ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

*Articles on Economics and Finance are especially perishable. Change is continuous and fast and what you say one day may be irrelevant the next. Putting my thoughts down on this 29th day of September 2006, I will come back and read it one year from now and see how relevant it will be then. As the first baby boomer turns 60 this year, and 78 million more in America born between 1946 and 1964 do so in the next 25 years, will this have an earth-shaking effect on the U.S. economy? As the baby boomers sell their stock market holdings or downgrade to smaller homes to free up cash, investors all the over the world shudder at the possible consequences on the stock market and the real estate market. There is no consensus on how serious this impact will be. Professor Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School of Business and author of the best seller " The Future for Investors" certainly thinks that we will all suffer a lowering in our standard of living, but street-smart reformed junk bond k...

There are two aspects of American culture that I will never get accustomed to: (1) The practice of separate bills [or checks as they call it] for meals, and (2) The practice of greeting anyone and everyone with ‘How are you doing?’ [Often it becomes a lazy ‘How ya DO-ING as in the sound you would make riding a pogo pole with springs] Lets get (1) out of the way first: I can never understand how Americans can act so calmly, and stone-faced, with no sign of awkwardness or embarrassment whatsoever, when at the end of a meal with a friend [s], they calmly ask the waiter for separate checks. In Asia, this is unheard of, no matter how poor anyone is. Why not, be more gracious, and yet practical as in Asia, by letting one party pay for the meal. The one who wants to do the paying would insist on doing so, while the other would protest most vehemently, but ultimately only one party would pay the bill, with a promise [and insistence] by the other party to reciprocate such an act of graciousness...

Blackbox models of complex situations are tempting. Without the need to specify parameters, and not limited by choice of variables, you can throw in everything including the kitchen sink, and see how the model performs. But in real life, it is not that simple. With every variable that you throw in, you are increasing the complexity of the model exponentially as well as the computational workload. Although there are algorithms for dimension reduction as well as for assessing the significance of an input towards model accuracy, nothing beats a good old human being with expertise in the subject domain, for initial choice of input variables. Let's do an academic exercise for the building of a model that (1) hopefully gives an objective, 'true' valuation of a house. (2) predict the future house price. We will attempt to build our model using a Neural Network, or a hybrid Neural with Genetic Algorithms for the last mile of calculation, to avoid local optima. Any human expert in r...

One of the most common things we humans face in our daily lives is the problem of optimization. viz what is the optimum solution for a problem using certain mix of resources that we have, and bearing in mind our objective(s) In Life we seldom find that there is only one solution to a problem, but in fact many possible choices for a solution. Here are some examples: Which is the best route to travel from A to B, after defining what is ‘best’. {is it the shortest route in time, which again is different from the shortest route in distance, or is it the most economical route, the most scenic route etc}. What is the minimum risk and maximum gain I can get from re-allocating the number of shares in each stock that I hold in a portfolio? What combination of resources [land, labor, capital] will enable me to complete a certain construction project in a specified period of time. What is the best way to draw up the School timetable using the variables we can juggle with viz the school hours Mon-...

Besides Char Kway Teow, another Singapore street food dish that I miss is Teochew Fishball Noodles. The dish has two variations: soup or dry. The photo here shows the dry version. These noodles are of the flat variety, rather like the Italian fettucini. They are cooked by dipping them into a rich stock of pork bones, and quickly taking them out of the boiling stock in less than a minute. They are then made al dente by giving them a quick rinse in cold water. The side ingredients that go with the noodles: fish balls, minced pork, mushrooms, beansprouts and fishcake are also cooked in this way. But it's the sauce that makes the dish. It's a paste made of chili, onions, dried shrimp, soya sauce and vinegar. Each noodle seller will have his own recipe for the sauce. The sauce is at the bottom of a bowl and the cooked noodles plus ingredients are deftly stirred in to blend with the sauce. A separate bowl of soup made with pork bones is given to accompany the noodles. A garnish like...

Char Kway Teow is a dish loved by all Singaporeans, and what they miss most when on prolonged stays in a foreign country. It is hard to express why we love this mess of flat noodles fried in pork lard. A simple dish actually, if you look at the recipe. First heat up a wok with some pork lard. Brown some minced garlic in it, then toss in the noodles. Stir in and mix a table spoonful of soya sauce that's black and thick and slightly sweet. Add chili paste to taste for that touch of spiciness Now comes the hard part: Use your gourmet instincts to stir-fry this mixture until you can smell the fragrance. Add in bits of shrimp, Chinese sausage, and slices of fish cake. Then throw in a handfil of bean sprouts and chives as garnish. But we are not finished yet. Next break and stir in an egg over this, and finally sprinkle a handful of cockles as a final flourish. With the cockles half-cooked, make a final stir and then take what is now called Char Kway Teow out of the wok. I think the appe...

There was a time when you could easily tell people what you did for a living and they could easily understand. If you were an auto mechanic or a restaurant manager, people knew what you did. So too, if you were a doctor, racing car driver, economist or professional poker player. And then came the Information Technology revolution and the Knowledge Economy, when more and more of what we do was assigned to the Machines who could do what we did faster, cheaper and never fell sick or took vacations. Thus many jobs became redundant, among them parking meter maids, bank tellers, clerks, and all jobs which could be automated or relegated to a computer. Bosses didn't need a secretary anymore [except for reasons of prestige] because they had computers and email and scheduling software. Companies didn't need mid-level paper shufflers called managers because Management could easily obtain information on the state of their business on their computers. In the factories Robots and automation...