Consider this an academically minded follow-up to the John Bird and John Fortune segment on sub-prime mortgages.

The stability of the financial system and the potential for systemic events to alter its functioning have long been critical issues for central bankers and researchers. Developments such as securitization and greater tradability of financial instruments, the rise in industry consolidation, growing cross-border financial activity, terrorist threats, and a higher dependence on computer technologies underscore the importance of this research area. Recent events, however, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), suggest that older models of systemic shocks in the financial system may no longer fully capture the possible channels of propagation and feedback arising from major disturbances. Nor can existing models account entirely for the increasing complexity of the financial system, the spectrum of financial and information flows, or the endogenous behavior of different agents in the system. Fresh thinking on systemic risk is therefore required.

For the pop culture coverage, check in on James Surowiecki.

New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk: A Report on a Conference Cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Sciences

Women want to talk about it, but men are more likely to retreat into stoney silence. Our correspondent investigates the science behind how we argue

The short answer is that there is no science behind this.

Why men and women argue differently

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. At issue is whether the procedure whereby the government can subpoena stored copies of your email - similar to the way they could simply subpoena any physical mail sitting on your desk - is unconstitutionally broad.

This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn't any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's email at any time without a warrant.

No email privacy rights under Constitution, US gov claims

I grew up in a corporate culture over almost quarter of a century, that highlighted the importance of not engaging in any communication with the outside world that would be embarrassing for the individual and/or the firm to see in the Wall Street Journal the next day.

In those days this applied of course to snail mail and all traditional forms of written communication, but now of course covers email, blogging and every eventual mode of digital communication.

Teenagers and college kids of course don't have the advantage of this warning, and if they do, are too convinced of their reputational immortality to worry otherwise.

And it's not just about their behavior on services like MySpace and Facebook, but their conduct all across the web, including services like instant messaging, SMS texting and the like. They are leaving reputational footprints that in many cases will be a matter of permanent record, potentially increasing their reputational mortality.

So it's an important distinction for us to keep in mind, and whenever appropriate, try and get them to "get it".

This could be a generational statement about the public opinion of the media. I guess it was appropriate that MySpace ended up in the hands of News Corp.

On MySpace and Reputational Mortality

One hoary truth of computing technology is that most of the pressing problems today have solutions discovered or developed, at least in part, twenty years ago. (This nicely avoids the patent problem.)

Google’s announcement of the OpenSocial API brought up yet again the persistent problem of walled gardens on the Internet, as myriad social networking sites spring up, offer to invite all of your friends if you divulge your address books, and then slowly wither as you realize that visiting half-a-dozen sites every day to read messages from your fragmented social groups is busy work.

If Social Networking Sites *Really* Wanted to Interoperate

I've seen a lot of claims that there is something fundamentally new about service-oriented architectures. I don't buy it. Distributed computing has always been about the same set of problems. The speed of light is fixed, bandwidth is finite, and networks can be relied on to fail periodically. What we discovered in the 80's and 90's is that it's hard to build a completely general-purpose system that deals with these issues. Service oriented architecture is all about solving these problems in the context of a specific set of domain objects and business needs; that is, defining restrictions which make a viable solution easier to create. But SOA is no more a silver bullet than the approaches which preceded it, and the fundamental techniques and strategies used for the previous generations of distributed systems are the foundation of a well-designed SOA.

From Here to There, The SOA Way

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraib and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

See also Keith Olbermann's Special Comment.

Waterboarding is Torture… Period.

The havoc on Wall Street following the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market boils down to a simple truth: for years, lots of very smart people took lots of very foolish risks, betting borrowed billions on dubious mortgage derivatives, and eventually the odds caught up with them. But behind that simple truth is a more surprising one: the financial whizzes made bad decisions in part because that’s what they were paid to do.

...

One lesson of the current market chaos, then, is that it’s hard to get incentives right. Investors, after all, want fund managers and corporate executives to take reasonable risks—that’s the only way to make money—and many of them do just that. But, in trying to reward reasonable risks, we’ve encouraged unreasonable ones as well. And when you make it rational for people to bet the house, you may end up without a roof over your head.

Performance-pay Perplexes

One of the benefits of the Honors Lecture Series is that students can collectively experience the eclectic thoughts of MTSU's faculty. Thanks to John Paul's thematics, this experience also pushes the speakers to step outside our routine of thought and to consider a bigger picture. While the significance of what we say may not be so immediately obvious, I do hope there is something of a haunting curiosity awakened in you for the prospects and process of discovery conveyed in these honors lectures.

There are three points of this lecture.

One is to impress upon you that reliance on the electronic network is already inescapable as an information source.

Second is to suggest to you that the network is now essential in expanding your intellectual capital.

Third is to provide few elementary examples of a constructive learning network within the technology framework.

... Human interaction via electronic networks has much promise. I believe the promise is the new dynamics of access, speed, convenience, intelligent collaboration, and low costs associated with these attributes. But intelligence still has a dear price in time and study and thought. In this respect, I don't think electronic networks change the quality of intelligence. But the change in the mix of sources relied upon is already underway. Today and in the future, much more of our learning will be network dependent. The current challenge before faculty and students is to begin to craft a more comprehensive framework for this new reality.

Will this change the nature of truth? No, I think there will just be more of it. If truth is state of alignment with intellectual values and standards, then it is neither the alignment nor the standards or values about which I've been speaking. Rather than a state (read static), I think we have entered an era of dynamic adjustment to achieve our personal and collective intellectual aspirations. If the networking of truth can cause the collapse of communism, imagine what it can do in the construction of intelligence.

Dynamic Intelligence in the Networked World | MTSU Honors Lecture

Booklist Starred Review:

Dana Thomas has been the fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for 12 years and writes about style for the New York Times Magazine and other well-known publications. She traces the origins of luxury from the mid–nineteenth century, when Louis Vuitton made his first steamer trunks and custom-made clothing was strictly the province of European aristocracy, through the fashion boom of the 1920s, when names such as Dior, Gucci, and Yves Saint Laurent came into prominence, and buyers with expendable income could afford exquisite clothing and perfume. Sadly, today most of the well-known names are owned by multinational groups, and luxury items have become commodities, where buyers crave name brands for what they represent rather than their inherent quality of manufacture and design. Thomas takes us into the streets of New York, where counterfeit items are sold that look so much like the real thing that it takes an expert to tell them apart, to the Guangzhou region in China, where children make knockoff goods under appalling conditions. She manages to remove the veil from the fashion industry with a blend of history, culture, and investigative journalism.

From the NYT review:

In truth, the perverse reality of luxury consumption today is that so few people are complaining.

“Deluxe” performs a valuable service by reminding us that these labels don’t mean much else. Once guarantors of value and integrity, they are now markers that point toward nothing, guiding the consumer on a road to nowhere.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster