That's Interesting
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What we’re reading: The Idea Factory
05th December, 2018Interesting read about one of the most prolific innovation hubs of the past century and background behind the invention and development of the point-contact transistor which forms the building blocks for pretty much every electronics device we use today and the formation of silicon valley. The inventors, who worked at Bell Labs, won the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics.
External Link: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/193465/the-idea-factory/9780143122791.html -
BoJ: What Drives China’s Growth? Evidence from Micro-level Data
05th December, 2018The linked Bank of Japan research paper discusses the sustainability of China’s rapid growth mainly based on the estimation of the corporate-level total factor productivity of Chinese listed firms.
External Link: http://www.boj.or.jp/en/research/wps_rev/wps_2018/wp18e19.htm/ -
NPR: How the beatles made the white album
05th December, 2018Fifty years ago, just before the holidays in 1968, The Beatles put out not just a new album, but a double album, something relatively unheard of at the time. The album art was a stark, white, glossy cover with raised, slanted lettering that simply said, “The Beatles.” That self-titled album, with its 30 songs that span genres from American country music to avant-garde tape collage, has come to be known as “The White Album.”
External Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2018/11/13/666154261/how-the-beatles-made-the-white-album -
The Impossibly Cool Album Covers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Creative Team Behind These Iconic Designs
05th December, 2018The album covers of Blue Note Records included designs for John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Lou Donaldson.
The link includes an embedded youtube video from Vox Earworm on ‘The Greatest Album Covers of Jazz’.
External Link: http://www.openculture.com/2018/11/the-impossibly-cool-album-covers-of-blue-note-records.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29 -
The Great Telegraph Breakthrough of 1866
08th November, 2018“The transatlantic telegraph cable amounted to the information revolution of the day, tying global markets together in unprecedented ways.”
External Link: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2018/q2/economic_history?platform=hootsuite -
RBA Speech: The Evolving Australian Labour Market
07th November, 2018“The long-running trend towards more flexible work and the implications it might have for a monetary policymaker”.
External Link: https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2018/sp-so-2018-10-05.html -
Planet Money – Episode 864: The Central (Bankers’) Question
07th November, 2018“It used to be central bankers had a powerful lever to guide the pace of the economy: The ability to raise or lower interest rates…But lately, the lever hasn’t been behaving like the textbooks say it should.”
External Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/09/14/647979229/episode-864-the-central-bankers-question?utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=bufferef794&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer -
RBA: Does it pay to study economics?
08th October, 2018The RBA has written an interesting analysis on the economics of studying economics.
External Link: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2018/sep/does-it-pay-to-study-economics.html -
Mark Carney: Rebuilding trust in global banking
08th October, 2018Timely re-post given the outcomes from the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.
External Link: https://www.bis.org/review/r130226c.pdf -
What we’re reading: Bad Blood
24th September, 2018Fascinating insight into Theranos from the investigative journalist who broke the story.
“In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.”
External Link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549478/bad-blood-by-john-carreyrou/9781524731656/