Archives for



Quantifying the President's Speech

Doug Mills/The New York Times Our friends at speechwars.com have put together a really fun tool to help you mine their database of the full text of all State of the Union Addresses (even though this wasn’t technically such an address) as well as inaugurals. It’s a fun way of tracking which issues have occupied Read More »



Are There Enough Altruists to Profit From?

While activism is virtually synonymous with “not-for-profit,” a San Francisco startup called Virgance has begun a slew of campaigns that aim to make money off of activism. As reported in The Economist, one campaign is a “green venture fund” on Facebook where users can invest their money (as little as $100), with Virgance getting a Read More »



For Madoff, Reputation Is Apparently a One-Way Street

Our friend James Altucher, in an interview at Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker, talks about visiting Bernie Madoff and his son Mark back in early 2005 to pitch them his fund of funds: I had a fund of what’s called PIPE [private investment in public equity] hedge funds. And I went through the whole pitch. My returns Read More »



Los Angeles Transportation Facts and Fiction: Freeways

We’ve been running a quiz about stereotypical views of transportation and urbanization in Los Angeles. Consider a headline that ran in The New York Times in 2006: “In Land of Freeways, Mass Transit Makes Nary a Dent.” I’ll soon address the issue of Los Angeles transit. In the meantime, did you, like The Times‘s headline Read More »