Kuring? No, But Konfirming The Origins Of Kawasaki Disease

Here is a nice story about the ancient Barts Pathology lab helping advance modern medical science a teensy bit over the tragic Kawasaki disease:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kawasaki-disease-an-unknown-illness-with-no-definitive-medicaldiagnosis-and-no-known-cause–but-it-may-all-be-in-the-wind-10376403.html

“Gee’s post-mortem examination findings, preserved in a single paragraph written in 1871, recorded signs of damage called aneurysms in the coronary arteries running across the surface of the boy’s heart.”

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For me, this museum story began in 2006.  Professor Will Ayliffe and I were aghast at the state of deliberate neglect when we made an ‘illegal’ tour of the then abandoned facility.  I was on a board of the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) where the Clinical Pathology Association (CPA) was a subsidiary.  The CPA had a Trust to which we applied for cataloguing, and the CPA Trust funding came through in 2009/2010 with Dr Ken Scott’s support (the CEO of CPA).  Colleague Professor Adrian Newland lent his support, thus drawing in Barts Trust support.

The publication by Carla Connolly of her preservation work – http://www.ibms.org/includes/act_download.php?download=pdf/2012-March-St-Barts.pdf –  along with this Gresham College lecture by Will – http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/anatomy-museums-past-present-and-future – (supported by Gresham Professors Tim Connell and Frank Cox), and City of London support through Wendy Mead kept up the visibility, leading to the permanent museum arrangements with Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) – http://www.smd.qmul.ac.uk/about/pathologymuseum/

And it turned out the historic collection was useful, perhaps invaluable, as long suspected by Will and me. Sadly (for those with this rare disease and their families), yet hopefully (medically and scientifically), perhaps more value will be derived in future on Kawasaki and other diseases. I think it is a great story, or backstory, for all of us in the City, Gresham College, and the scientific profession.

[Coda: during the covid-19 pandemic we have also seen Kawasaki disease feature, so the origins are important –

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31129-6/fulltext

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/a-pretty-scary-thing-rare-child-syndrome-tied-to-virus-worries-new-york-100-sick/2413952/]

Sirius-ly Long But Successful-ly

One of my longer and more problematic projects has been Sirius Minerals.  What began as a copper and gold mining exploration firm turned into one of the biggest potash firms, and the first non-hydrocarbon mine in the UK in over half a century.  As I’ve remarked to friends, if oil & gas run out we wind up cycling, but if the potash runs out we move from 7 billion people to 1 billion people in less than two years.  Hmmm.

Planning permission has been the key to success.  Having been one of the founders, along with Richard Poulden and Jonathan Harrison, back in 2005, I was delighted to see planning permission finally approved.

FT Coverage – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a70a4568-1f4f-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f25d0.html

Guardian Coverage – http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/30/north-york-moors-potash-mine-gets-17bn-go-ahead

Potash-mine-and-map-3-0-0

It’s an exciting, interesting (not least being a two century export supply for all of Europe and  having a 37 km transportation tunnel to Teeside), and potentially highly-profitable project with which I’m proud to have been associated.  Interesting that it becomes successful alongside another decade long project at Barts (see next).  The pigeons may take a long time to come home to roost, but they do home in.

Knightian Ignorance – “Are You Not Thinking What I’m Not Thinking?”

Voltaire said, “Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is absurd.”  I was asked to share my ignorance by speaking about uncertainty and finance at the Calculating & Communicating Uncertainty Conference on 27 January 2015 at BIS, London.  The event was sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence, Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and Public Health England, and organised by the University of Southampton.  You can read the full talk, “Where The Numbers Meet The Road – Uncertainty At The Frontiers Of Finance”.  As my highlight, I would point out how much I enjoyed sharing with the audience my concept of “Knightian Ignorance”.

DSTL Conference 2015.01.27

University of Chicago economist Frank Knight (1885–1972) distinguished risk and uncertainty in his 1921 work Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit.  Risk is something you can assess by knowing impact and likelihood.  Uncertainty is something you realise might happen, but can’t quantify.  Black Swans and unknown unknowns are popular party points today.  To explain the conjunction of known unknowns and unknown unknowns I remembered the UK Conservative Party’s crude slogan under Michael Howard in the 2005 general election, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”  I could explain known unknowns and unknown unknowns as Knightian Ignorance, “Are you not thinking what I’m not thinking?”  Enjoy!

