Lone Gunman

Still on vaca­tion, Dan Zam­bonini has been your host here on Lone Gun­man for the past week. While here, Dan pub­lished six items:

• Image Com­pres­sion and the Ori­gins Of Life
• Mod­ern Amer­ica: Designed by a Frenchman
• My GeoPo­lit­i­cal Memberships
• Want to be a mil­lion­aire pop star? You’re bet­ter off buy­ing £64 of lot­tery tick­ets than enter­ing the X-Factor
• DNA R/W+ 12 Speed
• The Asso­ci­a­tion of the Dead

Trav­el­ling from Tokyo to Syd­ney and onwards to Mel­bourne over the last week I’ve had a lit­tle bit of time to pro­duce a few posts of my own.

This com­ing week I’ll be pro­duc­ing some of my own posts… but only a few. More guests posts soon.

Many thanks to Dan.

I’m away on vaca­tion, and last week Alex J. Mann took over Lone Gun­man for the week and pro­duced five thought­ful posts:

• To Invest is to Aim
• See­ing with Tongues
• In Defense of Sam­pling: Why Steal­ing is Inspiring
• New Lit­er­acy Strategies
• Your Job as an Artist

This com­ing week, your host is Dan Zambonini—a true Renais­sance man.

Dan is the co-founder of the excel­lent Box UK (“cre­ators of amaz­ing web apps” and much more besides) and not only has his own tag here at Lone Gun­man but also may be the source of more posts than any other person.

Dan is a great per­son to fol­low on Twit­ter, and you can do that here. If you’re inter­ested in things web you should sub­scribe to Dan’s com­pany blog here, and if you love design, you should fol­low his per­sonal Tumblr-style blog here (where you can find fur­ther links to his many projects in the sidebar).

On top of all this, Dan also helps to organ­ise some fine events around the UK. I spoke at one not too long ago (Ignite Cardiff) and now the first Ignite Lon­don is cur­rently lin­ing up speakers—one to watch.

Thanks to Alex and thanks to Dan.

Right now I’m in Japan. I’ll be stay­ing here for another cou­ple of weeks before head­ing to south­east Aus­tralia for another few weeks. While I’m away your occa­sional Lone Gun­man fix will come from a selec­tion of fine guest writers.

For the com­ing week your host is Alex J. Mann.

Alex has his own tag here on Lone Gun­man thanks to the fol­low­ing posts:

• The Exe­cut­ing Your Idea series of posts–selected as one of my picks of Lone Gunman’s first year.
• Grad­u­at­ing into the reces­sion and what next?–an inter­view with Phi­laLawyer (LG).

As you can tell from perus­ing the above posts, Alex is a recent grad­u­ate, an entre­pre­neur, and a damn nice guy with brains to boot.

You can read more from Alex on his blog where he reflects on entre­pre­neur­ship, cul­ture and technology. As expected, Alex is also on Twit­ter and you can fol­low him here.

That’s not all, of course: Alex’s fan­tas­tic Deli­cious book­marks can be seen and fol­lowed here, and you can find out more about Alex’s fan­tas­tic startup, AM Ana­lyt­ics, by head­ing here.

Join me in wel­com­ing Alex–my first ever guest author–by leav­ing com­ments on his posts.

Thanks to Alex and to you.

Ron Lieber of The New York Times asks, Could the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis be breed­ing an entire gen­er­a­tion of risk averse traders?

Kevin Bro­sious, a finan­cial plan­ner in Allen­town, Pa., polled the stu­dents in his finan­cial man­age­ment class at DeSales Uni­ver­sity on the per­cent­age of their port­fo­lios they would allo­cate to stocks right now. The major­ity would put less than half in stocks; among their rea­sons were fear of job loss, lack of account­abil­ity on Wall Street and eco­nomic fears ampli­fied by the news media.

The prob­lem with their approach, accord­ing to Mr. Bro­sious, is that by invest­ing con­ser­v­a­tively they are prob­a­bly guar­an­tee­ing them­selves a smaller return and a more mea­ger stan­dard of liv­ing in retirement.

Or, as Robert N. Sieg­mann, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer and senior adviser of the Finan­cial Man­age­ment Group in Cincin­nati, wrote to me in an e-mail mes­sage, “Why would you con­sider tak­ing less risk NOW after most of the risk has already been paid for in the mar­ket over the past 12 months?”

[…]

So what kind of risk should you take on with the sav­ings you have left over? To Moshe A. Milevsky, […] risk should have less to do with the era in which you live and more to do with what you do for a living.

On the topic of rea­son­able risk assess­ment, the UK Pro­fes­sor of the Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Risk, David Spiegel­hal­ter, believes it may be time to teach risk lit­er­acy as part of the main­stream aca­d­e­mic cur­ricu­lum.

“I regard myself as part of a move­ment we call risk lit­er­acy. […] It should be a basic com­po­nent of dis­cus­sion about issues in media, pol­i­tics and in schools.

“We should essen­tially be teach­ing the abil­ity to decon­struct the lat­est media story about a can­cer risk or a won­der drug, so peo­ple can work out what it means. Really, that should be part of everyone’s language.”

As an aspect of sci­ence, risk was “as impor­tant as learn­ing about DNA, maybe even more impor­tant,” he said. “The only prob­lem is putting it on the cur­ricu­lum: that can be the kiss of death.”

Like Schneier, this reminds me of John Allen Pau­los excel­lent ‘man­i­festo’, Innu­mer­acy.

Aca­d­e­mic Earth is the lat­est addi­tion to my grow­ing col­lec­tion of online lec­tures from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties around the world.

The site cur­rently includes lec­tures from Berke­ley, Har­vard, MIT, Prince­ton, Stan­ford and Yale on top­ics rang­ing from Entre­pre­neur­ship to Law, and Eco­nom­ics to Psychology.