Unconditional Love

I had my pets and I know exactly what this feeling is :)

Please adopt a dog, we are desperate for good foster and direct adopter pet owners.

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The hard graft of finding a graduate job in the City of London

Note the point being made by the chap who says that he should've applied for internships son. And also look at the competition, 135 applications for every position. I get weekly requests to meet at least 2-4 students every week and do try to meet them.
Even with an internship it's challenging. By the time you graduate son, the banking industry will be even more competitive and shrunken.
So next year, besides you having fun, do try to get an internship. Start looking for these roles son. Otherwise you'll have regrets. Like this chap did. It's very very corrosive son. Avoid. Plan ahead. Be slightly paranoid. Remember you judge yourself with what you think you've done while others judge you by what you're done.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Love
Baba

 

The hard graft of finding a graduate job in the City of London
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By Emma Jacobs
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Two Londoners with degrees in Maths took a novel approach to the jobseekers’ market by touting for work in a public square….

Competition for graduate- level jobs is fierce. According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month, almost half the UK’s new graduates are working in non-graduate jobs. Forty-seven per cent of those who had finished their degree in the past five years were working in roles such as sales assistants and care workers. Recent analysis by the Financial Times showed that people who graduated this year are earning 12 per cent less than their counterparts before the financial crash.

Typically, positions at investment banks or fund managers are highly contested. These industries receive 135 applications per job, according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters…..However, they believe that it was perhaps a mistake not to have applied for internships when still students. “I wanted to focus on my degree. I got the chance to study in Hong Kong for a year and I wanted to do well,” says 23-year-old Mr Abbas.

Read the full article at: http://on.ft.com/1gIsit6

The problem with high frequency trading

I was working in Solomon brothers son when I first came across algorithmic trading. This is around 2000. You were 5 years of age then. We launched 4 of these models and the limit was 50000$ per day. 3 would propose trades and one would decide and then launch the winning trade. 

Life has moved on hugely since then son. It's become something like skynet from the terminator days lol. The equity markets are really strange. There is no money to be made. Take a look at the major players, hardly anybody on the sell side makes any money because there's no margin. Spreads are so tight. And therefore it's difficult. Good for retail investors like you and I but for the big boys it's getting stupid. The buy side, the asset managers and fund managers, who buy and hold for longer periods are still around and will be so as well but it's going to be a difficult time for equities son. So do think again about your career option of being a stockbroker. Not enough money. 

Be somewhere where technology supports you. Like you come up with new complex instruments and strategies while technology helps. Or go into the advisory business where you need to take nonlinear decisions. Combine your mathematics knowledge with knowledge of technology, philosophy, politics, economics and something that you will pick up later on - psychology. That's what's will help pay huge dividends son. 

Love

Baba

The problem with high frequency trading | Felix Salmon
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/10/06/the-problem-with-high-frequency-trading/

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Last night, on BBC Radio 3, I was featured reading an essay about high frequency trading. I hope it’s fun to listen to, but if you want to read it, here you go.

One of the many consequences of global warming is that it’s now, for the first time, possible to drill under the sea bed of the Arctic ocean. The oil companies are all there, of course, running geological tests and bickering with each other about the potential environmental consequences of an oil spill. But they’re not the only people drilling. Because there’s something even more valuable than oil just waiting to be found under the Arctic.

What is worth so much money that three different consortiums would spend billions of pounds to retrofit icebreakers and send them into some of the coldest and most dangerous waters in the world? The answer, of course, is information.

A couple of days ago, I called a friend in Tokyo, and we had a lovely chat. If he puts something up on Twitter, I can see it immediately. And on the web there are thousands of webcams showing me what’s going on in Japan this very second. It doesn’t look like there’s any great information bottleneck there: anything important which happens in Japan can be, and is, transmitted to the rest of the world in a fraction of a second.

But if you’re a City trader, a fraction of a second is a veritable eternity. Let’s say you want to know the price of a stock on the Tokyo Stock exchange, or the exact number of yen being traded for one dollar. Just like the light from the sun is eight minutes old by the time it reaches us, all that financial information is about 188 milliseconds old by the time it reaches London. That’s zero point one eight eight seconds. And it takes that much time because it has to travel on fiber-optic cables which take a long and circuitous route: they either have to cross the Atlantic, and then the US, and then the Pacific, or else they have to go across Europe, through the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean, and then up through the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.

