In Will invest for food, the Economist looks at the growth in trackers over active funds.
Earlier generations of investors were prepared to believe that the returns achieved by fund managers were down to skill. Now it has become clear that the returns were the result of factors that can be replicated. Like shoppers on a budget, investors are trading down from expensive brands to white-label goods. That may put many active managers out of a job.
First and foremost, Ukraine needs a legitimate, national government. The interim leaders installed by the Rada, its parliament, may be more palatable than Mr Yanukovych; but the Rada is a nest of crooks and placemen, and scarcely more legitimate than he was, as some protesters, and Russia, have pointed out. It is vital that the presidential election in May is clean, and seen to be: Western monitors must help to ensure that. And the new president should be untainted by the score-settling and nest-feathering that have blighted Ukraine’s politics.
In In the Name of Love, Miya Tokumitsu takes apart the mantra, “do what you love, love what you do”. Being fortunate enough to enjoy what I do at work for the most part, I was in thrall to this aphorism until it was pointed out to me a few years ago how implausible this was for most people. Miya says,
DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.
This is an aide memoire, but I thought it worth pointing to. Objective-c’s foundation library offers several amazing classes for language processing; far superior to built-in functionality I’ve seen elsewhere. The two central players are CFStringTokenizer and NSLinguisticTagger.
CFStringTokenizer allows you to tokenize strings into words, sentences or paragraphs in a language-neutral way. It supports languages such as Japanese and Chinese that do not delimit words by spaces, as well as de-compounding German compounds. You can obtain Latin transcription for tokens. It also provides language identification API.
GENETICALLY modified maize causes cancer: that was the gist of a study, among the most controversial in recent memory, published in September 2012 in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Well, actually, it doesn’t. The journal has just retracted the article. It would be too much to say that GM foods have therefore been proven safe. But no other study has so far found significant health risks in mammals as a result of eating GM foods.