Month: January 2013

On Revamping Your Online Dating Profile

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After a string of digital dating disasters, Amy Webb dug into the data, played around with her dating profile on Match.com and OKCupid.com, changed it, and soon went on her “last first date.” It sounds quite easy, but I think it took a lot of work. She provides some tips on revamping your dating profile in this interesting Wall Street Journal piece:

My profile was obviously attracting the wrong kind of man. After one particularly disastrous date—he casually dropped the fact that he was actually married—I decided to change my approach. Drawing on my background in data analysis, I set out to reverse engineer my profile. I outlined 10 male archetypes and created profiles for each of them on JDate. There was JewishDoc1000, the private-practice cardiologist who hated cruise-ship travel, and LawMan2346, an attorney who was very close to his family and a former national debate champion.

And here are Amy’s tips on attracting the right kind of person on your online dating profile:

• Use between three and five photos in your gallery. More photos can do some good, but after five, my analysis suggests, profiles pass a point of diminishing returns.

• Lead with your hobbies and activities, unless they require lots of description or explanation. So you can start with tennis, if that’s your thing, but not aikido—or worse, “I have a black belt in aikido.” (I actually do, and I put it on my profile at one point, which prompted some men to challenge me to a fight on the first date, which was as horrible and awkward as it sounds.)

• It’s really hard to be funny in print—especially if you’re naturally prone to sarcasm. I found that people who thought they were being funny in their profiles weren’t. Instead, they seemed angry or aloof.

Women: Don’t mention work, especially if your job is difficult to explain. You may have the most amazing career on the planet, but it can inadvertently intimidate someone looking at your profile. I realize this sounds horribly regressive, but during my experiment I found that women were attracted to men with high-profile careers, while the majority of men were turned off by powerful women.

• Women with curly hair are at a distinct disadvantage online. I have no idea whether men prefer blondes, but I can say definitively that most men prefer women with healthy, long, straight hair. If you have curls and feel comfortable (and look good) straightening your hair, give that a try.

These tips will appear in Amy Webb’s upcoming book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match.

Risk Management at JPMorgan: Relying on Excel Spreadsheets

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I spent some time this morning reading the recently published “JPMorgan Chase & Co. Management Task Force Regarding 2012 CIO Losses,” a 129-page report on how and why the Chief Investment Office (CIO) lost more than $6 billion for the company in 2012. The media has been quick to point the finger at Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale” responsible for executing the trades. As Felix Salmon notes, the executive summary on the first 17 pages of the report is well-written and provides the context behind this trading disaster for JPMorgan.

I went through the other portions of the document and wanted to highlight that the Risk Management, particularly in the CIO, wasn’t up to snuff. First, this was a huge red flag:

The Firm’s Chief Investment Officer did not receive (or ask for) regular reports on the positions in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio or on any other portfolio under her management, andinstead focused on VaR, Stress VaR, and mark-to-market losses. As a result, she does not appear to have had any direct visibility into the trading activity, and thus did not understand in real time
what the traders were doing or how the portfolio was changing. And for his part, given the magnitude of the positions and risks in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio, CIO’s CFO should havetaken steps to ensure that CIO management had reports providing information sufficient to fully understand the trading activity, and that he understood the magnitude of the positions and what
was driving the performance (including profits and losses) of the Synthetic Credit Portfolio.

But the big question: why did it take so long for JP Morgan to discover that these trades were losing money for the company? Turns out, it had to do with rudimentary platforms in place to measure/track risk on a daily basis. Alas, they were relying on Microsoft Excel!

During the review process, additional operational issues became apparent. For example, the model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another. In addition, many of the tranches were less liquid, and therefore, the same price was given for those tranches on multiple consecutive days, leading the model to convey a lack of volatility. While there was some effort to map less liquid instruments to more liquid ones (i.e., calculate price changes in the less liquid instruments derived from price changes in more liquid ones), this effort was not organized or consistent.

…

In addition to these risk-related controls, the Task Force has also concluded that the Firm and, in particular, the CIO Finance function, failed to ensure that the CIO VCG (Valuation Control Group) price-testing procedures – an important financial control – were operating effectively. As a result, in the first quarter of 2012, the CIO VCG price-testing procedures suffered from a number of operational deficiencies. For example, CIO VCG did not have documentation of price-testing thresholds. In addition, the price-testing process relied on the use of spreadsheets that were not vetted by CIO VCG (or Finance) management, and required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors.

Yikes!

If you’re into risk management at all (like I am), the entire report is worth perusing.

Aaron Swartz on Staying Curious

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Ronaldo Lemos interviewed Aaron Swartz in 2009. Here is what the late Aaron Swartz had to say about curiosity:

Q: You did a lot of important things at a very young age, could you describe a few of them? And how do you see and would explain that? Talent, inspiration, curiosity, hard work? Is there something that you would think that other kids who would like to follow your steps should know?

