Short Skirts & Thriller Economics

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

Want to be setting the next fashion trends? Just look at the Dow Jones!  Hemlines appear to be rather correlated to economic cycles – inching higher with booms and draping low during the busts.  Presented as a theory in 1926 by George Taylor, the hemline index has often been tested. In its most recent phase (2010), researchers in the Netherlands quantified the correlation: a …

Moore’s Law: Resurrected by Marketing

Travis Dirks Uncategorized

Moore’s law has become a sort of mystical talisman in the computing industry. Every few months there is a new round of articles arguing about whether and when Moore’s law will end. In fact, it was only in 2005 when Moore himself finally came out and admitted that his namesake would eventually end. This is puzzling because 1) it was, …

An Activist Investor Walked into Apple

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

The low-down on what Carl Icahn, an Activist Investor, is trying to do at Apple.  ‘Big’ must naturally go with ‘Apple’. With more than 900 million shares trading on NASDAQ, at times with over 50 million per day, calling Apple popular is an understatement.  From hedge fund managers and analysts to iPhone owners, diverse investor groups profess an unconditional love …

The Turing Trifecta

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

We are right in the middle of the Shiny-Tech Information Age.  And if there is one person we can thank, the credit goes to the legendary Alan Turing  – the father of computing.  I don’t use the word legendary lightly. Turing’s first claim to fame was during the height of World War II when he saved millions of  lives by breaking …

Asteroids, Asteroids, How Many Are There to Mine?

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

  “You recognize true innovation because doubt, fear and excitement are part of its entourage. It should make you a tad-bit uncomfortable, skeptical, and at the same time raise your hopes.” So reads a line from my post on innovation Red Queen of Technology, written just a few days ago. And Planetary Resources, a startup backed by some big shots …

5 Top Moves from Top Entrepreneurs

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

Heart felt advice from 44 or so of the best entrepreneurs the world has seen, including Elon Musk (of Tesla), Reid Hoffman (of LinkedIn), and Sara Blakely (of Spanx). That in itself is worth more than what money can buy. But what’s more impressive is how David Kidder (of Clickable) crisply pinpoints the 5 recurring themes from his conversations with …

Computational Challenge of the Millennium

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

  Computer scientists, both classical and the quantum kind like me, traditionally divide the world into two problems that can be solved easily (= scales polynomially in time with more inputs) and not so easily (= scales exponentially).  The former class of problems are formally called P and the latter NP. The reason this is a big deal and why you …

Does BIG DATA Imply Small Effects?

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

Two words are thrown around a lot these days, mostly together: Big Data. Given the abundance of information, affordability of data storage, ease of collection, lax privacy concerns and even better, eagerness to share, data is ubiquitous. How we shop, what we eat, how our hearts beat, and what the world did for millions of years. If there is any record …

The Red Queen of Technology

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

‘Innovation’ is a sickening buzzword & cliche these days, with an (almost) exponential growth (and degradation) in the word’s usage over the past two decades. In fact, the word has lost its meaning so much that I ended up removing any traces of it from my Linkedin profile, after hearing it on America’s Next Top Model. A wannabe model called …

What Spurs Breakthroughs ?

Radhika Dirks Uncategorized

What spurs breakthroughs? Technological and scientific breakthroughs occur when one or more of the following 5 things occur: 1. New measurement techniques, tools & regimes: When new regimes of measurement and exploration are possible, people begin to see, understand, control, and design things differently. Invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and its successor the atomic force microscope spurred the birth of nanotechnology. …