here's some interesting info from an energy analyst on the future of the oil patch..
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/INTERVIEWS/MATT.SIMMONS/
It's time for a run!
Thursday, April 24, 2003
The Future of The Oil Patch
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Consumption and The Crisis in Iraq
The majority of wars in our history have been religiously based. Look at N. Ireland...Christians killing Christians... Yes, the propaganda makes each side out to be evil. A mother in Iraq is as caring as a mother in the US. A child in Iraq is as precious as a child in the US. Countries of people aren't evil, but their leaders can be.
My personal belief is that our interest in this region is purely about oil. It's about oil because you and I live in large houses, drive cars all the time, eat food out of plastic containers, and keep warm in the winter. We consume 25% of the worlds resources....you and I. This mission is about establishing a base for future conflicts to come in a region that is significant to the future well being of our country. Right or wrong, that's the plan. If it were about a humanitarian effort, we would then have to ask why are so many Africans suffering? Bosnians? and the list goes on. If it were about weapons of mass destruction, we'd be in N. Korea, India, and Pakistan. Yes, it's about oil, but you and I are responsible for it until we reduce our consumption by 80%. Are you committed?
My personal belief is that our interest in this region is purely about oil. It's about oil because you and I live in large houses, drive cars all the time, eat food out of plastic containers, and keep warm in the winter. We consume 25% of the worlds resources....you and I. This mission is about establishing a base for future conflicts to come in a region that is significant to the future well being of our country. Right or wrong, that's the plan. If it were about a humanitarian effort, we would then have to ask why are so many Africans suffering? Bosnians? and the list goes on. If it were about weapons of mass destruction, we'd be in N. Korea, India, and Pakistan. Yes, it's about oil, but you and I are responsible for it until we reduce our consumption by 80%. Are you committed?
Puplava's View on Derivatives
Puplava's risk comments are targeted at the significant amount of derivatives in the world.
His argument is that the risk can NOT be taken out. Many on Wall Street believe that great mathematical models can remove the risk. For a more thorough understanding of the crisis evolving....
http://www.financialsense.com/series2/rogue.htm
His argument is that the risk can NOT be taken out. Many on Wall Street believe that great mathematical models can remove the risk. For a more thorough understanding of the crisis evolving....
http://www.financialsense.com/series2/rogue.htm
Monday, March 17, 2003
Time For Another Oil Boom
Just back from the slopes.....
This week should be interesting with numbers coming out and the Iraq situation heating up.
I'm still pessimistic over the market and economy, but very high on the petroleum industry. It's time for another oil boom...
This week should be interesting with numbers coming out and the Iraq situation heating up.
I'm still pessimistic over the market and economy, but very high on the petroleum industry. It's time for another oil boom...
Monday, March 3, 2003
What Worries Warren
WHAT WORRIES WARREN
Buffett on Investing in Stocks Today
'Unfortunately, the hangover from [the market bubble] may prove to be proportional to the binge.'
FORTUNE
Monday, March 3, 2003
By Warren Buffett
In a section of his upcoming annual letter to shareholders separate from the
derivatives discussion, Buffett talks about stocks, cash, and the lure of junk bonds. A list of Berkshire's major common stock investments (those with a market value of more than $500 million at the end of 2002) will be posted on March 8, on www.berkshirehathaway.com.
We continue to do little in equities. Charlie and I are increasingly comfortable with our holdings in Berkshire's major investees because most of them have increased their earnings while their valuations have decreased. But we are not inclined to add to them. Though these enterprises have good prospects, we don't yet believe their shares are undervalued.
In our view, the same conclusion fits stocks generally. Despite three years of falling prices, which have significantly improved the attractiveness of common stocks, we still find very few that even mildly interest us. That dismal fact is testimony to the insanity of valuations reached during The Great Bubble. Unfortunately, the hangover may prove to be proportional to the binge.
