These are my links for July 27th:

• Chinese-American Children Sent to Live With Kin Abroad Face Tough Return – NYTimes.com – “I advise all Chinese families, do not send your kids away, no matter how hard, because that loss cannot be made up,” she said. “Money is not so important. Nothing can make up for the sensation of love between parents and children.”

These are my links for July 25th:

• NASWA WWW Shortwave Listening Guide –

These are my links for July 24th:

• Oh glory be! 8 stones in one month! – Go Discussions – Following the advice of the good people here, I shifted from a few long, leisurely face-to-face games a week, to banging out fast games on KGS. And I shifted from slowly doing a few hard go problems, to running through easy ones until they became natural.

These are my links for July 21st through July 22nd:

• YouTube – This Week in Public Comment – OMG!
• The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone – Goldman Sachs is SATAN!

These are my links for July 20th:

• Nassim Taleb: clown of quantitative finance « Locklin on science – As such, Taleb is merely setting himself up as some sort of heretical alpha monkey of the quants for stating the obvious, the misleading, and occasionally the gratuitously wrong-headed and untrue. – LOL HERETICAL ALPHA MONKEY OF THE QUANTS
• TheHill.com – IG: Treasury ‘failed’ to adopt bailout safeguards – Barofsky said that while the TARP program that Congress passed amounts to $700 billion, the total federal government support since 2007 for the economy and the financial sector could reach a far higher figure of $23.7 trillion. The government has committed significantly more money through a variety of other federal agencies and programs. 24 TRILLION DOLLARS??????

These are my links for July 19th through July 20th:

• Stocks, Oil Rise on Optimism Earnings Show Slump Is Bottoming – Bloomberg.com – “Corporate profits are beating expectations by their widest margins in a year, pushing most equity markets within a whisker of new year-to-date highs and the dollar toward its 2009 lows,” John Normand, head of global currency strategy at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in London, wrote in a research note. – PUMPED UP WITH STIMULUS MONEY
• Stocks, Oil Rise on Optimism Earnings Show Slump Is Bottoming – Bloomberg.com – “Corporate profits are beating expectations by their widest margins in a year, pushing most equity markets within a whisker of new year-to-date highs and the dollar toward its 2009 lows,” John Normand, head of global currency strategy at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in London, wrote in a research note. – PUMPED UP WITH STIMULUS MONEY
• Who coined"Chillax?" – I found this funny.
• Frank McCourt, Author of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ Dies at 78 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com – I’d say to myself, ‘Well, someday you’ll think it’s funny.’ And the other part of my head will say: ‘No, you won’t — you’ll never think this is funny. This is the most miserable experience you’ve ever had.’ But later on you look back and you say, ‘That was funny, that was absurd.’ ”

These are my links for July 18th:

• Northern Gray Treefrog – Northern Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor) and Southern (Cope’s) Gray Treefrog (Hyla
  chrysoscelis) Southern Gray Treefrog is a State Endangered Species
• Northern Gray Treefrog – Northern Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor) and Southern (Cope’s) Gray Treefrog (Hyla
  chrysoscelis) Southern Gray Treefrog is a State Endangered Species
• Hyla chrysoscelis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – We found this little guy on our deck after the wicked overnight wind/rain storm

These are my links for July 17th through July 18th:

• Chinese Question Police Absence in Ethnic Riots – NYTimes.com – The bloodletting here on July 5, in which ethnic Uighurs pummeled and stabbed ethnic Han to death, was just the latest episode in a nationwide upswing in large-scale street violence that had already prompted concerned officials in Beijing to look for new ways to defuse such outbursts. In all of the recent cases, not only were officials and security forces unable to contain the violence, but average people clashed with the police en masse — a sign of the profound distrust of local authority throughout much of China.
• Atheist Melon | Unreasonable Faith – If the roles were reversed. Brilliant.
• AAR Railroad Reporting Marks – An AAR (Association of American Railroads) reporting mark is two to four letters that uniquely identifies the owner of a piece of railroad rolling stock. The reporting mark is generally derived from the assigned company's initials. All cars in interchange service must be labeled with a reporting mark.
• AAR Railroad Reporting Marks – An AAR (Association of American Railroads) reporting mark is two to four letters that uniquely identifies the owner of a piece of railroad rolling stock. The reporting mark is generally derived from the assigned company's initials. All cars in interchange service must be labeled with a reporting mark.
• Investors.com – It’s Not An Option – It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.

