Music exists at the sublime confluence of mathematics and artistry, embodying a synergy that elevates both disciplines. The essence of music theory, particularly in the analysis of chords, mirrors an advanced form of modular arithmetic, showcasing a mathematical elegance. Musical scores serve as encoded scripts of melodies, awaiting decryption and performance. Particularly, Johann Sebastian Bach epitomizes this blend of mathematical intricacy and artistic beauty, standing as a paragon of the fusion between the two realms....

I prefer writing in all lowercases–especially devoid of conventional capitalizations of the first letters. First learnt this in Ariana Grande’s Sweetener album tracks’ all-lowercase namings and initially trying just for fun, I found this way of styled writing extremely comfortable so that it eventually forms into a habit. This seemingly personal preference however, coincides with a latest trend of writing style, especially among Gen Z. Ariana Grande’s iconic, abusive use of all-lowercase writings in her social media posts, do do her fans....

categorized and re-organized list of tags. hurray to my OCD…

what to look forward

Make the AI dance in certain ways, they would eventually stumble. Here’s a new story from the economist about fake-news new: Many AI researchers think fakes will become undetectable AI created contents that are indetectably mixed within genuine ’natural’ human products are causing a lot of troubles. Deep-fake videos and news are generating misleading information towards public. For AI developers who relies on internet-based text corpus to train new AI versions, they are finding their relied sources being polluted by AI generations....

The Spring Festival in-cinema movie market is a compelling subject for analysis. From a macro perspective, its structure transcends the basic two-sided model of buyers and sellers. This market encompasses multiple stakeholders: cinemas, filmmakers (including actors and directors) and their production companies, ticketing platforms, rating agencies, social media, and, crucially, the consumers themselves. These Spring-Festical films are typically produced months in advance, with release dates often aligned with the Spring Festival holidays....

With Valentine’s Day colliding with the fifth day of the Spring Festival, love is in the air, and economics is on the mind. Here are two tales where romance meets rationality. The Economist’s cost-of-loving index Love, they say, is priceless. But let’s face it, showing off one’s financial prowess can be quite the love language in today’s material world. Valentine’s Day, in particular, turns into a veritable showcase of affection-measured-in-dollars. According to the National Retail Federation, the average American is expected to shell out $186 to woo their Valentine this year....

A paper I read recently is somewhat interesting. The model is very inspiring for an OM project I’m working on recently, whereas its mathematical method and results are immensely useful to learn from for another problem that I’ve been working on for a while. Is Selling Complete Information (Approximately) Optimal? Dirk Bergemann, Yang Cai, Grigoris Velegkas, and Mingfei Zhao. 2022. ABSTRACT We study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty....

Today’s blog draws inspiration from Michael D. Smith’s perspective on higher education, as discussed in a recent episode of the podcast People I (Mostly) Admire, titled “Higher Education Is Broken. Can It Be Fixed?” . Btw, the podcast itself is part of the Freakonomics network, the academically inclined perspective is particularly sweetspot for an econ student. This episode elucidates the systemic flaws plaguing the U.S. higher education system. One pov involves diving into the market power of colleges....

I’m reading some papers about mechanism design on pricing of information, following up on this data trading reading session Bergemann et al. (AER 2018): The Design and Price of Information. Bergemann et al. (EC 2022): Is Selling Completely Information (Approximately) Optimal? Bergemann et al. (EC 2015): Selling Cookies. Hopefully, I’ll finish them within this week. I have a strong feeling that they will be immensely interesting. Before our discussion, a short notice: a review of numerous news posts and literature in econ-CS reveals a significant discrepancy between academic research on data trading in algorithmic game theory (AGT) and Econ-CS communities, and the evolving realities of the actual data trading market....