“You have one choice. In front of you is a machine: if you put a coin in the machine, the other player gets three coins – and vice versa. You both can either choose to COOPERATE (put in coin), or CHEAT (don’t put in coin). Let’s say the other player cheats, and doesn’t put in a coin. What should you do?”
European demographics, mapped OR Glance at the Lancet
“Demographic history of a population is imprinted in its age structure. A meaningful representation of regional population age structures can tell numerous demographic stories – at a glance. To produce such a snapshot of regional populations, we use an innovative approach of ternary colour coding.”
“The key is to distinguish what kind of response you are giving. Are you giving a response where you know the answer because you actually looked into that? Are you giving a complete guess where you have no idea? Or, what is more likely, are you somewhere in between?”
The gnostic translation by the machine
“Sean Colbath, a senior scientist at BBN Technologies who works on machine translation, agreed that strange outputs are probably due to Google Translate’s algorithm looking for order in chaos. He also pointed out that the languages that generate the strangest results—Somali, Hawaiian and Maori—have smaller bodies of translated text than more widely spoken languages like English or Chinese. As a result, he said, it’s possible that Google used religious texts like the Bible, which has been translated into many languages, to train its model in those languages, resulting in the religious content.”
RE: Would you rather be wrong in public or private?
“Private-market vehicles focused on high NAV-premium sectors can benefit directly if they use the public market as an exit strategy, or indirectly because those sectors tend to have the best property appreciation. It seems like a no-brainer that a private fund operator would prefer to focus on self-storage (10% premium to NAV) in today’s market, rather than office (16% discount to NAV), but private capital flows into the latter sector have been massive.”
“I transcribed a collection of 18th century student disciplinary records once. Let me give a quick overview of the things that generation were doing…Getting drunk and arguing with a lecturer, deciding later that he needed to be taught a lesson, marching out drunkenly into the night with the tavern fireplace poker, beating an innocent passer-by w/ it until the Lord Provost arrived to wrench said poker out of student’s hand.”