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- Cognitive dissonance and the stock marketDecember 3
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On arriving at work each day, I usually do a morning check to see what's happened on the overseas stock markets overnight. Today I saw that the market had finished up 2%, a move which was accompanied by the following brief summary of events:
US stocks rallied for a second straight session overnight, after a robust report on online holiday spending and a surprise jump in mortgage applications offset a new batch of dismal economic data….
And here is a graphical representation of of the battle that was fought throughout the day between that robust report and those pesky pieces of dismal economic datum:
There it is, plain as you like… the winner was clearly the robust report! I would like to propose that another way of writing a summary for how stocks had traded on that day:
Today stocks went down at the start, then went up for a while, they then went down a bit, before finishing up in the afternoon. Tomorrow, who knows!
As I went back
- But who controls the systems?November 26
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I finished reading The Fifth Discipline today - what a book! Understanding a "systems way of thinking" really opens a lot of doors to how I relate to things and has a profound effect on my outlook.After reading the book I was thinking back to a topic that we discussed in one of my early MBA classes: Locus of Control. I was trying to recall what we learned about what the Locus of Control means about people and then, to think about what effect my new understanding of systems thinking has on the topic. So I went off to Wikipedia to see what it had to say on the topic: [Link]. The article had some interesting things to say, particularly where it drew this assumption:This has obvious implications for differences between internals and externals in terms of their achievement motivation, suggesting that internal locus is linked with higher levels of N-ach.Thinking about the source of power in a systems-based universe is an exercise in recursive thinking. On the one hand I understand that I am held within larger systems, yet on the other hand, I understand that, eve
- AlignmentNovember 21
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Yesterday morning I was on the bus heading in to work. I had my music playing and I had just started reading Chapter 11 of The Fifth Discipline when I read the following quotes from Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics; apparently the quote comes from Russell’s book titled: “Second Wind: Memoirs of an opinionated man”.
On reading this passage, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end and I felt a deep sense of emotion wash over me. In the passage, Russell is talking not about the individual attributes of his stars, but of the sensation that came about when they were all in perfect alignment. In sport, we know this as being "in the zone":
“Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics but also the players on the other team, and even the referees. To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks, and they had to be competitive
- Live Services ResourcesOctober 30
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Here are some links to resources that I jotted down while playing with Live bits today:
- Developer CTP site – this is where you get the bits so that you can build Live Services and Mesh Apps. You go here to get both the Live SDK and also the Visual Studio Tools. Note: You have to ‘install’ the SDK before you can install the VS tools… the ‘install’ is actually an xcopy into Program Files… read the ReadMe file for more info on that.
- Mesh CTP site – this is the CTP version of the Live Desktop and where you go to sign-up for the CTP program
- Azure Developer Portal – this is where you go to create Services Applications such as Mesh Web enabled apps
- Live Services SDK documentation – includes SDK information about API’s ranging from things such as Mesh enabled web apps through to Resource scripts
- Live Framework Toolkit References – a page with links to information about the new libraries for programming against Live services
- Photo Album: PDC 2008October 29
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PDC 2008