The aversion to equities that Charlie and I exhibit today is far from congenital. We love owning common stocks--if they can be purchased at attractive prices. In my 61 years of investing, 50 or so years have offered that kind of opportunity. There will be years like that again. Unless,however, we see a very high probability of at least 10% pretax returns (which translate to 6% to 7% after corporate tax), we will sit on the sidelines. With short-term money returning less than 1% after-tax, sitting it out is no fun. But occasionally successful investing requires inactivity.
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. The dangers are now latent--but they could be lethal. Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.
Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time. (At Gen Re Securities, we still have $6.5 billion of receivables, though we've been in a liquidation mode for nearly a year.) A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times.
In banking, the recognition of a "linkage" problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put sudden and unanticipated liquidity demands on previously strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed now insulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that are fundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down the chain. When a "chain reaction" threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind. That's how we conduct our reinsurance business, and it's one reason we are exiting derivatives.
Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can't bear certain risks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize the economy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants. And, on a micro level, what they say is often true. Indeed, at Berkshire, I sometimes engage in large-scale derivatives transactions in order to facilitate certain investment strategies.
Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one another. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by nondealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I've mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.
Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort. In later congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, the outstanding trades of LTCM--a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundred people--could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, the Fed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutions had the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair,though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.
One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate 100% leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts up all of the money for the purchase of a stock, while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at a future date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.
Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types of derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers, and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running.
The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Knowledge of how dangerous they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.
Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength--for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders, and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of mega-catastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.
Buffett on Investing in Stocks Today
'Unfortunately, the hangover from [the market bubble] may prove to be proportional to the binge.'
FORTUNE
Monday, March 3, 2003
By Warren Buffett
In a section of his upcoming annual letter to shareholders separate from the
derivatives discussion, Buffett talks about stocks, cash, and the lure of junk bonds. A list of Berkshire's major common stock investments (those with a market value of more than $500 million at the end of 2002) will be posted on March 8, on www.berkshirehathaway.com.
We continue to do little in equities. Charlie and I are increasingly comfortable with our holdings in Berkshire's major investees because most of them have increased their earnings while their valuations have decreased. But we are not inclined to add to them. Though these enterprises have good prospects, we don't yet believe their shares are undervalued.
In our view, the same conclusion fits stocks generally. Despite three years of falling prices, which have significantly improved the attractiveness of common stocks, we still find very few that even mildly interest us. That dismal fact is testimony to the insanity of valuations reached during The Great Bubble. Unfortunately, the hangover may prove to be proportional to the binge.
The aversion to equities that Charlie and I exhibit today is far from congenital. We love owning common stocks--if they can be purchased at attractive prices. In my 61 years of investing, 50 or so years have offered that kind of opportunity. There will be years like that again. Unless,however, we see a very high probability of at least 10% pretax returns (which translate to 6% to 7% after corporate tax), we will sit on the sidelines. With short-term money returning less than 1% after-tax, sitting it out is no fun. But occasionally successful investing requires inactivity.
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. The dangers are now latent--but they could be lethal. Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into for completely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require that a company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counterparties. Imagine, then, that a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in with their requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company. The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases, trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.
Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay off much of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counterparties tend to build up over time. (At Gen Re Securities, we still have $6.5 billion of receivables, though we've been in a liquidation mode for nearly a year.) A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to be diversified and therefore not dangerous. Under certain circumstances, though, an exogenous event that causes the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z. History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times.
In banking, the recognition of a "linkage" problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the Federal Reserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put sudden and unanticipated liquidity demands on previously strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed now insulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that are fundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down the chain. When a "chain reaction" threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind. That's how we conduct our reinsurance business, and it's one reason we are exiting derivatives.
Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can't bear certain risks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize the economy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants. And, on a micro level, what they say is often true. Indeed, at Berkshire, I sometimes engage in large-scale derivatives transactions in order to facilitate certain investment strategies.
Charlie and I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous and getting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands of relatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one another. The troubles of one could quickly infect the others. On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by nondealer counterparties. Some of these counterparties, as I've mentioned, are linked in ways that could cause them to contemporaneously run into a problem because of a single event (such as the implosion of the telecom industry or the precipitous decline in the value of merchant power projects). Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serious systemic problems.
Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort. In later congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, the outstanding trades of LTCM--a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundred people--could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, the Fed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutions had the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair,though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income market for weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.
One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate 100% leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts up all of the money for the purchase of a stock, while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at a future date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.
Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types of derivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms around the risk profiles of banks, insurers, and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investors and analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavily involved with derivatives contracts. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running.
The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Knowledge of how dangerous they are has already permeated the electricity and gas businesses, in which the eruption of major troubles caused the use of derivatives to diminish dramatically. Elsewhere, however, the derivatives business continues to expand unchecked. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts.
Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength--for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders, and employees. We try to be alert to any sort of mega-catastrophe risk, and that posture may make us unduly apprehensive about the burgeoning quantities of long-term derivatives contracts and the massive amount of uncollateralized receivables that are growing alongside. In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.
Monday, February 24, 2003
Collective Action and Behavior
Army Ants Obey Traffic Plan to Avoid Jams, Study Says
John Pickrellfor National Geographic NewsFebruary 24, 2003
"Many complex and seemingly organized group behaviors…have been shown to emerge from the collective action of individuals that do not have an understanding of the big picture," commented Martin Burd who studies evolution and behavior at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0224_030224_anttraffic.html
Just as a city relies on an efficient transportation network, research shows that vast army ant colonies also employ simple mechanisms to organize traffic flow and mimimize congestion.
According to a new study, some carnivorous ants use just a few simple rules of thumb to determine the direction taken by prey-seeking raiding parties and to organize potentially chaotic forest-floor freeways, packed with up to 200,000 fast-moving workers.
"It's clear that the functioning and success of modern cities is dependent on an efficient transportation system," said Iain D. Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and co-author of the new study. "[Therefore] the effective management of traffic is likely to be essential to insect societies," he said.
"When one studies the organization of insect societies, the similarities [to human societies] are often striking, whether we like it or not," commented Madeleine Beekman, who studies bees at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Attack of the Clones
Effective congestion management is especially important for the jungle-living army ants of central and South America, Eciton burchelli, said Couzin. Colonies of E.burchelli can be made up of up to half a million workers or more, he said.
E.Burchelli ants stage colossal raids in search of invertebrate prey. During these raids, up to 200,000 near-blind ants stream out of their nest and form multiple freeway-like trails that are up to 20 meters (65 feet) wide and 100 meters (330 feet) long. In a raid the ants can attack and kill as many as 30,000 prey items.
"These ants can sweep over an area of more than 1,500 square meters [1,800 square yards] in a single day, and devastate the invertebrate fauna to such a degree that the colony has to be nomadic," said Couzin.
Army ants are also unique in constructing bivouac-like nests entirely from their own bodies. A nest is made up of sheets of ants connected by special claws, said Couzin. The strategy is necessary when, during nomadic phases, the colony may move every day for up to twenty days at a time.
Intrigued at the ants' ability to form separate traffic lanes within the foraging freeways, Couzin and his colleague, Nigel R. Franks at Bristol University's Centre for Behavioural Biology in England, designed a computer model to mimic the individual interactions and movements of ants and shed light on their foraging behavior.
The pair then compared the computer data with the real behavior of ant colonies filmed in Panama's Soberania National Park.
The scientists found that simple movement rules, obeyed by each ant, collectively add up to the large-scale movement of the entire raiding party. "Local interactions can have a very large influence on large-scale patterns and behavior," said Couzin.
One of the rules obeyed by ants is that each blind forager instinctively turns away from other ants approaching it in the opposite direction.
In order to determine how a phalanx of foragers leaving the nest chooses a direction in which to raid, the pair looked to another behavioral pattern known as a circular mill. When ants are separated off from the main colony—in the laboratory or under exceptionally heavy rainfall in the wild—they often form a milling circle, trailing around in the same direction.
