Sunday Culture - Bronze Boxer

Something from the ancient world for you today. Before I saw this video I didn't know that in ancient Greece bronze was used to create statues long before modern times. And that most statues we nowadays see are copies made by the Romans and bronze was melted to be re-used. Therefore very few original statues exist. I hope you find this video as interesting as I did.

Apollonius, Boxer at Rest, c. 100 B.C.E., bronze, Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome

Game Theory

Once again on the subject of educating yourself. Game Theory is something that can help you to make decisions. It works with psychology, with investing, with poker.. So when you understand it you have, simply said, much more stronger knowledge to make strategic decisions based on your information.

Maybe the easiest way to study Game Theory is as an online course in Coursera. It only requires a simple registration and even though the course has ended already (so you can't do the exam anymore) all the materials and video lectures are still available for you to study. They are very clear in their explaining so I highly recommend them.

This course is held by Kevin Leyton-Brown (The University of British Columbia), Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham (both from Stanford University). So quality of the teachers and the course is high.

About the Course

Popularized by movies such as "A Beautiful Mind", game theory is the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) agents. Beyond what we call 'games' in common language, such as chess, poker, soccer, etc., it includes the modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. How could you begin to model eBay, Google keyword auctions, and peer to peer file-sharing networks, without accounting for the incentives of the people using them? The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and real-world applications.

Wikipedia definition: Game theory is a study of strategic decision making. More formally, it is "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers." An alternative term suggested "as a more descriptive name for the discipline" is interactive decision theory. Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic and biology. The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person's gains exactly equal net losses of the other participant(s). Today, however, game theory applies to a wide range of class relations, and has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science, to include both human and non-humans, like computers. Classic uses include a sense of balance in numerous games, where each person has found or developed a tactic that cannot successfully better his results, given the other approach. 

Modern game theory began with the idea regarding the existence of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum games and its proof by John von Neumann. Von Neumann's original proof used Brouwer's fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets, which became a standard method in game theory and mathematical economics. His paper was followed by his 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, with Oskar Morgenstern, which considered cooperative games of several players. The second edition of this book provided an axiomatic theory of expected utility, which allowed mathematical statisticians and economists to treat decision-making under uncertainty. 

This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to biology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields. Eight game-theorists have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of game theory to biology.  More information by Wikipedia.

So if you are interested to improve your skills I highly recommend you to go through this course and www.coursera.org is a great way to do it whenever you have the time to focus on it.
They also have plenty of other courses and more to come that can be useful knowledge for investors, so check them out and lets IMPROVE OUR SKILLS TO RULE THE MARKETS ;)

The Secret To Staying Motivated? Optimism

I wanted to share with you this text I recently read. It shares my view on how to be motivated, but I had forgotten I was using it. In short, being optimistic keeps you motivated.

There’s an old idiom, “don’t get mad, get even.” I’ve always loved it, but of course, that just means I’m a hothead. Because if you really break down that idiom’s meaning, it’s not telling you to quell your conniption. It’s telling you to channel that anger to reach new heights. So to the bells of Rocky, many of us punch away at projects, venting our way to the top.

But as Emily Esfahani Smith points out over at The Atlantic, research has shown that optimism--for however cheesy that term can sound to the bag-punchers in the crowd--is a lot more powerful when your chips are down than making two fists and fighting your way out of a corner.

This is what Dr. Dennis Charney, the dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, found when he examined approximately 750 Vietnam war veterans who were held as prisoners of war for six to eight years. Tortured and kept in solitary confinement, these 750 men were remarkably resilient. Unlike many fellow veterans, they did not develop depression or posttraumatic stress disorder after their release, even though they endured extreme stress. What was their secret? After extensive interviews and tests, Charney found ten characteristics that set them apart. The top one was optimism. The second was altruism. Humor and having a meaning in life--or something to live for--were also important. 

For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety--blow off some steam--to be happier. But this is wrong. Researchers, for example, asked people who were mildly-to-moderately depressed to dwell on their depression for eight minutes. The researchers found that such ruminating caused the depressed people to become significantly more depressed and for a longer period of time than people who simply distracted themselves thinking about something else. Senseless suffering--suffering that lacks a silver lining--viciously leads to more depression.

Counter-intuitively, another study found that facing down adversity by venting--hitting a punching bag or being vengeful toward someone who makes you angry--actually leads to people feeling far worse, not better. Actually, doing nothing at all in response to anger was more effective than expressing the anger in these destructive ways.

Taking this research into account, another idiom comes to mind: “The darkest hour is just before the dawn.” Interestingly enough, that was also the slogan of the latest Batman movie. In other words, even Bruce Wayne, who dedicated his life, fortune, and fashion sense to avenging his parents ultimately figured out this whole optimism lesson. Maybe there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

Source of the text