Safer Cities – open data, cyber insurance, new currencies

Safer Cities – People, Security, Technology
Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli
CityForum – http://www.cityforum.co.uk/events.asp?eventID=10037
Monday, 10 March 2014
One Whitehall Place, London SW1

As a student of international economics, I’ve been asked to provide some comments today on Safer Cities. In 1800, only three percent of the global population lived in cities and only one city, London, had more than a million people. In 2008 more than 50% of the world lived in cities and there were well over 300 cities with a population over one million people. Despite working with many cities on things such as the Global Financial Centres Index or futures work on drone delivery strategies or new currencies, I’ve never claimed to be a City guru. However, you don’t need a guru – the question “what makes a great economic city” has a simple one word answer – Trade.

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Cities reduce the degrees of separation. People come to cities to trade. What makes cities strong is the free flow of goods, capital, services, labour, and intellectual property. Gross World Product is about $50 trillion, and trade is over $25 trillion. In fact, 25% to 40% of trade is non-monetary, so global trade is not far off Global World Product, though this is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. Now, can you name my economic hero of the 20th century? He transformed the UK road network, destroyed the northern ports, and devastated east London. He was of Scottish descent. Several cities such as Oakland, California or Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia sprang from nowhere due to him. His innovation created London’s Tilbury port. He is of course Malcom McLean, father of the shipping container.

The biggest gains for peoples of the world have been through free trade. When major eastern economies embraced free trade, almost two billion people were lifted out of poverty. The biggest innovation of the 20th century that contributed to reducing poverty was probably also the sea container.

So let’s look at security. One of my favourite Benjamin Franklin quotes is: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. Franklin meant, of course, that even seemingly minor or transient curbs on freedom should not be tolerated. American representative democracy required a compact with markets that did give up some essential liberties to regulators in order to purchase a little temporary safety. Madison notes in The Federalist Papers, “The regulation of commerce, it is true, is a new power; but that seems to be an addition which few oppose, and from which no apprehensions are entertained.” I think Madison underestimated the apprehensions.

We have to get the relationship between commerce and our security services right. So what are my thoughts on safer cities? One of my big cyber security fears is hacking those same sea container stacking systems on the docks and randomly shuffling them. We might slowly starve and riot, unable to get at the scrambled stacks with food inside. I want to talk about non-physical trade, so I’ll point out that the biggest shift in trade today also involves containerisation – the data packets transmitted and swapped over the internet. I shall provide three points for discussion on weightless, online trading – open data, cyber insurance, and the changing nature of money.

First, I wonder, with the Lord Mayor Alderman Fiona Woolf CBE, if how we gather and exchange data might define a city. Perhaps, our new city wall is a data wall. Our new reservoir is our data store. Perhaps on entry to a city we contract to provide movement information from our smart phones to help transport planning – a mobile app passport. If I get planning permission to build a block of flats, must I provide ways of sharing energy, occupancy, or waste information with the city, which it anonymises, stores, and then shares more widely. I can link up with neighbours to consider new power or water treatment plants because I have the data on local consumers, their needs, their usage patterns. There are liberty and security issues, certainly, but more open data could transform London and other cities. We’ve seen this locally in minor ways with transport apps. We’ve seen this globally in major ways with GPS or weather data. Perhaps we should be freer with Land Registry data. Perhaps utilities should have sharing obligations in exchange for their quasi-monopolies. Perhaps cities should have open source blockchains of recorded trades within their walls. A safer, wealth producing City has to reset a number of boundaries, to build new city walls around reservoirs of data, keeping out the highwaymen of the internet. I might go further and muse on how fundamental reform of patents and copyright might help trade in data by lowering trade conflict, but due to time shall move on.