These are my links for July 17th:

• Sudden Debt: A Plan For Debt Relief – Debt relief must happen within the context of comprehensive transformation of the economy. It would make no sense whatsoever to provide debt relief, only to see borrowing come roaring back.

These are my links for July 15th through July 16th:

• Xavier Llorà » Blog Archive » Large Scale Data Mining using Genetics-Based Machine Learning – We are living in the peta-byte era.We have larger and larger data to analyze, process and transform into useful answers for the domain experts. Robust data mining tools, able to cope with petascale volumes and/or high dimensionality producing human-understandable solutions are key on several domain areas. Genetics-based machine learning (GBML) techniques are perfect candidates for this task, among others, due to the recent advances in representations, learning paradigms, and theoretical modeling.
• Edward O. Thorp – His hedge funds and his personal portfolio have been profitable in 42 of the subsequent 43 years. Based on his work, he and Jay Regan launched the first market neutral hedge fund in 1969. Dr. Thorp, with Claude Shannon, also invented the first wearable computer in 1961 to win at roulette. He has also written Elementary Probability (1966), The Mathematics of Gambling (1984) and numerous mathematical papers on probability, game theory, and functional analysis.
• Paper Economy – A US Real Estate Bubble Blog: Burning Like a Phoenix: Crash and Burn for Phoenix Area Residential Home Prices – When a boom goes bust many participants would be happy to simply snap back to the life as it was in the pre-boom era but that’s just wishful thinking… the reality is, it will be many years of cleaning up the aftermath during which time prices will likely overshoot the mean and drop lower than anyone expects.
• First half foreclosures break records – Jul. 16, 2009 – "What this means is, despite the intensity of the efforts on the part of government and lenders we don't have a handle on foreclosures yet," said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac. – WHAT THIS MEANS IS THAT GOV'T INTERVENTION DOESN'T WORK.
• Verleger Predicts $20 Oil This Year on ‘Devastating’ Crude Glut – Bloomberg.com – “Prices would be much lower today, but for the very large incentive to build inventories,” Verleger said. “You need forward buyers, which we had when people were fearing inflation, but as concerns turn toward deflation” that will no longer be the case. – MAYBE
• At a Factory, the Spark for China’s Violence – NYTimes.com – During a four-hour melee in a walkway between factory dormitories, Han and Uighur workers bludgeoned one another with fire extinguishers, paving stones and lengths of steel shorn from bed frames. – IT'S US VS THEM MENTALITY.
• Yoga Retreats With Chores Attract the Weary and Unemployed – NYTimes.com – Now he spends his days on the Himalayan Institute’s 400-acre wooded campus, practicing hatha yoga and meditation, studying spiritual texts, biking, walking and preparing meals in the institute’s kitchen. In exchange for his cooking duties and an annual fee of $3,000, he gets a private room, three vegetarian meals a day and unlimited access to the institute’s classes, seminars and other events. – ONE DAY I WILL START A NEURAL NET OR ENGINEERING RETREAT AND CHARGE MONEY FOR SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
• At a Factory, the Spark for China’s Violence – NYTimes.com – During a four-hour melee in a walkway between factory dormitories, Han and Uighur workers bludgeoned one another with fire extinguishers, paving stones and lengths of steel shorn from bed frames. – IT'S US VS THEM MENTALITY.
• Yoga Retreats With Chores Attract the Weary and Unemployed – NYTimes.com – Now he spends his days on the Himalayan Institute’s 400-acre wooded campus, practicing hatha yoga and meditation, studying spiritual texts, biking, walking and preparing meals in the institute’s kitchen. In exchange for his cooking duties and an annual fee of $3,000, he gets a private room, three vegetarian meals a day and unlimited access to the institute’s classes, seminars and other events. – ONE DAY I WILL START A NEURAL NET OR ENGINEERING RETREAT AND CHARGE MONEY FOR SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
• Economy in China Regains Robust Pace of Growth – NYTimes.com – The robust growth in China’s economy came as the United States and several other leading economies remain mired in recession, hobbled by the aftereffects of bad lending, weak real estate markets, and the uneven results of economic stimulus packages. – NOTE, THEY ARE USING AGGRESSIVE BANK LENDING
• Rail Funds Give Chicago Hub a Lift – WSJ.com – Rail congestion in Chicago is so bad that some freight is taken off trains at one side of the city, driven across town on trucks and placed back on another train. Paul Nowicki, assistant vice president at Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., said that is particularly true for perishable goods transiting Chicago via Western states.

