What a person in the know should know, as defined by Harvard…looking conservative to me

What we’re saying is that an educated person should have a certain set of capacities: inter-pretive capacities, problem-solving capacities, reflective capacities and critical capacities to help them through the world,” she said.

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required to take one course in each of eight categories. These include: science of living systems; science of the physical universe; societies of the world, which would cover ethnic identity, statehood and government; empirical reasoning, which would include courses on evaluating data; and ethical reasoning, which would cover philosophy, political theory and religion.

The three other areas are: aesthetic and interpretive understanding, which focuses on cultural expression, such as literature, art and music

Long lag between peak in margins and begining of recession (Surprise,surprise)

from BCAr

It used to be a secret

The t statistic was introduced by William Sealy Gosset for cheaply monitoring the quality of beer brews. “Student” was his pen name. Gosset was a statistician for the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was hired due to Claude Guinness’s innovative policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to apply biochemistry and statistics to Guinness’ industrial processes. Gosset published the t test in Biometrika in 1908, but was forced to use a pen name by his employer who regarded the fact that they were using statistics as a trade secret

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-test

Linear regression

In statistics, linear regression is a regression method that allows the relationship between y, the dependent, or response, variable, and the x, the independent, or explanatory, variable, in the case, where the model can be written as

where is the matrix representing the independent variable and β is a vector representing the co-efficients. This method can be contrasted with non-linear regression.

This method is called “linear” because the relation of the response to the explanatory variables is assumed to be a linear function of some parameters. It is often erroneously thought that the reason the technique is called “linear regression” is that the graph of y = ax + b is a line. But in fact, if the model is (for example)

(in which case we have put the vector in the role formerly played by X and the vector (β,γ) in the role formerly played by β), then the problem is still one of linear regression, even though the graph is not a straight line.

Way before Hume

That there are many who persuade themselves that there is a difficulty in knowing Him is due to the scholastic maxim that there is nothing in the understanding which has not first been in the senses; where the ideas of God and the soul have never been.

r.descartes

Vehicle to flip-flop China IPOs – now thats what you call bull market exposure

Macquarie unveils pioneering fund to invest in China IPOs

By Tom Mitchell in Hong Kong

Published: January 26 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 26 2007 02:00

The craze for Chinese listings has inspired a pioneering fund that will automatically liquidate hot new stocks within months of their purchase and reinvest the proceeds in yet more initial public offerings. Macquarie’s IPO China Concentrated Core Fund will employ a “rotational strategy” to invest in Chinese companies’ debuts in Hong Kong, Singapore, the US and other overseas markets. The fund will operate through a “rules-based process” under which it will sell its longest-held positions to free capital for forthcoming flotations that meet the fund’s criteria.The fund – unveiled in Hong Kong yesterday and due to commence in March – comes on the heels of a blistering year for China issues, during which Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the country’s biggest bank, and Bank of China raised a combined $28bn (£14.1bn) on the Hong Kong stock exchange and another $8bn in Shanghai.

ICBC’s offering, the world’s biggest, attracted global subscription orders in excess of $500bn. With such competition for ICBC and other China-related offerings, investors frequently receive only a fraction of the shares they subscribe for.

“We put [this product] together to fill a gap in the market,” said Nick Thompson, head of non-flow structured products sales at Macquarie Equities (Asia). “People are going for IPOs but [their allocations] are being scaled back.”

Mr Thompson added that the fund would offer “one-day” punters the opportunity to invest on a longer-term basis. Citing Bloomberg data for the first half of 2006, Macquarie noted that China-related listings in Hong Kong, Singapore and the US paid an average return of more than 25 per cent on the first day of trading and almost 50 per cent in the first week. But investors who held shares for three months did best, realising an average return of about 90 per cent.

The length of time the fund holds the China stocks it acquires will depend on the number of newer issues in which it needs to invest. The stronger the pipeline, the more positions it will liquidate to invest in fresh offerings.

“This strategy means investors now have a vehicle that can capture the longer-term growth in China’s newly listed companies and offers them a disciplined approach to IPO investing,” said Sonia Cheung, head of flow structured product sales for Macquarie Equities.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Arcibishop Chrysostomos II says the church would by more shares

Archbishop vows to back Cypriot bank

By Kerin Hope

Published: January 23 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 23 2007 02:00

Bank of Cyprus, the island’s biggest lender, has some powerful friends.

Last week, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, head of the island’s Orthodox church, denounced a takeover bid by Marfin Popular Bank, a Nicosia-based lender controlled by Greece’s Marfin group.

var mpusky = new Advert(AD_MPUSKY);mpusky.init();

The church is BoC’s third-largest shareholder, with a stake of about 5 per cent. Archbishop Chrysostomos said it was prepared to buy more shares to “ensure that a Greek Cypriot bank is not looted by foreigners”.

Nearly 80 per cent of the shares in BoC are held by retail investors and international funds, making it vulnerable. But it has the status of a Greek Cypriot national champion. Almost every Greek Cypriot family owns shares in BoC, as well as savings at the bank.

The Cyprus securities and exchange commission last week told Marfin Popular to withdraw its hostile bids for BoC and Greece’s Piraeus Bank because Marfin was itself the target of a takeover attempt by Piraeus Bank.

But analysts in Nicosia expect Marfin Popular to stage a counter-attack. The bank’s board meets in Nicosia today under the chairmanship of Soud Ba’alawy, chief executive at Dubai Financial, to decide its next move. The Gulf state’s investment arm holds a 16 per cent stake in the bank through its participation in the Greek parent company.

BoC rejected the “friendly” offer from Piraeus, its biggest single shareholder with an 8.2 per cent shareholding. It said the terms of the Greek bank’s cash and shares offer, which valued BoC at €5.9bn ($7.6bn), did not provide for “equal co-operation” and failed to take into account BoC’s potential for growth.

Mr Eliades says BoC, which is listed on the Athens and Nicosia stock exchanges, “is not allergic to co-operation if the risks are low and the result would be a higher level of performance”. But growth in eastern Europe will be the priority for the next two years, he says.

Having fended off two takeover attempts this month by Greek-owned banks, the bank is turning its attention to new ventures in Russia and Romania. Branches in Moscow and Bucharest, due to open this year, would at first be supported by BoC’s existing customer base of companies working in eastern Europe.

“These markets are familiar, and we’ll be serving customers that we know well. But at the same time we’ll look for acquisitions to accelerate growth,” Mr Eliades says.

Funds from abroad, mainly Russia, make up an estimated 40 per cent of BoC’s C£18bn ($40bn) domestic deposit base. Treaties on the avoidance of double taxation, signed under communism, have contributed to making Cyprus a centre for international companies working in eastern Europe.

BoC can point to a successful start-up in Greece, where it has a 4 per cent market share, the largest held by a foreign bank. In Cyprus, it increased lending last year by 19 per cent, up from 10 per cent the previous year. According to analysts’ projections, 2006 profits would more than double to €290m.

Archbishop Chrysostomos could yet have a fight on his hands.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Conservation of energy ( its not a mechanism??)

During a 1961 lecture for undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a celebrated physics teacher and a Nobel Laureate, said this about the concept of energy:

“

There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy [it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes]. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.