Second, we have to make data trade and cyber issues commercially ‘normal’. The state of commercial normalcy for most risks, think fire, theft, flood, for a business is that – after a business has done all the right things – it can then buy insurance. Why don’t we have a Cyber Re (or extend the existing Pool Re for terrorism insurance) where government becomes a partner to the insurance industry funding the extreme losses of cyber-crime, learning how to talk to industry in commercial terms? With reinsurance, normal insurers write cyber policies which help spread information and best practice. A Cyber Re helps promote a stronger ICT security industry and a more promising national location for ICT business. Cyber Re would provide proof that ICT security technology works, in financial terms. Normalcy is more than just cyber. I’d include working visas & immigration, regulation, and taxation in commercial normalcy. Given the number of financial scandals over the internet, such as FX, the regulators are unintelligent but they are not inexpensive. Retroactive or ‘shakedown’ taxation is equally reprehensible. Perhaps I might mischievously suggest that Starbucks be reported to the US authorities for paying £20 million to HMRC recently. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 “was enacted for the purpose of making it unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business.” [US Department of Justice website] Reducing trade frictions generated by immigration, regulation, and taxation, which are security-related, e.g. Anti-Money Laundering, will help cities flourish economically. Security has a cost, but efficient security pays. But I’ll move on.

Third, money is traded online via data packets. And the nature of money is changing. Bitcoin has the headlines. Bitcoin’s essential innovation was a public blockchain, which eliminates the need for a central bank by making the entire network the record of transactions. From several possible choices of currency architecture, Bitcoin chose to set a maximum fixed supply of 21 million coins. This fixed supply means that Bitcoin is possibly best compared with gold. Gold is also an element with a fixed earthly supply. Imagine Bitcoin as a virtual element. We know what the supply is. We know where most of it is, and can mine a bit more. However, it is not money. It is a virtual element, weightless. Only a community can decide whether to use it to trade. So far, many of the allegations for or against Bitcoin focus on what type of community is perceived to be using it to trade debts – a Silk Road of illegal transactions, quixotic libertarians damning profligate governments, new age gold bugs, or hard-pressed traders in a tight credit environment.

Many people dismiss cryptocurrencies out of hand, forgetting that in times of economic turmoil and tight credit alternative currencies flourish. Well over 400 currencies sprang up in the USA in the 1930’s to fill credit gaps. The eighty year old Swiss WIR is a government-sanctioned trade currency still providing useful credit to a quarter of Swiss businesses counter-cyclically to the Swiss Franc. Bitcoin may fail, but it is already economically important. A quick insanity check – the five year old Bitcoin has a market capitalisation today of several billion dollars, albeit fluctuating wildly, with about the same market capitalisation as the two century old London Stock Exchange Group.

In summary, successful, safe cities are safer places to trade. We need to understand that data containerisation, the internet packet, is transforming them. We need to provide more smoothly swapped open data, normalise cyber risk, and embrace the innovation cryptocurrencies provide. Thank you.

‘Open Commerce’ Talk To Worshipful Company Of Information Technologists

Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, 83rd Business Luncheon

“Open Commerce Drives Out Closed Commerce”

Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli FCCA FCSI FBCS

Tallow Chandlers’ Hall, 4 Dowgate Hill, London EC4R 2SH, 12 February 2014

WCIT logo

Master, Deputy Master, Wardens, Alderman, Liverymen, distinguished Guests.  I’ve had the delight of knowing this Wonderful Company for three decades.  I worked at British Leyland in the early 1980’s with John Leighfield; I fondly remember scheming for reform with Alan Benjamin; like all of us, I constantly admire Dame ‘Steve’ Shirley.  Back in the mid-1990’s, with the Ministry of Defence, the London Stock Exchange, and others, this Company and my firm, Z/Yen, created the Financial Laboratory Club to visualise risk.

I’ve also been coming to your business luncheons for two decades.  While it’s a great honour to be given this chance to discuss whether “open commerce drives out closed commerce”, it was also a bit of a terror when your Master Michael Webster asked me to follow the magnificent Vint Cerf from three months ago.  How inspiring to hear Vint’s plans for interstellar travel – truly per ardua ad astra – striving to bring mankind to the stars.  My plans are more mundane.  I shall swiftly star trek through community, code, and currency to ask you to promote open commerce.

Community

The writer Orson Scott Card said, “Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.” [Speaker for the Dead, 1986].  Now the IT industry is a young community, yet there is already an old joke about three engineers, a mechanical engineer, a production engineer, and a software engineer, think Past Master Charles Hughes.  The three engineers drive to the top of a steep mountain to see the view.  On the way back down the car veers out of control and they barely bring it to a halt on the edge of a cliff.  The mechanical engineer gets out, looks under the engine, and says, “it’s a leaking brake line.  Let’s patch the hole, refill with fluid, drive home”.  The production engineer says, “no, let’s try to remove the flaw from our factory floor.”  The software engineer says, “hey, let’s go back to the top of the hill and see if it happens again.”