But! If you can lay an undersea cable across the Arctic, you can save yourself about 5,000 miles, not to mention the risk of routing your information past a lot of political flash points. And when you’re sitting in your office in London and you get that dollar/yen exchange rate from Tokyo, it’s fresh from the oven, comparatively speaking: only 0.168 seconds old. If everybody else is using the old cables and you’re using the new ones, then you have somewhere between 20 milliseconds and 60 milliseconds when you know something they don’t.

Retracing how a Georgian Queen ended up in Goa

This was a fascinating story about how a Georgian Queen from the Eastern Caucasus region ended up in Goa, India. I quote the main bits from here.

In the year 1613, the emperor of Persia, Shah Abbas I led an army to conquer the Georgian kingdom and Queen Ketevan became his prisoner. The queen was held in Shiraz, southern Iran for approximately ten years, but in 1624, the emperor sent soldiers to convert her to the Islamic faith and to force her into his harem. However, she resisted his orders and as a consequence was tortured and strangled to death on 22 September 1624.

Ruined bell tower of the church of Our Lady of Grace within the St. Augustine convent in Goa. Image: Ramesh Lalwani (Flickr, used under a CC BY 3.0)

Remains taken to Goa

In 1623, a year before her death, two Augustinian friars had arrived in Shiraz to start up a mission and succeeded in gaining the queen’s trust, becoming her confessors. At some point after her death these same friars unearthed the remains of Ketevan and hid them. In 1627, some of these remains (the right arm) were taken to Goa and kept in a black box or stone sarcophagus on the second window along the Epistle side of the chapter chapel in the St. Augustine convent.

Over time the convent had been enlarged and rebuilt in places, but in 1835 the church underwent partial demolition, and in 1842 the main vault collapsed. After this episode, the convent rapidly became ruinous and valuable artefacts belonging to the religious complex had been either sold or lost.

Despite the fact that the exact location of the queen’s relics is mentioned in a Portuguese document, all efforts to find them had proved unsuccessful due to difficulties in the interpretation of the convent layout. However, a ground map of the convent was reconstructed on the basis of the literary sources and the help of local historians. After a topographical survey within the convent was carried out, the chapter chapel and window were finally located.

As per the literary sources, the relic box of Queen Ketevan was expected to be at the second window of the chapter chapel towards the Epistle side. Therefore, this area was systematically explored in 2004 for a stone sarcophagus, which was found broken into pieces due to the collapse of the wall. Whilst clearing the rubble the team also found an arm bone. Two other bone relics were recovered from outside the second window area, within intact stone boxes.

More proof

While the archaeological and historical data were consistent with the relic being the remains of Queen Ketevan, the archaeologists needed to somehow conclusively prove that the bone belonged to her. They approached the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad who isolated DNA from the bone. Based on the sequence variation in the mitochondrial DNA, they assigned a haplogroup U1b to the sample.

After surveying the mitochondrial DNA sequence of 22,000 individuals from the Indian sub-continent, none of them belonged to U1b haplogroup. However, two out of 30 Georgians analysed have the same haplogroup, suggesting that the bone excavated in Goa is likely to be the remnant of Queen Ketevan of Georgia.

I found the story deeply moving. how this lady ended up on Goa. Her Wiki entry is very interesting as well. She seems to be a very brave woman. She seems to have actually led the Kakhetian nobles against an ursurper’s attempts to take the crown. She was tortured with red-hot pincers in 1624 and died.

William Forsyth composed a whacking big poem called as the Martyrdom of Kelavane (1861) and thankfully its fully available online here. Here’s the first few lines

Know ye the story of Queen "Kelavane ? 
She was no daughter of the days of joy; 
Her tears were countless as the stars of heaven. 
The radiant beauty and the queenly graee, 
That glorified the morning of her y-ears, 
Were sighed away in sorrow long ere noon. 
The fervour of her solitary faith, 
That burn*d like some lone beacon of the sea, 
With no kind ndghbourhood of hopeful hearts. 
Kept shining through the tempest all night long. 
Until it faded in the dawn of heaven. 
And so it was, because she stood alone 

This is what she looked like

Nice boots :)

It was good to read about another lady from Iran who was given succour in India…Like the Zoroastrians.

