29 April 2012

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, and Ideas



My collection of best reads for your Sunday!

  • Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash (BBC)
It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world. 

  • Why do they hate us? (FP) This article on the status of women in the Middle East societies (and in Islam), is one of the best I have read in a long time.
How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. 

Nokia’s 94 percent share-price plunge from its 2000 peak has left thousands of engineers looking for work now that Nokia is curtailing local development and moving production to Asia. Nokia’s share of gross domestic product probably shrank to 0.8 percent in 2011 from as high as 4 percent in 2000.  

  • Must watch: Andre Kuiper's stunning photographs of the Earth and space sent to Earth via Twitter. (Telegraph UK) Take, for instance, this photo of the UK and Ireland by night, with the Aurora Borealis on the horizon, snapped on March 28 this year.







    2 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    Why do they hate us? Astonishing article! Lots of revealations! Just the other day, I read TOI article on Mangalore's ban of burqas in classrooms and few days ago read another TOI article on Byari, a kannada movie highlighting the misuse of islamic triple talaaq rule. And now Why do they hate us, boggling my mind how are we going to fight the injustice towards Islamic women?

    Unknown said...

    Keep going, Mr. Bharat! I love your blog and wait eagerly for new and informative posts every week! This is really helpful for students like me to keep up with the world and its happenings. Kudos to you!