- “Obviously, there are many more novels and memoirs that mention long lists of books than are included here, but I’m limited, as ever, by time, availability of data, and the demands of maintaining sanity. So below, please find twelve books that are filled to the gills with mentions of other books, and feel free to add further suggestions in the comments.”
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If you, like me, are fond of bookmarking lists that will prove to be useful at some undefined point of time in the future, you might find this useful. Books that contain lists of other books worth reading is an interesting enough article by itself – as an academician, I’d argue it’s the very best way to include a bibliography.
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.. - “Alas, if only healthcare policy were so simple. The reality is messy and there is no magic bullet. Singapore’s success in healthcare is built on a panoply of measures developed and refined over decades. The measures employ a variety of policy tools that both individually and collectively target the market and government failures afflict the healthcare sector. For a comprehensive understanding of health policy in Singapore, we need to understand all the policy tools used and how they operate individually and in relation to each other.”
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A very readable PDF about what makes Singapore’s healthcare system so very awesome. Truly worth a read to find out how it evolved, and as an Indian, to understand how far we have to go.
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.. - ““You will hardly find women with wombs in these villages. These are villages of womb-less women,” says Manda Ugale, gloom in her eyes. Sitting in her tiny house in Hajipur village, in the drought-affected Beed district of Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, she struggles to talk about the painful topic.”
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Speaking of a long way to go…
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.. - “Facebook’s powerful network effects have kept advertisers from fleeing, and overall user numbers remain healthy if you include people on Instagram, which Facebook owns. But the company’s original culture and mission kept creating a set of brutal debts that came due with regularity over the past 16 months. The company floundered, dissembled, and apologized. Even when it told the truth, people didn’t believe it. Critics appeared on all sides, demanding changes that ranged from the essential to the contradictory to the impossible. As crises multiplied and diverged, even the company’s own solutions began to cannibalize each other.”
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A very long article about the troubles at Facebook, but you can never read too much about the how’s and what’s at Facebook.
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.. - “If that’s an equally unpleasant prospect, consider Andreessen, who’s 47, the perfect messenger. From showy check-writing to weaponizing his popular blog and (before Trump) Twitter account to hiring an army of operational experts in a field built on low-key partnerships, he’s one of Silicon Valley’s poster boys for upending the rules. And it’s worked: In one decade, Andreessen Horowitz joined the elite VC gatekeepers of Silicon Valley while generating $10 billion-plus in estimated profits, at least on paper, to its investors. Over the next year or so, expect no less than five of its unicorns—Airbnb, Lyft, PagerDuty, Pinterest and Slack—to go public.”
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a16z is a firm everybody should know more about – this article helps. By the way, their podcast is good as well.
Tag: health
Links for 18th April, 2019
- “According to the Wall Street Journal, Mickey Mouse and his gang (including Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, and Donald Duck) sold $3 billion in merchandise in 2018, a figure that includes both adult and children’s products. Shockingly, that is only about half of what Mickey made in 2004, when Disney heavily pushed out products in celebration of his 75th birthday.”
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The Fast Company on the gift that (literally) keeps on giving for Disney. But you should also read Ben Thompson to understand that this is planned – way back when.
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.. - “American involvement in military and economic capacity building could facilitate or overlap with India’s interests in its neighbourhood – to some extent. Delhi has traditionally been skeptical, if not suspicious, of extra-regional actors’ activities and influence in its neighbourhood. Its resistance to such activity on the part of the U.S. has historically only been tempered when Delhi has had even greater concern about a Chinese presence. Now, with increasing Chinese activity in the region and limited Indian capacity to compete alone, Delhi once again seems more willing to work with – and perhaps begrudgingly accept or welcome greater interest from – partners like Japan and the U.S.”
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A useful article to read to understand Indo-American relations today, and also how to think about these two countries and the Indo-Pacific region in light of the gorilla (or is it the panda) in the room.
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.. - “The world loves meat, but that love puts pressure on the world. The United Nations has estimated that livestock are responsible for 14.5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat in the atmosphere. Project Drawdown, a group of scientists pursuing climate solutions, puts the figure at 18 to 20 percent, and some studies have suggested even that’s way too low. In any case, meat is a significant contributor to the climate crisis, and as millions of families in India and China join the meat-eating middle class, its contributions could soar.”
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An interesting article that helps you understand the players (politicians, firms and individuals) involved in the race to produce plant based meat.
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.. - “The report finds 54.4% of girls had access to menstrual hygienic management tools. However, in terms of wealth quintiles, we see massive variation. While 71.6% of the surveyed girls in the upper wealth quintile report access to MHM tools only 42.6% of girls in the lower wealth quintile report similar access. When inquired about reasons for not using MHM tools, about three-fifths of the surveyed girls reported that they couldn’t afford them and since the government does not provide them, they choose to stick to traditional methods.”
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A useful, and interesting survey about the aspirations of teenaged girls in India.
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.. - “Readers today are unlikely to confuse an adolescent with an armload of brushwood used for fences and hedges. Still, the magazine’s copy editors dutifully hyphenate “teen-ager” even as we half-heartedly enforce the ban on “balding”—the editor William Shawn preferred “partly or partially bald”—without knowing exactly what is wrong with it.”
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Grammar nerds and readers or this blog: rejoice.
Links for 17th April, 2019
- “Nearly half a million people are incarcerated on any given day without having been convicted of a crime. Add it all up, and over 10 million people during a given year year are locked up without being convicted of anything. Roughly one-quarter of all inmates in state and local jails have not been convicted. ”
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Timothy Taylor explains the pros and cons of eliminating monetary bail. The issue is a complex one, as one might expect, and is a useful way to learn about cost benefit analysis.
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.. - “It’s a reminder that “growth” in cities isn’t always what it seems and that architecture can be an awfully poor proxy for the social structures to which it seems so closely tied. Neighborhoods that appear to be magnets for new people and more apartments may, behind every historic façade, be losing both.”
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Opportunity costs, population density, gentrification, urbanization and reducing family size – all there in this information dense article.
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.. - “A lot of what you learn when you work at a firm is its organizational culture. Moving within a firm means you learn new subject matter, but you are largely staying within the same culture. The psychologically more challenging move to a different organization gives you an opportunity to experience a different culture, sort of like spending time abroad.”
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Arnold Kling on culture and the organization. On a related note, the recent somewhat viral article about AirBnB and its culture is also worth reading.
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.. - “There’s a lot going on when you speak. The whole assembly process of how you string words together and form sentences is complicated. If you could use a computer to analyze how an Alzheimer’s patient speaks over the years, you might be able to pick up on subtle changes—and then look for those same patterns in younger patients who show no other signs of the disease. If you’re able to identify those changes early enough, you might even be able to stop someone from getting Alzheimer’s in the first place (although we’d also need advances in Alzheimer’s prevention to do that).”
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Might how you talk be able to predict if you will get Alzheimer’s in the future? A complicated topic, and one that is sketchy on the details – but very interesting nonetheless.
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.. - “Chinese government statements indicate that 50 state-owned firms have invested or participated in almost 1,700 projects in countries along Belt and Road’s path over the past three years, according to Baker McKenzie. The wider the road, the more drivers are bound to crowd in.”
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International finance meets the Belt and Road Initiative. Who will win, and in what shape, is what the article speaks about.