Coruscation

Cornell Tech today announced that Denise Young Smith, Apple's Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity, will be the new Executive-in-Residence at Cornell Tech, beginning her role in January 2018.

One of the most prominent African-American female executives in Silicon Valley, Smith's 20-year career at Apple includes leading Human Resources and most recently overseeing the company's global effort for an inclusive and embracing culture and workforce. As the Executivein-Residence, Smith will work with students to build an early career-stage awareness of the criticality of inclusive leadership and a diverse talent imperative.

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Eleanor's NYC's profile of Helen Shirley Ho of recycle-a-bicycle, New York.

More.

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Prof. Jeff Jarvis is the world's leading hyperglocal thinkfluencer and Journalism 3.0 advocate. He is cofounder of the Mogadishu:Reinvent unconference and CEO of Mogadishu Capital Partners LLC. He is not Jeff Jarvis.

But even the byline is a fake -- the author's real name is Rurik Bradbury, according to a 2012 piece in Slate. There is a real Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York who writes about media and technology for Buzz Machine. Bradbury told Slate in 2012 why he adopted Jarvis's moniker:

"I chose Jarvis because he epitomizes a certain type of 'thinkfluencer,' " Bradbury told me, "someone with an online influence massively greater than the thoughtfulness of his positions. It's all style and rhetorical flourishes which don't stand up to scrutiny--but do grab attention." But it's not personal. "It's more of a general parody: a composite of Jarvis, Seth Godin, the media 'freetards' who insist paywalls, etc., are bad by definition."

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Marissa Mayers' nine points

# Ideas come from everywhere
# Share everything you can
# You're brilliant we're hiring
# A license to pursue dreams
# Innovation not instant perfection
# Data is a-political
# Creativity loves constraint.
# Don't Kill Projects, Morph them
# Users not money

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AT an office party in 2005, one of my colleagues asked my then husband what I did on weekends. She knew me as someone with great intensity and energy. "Does she kayak, go rock climbing and then run a half marathon?" she joked. No, he answered simply, "she sleeps." And that was true. When I wasn't catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage -- which ended just a few years later.

In recent weeks I have been following with interest the escalating debate about work-life balance and the varying positions of Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo and the academic Anne-Marie Slaughter, among others. Since I resigned my position as chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers in 2008, amid mounting chaos and a cloud of public humiliation only months before the company went bankrupt, I have had ample time to reflect on the decisions I made in balancing (or failing to balance) my job with the rest of my life. The fact that I call it "the rest of my life" gives you an indication where work stood in the pecking order.

-- Erin Callan, former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers

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Watchers of the bilingual soccer channel GolTV are treated weekly to the cockeyed enthusiasm of the British commentator Ray Hudson. A blog, Hudsonia, was inspired by his ability to "coin phrases that defy both logic and belief" and by his unending quest to "invent a new language in English."

In Hudson's words, Hernandez has "chameleon eyes" and is as "slippery as an eel covered in Vaseline" and plays with the predatory appetite of a "zombie hunter looking for a Twinkie." Somehow, out of incomprehension comes clarity. Even poetry.

Robert Lalasz, the editor of the Web site Must Read Soccer, has assembled Hudson's verbal improvisations into verse, the way others previously did for the Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto. One of the poems, "He Doesn't Live There," opened this article.

Here is another:

"Neither With Net nor Trident"

The genius, the genius of
Football
In our modern-day life
Utterly
Unpredictable
He doesn't know
What he's going to do
So how the hell
Do the defenders
You cannot contain him
With a net
Or a trident
He's got pace
He's got power
He's got vision
Technique!
And he's got
Finishing power
His cup
Runneth over ...
Magnificent Messi
Wild man
He doth bestride the Earth
Like a Colossus

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Junior Minister for 4Chan ?

Sunstein had, during his academic career, a penchant for publishing trial balloons -- they were a necessary part of his inquiry, a perpetual what if? Now, with their author a government official, some of these conjectures seem more worrisome. Sunstein has, for example, written often about the corrosive effects of rumors and falsehoods on democratic discourse (it is the subject of one of the two books that were published while he was waiting to be confirmed last year), and in a 2008 paper, he proposed that government agents "cognitively infiltrate" chat rooms and message boards to try to debunk conspiracy theories before they spread. The paper was narrowly concerned with terrorism, but to some, these were dark musings. The liberal essayist Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, called the proposal "spine-chilling."

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Negative equity is the best predictor for loan defaults, said Sam Khater, a senior economist for First American. Still, "a majority of people who are underwater probably will not default," he said, "because if you have your job and don't encounter economic shock, you'll most likely keep paying your mortgage on your home."

Real estate values in the greater New York area may suffer less from underwater mortgages than in other parts of the nation, said Mr. Khater, of First American, because homeowners are less likely to fall into foreclosure.

That is because this area was less popular among people who bought homes as investments rather than for their own use. In Arizona, Nevada, California and Florida, where speculative buying was much more common, homeowners who owe much more than their homes are worth generally have less incentive to keep paying the mortgage.

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The Party Starter, Blythe Masters:

"Just as the rapidly growing asset backed securitisation market is bringing investors new sources of credit assets, the credit derivatives market will strip out and repackage credit exposures from the vastly greater pool of risks which do not naturally lend themselves to securitisation, either because the risks are unfunded (off-balance-sheet), because they are not intrinsically transferable, or because their sale would be complicated by relationship concerns."

The best line of course is "By enhancing liquidity, credit derivatives achieve the financial equivalent of a "free lunch" whereby both buyers and sellers of risk benefit from the associated efficiency gains."

from concluding paragraph from her magnum opus - all in the Queen's English of course.

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Goldman Sachs name new MD (Managing Director Partners) for 2009.

Included was Jan Hatzius, economist known for real estate commentary.

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felixsalmon, Portfolio writer ( since moved to Reuters).

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Tanta of Calculated Risk, dead at 47.
A scathing yet joyous nerd.

Best of: On automated underwriting systems (AUS), underwriting cheat sheets, dogs.

First, there's the old "let's retrain a bunch of subprime loan officers to be prime GSE loan officers." You civilians might think this should be fairly easy, but the fact is that training a lot of these people to be prime loan officers basically means training them to be loan officers. If they had any basic depth of understanding of the business they're in, they could move to prime origination by just reading that other rate sheet. The reality is that they've been doing no-doc no-down no-sweat stuff for so long--some of them have never done anything but--that they're sitting around with the PlayStation waiting for someone to tell them how a 30-year fixed rate loan with a down payment and verified income actually works. Which is to say, their bosses are sitting around in the busier conference rooms trying to figure out if it's possibly worth the time and money to turn these people into mortgage experts instead of corner-cutting order-takers.

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Chris Whalen @ PRMIA, (archives).

Example:
There is nothing you can do to "fix" a CDO, to make it liquid,
other than to standardize the terms and trade it on an exchange.
The liquidity gridlock prevailing in the secondary market for CDOs
is the normal situation for such unique and entirely opaque
instruments, whereas the past illusion of liquidity was abnormal,
a byproduct of the "irrational exuberance" described by Greenspan
himself. Buy Side investors accepted the fallacy of liquidity -- until
they asked the Sell Side dealers to bid on the paper. That's when
the current trouble really began.

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