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Tournament Maker {Simple Tournament Creator}

2010-05-19T17:27:00Z

I just finished creating my first Facebook app. Tournament Maker allows you to setup a bracket for your tournament in no time. Invite your friends to take place in a Beirut, Soccer, Tennis, Flip Cup tournament, you name it Tournament Maker automagically makes the bracket.

If you get a chance go check it out at:

http://apps.facebook.com/fbtournament

or go to Tournament Maker’s profile page and tell me what you think.

Riding The Hot Goalie Fallacy

2010-05-17T16:53:00Z

Common wisdom in the NHL is that a goalie can carry a team in the playoffs. The Bruins / Flyers series was a blueprint about the fallacy of this commonly accepted wisdom. Tucca Rask was the hot goalie coming into the series, while the Flyers had to resort to their backup goalie after Michael Leighton after Brian Boucher went down with an injury. What happens, Flyers win and everybody in Boston is asking why didn’t Claude Julien replace Tucca in games 6 or 7.

The fact of the matter is, there is not a huge difference between goalies in the NHL. I just finished reading Stumbling on Wins were two economist take the Moneyball approach to dissect other sports statistics.

What they found was that over a course of an 82 game season the best season ever by a goalie Curtis Joseph (92-93) only provided 8 wins more than an average goalie. To make it more clear how close the best goalie and an average goalie are:

“Brodeur’s carrer performance after the 2008-09 season was only worth 33.5 Wins Above Average. Remember Broduer is the all-time leader in career wins. If Brodeur was replaced by an average goalie, though, this average goalie would be ranked second all-time with 524 career wins.

Just to give you a comparison, in the 2008-2009 basketball season, Chris Paul led the league Wins Above Average with 22.0.

So layoff Tucca, whether him or another goalie probably would not have made a difference. Goalies just don’t matter as much as everyone thinks.

You Think Healthcare Cost are Skyrocketing

2010-04-29T12:24:00Z

I have blogged about this before, but Seth Godin’s blog post on higher education got me thinking about this issue again. The higher education tuition bubble is waiting to be popped. This could happen through the innovative use of technology bringing the system down or it could be the system imploding on itself much like the housing market did. My guess is it will be the later, students and their families will stop being able to afford the education that may or may not payoff in the long run. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for educating our kids. I think the U.S. higher education system is one of the country’s chief advantages in the global economy. But sooner or later, like all economic decisions, one has the weigh the cost vs. the benefits. Looking at the cost curve that day is coming soon.

I am not sure what can be done to stop this bubble. I hope its technology that plays a pivotal role in reinventing the higher education system. It certainly won’t be the government, cost containment is not its specialty (see healthcare).

Gridlock Economy and Patent Reform

2009-11-29T02:25:00Z

Just finished listening Michael Heller on EconTalk who was talking about his new book The Gridlock Economy. Michael Heller talked about a fact that a had previously known but had not given much thought recently. There is an increasing number of biotech patents being issued, while the number of biotech drugs approved has remained relatively stagnant. This is both an indictment on are drug approval process and more so of the patent system.

Heller talks about how the patent system was written 50 years ago when one patent went with one product. While this may still be the case in small molecule pharmaceuticals, this is certaintly not the case in biotech or in software or in any complex system. Today, innovation is built on the innovation of the passed. The need to find the possible world of patents your product may infringe on and negotiating with those parties limits innovation / public good. Research shows that the patent system, excluding pharmaceuticals, has an overall negative economic impact.

This got me wondering, is these are market solution to this problem? The status quo will not allow the patent system to be abolished, but could the government decrease the transaction costs? Could the government make a market for buying and selling partial patent rights?

(Disclaimer, the details to this proposal have only been hashed out for 20 minutes. )

When a patent is issued, shares to use that patent are issued as well. These shares would allow companies to use the patent up to a certain revenue threshold. (Make 100K off a patent). The company would receive the proceeds of the public offering of these shares. Additional, follow-on offering would also be in the companies control. I am sure there are all sorts of problem with this thought process, but its a start in decreasing the transaction costs that patents bring.

Not the exact graph I was looking for, but replace cost with patents, and the graph looks pretty identical.

Tuition Bubble?

2009-09-28T21:18:00Z

Awesome info graphic from mint. My favorite part is the tuition bubble question. I think this may be one of the next U.S. bubbles.

