Some Videos for Former and New CS 5150 Students

I usually get the impression that most of what I was trying to teach CS 5150 students about product definition was ignored. Since Prof. Arms worked at Next, he may get a kick out of these old videos, which show Steve Jobs selling the beginning of the product vision for Next to internal employees.

Part I.

And Part II.

A little less Greyhound at the airport

Blueberry Lavender Ice Cream

The trick to making blueberry ice cream is to understand whether the blueberries are in the perfect state of freshness. If they are, then they can be folded into the ice cream base after it spins, assuring a fresher taste. If they are not in the special place of freshness, then cooking the blueberries into a syrup and mixing it with the base yields a better result.

To identify whether your fresh blueberries are a good candidate for the non-syrup approach, first, squeeze a few. If they easily loose their integrity, they are over-ripe. Second, taste them. If you sense any bitterness, cook them into a syrup.

Although I didn’t follow these recipes (I’ll post a recipe next year when I get more time to work on this during the season), here are other potential options. One for fresh blueberries that has a small yield; one for a fresher tasting version of the non-syrup process and one for a syrup mixture.

Online Ticker Search Intensity Predicts Abnormal Volume and Returns?

A student is working on replication of this paper with me for our discussion on Gold pricing. Wall Street geeks may find it interesting to read before the next post.

Dissertation Correction That I’m Memorializing

Like many students (and even future Nobel Prize Winners such as Milton Friedman), I sometimes misspeak about the definition of a confidence interval. I’m leaving this as a placeholder to refer back to when making formalization corrections.

Searching for Economic Models that Work

Bill Gross (at Pimco) is having a bad year in bond returns because he bet against the Treasury. When Mr. Gross made public his bet against the Treasury, I thought he was nuts. Perhaps this was because I was only recently (in the last 5 years) trained on the IS-LM economic model that is working to predict bond price movements with higher accuracy than Pimco’s models.

This is yet another example of two sets of (in this case) completely reasonable facts in the market. One cluster of facts, believed by Mr. Gross and others, suggested that medium term Treasury prices would decline. Another fact cluster suggested that medium term Treasury prices would rise.

Read more »

Traditional French cooking of root vegetables softens the flavor of purées. If you’ve tried baby carrots sous vide and then glazed, you know that true carrot flavor can really shine through. I’ve been experimenting with a new way to make the purée in a water bath. These bags can be assembled days in advance and also partially cooked days in advance to speed preparation. Here are the steps: Freeze a disc of chicken stock. I use a ramekin. This takes at least 3 hours in my freezer. Take a Foodsaver bag (I’m using large for now) and insert about a tablespoon of chopped butter. Then press a large clove of garlic into the bottom. Avoid getting any residue at the top of the bag (to facilitate sealing). Chop a few carrots and a portion of onion. Thin rounds and small dice. Nothing is too small here. You can also use a food processor. Add these to the bag. Finally, add the disc of chicken stock to the bag and vacuum seal it. Before sealing, wipe the top of the bag, inside and out. Place the vacuum sealed bag into a 185 degree F water bath and let it cook for 3 to 5 hours. Remove the cooked bag from the water. It’s now possible to return this to the refrigerator and let it sit for up to 3 days. If eating directly after removing from the water bath, strain the contents of the bag and put the solids into a blender (optionally: do not strain … it depends on how you like your purée). Using only the solids will thicken the purée and allow you to thin it with cream (which is richer) but using the liquid from the bag instead of cream results in more carrot flavor and less cream flavor in the finished product. Add a tablespoon or so of heavy whipping cream plus salt and pepper to taste. Blend to the consistency that you desire. You can add more cream if you like it thinner or if you used more solids (carrots, onions, etc.). If you choose to refrigerate the bag after cooking, reheat it in a water bath before blending it. For tonight’s dinner, I’m reheating it while I’m cooking the steak at 120 degrees. You only need the high heat initially to break down the carrots and soften them. The second heating is just for reheat to keep it warm for serving. UPDATE: I actually find that 120 degrees F to reheat the bag isn’t hot enough. 140 degrees F is better. I can make this work in my kitchen because it takes the Sous Vide Supreme little time to get from 120 to 140 and if I start reheating the bags for a long time with the steak (to get them to 120), they move up fast enough that I can finish the purée just in time to add it during plating.

Traditional French cooking of root vegetables softens the flavor of purées. If you’ve tried baby carrots sous vide and then glazed, you know that true carrot flavor can really shine through. I’ve been experimenting with a new way to make the purée in a water bath. These bags can be assembled days in advance and also partially cooked days in advance to speed preparation.

