Book Review: The Greatest Ever Bank Robbery

Note:  Not to be confused with William Black's book of a similar name.

The Greatest Ever Bank Robbery.




The story of the late-80s savings and loan fiasco foreshadowed much of the economic crisis of our time. 

Financial journalist Martin Mayer highlights one particular problem: FDIC insured deposits. This leads savings and loans to overextend themselves with loans to go-go builders and oftentimes in bizarre things like currency speculation. But the unlimited government FDIC backstops means all will be made well.

See where this is going?

This book has very useful details about specific kinds of accounting fraud, especially in the land development business. 

In another troubling sign of things to come, Mayer discusses the conspiracy of corruption that included regulators, land appraisal, bank officials, and others that should have been ethical but instead knowingly looked the other way or invented metrics to mask the problem.

Restaurant Business Resources

Here are some resources to help you with your restaurant small business project.

Books:

restaurant management books

Includes e books as well. Rules and ratios of the restaurant businesses and how to operate a successful restaurant.

This Gale Business Plan e-book has a restaurant business plan.

(Extra: don't miss the great Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential )

Trade publications:

Infotrac small business

Trade publications on the restaurant business.  Practical how to tips and industry trends. Note: be sure your screen is tabbed to Magazines (left side of screen). Also you may want to change the results to  Publication date descending (most recent first.)

Rosetta Stone And More Ways To Learn A Language

We have Rosetta Stone Language Learning software, as well as other fine language learning programs.

The easiest thing to do is just follow this link to see all of our holdings in all languages from different publishers.

The Rosetta Stone stuff from the 3rd floor CAN leave the building, but the Rosetta Stone material from the fourth floor computer lab has to stay in the building.

Another option:


BBC - Languages - highly recommended interactive site that features many different languages.

Beware the Big Errors of Big Data

Nassem Taleb is at it again:

In his latest essay "Beware the Big Errors of Big Data," he writes:

We’re more fooled by noise than ever before, and it’s because of a nasty phenomenon called “big data.” With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level.
Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information.

In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.


My takeaway:

1. Behavior changes and not everything is known
2. Correlation is not causation.
2. Designing models around averages changes the average itself.

Please see When Genius Failed, the last time we thought we knew everything.

Historic Statistics for United States

This is a great place to find decades worth of interesting statistics on things you didn't think they collected statistics on.

You have the usual suspects of GDP and employment, but also off-beat items like food consumption, credit worth, suicide rates, busiest airports, number of foodstores, fish imports/exports and so on.

The Datapedia book is in the reference section. The e-version is here.

Find the Best And Most Influential Articles and Sources

Even after you get your keywords and databases down, there's still a lot of articles to read!

However, you may wish to only spend time on the most cited articles. They are usually the most important ones to have read. Or, if you find a dissertation on your topic, those articles or other sources listed in the bibliography.

Here's a video that explains this!

Rise of the Permanent Temp Economy

Good New York Times summary of the history of the permanent low-wage temp economy.

This is an interesting article about the history of the part-time worker during the last few decades, and how low wage, long hours, part-time work is becoming the norm.

Read the classic Atlantic essay about the implications of the permanent underclass here.