Why Tunisia's Islamist Party Agreed to Give Up Power

There are four fascinating political experiments going on son, in the Islamic governing political economic spheres. Like in Iran, turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Mind you, pretty much all Muslim countries are constantly struggling with democracy, rule of law and the role of Islam. But these 4 are the furthest advanced. Iran has had the longest history of constitutionalism going back almost 100 years. Turkey started even earlier but stuttered. Egypt frankly started and has now gone back even further. Tunisia seems to be the most advanced and if I had to put money down, I would say that Tunisia will reach civilisation the earliest compared to the others. Despite the issues they are facing with assassinations and demonstrations. It's an urbanised society so the usual rural obscurantist structures are avoided. Mind you, the Bahrain example is the counter example for urbanism. Then again the gulf Arabs are particularly well noted to be a bunch of weirdass morons. There's a very good reason why Allah decided to emerge his religion in the gulf. Imagine what they would have been without it when you see what they have done up till now with it. 

But politics is this. The spirit of consensus and compromise. And religion usually doesn't allow you to do so hence the utmost importance of having a secular structure son. 

I'm hoping Tunisia can show the way to how a liberal consensus driven democratic society with some elements of Islam can be part of this modern world son. Turkey went a bit too far with the secularism so it's trying to get back into balance. Iran went totally the other way with religiously driven politics. And well you know the utter mess Egypt is in. 

So interesting days ahead to watch how Tunisia is going to play out.

Love

Baba

Rory McCarthy | Why Tunisia's Islamist Party Agreed to Give Up Power | Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/lets-make-a-deal

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Three years after the popular uprising that brought down President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, demonstrations, sit-ins, and strikes have become part of daily life in Tunisia. Railway workers, customs officers, and doctors went on strike earlier this month over changes to their working conditions; next month, taxi drivers will begin an open-ended sit-in to protest rising fuel prices. Politics often seem hopelessly polarized, with Islamists led by the political party Ennahda pitted against their secular opponents in parliament in a manner not unlike Egypt’s bloody rivalries. And the assassinations of two prominent liberal politicians, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, by Islamist militants earlier this year brought public anger against Ennahda into the streets, as many Tunisians blamed the Islamists for a soft embrace of extremist groups. It appeared that Tunisia — whose largely functional democratic transition has set it apart from the other Arab Spring countries — would no longer avoid the violence that has undermined the other revolutions and uprisings across the Middle East.

But for the first time in a long time, the political class has reached an accord. On December 14, after weeks of broken promises and missed deadlines, Tunisia’s rival political parties finally agreed on a deal to dissolve the Ennahda-led government and create an interim administration led by a compromise prime minister. If all goes according to plan, Mehdi Jomaa, who had previously served as minister of industry, will lead a caretaker government of technocrats until elections can be held next year, most likely after the summer. It’s further confirmation that, despite their ideological differences, Tunisia’s Islamists and secularists are perfectly capable of cooperating. It’s also another sign of pragmatism from the Islamists, who in October 2011 swept the first elections after the fall of Ben Ali. Now Ennahda, an Islamist force that sees itself as both a grassroots movement and a political party, has agreed to bow to the demands of its critics and give up power.

Aztec codices

Kids

I saw these codices in the Mexico City museum of anthropology. They are extraordinarily beautiful works of art. They don't have words or letters. But like the Han script or the mandarin or Japanese or Korean script, they are ideograms. Pictures. The Chinese Japanese and Korean characters have now evolved from the original picture to an idealised character but in these codices, you can see the original diagrams. Each of them tell a story. They are long, anything between 5 to 15 meters long, folded up and people will read from them. 

The colours are vibrant, 600 years since they were created. And I fogged up the glass cabinet by peering so closely at them. 

I'm trying to find a replica of these documents for our home but in the meantime you can read about them here or if kannu goes to oxford, then we can go see them in that museum. 

Absolutely beautiful. And Diya, these are examples of what you want to do, illustrations :) 

Love

Baba

Aztec codices - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_codices

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Detail of first page from the Boturini Codex, depicting the departure fromAztlán.

Aztec codices (Nahuatl: Mēxihcatl āmoxtli Nahuatl pronunciation: [meː'ʃiʔkatɬ aː'moʃtɬi]) are books written by pre-Columbian and colonial-era Aztecs. These codices provide some of the best primary sources for Aztec culture. The pre-Columbian codices differ from European codices in that they are largely pictorial; they were not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives.^[1] The colonial era codices not only contain Aztec pictograms, but also Classical Nahuatl (in the Latin alphabet), Spanish, and occasionally Latin.

Although there are very few surviving pre-conquest codices, the tlacuilo (codex painter) tradition endured the transition to colonial culture; scholars now have access to a body of around 500 colonial-era codices.