The computer model revealed that the rotation direction is mostly determined by chance. As more and more ants move in one random direction, it becomes increasingly difficult for other ants to go against the flow, as they collide with ants moving in the opposite direction, and are forced to turn around. This behavior#151;whereby ants eventually are forced to move in the same direction—may explain how the raiding party decides on a direction in which to hunt, said Couzin.
The Big Picture
"Many complex and seemingly organized group behaviors…have been shown to emerge from the collective action of individuals that do not have an understanding of the big picture," commented Martin Burd who studies evolution and behavior at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
Another simple rule is that ants follow a trail of smelly chemicals, laid down by other ants. Like painted stripes on a road, these chemicals tell the poorly-sighted foragers which way to go.
When raiders set out, they move along the chemical trails at high speed in one direction. However, as they encounter prey, they must return along the freeway to the nest. This task is initially very difficult with an onslaught of speeding traffic coming in the opposite direction.
Couzin and Franks found that a simple difference in the rate at which returning ants are prepared to turn away to avoid head on collisions is enough to order ant-freeways into three efficiently organized traffic lanes.
All the ants instinctively prefer to be at the center of the trail, where the strongest marker fragrance can be found. However, as returning ants—burdened with invertebrate cargo—are less likely to turn to avoid a collision, a stream of these foragers end up forming the central lane of the freeway.
Outbound ants, which more rapidly dodge to avoid collisions, end up forming two lanes on either side of the homeward-bound trail.
This research "shows how simple responses to local information, allows organized traffic lanes to form, instead of a helter-skelter mob of aimless ants…no traffic cops, no road maps, no ministry of transportation," said Burd.
The emergence of "self-organized" patterns has been shown to be a general pattern in many other species of social insects, such as termites and bees, agreed David Sumpter a mathematician at Oxford University in England.
The ability to form congestion-minimizing traffic lanes in E.burchelli has probably evolved due to the great time constraints imposed on raiding parties, said Couzin. Raiding parties leave at dawn and must return by dusk, when the colony emigrates.
The findings were recently detailed in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
John Pickrellfor National Geographic NewsFebruary 24, 2003
"Many complex and seemingly organized group behaviors…have been shown to emerge from the collective action of individuals that do not have an understanding of the big picture," commented Martin Burd who studies evolution and behavior at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0224_030224_anttraffic.html
Just as a city relies on an efficient transportation network, research shows that vast army ant colonies also employ simple mechanisms to organize traffic flow and mimimize congestion.
According to a new study, some carnivorous ants use just a few simple rules of thumb to determine the direction taken by prey-seeking raiding parties and to organize potentially chaotic forest-floor freeways, packed with up to 200,000 fast-moving workers.
"It's clear that the functioning and success of modern cities is dependent on an efficient transportation system," said Iain D. Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University, New Jersey, and co-author of the new study. "[Therefore] the effective management of traffic is likely to be essential to insect societies," he said.
"When one studies the organization of insect societies, the similarities [to human societies] are often striking, whether we like it or not," commented Madeleine Beekman, who studies bees at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Attack of the Clones
Effective congestion management is especially important for the jungle-living army ants of central and South America, Eciton burchelli, said Couzin. Colonies of E.burchelli can be made up of up to half a million workers or more, he said.
E.Burchelli ants stage colossal raids in search of invertebrate prey. During these raids, up to 200,000 near-blind ants stream out of their nest and form multiple freeway-like trails that are up to 20 meters (65 feet) wide and 100 meters (330 feet) long. In a raid the ants can attack and kill as many as 30,000 prey items.
"These ants can sweep over an area of more than 1,500 square meters [1,800 square yards] in a single day, and devastate the invertebrate fauna to such a degree that the colony has to be nomadic," said Couzin.