A: When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity. First I got interested in computers, which led me to get interested in the Internet, which led me to get interested in building online news sites, which led me to get interested in standards (like RSS), which led me to get interested in copyright reform (since Creative Commons wanted to use similar standards). And on and on. Curiosity builds on itself — each new thing you learn about has all sorts of different parts and connections, which you then want to learn more about. Pretty soon you’re interested in more and more and more, until almost everything seems interesting. And when that’s the case, learning becomes really easy — you want to learn about almost everything, since it all seems really interesting. I’m convinced that the people we call smart are just people who somehow got a head start on this process. I fell like the only thing I’ve really done is followed my curiosity wherever it led, even if that meant crazy things like leaving school or not taking a “real” job. 

Amen to this. Stay curious, friends.

###

(hat tip: Dave Winer)

North Dakota: Kuwait on the Prairie

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Do you see that patch of light in North Dakota?

Do you see that patch of light in North Dakota?

Robert Krulwich wonders: what’s up with all that light seen in North Dakota in a recent nighttime image of the United States? Turns out there is no big city there. That light pollution is coming from nighttime evidence of an oil boom created by fracking. Those lights are rigs, hundreds of them, lit at night, or fiery flares of natural gas. One hundred oil companies are set up in this region known as the Bakken formation.

This oil rush is so sudden, so enormous, North Dakota now has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. More than 41,000 workers got jobs there between 2008 and 2012. Only seven years ago, the U.S. was importing 60 percent of its oil. Now imports are down to 42 percent. The Bakken fields are helping to improve energy security.

See the post for more images and great videos.

On Bargain Homes in Detroit

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“You can’t go to California and get a pair of shoes for what you can get a house in Detroit.”

That’s a quote from this Bloomberg story on the distressed housing market in Detroit, and how some people are scooping up foreclosed homes by the dozens. According to the story, one man bought 290 Detroit properties for $189,600, which is less expensive than a single-family home in many U.S. Metropolitan areas.

A bit more from the story:

More than 6,500 Wayne County parcels were auctioned in 2011 and another 20,000 are expected for sale this year, said David Szymanski, the county’s chief deputy treasurer.

 

Roughly one-quarter of Detroit’s housing units are vacant, according to Detroit Future City, a 50-year blueprint for the city’s recovery. Mallach worked on the plan initiated by Mayor Dave Bing to redesign Detroit’s 139 square miles, larger than San Francisco, Boston and Manhattancombined for a shrinking population. It envisions such strategies as turning sparsely populated swaths into green space and farms.

 

About 150,000 of Detroit’s 385,390 lots are vacant or have unused buildings, Mallach said. About 66,000 parcels are publicly owned, and that number grows as unsold homes from tax auctions revert to the city or state.

 

Detroit Future City assumes the population will bottom out at about 615,000. It fell by 25 percent since 2000 to 713,000 in the 2010 U.S. Census.

More here.

Obituary for Leon Leyson, Youngest Survivor on Schindler’s List

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Schindler’s List is one of my all-time favourite films. It is worth rewatching after I read an obituary of Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Oskar Schindler’s list, in this Los Angeles Times piece.

Leyson, a longtime resident of Fullerton, died Saturday in Whittier after a four-year battle with lymphoma, his daughter Stacy Wilfong said. He was 83.

She said her father was reluctant to talk about the war years because he “didn’t think anybody was interested. He didn’t have public speaking experience. He didn’t think he was going to be any good.”

His reticence may also have been due to his attitude that, having been given a second chance at life, he just wanted to get on with it.

“The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust,” he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. “I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom.”

The youngest of five children of a glass factory worker and his wife, Leyson was born Sept. 15, 1929, in Narewka, Poland, a village near the Russian border. He later moved to Krakow with his family.

He was a few weeks shy of his 10th birthday in 1939 when German forces invaded Poland and life as he had known it began to crumble.

Six months after the invasion, Poland’s Jews were ordered into a section of Krakow enclosed by a fence, the tops of which, Leyson often recalled, resembled grave markers. “I don’t think that was an accident,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. His parents loaded their belongings onto a wagon and were crammed into one bedroom of an apartment in the Jewish ghetto with only a sheet separating them from another family.

Leyson didn’t discount his luck in survival:

“I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped … to my left I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right,” Leyson told The Times. “It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.”

Worth reading the article for the last line alone. So touching.

On Effective Opening Sentences

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What’s the best way to begin a blog post or an essay? Perhaps not with a question mark.

This great post summarizes useful techniques for a strong opening sentence: 

You can start with a blanket statement. Chapter Nine of Sol Stein’s excellent How to Grow a Novel begins with: “A writer cannot write what he does not read with pleasure.” Chapter Fourteen begins with: “All fiction writers are emigrants from nonfiction.”

Sometimes you can just be stark-blunt about what you intend to do. Chapter Eight of Stein’s book, on “Getting Intimate with the Reader,” starts out: “This is a chapter about opportunities.”

If you’re writing a blog post about unequal pay of women and men, you can start with: “This post is about unfairness.” Just tell the reader what the subject is.

If you’re writing about a difficult subject (for example, rape), you can begin: “Rape is not easy to write about.”

Make an exaggerated statement, then tone it down. “In Prohibition days, alcohol could be purchased illegally on every street corner. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, but in fact it’s true that . . .”

