Hedge Funds and Insider Trading

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The NYT published an editorial today on how information available to hedge funds by virtue of their being involved with trading loan derivatives may effectively mean some kind of insider trading.

Insider trading is interesting because the definition of who is an insider has everything to do with game theory. On one hand, you want people to capitalize on information so that there is incentive to spread the information faster, resulting in higher efficiency. On the other hand, if few enough people know something to begin with, it becomes profitable to withhold that information and release it in a disruptive manner such as to reap maximum profit.

Motifs in Science

I am planning a course for MIT's IAP period next year. The course will be about patterns that keep coming up over and over again in the physical sciences.

The ideas that I have come up with so far will be on a page of the same name on this blog.

Update: Have given up on the course, think that a website would be a better use of time. 

A second language 'changes personality'

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I have long felt this to be true. Definitely is for me, I am a completely different person speaking English than in Mandarin. In fact, even the two dialects I use in English have different personalities associated with them.