Non-market strategy and Geopolitics

If you are in business you should also be aware of non-market strategy and geopolitics.

One of the world best energy and geopolitics experts is Daniel Yergin. His books are amazing. The Prize (winner of the Pulitzer prize) and the recent one, The New Map are highly recommended.

Other relevant geopolitics analysts are Ian Bremmer, Fareed Zakaria,Peter Zeihan

Magazines and newspapers
Foreign Affairs MagazineForeign PolicyProject SyndicateThe AtlanticThe EconomistFinancial TimesThe New York TimesThe Wall Street Journal

Books about the recent events
Putin’s World, by Angela Stent
Putin’s People by Catherine Belton
Freezing Order by Bill Browder

Learning Corporate Finance and Valuation

If you want to learn about corporate finance and valuation, the best resource is Aswath Damodaran’s website.

Damodaran online classes are available online

Damodaran regular Stern classes 2022, links below, Corporate Finance MBA Spring 2022, Valuation (MBA) Spring 2022, Valuation (UnderGrads)

and he has written books on valuation and corporate finance that are very good

Applied Corporate Finance, 4th edition

Damodaran on Valuation: Security Analysis for Investment and Corporate Finance

And in this page you can find the list of all his books

Nowadays, if you want to learn you have all the tools and resources available online and free.

Books and resources on Covid-19, Viruses, Pandemics

Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis

Infectious: Pathogens and How We Fight Them by John Tregoning

The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives by Matt Richtel

Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response by Andy Slavitt

A Shot to Save the World: The Remarkable Race and Ground-Breaking Science Behind the Covid-19 Vaccines by Gregory Zuckerman

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
by Sarah Gilbert, Dr. Catherine Green

The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Joe Miller, Özlem Türeci

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine
by Gregory Zuckerman

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb

Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Kyle Harper

Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity by Arup K. Chakraborty, Andrey Shaw

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry

The Secret Body: How the New Science of the Human Body Is Changing the Way We Live by Daniel M. Davis

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer

Additional resources

On Twitter, follow

Eric Topol on Twitter @EricTopol and subscribe to his newsletter Ground Truths and PodCast Medicine and the Machine via Apple Podcasts or Medscape.

Andy Slavitt on Twitter @Aslavitt and his PodCast In the Buuble

John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch Stories, stats & scatterplots for @FinancialTimes | Mainly Covid for now | Visiting senior fellow @LSEdataScience | john.burn-murdoch@ft.com | #dataviz

Dr John Tregoning @DrTregoning Research Scientist. Father. Academic. Author Infectious book Rep’d @LittleHardman

Scott Gottlieb @ScottGottliebMD Senior Fellow @AEI. Partner @NEA. Contributor @CNBC. 23rd Commissioner @US_FDA 2017 to 2019. Boards: @Pfizer@Illumina@AetionInc@TempusLabs

The Lancet @TheLancet

Center for Disease Control & Prevention. @CDCgov

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing Epidemiologist & health economist

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH @ashishkjha Physician, researcher, advocate for the notion that an ounce of data is worth a thousand pounds of opinion Views here surely my own Professor, Dean @Brown_SPH

Dr. Tom Frieden @DrTomFrieden President & CEO @ResolveTSL | Sr Fellow @CFR_org | Former Director @CDCgov & Cmish @nycHealthy | Focused on saving lives | COVID-19 pandemic response & recovery

Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD @PeterHotez Vaccine Scientist-Author-Combat Antiscience @bcmhouston Professor Pediatrics Molecular Virology, @bcm_tropmed Dean, @TexasChildrens Chair in Tropical Pediatrics

Prof. Akiko Iwasaki @VirusesImmunity We study innate and adaptive immunity to #viruses and #cancer#COVID19#immunology#vaccines@HHMINEWS@YaleIBIO@YaleMed@YaleEMD@YaleSPH.

Michael Mina @michaelmina_lab Epidemiologist, Immunologist, Physician. Discuss vaccines, immunity, infectious diseases, tests, public health. CSO eMed

Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter Chair, UCSF Dept of Medicine. Career: What happens when a poli sci major becomes an academic physician. Author: “The Digital Doctor”. Hubby/Dad/Golfer.

