it was the | was the best | the best of | best of times | of times it |
times it was | it was the | was the worst | the worst of | worst of times

Wolfram Alpha opened its doors today. What’s Wolfram Alpha?

…the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…

Go Nuts!

Almost, all financial derivatives display asymmetric payoffs. All sold (short) option positions and sold (short) derivatives positions – something that banks, financial institutions, hedge funds and even corporations engage in regularly these days – are negatively skewed bets. These short portfolio positions will produce negative skew for the trader. He will be fooled by the variance (volatility) of the process, as the observed variance (volatility) would be lower than the true variance most of the time. This would mean the more the skewness in the distribution (of the portfolio) the more the variance will be concentrated in a small slice of time and for most part it will generate steady returns. And the trader will think that he is making money, albeit in small proportions but steadily. And then after a while – could be a long wait – the true variance will wipe out all those gains.

[tags]pundits, do the math[/tags]

Achilles looked at the Tortoise with a mildly deprecatory look and sighed. “Oh bother, dear Tortoise, not again! Do we have to go through this yet another time? Infinite sequences can have finite sums, as the methods of calculus invented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz have … Tortoise … hrrm … I mean … have taught us. What is it with the repetitive answers we geeks have to give over and over again to questions that have already been solved? Will people never learn?”

Follow Zany Jambon on twitter. I do!

* Two species of Tinamus, and Eudromia elegans of D ‘Orbigny, which can only be called a partridge with regard to its habits.

(Thanks to Emily Davidow for the link.)

[tags]charles darwin, omnivores, carnivores, predators, prey[/tags]

[tags]naked dancer, goes both ways[/tags]

This Article Also Appears In Neurology/Neuroscience

Main Category: Eye Health/Optometry News
Article Date: 13 Mar 2024 – 23:00pm (UK)

Rodents
blinded by a severed tract in their brains’ visual system had their
sight partially restored within weeks, thanks to a tiny biodegradable
scaffold invented by MIT bioengineers and neuroscientists.