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People are not just chasing performance. They seem to be indicating a strategic preference.

Kenneth Heinz, president of Hedge Fund Research, in an interview with Bloomberg. He went on to mention that funds with assets of more than $5 billion experienced outflows while those with less than $500 million attracted money in the quarter.

The question is, who goes first? It would be very difficult for the Boston Herald to put its content behind a pay wall if The Boston Globe doesn’t. We will start to see newspapers stepping forward very soon. It’s inevitable. It’s the only way to sustain these (news) organizations

Lou Ureneck, chairman of Boston University’s school of journalism.

Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity. Thus people compare an ancient monarchy with an old building, an old tree, or an old man, and because the building, tree, or man must from the nature of things crumble, or decay, or die, they imagine that the same thing holds good with a community…All that we hear every day of the week about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure and unadulterated nonsense.

Lord Palmerston on Turkey, from his letters to Lord Granville and his brother.

Lord Palmerston recoils from the insistent caricature of the Turkish empire as in decay, a dead body or sapless trunk. Instead, he sees these for what they are, metaphor’s ability to mistake similarity or resemblance for identity.

Lord Palmerston’s letter continues with an overt shift in his language. He frames Turkey in terms of self-consciously technocratic considerations fitting a statesman. He continues: “if we can procure for it ten years of peace under the joint protection of the five Powers, and if those years are profitably employed in reorganizing the internal system of the empire, there is no reason whatever why it should not become again a respectable Power.” The problem of Turkey shifts from one of managing organic decay to a geo-political issue requiring the coordinated application of political resources.

Anthony Trollope would call these letters, in 1882, “sententious morsels of didactic wisdom, which would not have been put there in the hurry of private correspondence unless they had been intended for other eyes.” Nonetheless, the underlying wisdom around the nuance of metaphor persists. Metaphors are not merely rhetorical flourishes, but powerful tools that shape our understanding through the careful juggling of similarities. Benjamin Cardozo would later echo his caution in the context of the law. Cardozo warned in 1926, metaphors in law are “to be narrowly watched, for starting out as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.

”We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission…

We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it…

I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?…

I think we stand at an enviable moment where Microsoft and Google have decided to go to war, and we who produce content can start to figure out whether there’s an opportunity for us to help that sharing in a way that reverses the outflow of money from media and takes it back…

if you don’t agree to our protocols, if you don’t agree to give us real-time metrics, we aren’t going to work with you…

I said, this time is different…

I’m not talking about Google. [1] We haven’t talked. [2] We haven’t talked.  [3] We haven’t talked with them in any serious way.

Tom Curley, CEO of the AP in Asia, which will be testing the news registry in a matter of weeks

The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph

Rupert Murdoch, CEO News Corp, at the World Media Summit in Beijing.

In our specific case, the global nature of the Internet and the ability of search engines to quickly aggregate and distribute content has posed the most serious challenge to our business

Adrian Dickson, managing editor for Asia for ThomsonReuters

The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others. And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.
Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, via NYT

The real economy is barely recovering while markets are going this way. I see the risk of a correction, especially when the markets now realize that the recovery is not rapid and V-shaped, but more like U-shaped. That might be in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of next year.

In the short run we need monetary and fiscal stimulus to avoid another tipping point and to avoid deflation, but now this easy money has already started to create asset bubbles in equities, commodities, credit and emerging markets. For the sake of achieving growth stability again and avoiding deflation, we may be planting the seeds of the next cycle of financial instability.

Nouriel Roubini

Talk from John Temple @ the Berkeley conference on News

We are in a recovery, the recession does seem to be ending, and there’s a ton of cash on the sidelines getting a zero percent return

—Robert Doll, CIO at BlackRock, via USA Today

entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs are people who take risks and, by and large, don’t know they are taking them. This happens with mergers and acquisitions, but it also happens at the level of small-scale entrepreneurs. In the United States, a third of small businesses fail within five years, but when you interview those people, they individually think they have between 80 percent and 100 percent chance of success. They just don’t know.

Greenspan’s admission to congress: He basically said that the framework within which we had been operating was false, and coming from Greenspan, that was impressive

[that financial institutions are rational agents.] That seemed to me to be ignoring not only psychology but also economics. He appeared to have a belief in the magic power of the market to discipline itself and yield good outcomes.

delusional optimism: The people who took on subprime mortgages were thoroughly deluded. One of the main ideas in behavioral economics that is borrowed from psychology is the prevalence of overconfidence. People do things they have no business doing because they believe they’ll be successful.

prospect theory: People [are] willing to gamble on in the hope of recovering their losses.

Daniel Kahneman, interview in Finance & Development for the IMF

Thanks, xxxx! Great seeing you on Sunday, too. I’ll count on being there at 4:30 for the rehearsal, and I’m thrilled to be reading. What time does the dinner start?

Weddings go haywire? C’mon. No way. It’s going to be perfect.

My one requirement is that I must be suspended from the rafters by durable elastic rope, so I can rise and fall with the tempo of my voice. It’s really the only way I can fulfill my duties as a reader. Don’t worry, though. This is fairly standard. Be assured that St. Jude and I have a long history in this capacity.

I have found a supplier in East Dundee, Illinois (http://www.theecwcorp.com/cord.html). We will need two (2) fifty (50) foot lengths of “elastic shock cord” with torque balanced braids around respective galvanized steel thimble end-points for termination at the rafters. These will couple with the existing anchor-points at St. Jude. ECW can handle the customization, but be sure about the braids. Those are important. I will bring my own harness.

Expect ECW to drop-ship these items at St. Jude on Thursday. Joseph will store them in the nave-locker for Friday’s rehearsal and will have everything in place for the 4:30 start-time.

I’m really looking forward to this. See you soon!

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