Army ants are also unique in constructing bivouac-like nests entirely from their own bodies. A nest is made up of sheets of ants connected by special claws, said Couzin. The strategy is necessary when, during nomadic phases, the colony may move every day for up to twenty days at a time.
Intrigued at the ants' ability to form separate traffic lanes within the foraging freeways, Couzin and his colleague, Nigel R. Franks at Bristol University's Centre for Behavioural Biology in England, designed a computer model to mimic the individual interactions and movements of ants and shed light on their foraging behavior.
The pair then compared the computer data with the real behavior of ant colonies filmed in Panama's Soberania National Park.
The scientists found that simple movement rules, obeyed by each ant, collectively add up to the large-scale movement of the entire raiding party. "Local interactions can have a very large influence on large-scale patterns and behavior," said Couzin.
One of the rules obeyed by ants is that each blind forager instinctively turns away from other ants approaching it in the opposite direction.
In order to determine how a phalanx of foragers leaving the nest chooses a direction in which to raid, the pair looked to another behavioral pattern known as a circular mill. When ants are separated off from the main colony—in the laboratory or under exceptionally heavy rainfall in the wild—they often form a milling circle, trailing around in the same direction.
The computer model revealed that the rotation direction is mostly determined by chance. As more and more ants move in one random direction, it becomes increasingly difficult for other ants to go against the flow, as they collide with ants moving in the opposite direction, and are forced to turn around. This behavior#151;whereby ants eventually are forced to move in the same direction—may explain how the raiding party decides on a direction in which to hunt, said Couzin.
The Big Picture
"Many complex and seemingly organized group behaviors…have been shown to emerge from the collective action of individuals that do not have an understanding of the big picture," commented Martin Burd who studies evolution and behavior at Monash University in Melbourne Australia.
Another simple rule is that ants follow a trail of smelly chemicals, laid down by other ants. Like painted stripes on a road, these chemicals tell the poorly-sighted foragers which way to go.
When raiders set out, they move along the chemical trails at high speed in one direction. However, as they encounter prey, they must return along the freeway to the nest. This task is initially very difficult with an onslaught of speeding traffic coming in the opposite direction.
Couzin and Franks found that a simple difference in the rate at which returning ants are prepared to turn away to avoid head on collisions is enough to order ant-freeways into three efficiently organized traffic lanes.
All the ants instinctively prefer to be at the center of the trail, where the strongest marker fragrance can be found. However, as returning ants—burdened with invertebrate cargo—are less likely to turn to avoid a collision, a stream of these foragers end up forming the central lane of the freeway.
Outbound ants, which more rapidly dodge to avoid collisions, end up forming two lanes on either side of the homeward-bound trail.
This research "shows how simple responses to local information, allows organized traffic lanes to form, instead of a helter-skelter mob of aimless ants…no traffic cops, no road maps, no ministry of transportation," said Burd.
The emergence of "self-organized" patterns has been shown to be a general pattern in many other species of social insects, such as termites and bees, agreed David Sumpter a mathematician at Oxford University in England.
The ability to form congestion-minimizing traffic lanes in E.burchelli has probably evolved due to the great time constraints imposed on raiding parties, said Couzin. Raiding parties leave at dawn and must return by dusk, when the colony emigrates.
The findings were recently detailed in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Friday, January 31, 2003
Monday, January 20, 2003
Gold and Black Gold
an interesting article....
http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/invest/extra/10929.asp
http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/invest/extra/10929.asp
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
The Next Big Thing....Things!
a interesting new article at financialsense.com.....
Given all of these uncertainties, where should one invest this year? I believe the "Next Big Thing" is going to be in "things" such as commodities. The big winners in this decade are going to be gold, silver, and energy. Other commodities from sugar, coffee, cocoa and grains, to other soft goods will also be winners. Commodity prices will rise because of two trends: a declining US dollar and rising populations and industrialization of developing economies.
The time for paper is over and the rise of "things" has just begun. Another trend that is taking place is what Marc Faber calls the reemergence of the emerging economies. Economic power is moving from the West to the East and this trend is irreversible.