Anthropologists define a community as a group of people who are indebted to one another.  At first this sounds like an accountancy definition, but in joining any community, this livery company for example, we assume debits and credits.

Code

Code is language and language is code.  As a Harvard student on the internet in 1976, perhaps I should have dropped out like Bill Gates, rather than remain a penniless nerd.  And I am a nerd.  Though my wife may cook a blackberry tart or a mulberry cheesecake, we have two Raspberry PIs at home.  I’m still the unpaid IT director for some Ubuntu Linux machines.  You’ll date me easily when I say FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, PASCAL, or Cnot++.  I love the geek cartoon XKCD where a programmer dreams of a universe coded in Lisp but God explains, “Honestly, we hacked most of it [the universe] together with PERL.” [https://xkcd.com/224/]

At Harvard at the start of the 20th century, the faculty presented President Lowell with compelling arguments for a new department of political science. President Lowell agreed but remarked, “Gentlemen, there is no such thing as political science, we shall call it Government”.  And it is the Government department to this day.  Computer science is at that stage – it’s really just computing.  We hack it all together.  Yet some theory matters.

After mathematics, the biggest theoretical effect on code was linguistics.  It’s an unusual fact that in the 4th century BC the scholar Panini described Sanskrit using transformational syntax.  In the 1960’s we computer folk adopted Noam Chomsky’s syntactical theory to build language compilers.   FORTRAN 1 took thirty man-years in the late 50’s.  Today we expect an undergraduate to build a compiler as a semester’s exercise.

When we code, we squeeze a community’s language into a machine.  Over the years I’ve had to cram a parabolic missile guidance system into 4k of memory, or jam a world of Mundocart and Geodat maps into 4MB of DEC PDP storage.  I once coded biorhythms, though there I won’t claim they make sense.  Today my firm encodes statistical learning theory.  Coding teaches us about ourselves, in a little class ditty from the 1970s [archive text provided by William Joseph]:

I really hate this damned machine,
I surely wish they’d sell it.
It never does the things I want,
Just only what I tell it.

When talking about commerce we must talk about encoding money.

Currency

Money is a technology larger communities use to trade debts.  The technology is becoming ever more open.  Bitcoin’s essential innovation was a public blockchain, no need for a central bank.  When I explain Bitcoin, I ask people to imagine it as a new virtual element.  We know what the supply is.  We know where most of it is. However, it is not money.  It is a virtual element, but only a community can decide whether to use it to trade.  A quick insanity check – the five year old Bitcoin has a market capitalisation of $8.5 billion today, about the same market cap as the two century old London Stock Exchange.  There are now over 40 alternative cryptocurrencies, AltCoins.  While Vint Cerf was talking intergalactic last year, Travelex announced Quids, Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denominations, a space currency.  Bitcoin may fail, but some altcoins are likely to succeed and the technology has other applications, for example voting.

Wealth

Talking about money leads to dreams of wealth.  Your Senior Warden Nic Birtles reminded me that the Master’s theme this year is Ubiquity, so I’ll remind you of the Silicon Valley definition of URL – “Ubiquity first, worry about Revenue Later”.  In his essay “How To Get Rich”, the biogeographer Jared Diamond set out two principles for communities – connectivity and competition:

“First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside.  Second, [I also derive] the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don’t want excessive unity and you don’t want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other.  [And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.]’

So what is ‘open commerce’?  Sharing data, especially public data, and keeping our communities sensibly competitive.  Frankly, pretty much what Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

Gresham’s Law Of Commerce?

Sir Thomas Gresham’s family grasshopper graces his 16th century works, Gresham College, the Royal Exchange and St Martin’s goldsmiths.  Gresham’s Royal Exchange was a market and shopping mall where you could trade the virtual, such as a share of a voyage.  St Martin’s issued gold certificates you could trade if you believed in them.  Gresham College is a Tudor Open University, online today also as a Tudor TED, and with a Creative Commons policy.  But Gresham’s Law, “bad money drives out good”, was not his; it dates back to Aristophanes.  More importantly, the law is expressed backwards.  If you offer me a debased coin or a real coin, I’ll take the real coin unless some monarch insists we use his or her debased currency.  The Nobel economist Robert Mundell rephrased Gresham’s Law properly as “cheap money drives out dear money only if they must be exchanged for the same price”.  Open drives out closed.