Involve the reader in a bit of conjecture. “Suppose you were faced with the choice of living with cancer every day, or obtaining treatment that may or may not work, at the cost of becoming bankrupt and homeless.”

Sometimes you can start with a statistic. “This year, over two hundred thousand Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer.”

Summarize the current state of affairs, then tell how it’s changed recently. “Until recently, new MBA graduates could count on getting a job straight out of school. That’s no longer the case.” 

Put up a straw man and knock it down. “The conventional view of [XYZ] is [ABC].” (That’s the straw man.) “But it turns out the conventional view is wrong.” (That’s knocking it down.) Naomi Klein often uses this technique.

Read the entire post here.

Paul Theroux’s Travel Wish List

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Paul Theroux reminisces on his past travels in this piece for The New York Times. It’s a great essay in which he also considers his wish list for places to visit.

“You’ve been everywhere,” people say to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long but, in many cases, blindingly obvious. Yes, I have been to Patagonia and Congo and Sikkim, but I haven’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho or the Dakotas, and I’ve had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I want to see them, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc …”

Nothing to me has more excitement in it than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much on earth can beat it in travel for a sense of freedom — no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American.

This was my favorite paragraph:

The ultimate travel fantasies are, of course, unattainable. William S. Burroughs said in the 1950s, “What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.” In that spirit, I’d like to spend a Sunday in the West Medford of 1951, play bocce with my grandfather and eat some of my grandmother Angelina’s tortellini; I want to revisit the jolly bazaars of the Peshawar of 1973, the hopeful Nyasaland of 1964, the bike-riding China of 1980 (no private cars on the empty roads), and while I’m at it, I would like to return to the Borneo of the 1960s and again climb Mount Kinabalu.

I agree with Theroux on this count: a return journey to a place visited in the past can be a wonderful experience. A wonderful read overall.

Woody Allen on Hypochondria

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Woody Allen pens a great (and hilarious!) piece about hypochondria: 

But why should I live in such constant terror? I take great care of myself. I have a personal trainer who has me up to 50 push-ups a month, and combined with my knee bends and situps, I can now press the 100-pound barbell over my head with only minimal tearing of my stomach wall. I never smoke and I watch what I eat, carefully avoiding any foods that give pleasure. (Basically, I adhere to the Mediterranean diet of olive oil, nuts, figs and goat cheese, and except for the occasional impulse to become a rug salesman, it works.) In addition to yearly physicals I get all available vaccines and inoculations, making me immune to everything from Whipple’s disease to the Andromeda strain.

Best line in the op-ed:

Even when the results of my yearly checkup show perfect health, how can I relax knowing that the minute I leave the doctor’s office something may start growing in me and, by the time a full year rolls around, my chest X-ray will look like a Jackson Pollock?

I, too, would classify myself as an alarmist. But an occasional one, not a full-time one like Woody Allen.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

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It is with great sadness that I learned early this morning of Aaron Swartz’s suicide. I didn’t know Aaron personally, but I came to appreciate much of what Aaron wrote on personal development.

Cory Doctorow pens a worthwhile remembrance of Aaron Swartz at Boing Boing:

I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

This is a man that has suffered, at various points in his life, from a number of illnesses. Here are Aaron Swartz’s own words on depression:

You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

I don’t want to speculate on the suicide. But I think one of the best way to remember Aaron Swartz’s life is through the wisdom of his writings. So start by reading his “How To Get a Job Like Mine,” a no-bullshit examination of how he got to where he got. Follow with Aaron’s seven part series titled “Raw Nerve.” (Set aside an hour or two to read the whole series).

My favorite section was “Look at Yourself Objectively,” in which Aaron summarized:

Look up, not down. It’s always easy to make yourself look good by finding people even worse than you. Yes, we agree, you’re not the worst person in the world. That’s not the question. The question is whether you can get better — and to do that you need to look at the people who are even better than you.

Criticize yourself. The main reason people don’t tell you what they really think of you is they’re afraid of your reaction. (If they’re right to be afraid, then you need to start by working on that.) But people will feel more comfortable telling you the truth if you start by criticizing yourself, showing them that it’s OK.

Find honest friends. There are some people who are just congenitally honest. For others, it’s possible to build a relationship of honesty over time. Either way, it’s important to find friends who you can trust to tell to tell you the harsh truths about yourself. This is really hard — most people don’t like telling harsh truths. Some people have had success providing an anonymous feedback form for people to submit their candid reactions.

Listen to the criticism. Since it’s so rare to find friends who will honestly criticize you, you need to listen extra-carefully when they do. It’s tempting to check what they say against your other friends. For example, if one friend says the short story you wrote isn’t very good, you might show it to some other friends and ask them what they think. Wow, they all think it’s great! Guess that one friend was just an outlier. But the fact is that most of your friends are going to say it’s great because they’re your friend; by just taking their word for it, you end up ignoring the one person who’s actually being honest with you.

Thank you Aaron Swartz for your brilliance. For your honesty. For your daring.

RIP.