Stilltitled

Option value plays a big role in search. Indeed, if you didn’t have the option to truncate the search, it could hardly be called search. And option value is increasing in the riskiness of the choices—which means that it is better to look at risky choices early in the search process.

It follows that the standard practice of ordering retrieved documents by their expected relevance, or expected value, or any such expectation is not really right. The actual ordering should depend not only on the estimated first moment of the distribution, but on higher moments as well.
—Hal Varian on Search in 1999

“This is less a focus on Democrats and more a focus on the party…it’s time to get our heads out of the clouds, out of the sand, and stop the moping,” started Michael Steele.

“You might be building bridges with the Republicans, but you’re going to burn a bridge with the Democrats. You’re going to rebrand them the “Democrat Socialist Party. They’re not going to like that,” Steven Doocy said, laughing.

“I don’t know how that resolution will turn out,” Steele replied.

“Are you for that resolution?” asked Doocy.

“No, I am not for that at all,” responded Steele. “I’ve mentioned that to folks inside the party and said we need to be smart and strategic about that.”

Here’s something else for you to consider before you write an obituary for newspapers: The printed product still provides the most efficient way to deliver a mass of price and product advertising at a moment in time across a broad spectrum of our society. The Internet can provide access to that information, but only the newspaper can efficiently put it in front of a mass audience on a particular day.

I recognize that there may come a time when this can be done via the Internet. But The Courier-Journal , which operates the dominant local Web site, is well positioned for that turn of events. Of course, retailers would like to use their own Web sites to reach a mass audience, but efforts to make this happen have not gone well. Consider, for example, that Wal-Mart, the undisputed king of retail, reaches less than 3 percent of total Web users in a given month with its own Web site. Courier-Journal.com reaches 31 percent of its entire market every week, and that number is growing fast.

—Arnold Garson, President and Publisher of The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky

the worries of today’s deficit hawks sound eerily reminiscent of Roosevelt in 1936 and 1937
—Alan Blinder in the NYT

I’m advocating 6 percent inflation for at least a couple of years. It would ameliorate the debt bomb and help us work through the deleveraging process…There’s trillions of dollars of debt, in mortgage debt, consumer debt, government debt. It’s a question of how do you achieve the deleveraging. Do you go through a long period of slow growth, high savings and many legal problems or do you accept higher inflation?
—Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard

Anybody who has been a central banker wouldn’t want to see inflation expectations become unhinged. The Fed would have to create a recession to get its credibility back.
—Marvin Goodfriend, former official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business

The basic advantage of pushing inflation a little higher is that it would make it less likely that we run into the problem of the interest rate hitting zero and the Fed not being able to stimulate the economy if necessary.
—Laurence Ball, Johns Hopkins

A country that continuously expands its debt as a percentage of GDP and raises much of the money abroad to finance that, it’s going to inflate its way out of the burden of that debt. That becomes a tax on everybody that has fixed- dollar investments.
—Warren Buffet, May 4 CNBC interview

The world will not just bounce back to where it was. We continue to believe that economic recovery will be a long process.
—Daniel Och in a recent investor letter

Economic numbers, housing data, earnings, risk appetite and credit have all gotten less bad. The question is, for how long?
—Dmitri Balyasny, CIO of Balyasny Asset Management, $1.6b AUM