So do open data and competition drive out closed commerce?  Start with open data.  In the 1960s and 1970s the UK founded computer-based mapping.  From 1979 to 1987, a number of us in the mapping industry tried to influence three Chorley reports to release publicly-owned ordnance survey and hydrographic data at cost.  We failed.  The industry moved to nations, principally the USA, Germany, and Sweden, where firms and researchers could get data at cost.  Contrariwise, just a few years ago Transport for London decided on free release of train and bus data.  A number of innovative London firms turned it into information on the smart phones you have in your pockets – hopefully switched off – today.   Freeing data made London a global centre for software development of public transport apps.

In January the Rt Hon Lord Mayor Fiona Woolf CBE pointed out in her Tomorrow’s Cities Gresham lecture that our new city walls might be shared data walls – “Perhaps on entry to a city we contract to provide movement information from our smart phones to help transport planning – a mobile app passport.  If I build a block of flats, I must provide ways of sharing energy, occupancy, or waste information with the city, which it anonymises, stores, and then shares more widely.  I can link up with neighbours to consider new power or water treatment plants because I have the data on local consumers, their needs, their usage patterns.”

Competition

Master Michael Webster remarked via email last year on the benefits of Airbus and Boeing competition.  In the 1970’s, just as it looked as if Boeing would have a monopoly on large passenger aircraft, the European community, at great expense, created Airbus.  Though Europe has only come out even, thanks to the British and the French governments Boeing has no monopoly and benefits have spilled across the world through more diversity and lower prices.

How often does the average Briton meet a market?  After government takes 40% of the average Briton’s income, the remaining 60%’s big ticket items are housing, fuel, and food.  Six banks control mortgage markets; six energy providers dominate fuel: two in your area; four supermarkets dominate food: two in your area.  We have a lot of monopolies and oligopolies.  Few outside Brussels compare five dominant UK banks with the two thousand banks in Germany, or question four global auditing firms and three credit rating agencies.  In IT for twenty years we quite rightly we worried about platform providers such as IBM, Intel, or Microsoft; now we worry about Google or Amazon.  Competition is the most basic form of regulation.  It keeps us on our toes asking questions, and it’s ruthless.  When I asked my then 13 year old daughter why she hacked her school Microsoft computer to install Chrome, she heartlessly said, “Daddy, the only good use for Bing is finding Google”.  At the Ministry of Defence I constantly asked my research teams “if you learned so much last year, why are you spending your budget the same way?”, and “I don’t care if it’s the best British technology, is it the world’s best?”.

We should worry about change.  But we might equally worry about lack of change.  What might e-retailing do to our high streets?  We had more profound changes to our high streets over the past century due to the motor car.  Yes, we should worry about privacy, liberty, security, and fair recompense.  We certainly need to worry about earning our global crust as a competitive nation, but that’s brainpower as much as ownership.  Pierre-Marc-Gaston in 1808 observed that « Il est encore plus facile de juger de l’esprit d’un homme par ses questions que par ses réponses. »   “It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers”.  Today Kevin Kelly of Wired observes that in “The world that Google is constructing – a world of cheap and free answers – having answers is not going to be very significant or important.  Having a really great question will be where all the value is.”

Open The Competition

So what might you do?  As good professionals you should be annoying about open data and competition.  Open data is not just for governments.  Have you thought about freeing data from your firm?  Anonymise your vehicle movements and share with a traffic laboratory.  Release some energy data in a challenge for students to help you become more renewable.  Eliminate your legalese.  The IT industry has a tortured relationship with copyright, patents, and contracts.  I have a little numbers game I call ‘contract word count’ where I cut and paste those little online licenses that accompany every new app into a word processor.  Then I do a word count.  100,000 words is a typical length for a novel.  A typical Apple contract has over 40,000 words.  My record find was an app with 90,000 words.  For any lawyers here today, I wouldn’t lie.  Yes, I sit in front of my screen reading for two hours before I click ‘accept’.  Don’t you?  My next target is to beat War & Peace’s 587,000 words.  But have you thought about shareware, creative commons, and other methods of releasing information and sharing knowledge without such legal lunacies?  And will you push for open competition, even when you’re in a position of strength?

