Prediction markets have the Republican nomination for President of the USA going to billionaire reality TV host and megalomaniac Donald Trump. On the other side of the aisle, self-described socialist Sanders is making Hillary Clinton’s campaign sweat. This isn’t “politics as usual” for anyone except the writers of The Simpsons. According to the party decides theory (or at least my interpretation of Nate Silver’s interpretation) the party, as a loose coalition of opinion forming individuals, can heavily weigh in on who gets nominated.
A few books I recently finished reading are Ben Bernanke’s Courage to act, Dr Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, an unofficial biography on George Soros, and collection of druggie short stories titled Acid House by Irvine Welsh. I do not expect to do justice to the arguments in the books (read a real book review if you want that), I’m just sharing the lessons I learned from them as a little exercise.
I bought my Kindle slightly over a year ago, and since it has accompanied me everywhere I’ve been. It has provided me with entertainment on long journeys and education in subjects where I had none. I would like to share some of my favourite quotes. I have sorted them based on when I started reading them, with some slight editing.
December (2014) The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse.
This year has been an adventure. I've been on three continents, countless countries and dozens of cities. I thought it would be an interesting project to quantify it all by visualising on a map the places where I slept.
In September, images of anti-riot police in a standoff with desperate migrants were shown on television, inspiring many people to volunteer and even more people to chatter about the situation. Yet the problem with our handling of crises is that we often wait for one to happen before doing anything (even just notice something is amiss). Humans are vulnerable to overlooking gradual phenomena with no easily distinguishable onset. There is an ongoing global demographic transition and it will influence most shifts in the next 25 years, be it in politics, business or international relations.
A few friends and I are involved in the Budapest public bicycle data science competition. As of right now we are in the top ten, although in all honesty, it hasn’t really started yet. We signed a non-disclosure agreement, so I cannot really share any cool details. What I can share however, is the function I wrote in R to get calculate the distances and duration of bike trips using Google Maps’ API.
#distance calucations #### This script uses RCurl and RJSONIO to download data from Google's API library(RCurl) library(RJSONIO) #define api key as: api<-"YOURAPI" #the function assumes address input in following dataframe: #lat1,lng1,lat2,lng2 DistDur <- function(address,time = as.
English orthography is a tricky topic. Most people learning English (and a great number of native speakers) are puzzled by a written language with an utter disregard for phonemic representation. It is therefore very worrying that individuals intuitively assume making orthographic mistakes is a sign of low intelligence or unprofessionalism. In this post we are going to show how we looked into the relationship of IQ and orthography using R. We are going to need two things:
Startling new data show that emigration out of Hungary is at a 20-year record high and that many more Hungarians have seriously considered leaving Hungary to live, work, or study in another member state of the EU. But instead of speaking ominously about the potentially catastrophic consequences of such emigration trends for Hungary, it is useful to think of this increased mobility as a potentially positive phenomenon.
Geographic mobility is often an indicator of social mobility.