Archive for November, 2008
Domain Update Update
While I’m busy not posting interesting updates, I’ll just note that I communicated with my web-hotel about the domain issue. The host promises that things have been sorted out with the registrar – but on my control panel, the domain still appears to expire on November 28.
Well…
links for 2008-11-27
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What we have witnessed in recent months is not only the fracturing of the world’s financial system but the discrediting of an academic discipline. There are some 4000 university finance professors worldwide, thousands of finance research papers are published each year, and yet there have been few if any warnings from the academic community of the incendiary potential of global financial markets. Is it too harsh to conclude that despite the considerable academic resources that go into finance research our understanding of the behaviour of financial markets is no greater than it was in 1929/33 or indeed 1720?
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Iceland’s meltdown was caused by the rapid emergence of an oversized banking sector and accompanying domestic credit creation, asset bubbles and excessive indebtedness that all this encouraged. This column draws lessons from this crisis and suggests Iceland should join the EU if it wants to stand a chance at keeping its well-educated young people from emigrating.
The Death of the Critic
Roger Ebert (“Your Movie Sucks“) discusses the demise of film criticism:
The celebrity culture is infantilizing us. We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down.
I’ll just add that one thing which makes me to turn off a tv documentary is when I realise that all it contains is statements (“soundbites”) without arguments. I turn off lots of tv documentaries these days – or rather: I don’t turn on the tv to watch them.
links for 2008-11-26
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Tania Bubela from the University of Alberta, Canada, led a team of researchers who investigated 201 pharmaceutical and 352 herbal remedy newspaper articles, and studied the 48 pharmaceutical and 57 herbal remedy clinical trials that the stories referred to. For both complementary and mainstream medicine, stories under-reported risk and lacked any disclosure of trial funding or scientists' conflicts of interest. Bubela said, "There were significant errors of omission of basic information such as dose, sample size and methods for randomized clinical trials. In addition, there is an under-reporting of risks, especially in the context of herbal remedies".
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Germany is in better shape than many to weather the financial crisis. But, this column argues, it needs to raise private consumption with a substantial fiscal stimulus and higher real wages, lest it run the risk of slipping into combined stagnation and deflation.
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Many academics, policy makers, and business leaders stress the importance of local conditions for explaining spatial differences in entrepreneurship and economic development. This column assesses the importance of various forces for agglomeration. The empirical evidence suggests that market effects, such as proximity to input suppliers and labour market pooling, play a big role, while there is less support for factors like entrepreneurial culture and industrial diversity.
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A compendium of what services and companies are no longer available for our Internet pleasure and use.
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Today, the average size soft drink is 20 ounces and contains 17 teaspoons of sugar. More startling is that some citric acids found in fruit drinks are more erosive than hydrochloric or sulfuric acid—which is also known as battery acid. These refined sugars and acids found in soda and citrus juice promote tooth erosion, which wears away the hard part of the teeth, or the enamel. Once tooth enamel is lost, it's gone forever. There is a beverage that does not produce such irreversible results. When deciding between the many options available, the best thing to drink is brewed tea, according to a study in the July/August issue of General Dentistry, the clinical, peer-reviewed journal of the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD).
Domains
A minor public service announcement: I’m trying to figure out is my web-hotel and domain registrar has all its marbles in its database. The thing is that I keep getting messages that the domain expires on November 28, 2008 on the control panel.
But I have already paid for two more years of jacobchristensen.name – which the account also shows. In any event, I’ll make a back-up of the blog’s database. I have one or the other domain lying around for other uses.
links for 2008-11-25
Lawyers, Political Scientists and Other Oddities
Josep Colomer considers the correct classification of political scientists as he is mildly annoyed with the Academia Europaea’s grouping of law and political science:
…political scientists would be put together with lawyers, which seems to me a rather old-fashion pair. Indeed the dominion of law in political studies, which certainly promoted comparative studies on political regimes and structures from different regions and countries of the world, was strong until early twentieth century. But this persuasion was largely superseded with that of sociology, implying the diffusion of empirical, inductive methods, since mid-twentieth century, and the import of formal models, mathematical refinements and deductive reasoning from economics in the last few decades. All these contributions have been somehow cumulative. The scientific method indeed requires both empirical observations, quantitative measurements, and logical models. But the current developments in advanced research and graduate teaching do not seem to fit the coupling of Political science with Law.
Some quick observations:
- Does political science have a proper academic identity? In Colomer’s description, it looks as if PolSci has gone from being derivative of (constitutional) law to being derivative of sociology to being derivative of economics.
- That said, I would agree that there is – or rather: was – a link between some traditions in political science and law – this became especially obvious to me during my time in Sweden. (Which also points to differences between countries).
- …and that the behavioural revolution did a lot to redefine PolSci as an academic discipline.
- Colomer doesn’t consider that PolSci also has a basis in qualitative methods. Does this mean that research based on case studies or qualitative data shouldn’t be considered true PolSci?
What a Perfectly Odd People
Repressed sexuality, weird food, strange sports, infantile behaviour – yep, two US Americans discuss the strange ways of the Brits.
I’m trying to imagine how two US Americans discussing the Danes will sound.
links for 2008-11-24
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The industry faces a number of challenges, including economic and legal bottlenecks, banking concerns, and unharmonised financial regulations, but most of them arise from the industry’s infancy. Islamic finance’s long-term prospects seem promising.