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Quant Trading Male/Female Ratio 5:1

Today I talked to Ralph Goldsticker, a managing director of research at Mellon Capital Management and he told me that there are about 5 men to 1 woman in the quant industry. So it's a little better than software development but worse than going the pure business route.

Plasma from the Sun

This video of hot plasma "many times the size of Earth" unfurling from the sun is surreal. I'm not a space guy but that's pretty amazing.

Best Places to Launch a Career

Via Businessweek's amazingly accurate ratings:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/career_launch_2008/index.asp

Try to find the arbitrage opportunities
(i.e. sort by average pay and look for the lowest rank near the top, weight by # of entry level hires)

The only banks with liquidity now are sperm banks

(Seen on Sproul Plaza)

Memory Article

Here's an interesting article on memory: Wired

Woodhead Index and the Iraqui War

Google has provided me another way to search the world's information (that's their mission statement). In this case it's the intelligence of US citizens. Google Insights allows you to see which regions or cities are doing the most searches for any given phrase. See who's doing the most searches for misspelled words and you can pinpoint "woodhead clusters".

The problem is that it ranks by volume of searches so big cities will always dominate (even if they are not woodheads). I control for this by looking for differences between the city rankings for popular search terms and the misspellings. Sadly, "myspace" is apparently the most commonly searched term on Google so that is what I used to indicate "normal" intelligence.

One insightful result is that Washington was one of the few major anomalous cities to stand out in a search of "Iraqui":

vs. "myspace":

Woodheads are a significant factor in urban economic research so I am glad to make my small contribution.