Predicting the next viral song on TikTok is almost as hard, if not even more, compared to interest rates fluctuations. Question: can we treat TikTok viral music as a pure random selection? Regardless of the music-pop mechanism, John Williams would have a seat reserved for him at the TikTok Hall of Fame. One of his composition for starwars is now the constant popular song on TikTok — does the following music ring any bells?...

Bloomberg has the story The AI Boom Needs a Market for Compute. It claims that still now AI companies who need to buy computing resources have to reach a sales representative: In the clunky current system, the chief operating officer of an AI company calls up Amazon Web Services Inc. or CoreWeave and asks for a price. — Bloomberg And, … The godfather of spectrum auctions Paul Milgrom and his company, Auctionomics Inc....

I’ve just been assigned a new piece to practice as part of the University of Chicago Chamber Music Ensemble — Francis Poulenc’s Sonate pour flûte et piano (FP 164). The piece was premiered by Jean-Pierre Rampal — and by coincidence, I’ve also been reading his biography lately! Rampal had such a wonderful presence — full of humor, tolerance, and resilience. He was both humble and brilliant. Rather than trying to rephrase and risk losing the warmth of his voice, I’ll just share a passage from his book directly:...

A brilliant blend of economic modeling and reinforcement learning.

At the Conference on Frontiers in Machine Learning and Economics (2025), Professor Tamara Broderick from MIT gave a brilliant keynote, based on the paper An Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Metric. It’s a metric that measures how sensitive are conclusions to the removal of just a small fraction of data? Motivation Even dropping a vanishingly small proportion of observations can matter. We should worry if removing a fraction $\alpha \in (0,1)$ of the data:...

I got perfect 4.0s for a series of advanced-level statistics courses through my undergrad. Still today during our Empirical Economics class I was spellbound by the concept of confidence interval.

Macro is all about vibes. If you can vibe the math, it’d be super cool.

Here’s another lovely Saturday night spent at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: There’s a Ravel in the crowd yelling Bravi — can you spot him? Tonight’s program is splendid — the orchestra begins with Camille Pépin’s Les Eaux célestes. Anticipating upcoming Ravel, I was not surprised to catch a sense of oriental chords within the surreal, dreamy, beauuuuuutiful music. Turns out, the piece it was inspired by the ancient Chinese legend 牵牛织女鹊桥会 (a love story, read CSO’s official comment)....

In China, business deals are often made over dinners, where the essential informal/implicit consensus are reached. Drinking alcohol (especially, BaiJiu) in formal business dinner is not only for enjoyment, but more of a cultural etiquette—drinking with the the party is a way to show respect and commitment. Here’s a really interesting behavioral economics paper about the effect of alcohol intoxication affecting people strike a deal in business: The idea is golden — and the paper is only 15 pages!...

The 2025 Econ Camp is taught by Professor Emir Kamenica for incoming PhD students at Booth. This year, first-years from Griffin and Harris also joined, making the room a cross-department gala of future scholars craving for free coffee. The camp runs for an intensive week, with three hours of lectures every morning. At the Econ Department… Thanks to Professor Kamenica’s exceptionally clean logical organization, these notes preserve the blackboard style....