Given all of these uncertainties, where should one invest this year? I believe the "Next Big Thing" is going to be in "things" such as commodities. The big winners in this decade are going to be gold, silver, and energy. Other commodities from sugar, coffee, cocoa and grains, to other soft goods will also be winners. Commodity prices will rise because of two trends: a declining US dollar and rising populations and industrialization of developing economies.
The time for paper is over and the rise of "things" has just begun. Another trend that is taking place is what Marc Faber calls the reemergence of the emerging economies. Economic power is moving from the West to the East and this trend is irreversible.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
The Millionaire and Jackass
Some great insight from Bob Prechter........
"Have you ever wondered why certain television trends come and go?
In the late 1990s, for example, "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" was a huge hit; a host of imitators followed. Yet, in the past year or two, they've all vanished. Why? Here's a hint: A bull market peaked, a bear market began. Now consider today's hottest trend in television, which appears in "Survivor," "Fear Factor," "The Bachelor," "Jackass," "The Sopranos," and other popular shows.
The common thread? Behavior that's demeaning, moronic, humiliating, pathological. There's more to come, naturally. Fox is producing a game show called "Exhausted" with sleep-deprived contestants. HBO will air "Cathouse," thanks to a Nevada brothel's hidden cameras. (Nothing like watching a guy so pathetic that he has to pay for it.)
Why the public flood of degrading conduct? Because the same mass psychology that drives long-term stock market trends also drives popular culture. The deepest bear market in decades has left millions of people with emotions they've never felt before. The vast majority has "hung on" as their portfolios declined by 30%, 40%, 50% or more.
Is it really any wonder that they can identify with negative behavior, like the "Jackass" who squeezes into a shopping cart, plummets down a steep trail, and crashes into a tree?
We've followed the many ways that culture reflects mood trend for many years, going back to Bob Prechter's "Popular Culture and the Stock Market" report in 1985. As we do with our stock market forecasts, we provide cultural insights that you simply will not find anyplace else."
"Have you ever wondered why certain television trends come and go?
In the late 1990s, for example, "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" was a huge hit; a host of imitators followed. Yet, in the past year or two, they've all vanished. Why? Here's a hint: A bull market peaked, a bear market began. Now consider today's hottest trend in television, which appears in "Survivor," "Fear Factor," "The Bachelor," "Jackass," "The Sopranos," and other popular shows.
The common thread? Behavior that's demeaning, moronic, humiliating, pathological. There's more to come, naturally. Fox is producing a game show called "Exhausted" with sleep-deprived contestants. HBO will air "Cathouse," thanks to a Nevada brothel's hidden cameras. (Nothing like watching a guy so pathetic that he has to pay for it.)
Why the public flood of degrading conduct? Because the same mass psychology that drives long-term stock market trends also drives popular culture. The deepest bear market in decades has left millions of people with emotions they've never felt before. The vast majority has "hung on" as their portfolios declined by 30%, 40%, 50% or more.
Is it really any wonder that they can identify with negative behavior, like the "Jackass" who squeezes into a shopping cart, plummets down a steep trail, and crashes into a tree?
We've followed the many ways that culture reflects mood trend for many years, going back to Bob Prechter's "Popular Culture and the Stock Market" report in 1985. As we do with our stock market forecasts, we provide cultural insights that you simply will not find anyplace else."
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Monday, August 19, 2002
Ten Years of Oil and Gas
I think that the next 10 years will be really good for oil/gas.
Some good gold articles here...
http://www.financialsense.com/metals/main.htm
Some good gold articles here...
http://www.financialsense.com/metals/main.htm
Sunday, August 18, 2002
Derivatives and JPM Chase
Jim Puplava posted a great article on the banks last year...especially focused
on those with large derivative positions. JPM Chase has an incredible derivative position.
The wild ride continues!!
on those with large derivative positions. JPM Chase has an incredible derivative position.
The wild ride continues!!
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