Here are the steps:

  1. Freeze a disc of chicken stock. I use a ramekin. This takes at least 3 hours in my freezer.
  2. Take a Foodsaver bag (I’m using large for now) and insert about a tablespoon of chopped butter. Then press a large clove of garlic into the bottom. Avoid getting any residue at the top of the bag (to facilitate sealing).
  3. Chop a few carrots and a portion of onion. Thin rounds and small dice. Nothing is too small here. You can also use a food processor. Add these to the bag.
  4. Finally, add the disc of chicken stock to the bag and vacuum seal it. Before sealing, wipe the top of the bag, inside and out.
  5. Place the vacuum sealed bag into a 185 degree F water bath and let it cook for 3 to 5 hours.
  6. Remove the cooked bag from the water. It’s now possible to return this to the refrigerator and let it sit for up to 3 days.
  7. If eating directly after removing from the water bath, strain the contents of the bag and put the solids into a blender (optionally: do not strain … it depends on how you like your purée). Using only the solids will thicken the purée and allow you to thin it with cream (which is richer) but using the liquid from the bag instead of cream results in more carrot flavor and less cream flavor in the finished product.
  8. Add a tablespoon or so of heavy whipping cream plus salt and pepper to taste. Blend to the consistency that you desire. You can add more cream if you like it thinner or if you used more solids (carrots, onions, etc.).

If you choose to refrigerate the bag after cooking, reheat it in a water bath before blending it. For tonight’s dinner, I’m reheating it while I’m cooking the steak at 120 degrees. You only need the high heat initially to break down the carrots and soften them. The second heating is just for reheat to keep it warm for serving.

UPDATE: I actually find that 120 degrees F to reheat the bag isn’t hot enough. 140 degrees F is better. I can make this work in my kitchen because it takes the Sous Vide Supreme little time to get from 120 to 140 and if I start reheating the bags for a long time with the steak (to get them to 120), they move up fast enough that I can finish the purée just in time to add it during plating.

Sous vide scallops in 122 degree water bath

Before I forget what I did, I want to document the sous vide scallops recipe from last week:

Dump a pound of raw wild scallops into a bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Place them in a vacuum seal bag interspersed with 2 tablespoons of coarsely chopped butter. Seal. Submerge the bag in a water bath held at 122 degrees F for one hour or more. Remove scallops and brown one or more sides in a hot pan.

Served with swiss chard risotto (it’s nice to have the fresh chard from the garden … it tastes fresher). 

Special Report on High Frequency Trading (HFT)

I did a quick scan through the special report on HFT’s impact on the market. Here’s the money quote:

James MacIntosh, investment editor of the Financial Times, remarks that fundamental information is no longer reflected in stock pricing (see MackIntosh 2010). He suggests that pricing is now driven by market sentiment and possibly by the increase in trading on trends and patterns.

We will continue to explore this in our Gold posts next week.

Facebook and Twitter lead Web browser tracking

I just looked through the network traces of my home for a few days. Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies track the vast majority of web pages that the household visits. Google is trying to get in on what little they don’t already have of this market with +1.

Ten years ago it was a big deal because one company could track 20% of web views. Now it’s the new normal.

Gold analysis part 3, can Blogs or Twitter predict the stock market?

Journalists and scientists are extremely excited about methods for predicting the future based on the collective mood from Twitter, Blogs, or message boards. Should they be?

Read more »

Gold analysis part 2, a question for the social scientists …

For an industry awash in data, the empirical financial modeler faces an interesting problem — the quality of the data is always suspect.

Read more »

Why can’t my newsreader exclude any story that references a Kardashian?

You would think we would have this capability in 2011.

Investigating Gold's Pricing Factors

An open question in finance is whether gold pricing is inversely correlated with stock market performance and, therefore, serves as a hedge against asset distress. Some people in finance believe that gold is excessively bid up by wild buying by speculators while others believe it is undervalued.

The linked paper discusses a theory and an empirical model for gold pricing. The question that I’m going to begin to discuss in a series of posts is: “which side of the debate on gold has been fooled by randomness?”

But, first, some personal motivation. In the discussion of gold pricing, there are at least two different groups, armed with different facts, that are arguing about the fundamentals of gold pricing. If a person were to conduct a Bing or Google search to understand gold pricing, one might desire to see diversified search results identifying the two different camps of thought. Or a user might just want to see the search results that are most like their world view (personalized search). However, if you’re an investor, you want to be able to understand both sides of the argument, and you want to know which side is right so that you can bet against the other side.

In this blog post and the subsequent posts, I’ll start to examine how one can use the technology from my dissertation to do all of the above. So, in the short term, take a read through the linked paper to understand the fundamental view of gold pricing.

NOTE that TWO anonymous contributors to this work will, for the short term, remain anonymous. 

What am I supposed to do with the 2011 CHI Award?

This year, CHI began sending certificates of accomplishment to authors of papers that receive awards of distinction for their writing. Now that we have received them, what exactly are we supposed to do with them?