Commonwealth is a 15th century term meaning “public welfare; general good or advantage”.  “The common-wealth” or “the common weal” comes from an old meaning of wealth as “well-being” thus “common well-being.”  The Lord Mayor believes our common weal is moving into our data.  Our commons need to be places of competition not monopoly or oligopoly.  A village green of fair sport, not village bullies.  As liverymen, we start with community & comradeship, which leads to commerce, and after we’ve generated some wealth we turn to charity, building a just society.  Perhaps we should call out volunteer Deputy Master Michael Grant in all his polished Pikemen and Musketeers finery to defend our commons?  Our wealth is founded on what we share, which starts with data, then information, then knowledge, and then, perhaps, even wisdom.  So, paraphrasing Vint Cerf, per aperta data et commercia ad astra – through open data and commerce to the stars.

Thank you.

May I ask all of you to be upstanding and drink a toast with me to the health of the Company.  To the Company, may I.T. flourish root & branch!

Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli FCCA FCSI FBCS

Michael co-founded Z/Yen, the City of London’s leading commercial think-tank, in 1994 to promote societal advance through better finance and technology.  Educated at Harvard, Trinity College Dublin and the London School of Economics, where after his PhD he was also a visiting professor, Michael started his career in the USA as a research scientist in aerospace and computing, later becoming a partner and board member in a leading accountancy firm directing consulting worldwide, before a spell as Corporate Development Director of Europe’s largest R&D organisation in the UK Ministry of Defence, the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.  At Z/Yen, Michael is responsible for leading innovative projects and research, particularly for financial, technology, and government clients.  In 2005 Michael founded the Long Finance movement asking “when would we know our financial system is working?”.  One event had 350 finance professionals singing for monetary reform with Brian Eno at the Willis building.  Michael is a Freeman of the City of London and the Watermen & Lighterman, and a Liveryman of the World Traders.

Season’s Meetings – 2013

It would be difficult to cram in any more events between the parties.  Not only have we had the Z/Yen Christmas Party, my 27th annual boozy breakfast on Lady Daphne (beer courtesy of Fuller’s!), the annual Broad Street Ward Club luncheon, carol services at St Margaret Lothbury, and numerous other events, but work has been frenzied too.  Try some of these fascinating links for some variety, not even the half of it:

Then some amazing Financial Times coverage of a project we cooked up with Bob McDowall of Alderney over the summer:

but perhaps most noteworthy for me was the honour of presenting at this University of Sussex workshop for Onora O’Neill – http://www.sussex.ac.uk/philosophy/newsandevents/actingonprinciple – terrifying to be a business person presenting to philosophers, but Onora made it rewarding.  And that’s just bits of December, though a nice, closing for the year before heading away to Germany for Wolpertinger habitat preservation work – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolpertinger.  So I’ll leave a stressful 2013 behind with the following picture of peace and The Shard in fog after a few beers on a cold morning at St Katharine’s Dock.  Prost Neujahr 2014.

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Battle of the Quants

Working with Bartt Kellermann and Selvie Shaqiri to help bring their very successful US format here to the UK.  Very interesting session today discussing this brief title – “ From the Ephemeral Quant to the Eternal Coin: Short Term vs. Long Term Considerations when Allocating to Quantitative Based Strategies”.  Thankfully, some of our thoughts on Long Finance really rang a bell, and folks seemed to be interested in Asymmettric Gain-Loss Recognition, Performance Policy Bonds, Confidence Accounting, Irreversible Time, Unburnable Carbon, Internal Growth Rate as a key regulatory pension metric, and Volatility = Sustainability.  Wow.  Great crowd.

Eternal Coin Treadmill

Battle of the Quants

Working hard to get elected and already finding that the number of speaking engagements is climbing sharply.  I’m speaking next week at Battle of the Quants.  This is a very popular New York event format which is coming to London a second time.  I’ve been given a succinct title – ” From the Ephemeral Quant to the Eternal Coin: Short Term vs. Long Term Considerations when Allocating to Quantitative Based Strategies”.  We’ll see how well this audience takes to Long Finance‘s thoughts on the long term.

Coin