"The 75-year-old American-led international order will be back in his firing line. Men like Pompeo may tell themselves they can steer him in a different direction. But if they finally stand up to him, they may find themselves with urgent business to attend to in Ulaanbaatar or, worse still, at a potash factory in the Urals."

"then spent two decades at General Electric learning from Jack Welch how to erode industrial capacity in favor of shareholders"

Today Hong Kong rests upon a delicate balance — one in which western liberal capitalism and Chinese authoritarianism find themselves juxtaposed, not always without conflict, but never without mutual benefit. Far from the parallel tracks that we had once placed our obdurate faith in, my fear is that “one country, two systems” will end its days as a violent clash between east and west. The death of an independent Hong Kong will mean the death of the peaceful coexistence we have all come to take for granted.

liberals have higher openness to experience.

of 5 morality groups: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity

liberals and conservatives agree on the first two, but conservatives focus on the last 3

his website yourmorals.org

The mean-variance optimization (MVO) theory of Markowitz (1952) for portfolio selection is one of the most important methods used in quantitative finance. This portfolio allocation needs two input parameters, the vector of expected returns and the covariance matrix of asset returns. This process leads to estimation errors, which may have a large impact on portfolio weights. In this paper we review different methods which aim to stabilize the mean-variance allocation. In particular, we consider recent results from machine learning theory to obtain more robust allocation.

paper http://www.thierry-roncalli.com/download/Portfolio_Regularization.pdf

there are four principal exposures that explain up to 76% of corporate-debt returns, Israelov calculates: government obligations, equities, stock volatility and price swings in bonds. In his parlance, these are the most-rewarded risks out there for credit buyers.

In that spirit, investors can garner exposure to the asset class via a portfolio of fixed-income and equity-index futures, combined with selling options on a stock index and bond futures, according to the paper. All without holding cash bonds -- with smaller drawdowns and lower volatility compared with benchmarks.

paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3293357

One of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, who would go on to win an enormous kingdom stretching from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, introduced a new system for reckoning the passage of time. It is known, after him, as the Seleucid Era. This was the world’s first continuous and irreversible tally of counted years.

two-thirds of survey respondents who identified as atheist before the encounter no longer did (n=4285)

What does it mean that experiences that have formed a fundamental part of the world’s religions for millennia could, in the future, form a fundamental part of our treatment of depression?

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214377

The back-propagation algorithm is the cornerstone of deep learning. Despite its importance, few variations of the algorithm have been attempted. This work presents an approach to discover new variations of the back-propagation equation. We use a domain specific lan- guage to describe update equations as a list of primitive functions. An evolution-based method is used to discover new propagation rules that maximize the generalization per- formance after a few epochs of training. We find several update equations that can train faster with short training times than standard back-propagation, and perform similar as standard back-propagation at convergence.

In our exercise, we built a database using only photos from public websites