Know thy complexities ( Read this cheat sheet. ) Then make certain you understand how they work. Then implement common computational algorithms such as Dijkstra's, Floyd-Warshall, Traveling Salesman, A*, bloom filter, breadth-first iterative search, binary search, k-way merge, bubble/selection/insertion sort, in-place quick sort, bucket/radix sort, closest pair and so on. Again, ABC.
It used to be that human ingenuity was valued in the kitchen. Now, what matters more is chefs' knowing the right producers and buying the right products. Culinary excellence can no longer be achieved simply by learning the right technique; it can be acquired only by knowing the right things to buy--and by, it needs hardly be said, shelling out however much money it takes to buy them. In this way, modern foodies' materialistic definition of refinement is more exclusive than that of yesteryear's dogmatic French cooking. What appears to be a celebration of the natural and the simple is in fact more constrictive and less attainable, because it depends not on talent but on means and access.
Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America by Alison Pearlman. University of Chicago Press.
Have a habit of skipping meals? A new study shows that people who sit down to eat after an overnight fast are more likely to ignore protein, fats and vegetables and head straight for high-calorie carbohydrates and starches first.
"I think this emphasizes the importance of controlling your environment as far as the types of foods you're exposed to when you're hungry and how much of them you can get," said Aner Tal, a postdoctoral research associate in the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell and lead author of the study, published in Archives of Internal Medicine. "Because otherwise, you will mindlessly choose foods that are less healthy for you."
Continue reading "Eat carbs and starches last when hungry" »
Using detailed data from the American Community Survey, it examines the residential locations of today's three major classes:
the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers;
the rising ranks of the knowledge, professional, and creative class; and
the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid service workers.
"If we would call something 'fermented,' consumers would have a shock and wonder whether we were feeding them something they're not supposed to eat," says Saumya Dwivedi, a senior research specialist at IFF.
Instead, when leading focus groups Ms. Dwivedi sticks to the adjectives she hears consumers use as they describe the fermented flavors they taste: tangy, pickled, briny.
Chef Paul Virant is the author of a book for home fermenting, "The Preservation Kitchen." The menus at his two high-end, Chicago-area restaurants center around fermented flavors. His team cans about $35,000 worth of produce, or about 4,000 jars, each year.
The sour notes generated during fermentation help balance the flavors of his cooking, he says, which includes Brussels-sprout kimchi and duck confit with fermented rutabaga. "People are pleasantly surprised when they try it," he says.
Mmm, the Flavors of Fermentation, WSJ, ELLEN BYRON April 10, 2013
The idea of the adage is that the markets tend to be weak during the six month period from May through October is something that hits close to home for investors, given that we have just turned the calendar to the month of May. As we look back over the past couple of years, we find that May has ushered in some choppy, if not sloppy market behavior. For example, in 2012 the market (as measured by the S&P 500 (SPX)) peaked in April and the slid roughly -10.6% by early June, pushed higher in the later Summer months, only to experience an -8% starting in October. Point being, the "weak period" in 2012 was filled with periods of "fits and starts." And we all remember 2011, as it truly tested investor's mettle, as the SPX dove -21% from its peak in May to its October bottom. Tack this on to 2010 in which the markets experienced the "flash crash" in May, and it's not surprising that recent memories of the markets from May through October have left a bad taste in investors mouths. This is not to say that all May through October time periods result in major corrections or seismic market events, but it is a period of time that the market has not historically made great strides.
So as we hit May and the beginning of the historically "seasonally "weak" period for Equities, now is the time to think about positioning your portfolios accordingly. "Tilting" seasonally, using a combination of low-volatility and Technical Leaders ETFs, is a powerful way to do that.
Optionpit blog seeks volatility for options traders.
FRESNO, California. -- Lisa Beach, a senior at California State University, Fresno, endured two months of testing and paperwork before the student health office at her college approved a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Then, to get a prescription for Vyvanse, a standard treatment for A.D.H.D., she had to sign a formal contract -- promising to submit to drug testing, to see a mental health professional every month and to not share the pills.
How should we aggregate the data into an informative bottom line? To Reinhart and Rogoff's critics, the natural approach is to take the average for each debt level across all years in all countries. This would, for example, give a country with 10 years of very high debt 10 times the weight of a country with only one year. Instead, Reinhart and Rogoff took an average growth rate for each country experiencing very high debt, then calculated the average across countries. In their approach, all countries with any experience of very high debt get the same weight.
Which approach makes more sense? That depends on the question you want to answer. Reinhart and Rogoff are trying to find the average country's growth rate during episodes of very high debt. Their critics are seeking the average growth rate of GDP when debt is very high. These are subtly different.
From a statistical perspective, your preference might depend on your judgment about what drives differences in economic growth at a given level of debt. If you think broad country characteristics such as geography or quality of governance are the most important, you might choose Reinhart and Rogoff's approach of averaging out the national idiosyncrasies to determine the experience of the "typical country." If you believe that country and time-specific factors such as domestic- policy decisions matter most, then you might want to weight all years equally to average out these one-time influences.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
Vixcentral is a great dashboard for volatility trading.
Why choose? "Pain & Gain," though it compresses some events and characters, hews fairly close to the facts as related in Mr. Collins's deadpan chronicle of idiotic criminality and sloppy police work. Mr. Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer and bodybuilding enthusiast who lands a job at a Miami gym after serving time for an investment scam. Swearing that he has learned his lesson -- that there is no substitute for hard work -- he sets his sights on a South Florida vision of the good life, egged on by a self-help guru (Ken Jeong) who fills his head with slogans and three-point plans for success. "If I deserve it," Daniel says, "then the universe will serve it."
What he feels the universe owes him is more or less what a teenage boy raised on "Entourage," Grand Theft Auto and the oeuvre of Michael Bay might demand, though, since "Pain & Gain" is set in 1995, not all of those inspirations are available to Daniel. But the world, then as now, is full of hot babes, fast cars and money, tokens of a high-rolling, hedonistic existence just beyond poor Daniel's reach. He is motivated less by ambition than by a self-pitying sense of entitlement that is both democratic and Nietzschean. He says that he wants to be just like everybody else but also that he wants to set himself apart from the losers and suckers in whose ranks he unfairly languishes.
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, understands that we're drawn back to "Gatsby" because we keep seeing modern buccaneers of banking and hedge funds, swathed in carelessness and opulence. "But what most people don't understand is that the adjective 'Great' in the title was meant laconically," he said. "There's nothing genuinely great about Gatsby. He's a poignant phony. Owing to the money-addled society we live in, people have lost the irony of Fitzgerald's title. So the movies become complicit in the excessively materialistic culture that the novel set out to criticize."
He noted that Gatsby movies are usually just moving versions of Town and Country or The Times's T magazine, and that filmmakers "get seduced by the seductions that the book itself is warning about."
A really great movie of the novel, he argues, would "show a dissenting streak of austerity." He thinks it's time for a black Gatsby, noting that Jay-Z might be an inspirational starting point -- "a young man of talents with an unsavory past consumed by status anxiety and ascending unstoppably through tireless self-promotion and increasingly conspicuous wealth."
The problem with the "Gatsby" movies, he said, "is that they look like they were made by Gatsby. The trick is to make a Gatsby movie that couldn't have been made by Gatsby -- an unglossy portrait of gloss."