I work as an economist at Netcore Solutions in Mumbai.
You can contact me by writing to me atanudey at gmail.
If you needed more convincing on the matter of why India needs to build cities (and not futz around in villages), here’s a video of a TED presentation by Jaime Lerner. A video made more delightful by the way he wanders all over the place.
Thanks to Sudipta Chatterjee for the link.
Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning. (Filmed Feb 2006)
Jonathan Drori: Why we donât understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)
[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}
On March 8th, 2008, Richard Dawkins spoke at the Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus during his US book tour for his book “The God Delusion.” I am an absolute admirer of Prof Dawkins.
You could see the google video of Richard in Berkeley (56 mins) or you could see it in six parts on YouTube. Here’s YouTube part 1/6 of Richard at Berkeley:
Part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
Related post: Darwin’s Big Idea
An ordinary Joe at the gas station (note the car license plate at the start of the video.)
I admire Penn and Teller. They are sensible, forthright, articulate, and most of all very entertaining. So here’s an episode of their “Bullshit” series from 2003. It is about the hysterical reactions of some to the matter of global warming and climate change.
Here’s Jeff Dunham with Achmed, the dead terrorist. Is it work safe, you ask? Most certainly not. And besides, you should not be watching YouTube at work. Nor reading this blog, come to think of it. It is a waste of your employer’s money.
That video has had an astounding over 52,000,000 views and has a 5-star rating from over 200,000 reviewers.
Penn and Teller are pretty amazing. I especially like their debunking videos. They are iconoclasts and have a lot of fun letting the air out of some of the high and mighty. They have done the usual ones. YouTube has a lot of their stuff. Here’s a video of one great illusion by Teller: Shadows
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The following is a 1-minute video of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA 2007 contest. The video has been viewed around 22 million times on YouTube and accumulated over 65 thousand comments, and hundreds of video responses. Here’s Miss South Carolina attempting to answer a question which explores why many Americans are ignorant of basic geography:
Obviously she’s in the spotlight because she is pretty, and most certainly better looking than 99.99 percent of the population. But nature perhaps balances it out in her case by making her dumber than 90 percent of the population. It’s her beauty that brought a bit of fame, and her lack of brains that gave her a whole lot of notoriety. That’s the luck of the draw. And I suppose there’s a bit of envy of her looks that prompts the fun that one has in seeing her babble. But here’s a video response that has a very pretty face:
Clearly Miss West Carolina is not only very pretty but also articulate. And if she wrote the script as well, I say that she’s a pretty smart cookie. There’s a case of beauty and brains. I think Miss W Carolina is much much prettier than Miss South Carolina. (Miss South Carolina need not reach for her map to locate West Carolina on it.)
The other day, a BBC producer from London called me up and asked me if I would care to comment on the recent big sell-off in the Indian stock markets. I confessed that I am not fully qualified to do so but added that in all honesty that my guess would be as good as any one else’s. Still I declined. The best we can do is pull out Keynes’s “animal spirits,” which unfortunately is not amenable to rigorous scientific or economic analysis. The essential story of the stock market is well told in this cartoon.
That pretty much sums up how the stock market swings between fear and greed, the abrupt change from panic to irrational exuberance. And here are The Long Johns (John Bird and John Fortune) on turbulence in the financial markets. As one of the Johns so astutely observes, “You have to remember two things about the markets. One is, they are made up of very sharp and sophisticated people. These are the greatest brains in the world. The second thing you have to remember is that financial markets — to use the common word — are driven by sentiment.” I won’t spoil the fun for you. Just watch the video and fall off the chair laughing.
That’s why I don’t mess around in the stock market. 🙂
(Hat tip: Jan Manik)