No Random Walking!

The national pension funds of China returned 30% last year mainly due to the red-hot stock markets in China and Hong Kong last year, according to Mr. Xiang Huaicheng, a high ranking official in charge of managing the funds. He also said that China has invested its national pension funds in overseas markets, hopeful that the return will at least offset the potential currency loss. This makes perfect sense. I expect that China will, if not have done already, diversify its stockpile of US treasury in oversea stock markets as well.

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Link to MILITARY PREPARES FOR PEAK OIL

Statistician Peter Donnelly explores the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics, and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials. Donnelly is a statistics professor at Oxford University who collaborates with biologists, applying statistical models to genetics, with the hope of shedding more light on evolutionary history and the structure of the human genome.

Link to Peter Donnelly (video presentation) on TED Talks

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If the above link doesn't work, try this site for all of the 12 video clips on YouTube.

WordPress doesn't seem to support imbedded html object as Blogger does.

Game programmers are in great demand and I understand why not many people are qualified. A candidate for such a job has to be able to answer questions about vector projection (linear matrix), momentum (physics), C/C++/C# (programming), finite state machine(AI), texture mapping (graphics), and more! The skill set seems to be so diverse and high level that the candidate with such abilities should be able to work in many other highly sought positions as well (think quants, especially if he/she can also solve stochastic differential equations!).

Link to Binary Creativity - Things You Need to Know before Interviewing for a Game Programming Position

 A good (and lengthy) summary of what's happening in the telecom industry in China.

The Subscriber Party Continues – As Does Policy Uncertainty

Link to PTC 07: China Booms And Booms  |  January 17, 2007  |  Telecommunications Magazine

Can I use it to publish on multiple blogs, preferably with a single click?

How about images?

Status: It worked, though it took one click to publish on each of the blog sites and images in PNG format got resampled (see above). Also it isn't exactly WYSIWYG.

Now testing "blog update". .... worked. Now wait, No! the same blog appeared twice on Windows Live Space!

How about deleting existing blog entries like the redundant posts mentioned above? . ... yes, it worked.

All things considered, Live Writer is a good product.

Today's BW article explains, or speculates rather, how it has been the speculators, not necessarily the supply and demand, who have been the driving forces for the great oil volatility we are observing lately. There was a another article about this published in October.

Now the question is: what has made the speculators speculate?

A couple of years ago, everybody was pointing finger at China for the reason for the surge in oil price. China denied the accusation as it said China's oil import is only about 5%(?) of the total oil comsumption in the world and that alone cannot be responsible for oil to have gone from $10s to $70s a barrell. I thought China had a point there.

Now the media has been trying to make sense of, or speculate I may say, how the oil price got to the current "low" level at around $51 today. While I agree that the drop has been due to massive selling by energy funds, I don't agree with them on what triggered the massive selling. The comman explanation has been ranging from the warm weather in US this past winter, to what has been said by an oil minister in the middle east. I think there is a more influencial geopolitical force at work here: that's the corporation among the major oil consumers namely US, Japan, South Korea, India and China. And China is playing a leading role here. It proposed this idea of non-competing relationship among consumers last July or August and, again just several weeks ago, hosted a meeting in Beijing participated by all other major comsumers. Following both events, the oil price droped significantly. I think (speculate) that the hedge funds managers understood the significance of these proposals and thought the tide is turning to the side of the oil consumption countries and that oil price must fall (to its more reasonable level whatever it is).

As strongly as I may believe what I just said, it is of course all my speculation. In other words, I should be guilty for the part I am playing in this game, no matter how insignificant the role has been.

For the governments involved, I think they should not underestimate the impact of speculators on the policies they choose to make. Speculations are going on on grande scale in a lot of places. The forces are so strong that the attacks could cripple an economy or topple a government as we've seen in southeast Asia in late 1990s.

It's a Bloomberg story. Some interesting information here:

• Chevron Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are delaying construction projects from Australia to Nigeria, threatening to drive natural gas prices higher for years to come.
  • Chevron last year abandoned its timetable for approving the Gorgon LNG project in Australia. Developing the fields, which hold $400 billion of natural gas, would cost $10 billion and increase world supplies by 7 percent.
• The main reason is the cost to build LNG plants has tripled in six years, according to Bechtel Group Inc., the biggest U.S. contractor.
• Global oil and natural gas reserves were about the same at the end of 2005, equal to 1.2 trillion barrels of crude. Oil reserves are being burned almost twice as quickly as gas.
• CO2 emission: Gas is also becoming more popular because it emits 29 percent less carbon dioxide than oil and 45 percent less than coal burned in power stations.
• LNG will say high, even if oil declines, because of shortages.
• Some $37 billion goes up in smoke each year as waste, from Brazil to the Russian arctic to Nigeria.

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