Category: Pennies and cents
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Reinventing the dismal science
The discipline of economics in crisis. The credit crunch has exposed many economists’ most cherished ideas for the nonsense they manifestly are. With its theories in tatters, what now for the dismal science? It looks as if the best bet is take a a few leaves out of some network science text books. Economies are…
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How the credit crisis spread
Where did the credit crunch start? According to Reginald Smith at the Bouchet-Franklin Research Institute in Rochester, it began in the property markets of California and Florida in early 2007 and is still going strong. To help understand how the crisis has evolved, Smith has mapped the way it has spread as reflected in the…
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Triggering a phase change in wealth distribution
Wealth distribution in the western world follows a curious pattern. For 95 per cent of the population, it follows a Boltzmann Gibbs distribution, in other words a straight line on a log-linear scale. For the top 5 per cent, however, wealth allocation follows a Pareto distribution, a straight line on a log-log scale, which is…
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The first printed plastic magnetic field sensors
Conducting polymers just keep getting better. This week, Sayani Majumdar at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and pals say they’ve used using an inkjet printer to print a plastic circuit onto a plastic substrate that clearly shows magnetoresistance at room temperature. That means they can print plastic microchips capable of sensing magnetic fields. Cool,…
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Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha)
The French start up Aldebaran-Robotics based in Paris has high hopes for its humanoid robot called NAO. The device is 57 cm high and weighs 4.5 kilograms (about the size of a 6 month old baby) and you may be about to see a lot more of it. The company has sent a simplified version…
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Oil prices: a classic bubble economy?
The price of oil has quadrupled since 2003. If this dramatic rise were the result of speculation in a bubble economy and not the normal forces of supply and demand, how would you go about proving it? Try using some well known concepts from statistical physics and complexity theory, says our old friend Didier Sornette…
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The science of scriptwriting
You don’t have to delve far into the realms of scriptwriting before you’ll be pointed towards a book called Story by Robert McKee, which explains why scriptwriting is more akin to engineering than art. McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story…
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Money, it’s a gas…
…so said Pink Floyd in Dark Side of the Moon. And how right they turned out to be. The statistical rules governing the distribution of money and wealth bear more than a passing resemblance to the ideal gas laws. In fact, the statistical mechanics of money and wealth distribution have their own sub-headings in the…
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Game theory and the future of Adwords
Ain’t Google Adwords a miracle o’ modern science? Here’s a system that searches your web page for keywords, hunts for advertisers who wanna have their message displayed next to these keywords and then auctions the advertising space to the highest bidder. All in the twinklin’ of an eye. Adwords is so good that it’s made…
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The great gravity wave affair
Gravity waves do one helluva job a-squeezin and a-squashin everything in their path. Plonk a big aluminum bar in the way and gravity waves will squash it in one direction while stretchin it in another. With careful measurements yer should be able to spot this. In fact in the 1960s, Joseph “Big foot” Weber at…