This week I’ve finished another semester of my MBA program. It was a tough one that kept me from adding to this blog for the last few weeks. As a result, I can now estimate the value of a publicly traded company by analyzing free-cash-flows and weighted average cost of capital. I can even adjust for changes in capital structures.
Tantalizing stuff.
Now that I have just 2 semesters to go, I’ve been thinking about the experience of grad school, and how it might be made more fun. I think merit badges are the answer. Diplomas are fine, in fact I have a frame waiting to be filled already hanging in my office. But they aren’t as good as merit badges because they come too late. The Boy Scouts really do a better job of recognizing educational milestones than colleges do. Sure a diploma is the final recognition, but I’d really prefer to also get some recognition along the way just to keep my interest. That way it wouldn’t seem like such a slog to the finish line.
I had this for lunch today. If you like the whole couscous/raisin genre, it’s the best I’ve ever had. We had some fresh mint growing in the herb garden and that made all the difference.
The recipe is from Cooking Light magazine. I saw this picture of it when I was reading over my wife’s shoulder. I mentioned that it looked good and she made it for me as a surprise this afternoon.
Aerobie makes frisbees and my coffee maker. This is my $29 coffee maker, the Aeropress. If you buy this coffee maker, your old one will be on the curb by Monday morning.
For those of you that don’t know, I am a homebrewer. I was asked to make a couple beers for an upcoming wedding between a wetlands wildlife biologist and a bicycling enthusiast. Here’s the label I came up with for the occasion.
I’m working on a presentation for my scenario planning class this week. Topic: How might anthropogenic global warming effect business.
If you’ve looked into the subject yourself , you know that its really complicated to figure out if man-made CO2, natural climatic cycling, water vapor, or something completely different like solar intensity and orbital variables are affecting the climate. They could all be contributing actually. How much? Which is buffering which? Which is amplifying which? But the real actionable point boils down to the two fundamental positions. The answer to whether mankind is contributing to climate change is either Yes, or No.
The people who say mankind isn’t causing warming have been labeled skeptics. The common label of a minority viewpoint. Whether their skeptical position will be exonerated in the long run is unknown today. I’m typically pro-skeptic on many things. Skepticism to me is the loyal opposition of science. But after analyzing this particular situation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the skeptics CANNOT be allowed to win the argument this time.
Here is why. If the skeptics are right, and climate change isn’t man-made, all they win is the right to say “I told you so.” However, if they are wrong and human activity IS causing global warming and their protests inhibit us from protecting ourselves by limiting CO2, then their skepticism translated into inaction will have contributed to a global catastrophe.
On the other side of the argument, if the proponents are proven wrong, and global warming ISN’T caused by man, we will still benefit from the economic and technological advancements that will accompany a worldwide effort to convert the planet’s energy to sustainable non-polluting sources. If they are right, we will also add to that list the added benefit of averting a climatic disaster.
Skeptics, I love ya, but you should let the advocates have this one.
Photogenesis. This means the ability to create light. Typically we think of this as a fascinating quality of certain glowing fish and insects. Actually the natural world is packed with animals that flash. In some science experiments, biologists have used the genes behind photogenesis to make glowing bacteria in the lab. They program these glow genes to signal expressions of the genetic functions they are researching. This makes their results easier to spot. They use these pre-built genes as tools because people are cleverer than fish and insects, but not cleverer than genes.
Implanting these genes into things so that they will glow-on-demand is a very useful tool. It helps scientists identify biological systems at work. In nature, the animals use their glow talent it to signal their location. Its very helpful in the deepest seas to have a little light to show others where you are.
Scientists who study the nature of fractal repetition can tell us that often the purposes of the smallest genes in a ecosystem are often re-expressed again on scales orders-of-magnitude larger than themselves because the fundamental usefulness of those genes are not limited to their small scales. Genes have developed the ability to glow, because in some situations it is useful to glow. Reasoning follows that glowing in dark places has the universal benefit of attracting attention.
Now let’s take this discussion to this larger scale. In February 2006, some astronomers noticed something glowing through their telescopes. Considering that almost everything in space is glowing, you might wonder what’s so special about something glowing in space? Was it brighter? Faster? Red-shiftier? No, none of those things. The difference was, (and this is a tremendous difference) most things that astronomers see in their telescopes glow like a fire. What made this object interesting, was that it glowed like a FIREFLY.
Astronomers found a very peculiar glowing object that grew very bright, but did so slowly, and evenly, and then faded exactly as slowly and evenly as it had appeared. Not too fast to see, and very noticeable. Its intensity pattern was a perfect bell curve through time from emergence to darkness again. Experience tells us that perfectly symmetrical bell curves do not typically occur in the natural world. Supernovae pop into our notice like firecrackers and fade off into space slowly. Pulsars flash like strobes as they spin. This object did neither. But even its perfectly controlled ambiance wasn’t its most fascinating feature. Unbelievably, spectral analysis also showed that the light frequency it emitted was not formed from the elements of the periodic table that we know… It was a super bright, perfectly evenly timed glowing object that was conspicuously inconsistent with the spectral signatures of all known natural elements.
If you were cleverer than a fish and trying to attract attention in the deepest corners of the universe, how would you glow?
Does making something already really interesting, more interesting, sound interesting? In other words, do you want to bet on the likelihood that scientists will find the Higgs boson in 2009? Here’s a graph showing the spread right now on Intrade. Cautious Hint: Stephen Hawking is betting against it. (and he plays poker with Data and Einstein)
Acurately guessing the future is almost impossible for individuals to do. However, if you aren’t familiar with studies showing the uncanny accuracy of group guesswork, then you need to familiarize yourself with the studies of James Surowiecki. He is the author of The Wisdom of the Crowd. Its a fascinating topic that at first appears to resemble crystal-ball telepathy but is actually more similar to the mysteries of an ant mound.
If you ask a large enough group of diverse, independent people to make a prediction or estimate a probability, and then average those estimates, the errors of each of them makes in coming up with an answer will cancel themselves out. Each person’s guess, you might say, has two components: information and error. Subtract the error, and you’re left with the information. -Surowieki
Through the ages, Scientific Process itself has focused on reductionism. That is, reducing topics down to more easily measurable constituents. Then organizing and quantifying those components until a fuller understanding of the whole emerges. Yet, in the case of this phenomenon, studying the smaller components makes the phenomenon itself go away. It is a phenomenon of a constituency, not constituents. It emerges from its components, but is not comprised of them. There is an interesting study of this field called Emergence.
Speaking of constituencies, below is a link to a chart at Intrade.com. This is an online group prediction market which one can use to visualize the predictions of crowds. Keep an eye on this one in the coming weeks to see it in action.
This week I’ve finished another semester of my MBA program. It was a tough one that kept me from adding to this blog for the last few weeks. As a result, I can now estimate the value of a publicly traded company by analyzing free-cash-flows and weighted average cost of capital. I can even adjust for changes in capital structures.