Investment help from Mint.com

Intrinsic Motivators Matter Much More in The 21st Century

2009-08-24T22:43:00Z

Insightful TED talk on what motivates people and why rewards counterintuitively create poorer performance for creative cognitive tasks. We need to realign corporate Americas reward system from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Check out the talk and you may be convinced… I really liked the Encarta vs. Wikipedia example.

The Fuzzy Numbers of the Economy

2009-08-12T14:02:00Z

Hat tip zero hedge for linking to this must watch video on how the government manipulates inflation and GDP numbers to make things look a little better than the actually are. I am sure economist have good reasons for doing each of the little tricks described in this video, but sometimes simple numbers are more insightful than tricked up algorithmically adjusted nonsense.

Also, check out shadowstats.com which de-adjusted the government data.

Status Update (8/10/09)

2009-08-10T18:50:00Z

Have not been updating this blog at all for a long time. Hope to start getting in the habit again soon. Until then dogs!

Nationalized Citibank

2009-03-08T14:15:00Z

The New F*ing Citibank – watch more funny videos

John Stewart Ripping CNBC

2009-03-06T18:31:00Z

Very Funny.

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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM – Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Why I Don't Want The Government Operating A PE Firm

2009-01-23T00:48:00Z

Below are two awesome graphics that show how badly the government is doing at managing TARP. They are not even close to free market deals for OUR money. I know that returns may not be their number 1 objective, but they could do a little better.

This is why I would never be an LP in the U.S. govt. PE firm.

SNL: Morgan Stanley

2009-01-09T22:06:00Z

V@R: Is it a fraud?

2009-01-04T18:44:00Z

Great article written by Joe Nocera in today’s NYTimes Magazine that discusses Wall Street risk management practices. In particular, he discusses a risk measure call value at risk. Nocera does a good job looking at both sides, but I lean more to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s side of the argument. Here is my favorite passage of the article.

After the lecture, the professor who invited Taleb to Columbia took a handful of people out for a late lunch at a nearby diner. Somewhat surprisingly, given Talebâ€™s well-known scorn for risk managers, the professor had also invited several risk managers who worked at two big investment banks. We had barely been seated before they tried to engage Taleb in a debate over the value of VaR. But Taleb is impossible to argue with on this subject; every time they raised an objection to his argument, he curtly dismissed them out of hand. â€œVaR can be useful,â€ said one of the risk managers. â€œIt depends on how you use it. It can be useful in identifying trends.â€

â€œThis argument is addressed in â€˜The Black Swan,â€™ â€ Taleb retorted. â€œNot a single person has offered me an argument I havenâ€™t heard.â€

â€œI think VaR is great,â€ said another risk manager. â€œI think it is a fantastic tool. Itâ€™s like an altimeter in aircraft. It has some margin for error, but if youâ€™re a pilot, you know how to deal with it. But very few pilots give up using it.â€

Taleb replied: â€œAltimeters have errors that are Gaussian. You can compensate. In the real world, the magnitude of errors is much less known.â€

In theory V@R seems like a good tool, but because you don’t know the distribution of the errors, it has very little practical use. If one does use it, It must be with extreme caution.

Hulu & The Holidays

2008-12-25T19:00:00Z

First off, Happy Holidays to anybody who wanders on this post.

Lately I have been relying more and more on the internet for my video content. Hulu has given me a chance to watch shows I would normally miss out. I am loving it. Unlike my sister, I enjoy full episodes non of this 3 minute clip crap that drives youtube traffic. I like quality, full length programming. Hulu satisfies this itch.

A couple holiday recommendations for your Hulu watching pleasure.

ReGenesis – Like House but with more science.
FireFly – Fun Sci Fi drama created by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
John Doe – Quirky really smart guy, but is alien smart mystery

Why Most Things Fail?!

2008-12-19T21:53:00Z

I have been catching up on my reading lately, finishing books I started 1-3 years ago.

Why Most Things Fail by Paul Ormerod is on my desk today.

I found this quote to by very relevant to today’s economic landscape.

“The question, as Schumpeter saw it, was not ‘how capitalism administers existing structures… [but] how it creates and destroys them.’ This creative destruction, he believed, caused continuous progress and improved standards of living for everyone.”

Hopefully the fall, and the subsequent reshaping of the banking industry is capitalism driving improvement.