Another clueless day in the lives of equity traders prompted a conscientious few to finger through our list of regional potentials. Taking a contrarian view on the construction sector, an obscure Jurong Cement (now known by a snazzier name: JCL Readymix) ignited a spark in my pathologically bored mind.  

Eagerly typing the function JURC SP Equity CN <GO> to draw up necessary information on my Bloomberg terminal, I made two discoveries:

1. Jurong Cement has been delisted from the Singapore Exchange.

2. This is where it gets suacy.

So I know that there is a tendency amongst some Singaporeans, to mispronounce the word cement. A common aural alternative to this word sounds like… semen. Seriously. 

Who would have imagined, that this cement-semen swapping phenomenon would filter its way into my Berg? Check out the screen grab detailing some apparently NSFW snippets.

For those who were never initiated into the world of 24/7/365 online porn, by their hormonally-charged adolescent years, look out for these key words: cum, mouth, woman, tush.

* Clicking on the most enticing titles here will not link you up to your favourite porn category.     

Image via Bloomberg

I have been told one too many times, that the run-up to the eventual attainment of the coveted acronym behind your name: Phd, can be a gruelling preview of things to come your way before you’ve secured your seat at a choice institution. There’s the intended-panic-inducing GRE or GMAT, tons upon tons of research journals to plough through in search of your original Research Topic, piles of admissions essays, Statements of Purpose and Research Proposals to write.

Then there’s the grovelling or sycophantic act one must put up in front of one’s Academic Referees. The objective: to secure a more than stellar (mis)representation of one’s suitability to the programme. 

Not to mention, the ceaseless justification rhetoric one has to sprout out, in order to convince the folks that the 4-figure monthly pocket money generated by your high paying job at a seemingly glamorous industry, that they have grown accustomed to, will have to be deferred… indefinitely. 

And all this is just the beginning.

At the end of the day, why do we choose to do the bidding of Sade? An even more pertinent question to ask: what is a PhD anyway?

Matt Might, professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, has the best explanation I’ve seen so far. Here’s an extract from his blog: 

———————————–

Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.

It’s hard to describe it in words.

So, I use pictures.

Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:

By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:

By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:

With a bachelor’s degree, you gain a specialty:

A master’s degree deepens that specialty:

Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:

Once you’re at the boundary, you focus:

You push at the boundary for a few years:

Until one day, the boundary gives way:

And, that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:

Of course, the world looks different to you now:

So, don’t forget the bigger picture:

Keep pushing.

* Indulge in the hilarious comments that followed the original post here.

Matt Might finished his dent at Georgia Tech in 2007, and now enjoys advising his own Ph.D. students on how to make theirs. He tweets from @mattmight and blogs at blog.might.net.

1. A daily dose of Phd humour (yes, it exists) – phdcomics.com

2. Newsworthy – chronicle.com

3. GRE Test Prep – (i) Graduatetestprep (ii) mygretutor.com

4. Math Magic – lightning speed calculations to aid solving GRE quantitative questions in under 1 minute

5. General advice – Phd survey

6. The Mecca for PhDs – phd.org

7. Top 50 blogs – by graduate students across disciplines

8.

This is the second installment of my Art Collecting 101 series. Read Part 1 here.

 
Remember the bygone days of stamp, bottle cap, matchbox or scratch ‘n’ sniff sticker collecting? The sense of satisfaction and happiness that a 20 cent sticker brought?

Those were the days before our pocket money got inflated.

Despite the hoards of deflationary trap warnings you hear of, especially from die hard opponents of austerity drive measures, our piggy banks never quite caught up with the inflation rate.

Nonetheless, we still graduated to bigger toys -  designer jeans, designer sneakers, luxury watches, cars, horses, yachts, art.

As a child collector, the strategy was simple: ask and ye shall receive. If not, stamp your feet and roll about the street. For the adult collector, Occam’s Razor will not suffice. The “rules of engagement” are, unfortunately, a little more complex…

1. Do not collect art with the single aim of making a quick buck.

A golden rule of thumb: support the artist’s career and the value (read: not price) of his works will naturally follow.

