High frequency trading, betting on tennis edition. Given that in tennis the gap in the number of points won between the winner and the loser is often quite low, the difference of knowing who one a particular game can often swing the result expectations from one side to the other, opening up quick and short-lived arbitrage windows.
Lance Stephenson, basketball buffoon. “Back when he was in high school, Stephenson appeared in a documentary directed by Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, which centered on a pickup game between eight young basketball phenoms at Rucker Park, in Harlem. Joshua Hersh wrote about Stephenson’s role in the film for The New Yorker: “Stephenson appears to be having a lot of fun, throwing down slam dunks, and even, at one point, dancing a little jig. In the fourth quarter, muscling his way to a rebound, he smacks Love”—Kevin Love, then a player for U.C.L.A.—“in the face with his forearm, busting open his lip.”” This was prescient given Stephenson's slap of Norris Cole in the Heat's series-clinching victory the other day. I like the term “basketball buffoon.”
The ideological Turing Test. “The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by American economist Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.”
Is it time to abolish the 7-day week? It is somewhat arbitrary, but I think the author minimizes the value of coordination in the knowledge economy. The tech world has already hacked the 7-day work week quite a bit. Many developers are nocturnal and work on a different cycle than other job functions.
Selfish Play Increases during High-Stakes NBA Games and Is Rewarded with More Lucrative Contracts. This isn't meant to be another veiled reference to Lance Stephenson, though I wouldn't blame you for thinking it was. There's no “I” in “team,” but there is in “raise.” One of the reasons basketball is one of the hardest sports to quantitatively assess player value in is that an individual's statistical performance doesn't always correlate to the team's performance. That's much less true in a sport like baseball which is much more of a series of discrete individual confrontations.
