Oat milk sales surge as more consumers go dairy-free
Milk from cows or from soya beans or almonds is passe. The new fad is milk from oats. “The scramble for oat milk is so intense that Oatly, a large Swedish producer, has been forced to delay production of certain products so that it can meet demand in existing markets such as the US and the […]
WhatsApp’s child porn problem: Google and Facebook’s ad networks funded apps that led users to groups on the private messenger that are dedicated to swapping illegal images
In case you thought that the worst thing about social media is that it allows facists and religious fundamentals to spread hatred, think again. In the last week of December two charities in Israel dedicated to online safety, Netivei Reshet and Screensaverz, published research showing that WhatsApp is now the favoured method to circulate child […]
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
More of Taleb this week, this one is by Taleb. In his usual scathingly critical style, he has a go at psychologists and their use of IQ as a measure of intelligence with plenty of evidence showing the corelation is non-existent, except that lower IQ levels do prove mental disability. “…consider that if someone has […]
Bitter Bill – India’s transgender community is going to be policed by a bill which gives the Government the right to examine their bodies
In case you are on those people who spends her waking hours worrying what will happen in the next General Election or some other pressing matter of national import, here is a public policy issue which should make you sit up. The Lok Sabha has passed a Bill which says that when a parent or […]
Blowing up – How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.
“Taleb runs Empirica Capital out of an anonymous concrete office park in the woods on the outskirts of Greenwich, Connecticut…. Empirica follows a very particular investment strategy. It trades options, which is to say that it deals not in stocks and bonds but in the volatility of stocks and bonds… Nassim Taleb and his team […]
Marcellus: Does Spirituality Help Improve Clarity of Thought?
Published on: 11 Jan, 2019 Any activity which entails making a call on the future is as much about managing emotions as it is about rational analysis. Investing therefore is always and everywhere a dance between these two elements – reason & emotion. We find that spirituality (i.e. reducing clutter in our lives, increasing focus […]
Retreat from private infrastructure projects
20 years ago there was lots of discussion in India about how to attract more private sector investment in infrastructure. Then between 2004-11 India saw a boom in private sector investment in infrastructure. For a variety of reasons that did not go down well with the public and with the banking system. So now again, […]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING – Powerful Predictors: Diagnosing Cancer in India Using AI
“In India, approximately 74,000 women die from cervical cancer every year, accounting for 1/3rd of the burden of cervical cancer deaths globally. Less than 10,000 pathologists must service a population of 1.3 billion people…Aindra Systems, a tech start-up from India, has developed an innovative workaround. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to provide point-of-care cervical cancer detection, […]
Climate Change Drives Fish Into New Waters, Remaking an Industry
The fishing grounds are shifting northward as water temperatures rise, forcing crews to retool their boats and rework their businesses. This WSJ article says: “Aboard the Stanley K and the Oracle, two 58-foot vessels, Buck Laukitis and his crews chase halibut across the Bering Sea worth $5 a pound at the docks. As sea temperatures […]
Intellectual humility – the importance of knowing you might be wrong
A paradoxical attempt by Brian Resnick to bat for intellectual humility especially among social scientists backed by research from….social scientists/psychologists. “…We need more intellectual humility for two reasons. One is that our culture promotes and rewards overconfidence and arrogance (think Trump and Theranos, or the advice your career counselor gave you when going into job interviews). […]
Beyond the bottom line: should business put purpose before profit?
A fairly balanced and constructive debate around the need for ‘purposeful capitalism’, that can even carry the most ardent of Friedman’s followers. “Milton Friedman’s argument that for a company to pursue anything other than (legal) profit would be “pure and unadulterated socialism”” effectively underpinned the unbridled rise of capitalism over the last 50yrs. Of late though, criticisms […]
Too rich to jail
Maureen Dowd says that the rise of populist politicians like Trump is due to the failure of the American political system and Barack Obama to punish the Wall Street bankers who wrecked the economy and the lives of millions of people in 2008. She says, “We let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free […]
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