Laurie Garrett @Laurie_Garrett Former Sr Fellow @CFR_org. Recipient of Pulitzer Prize, Polk (2Xs) and Peabody Awards. Author: IHeard theSirensScream, TheComingPlague, Ebola & BetrayalofTrust.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and AI

How to get started?

There are many online courses and some are free. And with a few good books one person can get started in this field. It is rapidly evolving field and new things are available all the time.

Check the links for online courses, books and newsletter on the dedicated page.

And below you can find the books I highly recommend to get started

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Global Edition 4th Edition by by Peter Norvig, Stuart Russell

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems 2nd Edition by Aurélien Géron

Deep Learning with Python, Second Edition 2nd Edition by François Chollet (Author)

Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD 1st Edition by Jeremy Howard, Sylvain Gugger

The incredible life of Mario Capecchi

Mario Ramberg Capecchi is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice, Wikipedia.

What it is interesting and incredible is his biography. Mario Capecchi wrote his bio in the Nobel price webpage.

 I was born in Verona, Italy on October 6, 1937. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism were raging through the country. My mother, Lucy Ramberg, was a poet; my father, Luciano Capecchi, an officer in the Italian Air Force. This was a time of extremes, turmoil and juxtapositions of opposites. They had a passionate love affair, and my mother wisely chose not to marry him. This took a great deal of courage on her part. It embittered my father.

…..

For reasons that have never been clear to me, my mother’s money ran out after one year and, at age 4½, I set off on my own. I headed south, sometimes living in the streets, sometimes joining gangs of other homeless children, sometimes living in orphanages, and most of the time being hungry. My recollections of those four years are vivid but not continuous, rather like a series of snapshots. Some of them are brutal beyond description, others more palatable.

….

Highly recommended reading.

Software Engineering at Google

Writing an application is just the start of a long process. A software system requires a continuous development effort to keep it running and working. Software evolution and maintenance is what keeps busy any organization that creates systems that need to be working for many years.

Software needs to continuously be updated, bugs need to fixed and an organization needs to be able to release new features in a timely manner.

Software Engineering is all about software design, creation and evolution. A lot of different tasks that make a system able to be alive and stand the test of the time.

A nice new book explains how Google manages its vast repository of its source code and its software evaluation as scale. A highly recommended read.

Fixing defective MacBook Pros (2011 models)

The old MacBook Pros have a defective AMD Radeon GPU. Mine was from 2011. The solution for Apple was to replace the entire motherboard and I had it replaced 2 times for free. The replaced motherboards had the same defective components, and it was always a matter a time before a new failure happened.

Now my MacBook Pro 2011 is not supported anymore by Apple, so no more hardware fixes and software updates. Fortunately, I have found a solution. You need to bypass the GPU and disable it, by removing a resistor in the motherboard.

I have followed the article at the link below to solve the problem.

Fixing a 2011 MacBook Pro booting to a Grey Screen – AMD Radeon Video Glitch

Some more detailed information on how to disable the GPU is here. I had to change one command line.

Instead of this line

`printf "x07x00x00x00x01x00x00x00" > /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/gpu-power-prefs-fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9`

I used this line

printf "\x07\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00" > /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/gpu-power-prefs-fa4ce28d-b62f-4c99-9cc3-6815686e30f9

And I have happily installed Ubuntu

How to opt-out Interest-Based advertising

Watching ads based on our interests can be more interesting than having to be exposed to ads that are not relevant to us. At the same time, in order to show targeted advertising companies are creating a profile of all of us, and not everybody like to be profiled.

Below you can find some links that can help you opt-out to interest based advertising.

I recommend the following web page for more info about it.

How to Opt-Out of Interest-Based Advertising and Stop the Ads from Following You

For Facebook, how to opt-out

Building the Software 2.0 Stack

An interesting talk by Andrej Karpathy, currently Tesla’s director of AI and computer vision on how software is increasing being developed.

More and more parts of the software stack is built using data, deep neural networks. The software 2.0 stack will not replace the traditional way of building software but it will increasingly cover a larger area and domains.

Check the video on Vimeo. TRAIN AI 2018 – Building the Software 2.0 Stack