The art market is small. So small that it can be very easily manipulated by just a few reknowned collectors like author of My name is Charles Saatchi and I’m an artoholic, who could easily make or break an artist’s career.

Italian artist Sandro Chia has one sad tale to tell.

Unlike other investible assets, you must remember that behind every contemporary artwork, is a living, breathing human being. The once blank canvas, screen or space, is now a testimony to the artists’ blood, sweat, toil and soul.

Quick buck stratagies like flipping in real estate markets, trade dumping and pulling a stag on an IPO in the stockmarket, should not be applied to art investment.

2. What’s your Story?

A cohesive collection reflects the collector’s personal experiences. The chosen art works should weave together a story that expresses the collector’s life or chosen theme.

A well curated collection stimulates the senses, describes characters and conjures up settings of the collector’s story.

An effective strategy would be Michael Trant’s Three Anchors strategy: each collection should have three anchor pieces: a work from a well known artist, an emerging artist and an unknown artist.

3. Engage.

Every piece you buy should have a Wow! factor. Whether it is the artist’s compelling motivation, technique, style or story, the artwork should engage your senses.

Try not to be distracted by the lure of the gallerists’ investment calls.

Role Models

If you need role models to aspire to, here are two of mine:

1. Steve Cohen - the only hedge fund manager with street creds, whom I revere.

image by Annie Lebovitz for Vanity Fair

The estimated worth of the Cohen Collection is 450m$ and includes the following legendary artworks:

* The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - Damien Hirst: 8m$ (from Charles Saatchi) *  Police Gazette – Willem de Kooning: 63.5m$ * Woman III – de Kooning: 137.5m$ * Madonna – Edward Munch: 11.5m$ * Le Repos – Pablo Picasso: 34.7m$ * Marilyn – Andy Warhol: 80m$

2. Woffles Wu – celebrity platic surgeon

Woffle’s impressive botox-funded 12000 sq ft Maosoleum - which features more than 200 pieces of Chinese contemporary art, cost more than 100,000S$ to set up. Sure, in comparison to Steve’s collection, this might seem like Little League .

Nonetheless 1/3 of the size of his collection is all I need to relive the happiness that my prized 30 cent root beer flavoured sticker brought 2.5 decades ago.

Image via relax.com.sg

1. Babypips – the indispensible first-stop for fx noobs.

2. FX Instructor - great blog for technical chart reading analyses.

3. Forex Initiate – initiation into the FX realm.

4. Currency Thoughts - Deep, deeper and deepest thoughts from Larry Greenberg, a veteran currency economist.

5. Forex Crunch - useful trading tips.

6. Counting Pips – the market informant.

7. Kathy Lien - author of Day Trading & Swing Trading the Currency Market; a must have on your bookshelf.

Unlike demand & supply, the bard & the economist doth not an equilibrium point  make.

That is, until the arrival of Lew Duffey. His poem, High Finance, is like an op-ed imbued with fluid rhythm and rhyme that does poetic justice to the elusive chase for a truly enlightened economy.

High Finance

Our politicians today will tell you the economy is strong.

Who among us can really tell if they are right or wrong?

However questions keep playing across this uneducated mind.

If they ever analyzed the fact I wonder what they would find.

The first question is a simple point of definition.

What is it that they call a strong economy? Do they mistake it for inflation?

Yes, some who are already blessed with great earthly riches say the economy is strong.

However the middle class is paying for their wonderful success so this cannot last long.

Let me tell you what I believe a strong economy would be.

There would be enough food, clothes, housing and comforts for you and also me.

And there would be more left over to help those who have no home but live in boxes under some tree.

When anyone was seen in need they’d never have to ask, for there would be people who would simply want to help them out and try to guard their health

Yes, those multi-million dollar businesses would want to share their wealth.

For their millions will serve no purpose when there is no middle class.

Without the balance of distribution of wealth, it will soon simply pass.