These are my links for July 14th through July 15th:

• Property Values – What You Get for … $89,000 – NYTimes.com – Move to Springfield Mass.
• China’s Foreign-Exchange Reserves Surge, Exceeding $2 Trillion – Bloomberg.com – “Hot money is flowing back,” said Sherman Chan, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney. “China has the strongest prospects out of all major economies.” – A LOT OF IDLE MONEY LOOKING FOR A HOME. TREAD CAREFULLY.
• Property Values – What You Get for … $89,000 – NYTimes.com – Move to Springfield Mass.
• China’s Foreign-Exchange Reserves Surge, Exceeding $2 Trillion – Bloomberg.com – “Hot money is flowing back,” said Sherman Chan, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com in Sydney. “China has the strongest prospects out of all major economies.” – A LOT OF IDLE MONEY LOOKING FOR A HOME. TREAD CAREFULLY.
• Mobius Says Derivatives, Stimulus to Spark New Crisis (Update1) – Bloomberg.com – A “very bad” crisis may emerge within five to seven years as stimulus money adds to financial volatility, Mobius said. Governments have pledged about $2 trillion in stimulus spending.
• Germans flock to gold bars vending machine at Frankfurt airport – Online gold dealers — who offer a discreet armoured-car delivery for large purchases — are reporting boom times. The World Gold Council said that individual purchases started to rise dramatically in the last quarter of 2008 and have broken all records in the first quarter of this year.

These are my links for July 13th through July 14th:

• Bus rapid transit – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Bus rapid transit (BRT) is a term applied to a variety of public transportation systems that use buses to provide a service that is of a higher speed than an ordinary bus line. Often this is achieved by making improvements to existing infrastructure, vehicles and scheduling. The goal of these systems is to approach the service quality of rail transit while still enjoying the cost savings of bus transit. The expression BRT is mainly used in North America; in Europe and Australia, it is often called a busway, while elsewhere, it may be called a quality bus.
• Comments Dead, Twitter Holds Smoking Gun – At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
  "death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels. – I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THAT, TWITTER IS A LOVE/HATE THING.
• Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor – NYTimes.com – When Ford Motor flew her to Detroit this year for a test drive of the Fusion hybrid, she says, she expressed her true assessment on her blog, saying that she thought the vehicle would work for a family with teenagers, but would not fit the needs of her three children and a dog.

  “I still wrote my honest opinion,” said Mrs. Presnal, who did not receive a fee from Ford, but had her travel expenses paid. “If you don’t, in the long it’s going hurt your credibility.”

• Chinese Steel Inquiry Broadens Beyond Rio Tinto – NYTimes.com – It now includes accusations of widespread bribery in business dealings, as well as allegations that the four workers paid for detailed government trade and manufacturing data to give Rio Tinto executives an edge in iron ore negotiations with Chinese state-controlled steelmakers. – WAIT, BRIBERY IS NORMAL BUSINESS PRACTICE THERE!
• China Seeks Dominance in Clean Energy – NYTimes.com – China has built the world’s largest solar panel manufacturing industry by exporting over 95 percent of its output to the United States and Europe. But when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that at least 80 percent of the equipment be made in China.

  When the Chinese government took bids this spring for 25 large contracts to supply wind turbines, every contract was won by one of seven domestic companies. All six multinationals that submitted bids were disqualified on various technical grounds, like not providing sufficiently detailed data.

  This spring, the Chinese government banned virtually any installation of wind turbines with a capacity of less than 1,000 kilowatts — excluding 850-kilowatt designs, a popular size for European manufacturers. – HAHA, TYPICAL TACTICS BY CHINA, REMEMBER WE FEED THEM OUR MONEY FOR CRAPPY PRODUCTS, LET'S STOP THAT AND BUILD IN THE USA!

• China Risks Apple’s Reputation by Letting Factories Flout Law – Bloomberg.com – Apple Inc., which relies on Chinese manufacturers for its iPhones and iPod music players, found 45 of the 83 factories it audited last year didn’t pay proper overtime and 23 provided less than minimum wage, according to its 2009 progress report on supplier responsibility. The Cupertino, California-based company required them to adjust practices to ensure correct payments, it said in the report.
• Neural Network Prediction of NFL Football Games – Neural Network Prediction of NFL Football Games – Here's how he did it. Got a high accuracy rate but nothing on point spreads