Lie back and think of nothing

This was a very amusing read about the medieval marriage and superstitions in England. I quote the last paragraph:

Finally, the bride must not lie back and think of
England. Ideally she should think of nothing, as that
might influence the health and looks of the child she
might conceive that night

Do you complain about inequality? What kind?

Look at this graph of inequality. From the Human Development Report 2013.

People complain, with some justification, that the rise in inequality in income is bad. Hmmm, ok, I will give it a bit of credence but generally, don't give a shit. As a libertarian, you sow what you reap and as long as there is a minimum welfare state, you can earn what you want. But then here’s the question, what if rising inequality in income is accompanied with decreasing inequality in health and education?? Will you be willing to make the trade off? Or is there any relationship between these factors?

Read and Weep from page 203 onwards

The net result of all this is that neither Shias nor Sunnis nor Deobandis nor Ahl-i-Hadith nor Barelvis are Muslims and any change from one view to the other must be accompanied in an Islamic State with the penalty of death if the Government of the State is in the hands of the party which considers the other party to be kafirs. And it does not require much imagination to judge of the consequences of this doctrine when it is remembered that no two ulama have agreed before us as to the definition of a Muslim

Here

Another quote

Pakistan is being taken by the common man, though it is not, as an Islamic State.
This belief has been encouraged by the ceaseless clamour for Islam and Islamic State that
is being heard from all quarters since the establishment of Pakistan. The phantom of an
Islamic State has haunted the Musalman throughout the ages and is a result of the
memory of the glorious past when Islam rising like a storm from the least expected
quarter of the world—wilds of Arabia—instantly enveloped the world, pulling down
from their high pedestal gods who had ruled over man since the creation, uprooting
centuries old institutions and superstitions and supplanting all civilisations that had been
built on an enslaved humanity. What is 125 years in human history, nay in the history of a people, and yet during this brief period Islam spread from the Indus to the Atlantic and
Spain, and from the borders of China to Egypt, and the sons of the desert installed
themselves in all old centres of civilisation—in Ctesiphon, Damascus, Alexandria, India
and all places associated with the names of the Sumerian and the Assyrian civilisations.
Historians have often posed the question : what would have been the state of the world
today if Muawiya’s siege of Constantinople had succeeded or if the proverbial Arab
instinct for plunder had not suddenly seized the mujahids of Abdur Rahman in their fight
against Charles Martel on the plains of Tours in Southern France. May be Muslims would
have discovered America long before Columbus did and the entire world would have
been Moslemised; may be Islam itself would have been Europeanised. It is this brilliant
achievement of the Arabian nomads, the like of which the world had never seen before,
that makes the Musalman of today live in the past and yearn for the return of the glory
that was Islam. He finds himself standing on the crossroads, wrapped in the mantle of the
past and with the dead weight of centuries on his back, frustrated and bewildered and
hesitant to turn one corner or the other. The freshness and the simplicity of the faith,
which gave determination to his mind and spring to his muscle, is now denied to him. He
has neither the means nor the ability to conquer and there are no countries to conquer.
Little does he understand that the forces, which are pitted against him, are entirely
different from those against which early Islam, had to fight, and that on the clues given
by his own ancestors human mind has achieved results which he cannot understand. He
therefore finds himself in a state of helplessness, waiting for some one to come and help
him out of this morass of uncertainty and confusion. And he will go on waiting like this
without anything happening. Nothing but a bold re-orientation of Islam to separate the
vital from the lifeless can preserve it as a World Idea and convert the Musalman into a
citizen of the present and the future world from the archaic in congruity that he is today.

Do Elections Matter for Economic Performance?

Do they? do you feel lucky punk? go on, elect your leaders in a corrupt election, make my day

In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, most developing countries also hold elections, but these are often marred by illicit tactics. Using a new global data set, this article investigates whether these illicit tactics are merely blemishes or substantially undermine the economic efficacy of elections. We show that illicit tactics are widespread, and that they reduce the incentive for governments to deliver good economic performance. Our analysis also suggests that in societies with regular free and fair elections, leaders do not matter for economic growth.

that’s the key thing which so many people don't understand, they put their faith in single charismatic leaders and forget about institutions. While leaders do matter to some extent, but if you have regular free and fair elections where leaders are held to account, the leaders tend to focus on making their people better via economic growth. Look at India, the development story always helps. In the UK, the morons in the Labour govt starting with that blithering nincompoop Gordon Brown was thrown out when they screwed up the economy something bad.

good paper.