prosecutors, was a massive price-fixing scheme among airlines that artificially inflated passenger and cargo fuel surcharges between 2000 and 2006 to make up for lost profits.
To date, 19 executives have been charged with wrongdoing — four have gone to prison — and 21 airlines have coughed up more than $1.7 billion in fines in one of the largest criminal antitrust investigations in U.S. history.
Convicted airlines include British Airways, Korean Air, and Air France-KLM. No major U.S. carriers have been charged.
DIY Dress
The project is a successful attempt to combine self-authored design through interactive software, the internet, and digital fabrication to create an interactive clothing line.
In a Processing environment, the user draws a dress over a model, which is then triangulated and converted into a 3d model. The 3d dress is laid out to be digitally cut and hand sewn. You can design and purchase your own dress through the Continuum label, or download the pattern and cut it out yourself, free of charge.
On Longevity
Some results from an 80 year study and the book. The bottom line? Be healthy.
For instance, optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don’t follow doctor’s orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.
Marriage:
Marriage was health-promoting primarily for men who were well-suited to marriage and had a good marriage. For the rest, there were all kinds of complications.
It often seemed as if women who got rid of their troublesome husbands stayed healthy—most women, it seemed, can rely on their friends and other social ties. Men who got and stayed divorced, on the other hand, were at really high risk for premature mortality.
Work:
It was clear that working hard to overcome adversity or biting off more than you can chew—and then chewing it—does not generally pose a health risk. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive are exactly what those heading to a long life tend to do. The long-lived didn’t shy away from hard work; the exact opposite seemed true.
Open-Source Algorithmic Trading
The way this (ostensibly) works is, you write an algorithm (MATLAB or R) that is successful on a historical dataset (looks like the last 12 months), they validate it, and apply their existing capital to it, with you earning a cut with (ostensibly) no capital outlay on your own part.
That’s a pretty cool model. The nut, of course, is the capital distribution, both quantity and timing.
Other thoughts:
- Enable the workflow. There needs to be a hosted test box for experimentation and writing the scripts. That’s a product unto itself (with a constant stream of feedback) but worth it. API for that data.
- Minimize the pain. Abstract the algorithm creation process (as part of the product above) to make it as clean as possible with constant testing and adjustment tools.