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Models Behaving Badly has nothing to do with TMZ or a Harlequin novel. The models at the heart of this book are not beautiful people that fashion designers drape their creations over, but financial models that financiers and money managers try to drape reality over in order to make predictions about the market—and, of course, gobs of money.
The author, Emanuel Derman, is a former theoretical physicist and used to be the head quant (quantitative analyst) at Goldman Sachs, so this is not cheap or easy entertainment.
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Theseus was always in search of his next adventure, choosing to travel overland to meet his father in Athens so he could clear the road of its notorious monsters and villains (such as Procrustes, who business book readers may recognize from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bed of Procrustes) rather than taking the safer sea route suggested by his grandfather. And when he learned that Athens was sending seven young men and seven women in war tribute each year to be devoured by the Minotaur—the half-bull, half man pet monster of the cruel King Minos of Crete—he decided he would be one of the fourteen to go, that he would try to rid the world of yet another monster.
Winifred Gallagher's recently released New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, explains the tendencies each of us has (or lacks) for novelty and new experiences—or neophilia—and what those tendencies mean for each of us and our collective future.
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There is a misconception in American business that Bob Frisch says is getting in the way of getting things done and hewants to correct it. That’s the misconception that senior management teams, or SMTs, make the decisions in business today.
I may have shocked or surprised you with that statement, but if you have ever asked, or been asked, “Why wasn’t I in the room,” then you’ve had a taste of the challenge.
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In a 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. " There has been much literary analysis (and some criticism) of this assertion, and, over time it seems her call has been taken up by proponents of nearly every minority facing systemic repression, but in the context of the time, Woolf was being quite literal and pragmatic. Women rarely had space to call their own in which to do their own work.
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Our economic lives could literally stop on a dime. All it would take is an agreement redefining what a dime is, or is worth, backed by or tied to. It's happened before, and The Economist's "Buttonwood" columnist Philip Coggan believes it will inevitably happen again as the great international play of creditors and debtors enters its next act.
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