• The Regulation Crisis
  Surowiecki: "…acceptance of a law’s legitimacy is the key factor in getting people to obey it. So reforming the system isn’t about writing a host of new rules; it’s about elevating the status of regulation and regulators."
• Your Brain on Computers: Attached to Technology and Paying a Price
  "These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement – a dopamine squirt – that researchers say can be addictive…Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room."
• Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research
  The always brilliant Mary Meeker's most recent presentation – June 7th, 2010.
• In most forms a waste of time
  "14 compulsory forms demand 270 separate pieces of information. Each of those items of information has to be supplied, on average, 2.7 times. For each PhD student, academics lose 580 minutes of precious time on form-filling…for just one faculty, the value of this time would have funded about 11 full-time PhD students to completion, or paid for a professor for two years."
• Riding the Dragon
  Former Morgan Stanley analyst: "Powerful interest groups have paralyzed China’s macro-economic policy, with ominous long-term consequences. Local governments consider high land prices their lifeline…China’s macro policies have been reduced to psychotherapy, relying on sound bites and small technical moves to scare speculators. In the meantime, inflation continues to pick up momentum."
• Transistor merges man and machine
  "…embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells."

Here is some of what I have been reading since May 4th:

• STCI hosting $25k Boston startup competition
  A little about what we have been up to lately at Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations (STCI)
• China Doesn’t Need Us Anymore?
  Niall Ferguson says "they see this as a marriage on the rocks and they are actively looking, if not for another partner, then certainly for a divorce from this somewhat unreliable and spendthrift American spouse"
• Have we forgotten how to concentrate?
  A little story on Continuous partial attention, low-information diets and how to increase concentration
• The Levy flight
  How attention in people is similar to animal foraging behavior
• How the city hurts your brain

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 19th:

• Nassim Taleb on Black Swans, Fragility, and Mistakes
• IBM Picks Entrepreneurs Brains
  "Throughout the year, IBM will be running one-day SmartCamp programs in Paris (Sept. 16), Tel Aviv (June 24), Silicon Valley (Sept. 8), Boston (June 3), Stockholm (May 20) and London (July 21). Five applicants from each location will win a chance to attend the program, which includes face-time with 25 mentors, who are potential investors."
• Reducing debt-To-GDP is requires GDP growth
  Not many countries have done it, and the few that have grew their GDP to do it
• Using collective intelligence to detect the start of a recession?
  Mere references to the word "recession" worked for the last 4 recessions when searching the Washington Post & NYTimes, or Google Trends
• Did the SEC Bait Goldman Sachs?
  Insight from a former white collar criminal on what tactics and treatment Goldman Sachs can expect from SEC "pit bull" Richard E. Simpson.

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 17th:

• Acts of kindness spread surprisingly easily
  "When people benefit from kindness they pay it forward by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network."
• Brief meditative exercise helps cognition
  "new research now suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than we previously believed. Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as "mindfulness " found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills…after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day."
• Memristor emulates neural learning
  One more step to the singularity: electronic circuits that can learn similar to hos synapses of the brain work
• Investing Insights From a Top Fund Manager
  From Morningstar's domestic stock manager of the decade and manager of the year for 2009: "In investing, there are really two ways to go: to predict or to react to what happens. My prediction abilities are zero. So I go the other way: When what I don’t know happens, I make sure to be in a position with enough cash to take advantage of it."
• How to find gold in SEC filings
  "In 10-Ks and 10-Qs, look for the list of the company's risk factors and look at the financials. See whether there are significant differences from what the company reports in its press release."

Here is some of what I have been reading since April 12th:

• Hussman Funds: Extend and Pretend
  "Given the current state of valuations, and the likelihood of several years of additional credit deleveraging, it seems that economic conditions, valuations, and the typical duration of secular bear markets converge on the likelihood of several more years of interesting but unrewarding market volatility."
• Simple Demographics Shows Major Economic Trends
  "It turns out that population pyramids are something you can trade, buying the good ones and shorting the bad ones."
• A solution to the consumer spending mystery?
  "It's a theory: Americans are refusing to pay their mortgages and using the cash windfall for a spending spree"
• Optimism Bias in Equity Analysts
  "all that data is no match for a deep-seated bias, which leads us to accentuate the positive and downplay the prospect of potential losses"
• Policymaking the Darwinist way
  "Politicians and their expert advisers need evolutionary theory for the best of reasons: it provides new tools for making humane decisions on everyone’s behalf. "
• Laurentian Neuroscience Professor Finds Quantum Telepathic Link?
  Same guy that invented the God Helmet. "If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement."
• US military warns of massive oil shortages by 2015
  "Shortfall could reach 10m barrels a day…cost of crude oil is predicted to top $100 a barrel"