And when there are no more weak to trod upon, this is a fact of science

That it will simply be a matter of a battle of the giants.

Aggression begets aggression and anger brings the same.

So our strong economy is really only strong in name.

Strength means balance and balance tips the scales not at all.

When the scales are tilted our economy is doomed to fall

- Lew Duffey

Churning out eye candy from data, statistics and information:

1. information aesthetics

2. visualcomplexity.com

3. data mining and more

4. flowing data

5. eager eyes

6. many eyes

7. junk charts

8. stats, graphics & data visualization

9. pictures & numbers

10. forest & the trees

11. visual-literacy.org

12. programmableweb

13. knowledge-visualization.org

14. serial consign

15. coding horror

16. bokardo – social design

thanks to Seth Gillespie

17. visualeconomics

Periodic tables have transcended Nerdvana and are currently very much in vogue.

So here’s another one that gives you the different methods of data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor and compound visualization.

Click on the image for more interactive details.

Or download the pdf version here.

If James Bond 007, Men in Black, Conspiracy Theory and The X-Files, are your thing, then you will without a doubt, relish Washington Post’s (WP) latest interactive visual representation of the top-secret world created by the US government in the aftermath of 911. 

In the name of national security and justifiable paranoia, this huge industry has evidently spiralled beyond control. There were known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown knowns; questions that remained unanswered, questions that no one knew how or who to ask.

After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

Following a two-year investigation by the WP, the veil of opacity surrounding this unwieldy network, has been lifted.

Activate your roaming-eyes and navigate the insights into the ins, outs and who’s whos of the U.S Top Secret inc.

Click image to explore

Oil spills, obscene bankers’ bonuses, obesity, organized religion and obnoxious people are all part of the orthodox world.

Those who are not too lazy to think for themselves… even those who reap nominal benefits from it, frown upon the current world order with disdain.

On a systemic level, pessimism rules the rationale of these precious few.

But on an individual level, optimism is a state of being; a choice that resides within our spheres of influence. Happiness, once an elusive notion, morphs into an axiom. 

And for lack of better articulation, may I quote an orgasmic passage from the film Jeux d’enfant, that serves as my personal benchmark for recognizing the feeling of true happiness… when it arrives:

Du bonheur à l’état pur, brut, natif, volcanique, quel pied ! C’était mieux que tout, mieux que la drogue, mieux que l’héro, mieux que la dope, coke, crack, fitj, joint, shit, shoot, snif, pét’, ganja, marie-jeanne, cannabis, beuh, péyotl, buvard, acide, LSD, extasy.

Mieux que le sexe, mieux que la fellation, soixante-neuf, partouze, masturbation, tantrisme, kama-sutra, brouette thaïlandaise.

Mieux que le Nutella au beurre de cacahuète et le milk-shake banane. Mieux que toutes les trilogies de George Lucas, l’intégrale des muppets-show, la fin de 2001. Mieux que le déhanché d’Emma Peel, Marilyn, la schtroumpfette, Lara Croft, Naomi Campbell et le grain de beauté de Cindy Crawford. Mieux que la face B d’Abbey Road, les CD d’Hendrix, le nouveau p’tit pas de Neil Armstrong sur la lune. Le space-mountain, la ronde du Père-Noël, la fortune de Bill Gates, les transes du dalaï-lama, les NDE, la résurrection de Lazare, toutes les piquouzes de testostérone de Schwarzy, le collagène dans les lèvres de Pamela Anderson.

Mieux que Woodstock et les rave-party les plus orgasmiques. Mieux que la défonce de Sade, Rimbaud, Morisson et Castaneda. Mieux que la liberté. Mieux que la vie…

* Translation of important bits in bold: Better than freedom. Better than life.

Check out this video accompanying Canadian band Broken Social Scene‘s song Meet me in the Basement – a poignant fan-made video reflecting the sorry state of our politics and economics, and the transient ”victory” of plastic pop and marketing culture over… just about everything else:

May change come sooner than later.