Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, and Ideas
My collection of best reads for your Sunday!
- Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash (BBC)
It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world.
- Why do they hate us? (FP) This article on the status of women in the Middle East societies (and in Islam), is one of the best I have read in a long time.
How much
does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in
Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning
building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were
not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No
one was put on trial. Parents were silenced.
- Finland imagines life without Nokia. (BusinessWeek)
Nokia’s 94 percent share-price plunge from its 2000 peak has left thousands of engineers looking for work now that Nokia is curtailing local development and moving production to Asia. Nokia’s share of gross domestic product probably shrank to 0.8 percent in 2011 from as high as 4 percent in 2000.
- Must watch: Andre Kuiper's stunning photographs of the Earth and space sent to Earth via Twitter. (Telegraph UK) Take, for instance, this photo of the UK and Ireland by night, with the Aurora Borealis on the horizon, snapped on March 28 this year.
