Leonard Bernstein has several recordings of Carnival of the Animals composed by Camille Saint-Saëns. The 1967 recording is notably cool because it features the Bernstein’s charming commentaries. You can for sure read all about the piece via Wikipedia but it’s more fun to listen to the master speak: Your browser does not support the audio element. My dear young friends, music has lots of different uses in life. There are pieces that lift your spirit or interest your mind, or fill you with religious or passionate or dreamy or triumphant feelings. But some pieces are written only to amuse you, and one of them is this Carnival of the Animals, by the charming and masterful French composer Saint-Saëns. For one thing, it’s a sort of looney fantasy about a zoo, full of amusement and frolic. And although it’s written by Saint-Saëns mainly to amuse his friends, it was also partly intended to give young music students something for play that might be fun, instead of always that serious grind. ...

The Story of Classical (Link), produced by Apple Music Classical, is a nine-episode guide to classical music. Each episode is about an hour long and features insightful commentary along with extended excerpts of significant works. Notably, it includes generous, lengthy samples (no copyright issues for the largest company in the world…) that don’t just capture the highlights of each piece—unlike many other classical music introductions. The series strikes an excellent balance between accessibility, depth, and professional quality. ...

When conducting simulation experiments, maintaining an organized workflow is essential for ensuring reproducibility and facilitating debugging. As the experiments grow in complexity, managing outputs such as intermediate results, data files, and visualizations can become challenging. A streamlined approach involves using a logger to systematically store results and organizing all outputs in a structured directory based on random seeds and timestamps. In this blog post, we’ll explore setting up logging, managing directories, and storing results in an organized manner without delving into domain-specific simulation logic. ...

Summary and reading note of the paper Yongmin Chen, Chuan He, Paid Placement: Advertising and Search on the Internet, The Economic Journal, Volume 121, Issue 556, November 2011, Pages F309–F328, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02466.x Yongmin Chen and Chuan He are both Professors at the University of Colorado Boulder. This is a theoretical paper. The paper examines the effects of online advertising with paid placement on sellers and consumers. It formulates a market model with multiple differentiated sellers and searching consumers, with the search engine serving as an information intermediary. The paper emphasizes sellers’ differentiation and incorporates a mechanism design approach by assuming the search engine runs a generalized second-price auction to elicit sellers’ information about their relevance. The authors solve for the market equilibrium and analyze the implications of paid placement for the search engine’s profit, consumer welfare, and efficiency. Finally, the paper extends the analysis to include sellers with different costs. ...

Here is a summary of the paper “Digital Advertising and Market Structure: Implications for Privacy Regulation” by Deisenroth et al., along with some of my thoughts on its interesting aspects. This economics paper focuses on industrial organization and public policy. The five authors are Utsav Manjeer, Daniel Deisenroth, and Zarak Sohail from Meta; Steve Tadelis, a professor at UC Berkeley and affiliated with NBER and CEPR; and Nils Wernerfelt from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. ...

Here’s Susan Athey’s remarkably refreshing ideas on economists’ career in industry: (Stanford GSB wrote in the introduction of the YouTube video) “Economists are finding purpose outside of academia as their perspective becomes more valuable to technology companies… Susan Athey explains how economists offer new ways of mapping business objectives to metrics, incentives, and success.” Very refreshing pov: One of the things that’s been really interesting about the tech companies of the last 15 to 20 years is that, they’ve not only been innovating in terms of their technology, but also in terms of their business models. ...

The Berliner Philharmonic has been messing with cool marketing campaigns these days. Here’s one interview featuring Emmanuel Pahud, the principal flute: The flute to me is just the extension of my breath. I determine the length with the fingering I’m playing. But actually I’m a singer. It’s an open instrument, there’s no resistance from the instrument itself unlike any other woodwind instrument or brass instrument. And it creates an open sound, that is truly the extension of my breath, and the projection , the resonance is something that you create in your own body. ...

For the suppose-to-be-continuous series of online algorithm’s seminar course note (see a pervious note here), here’s a latest one. Today’s theme is introduction to online learning. the so-called “expert setting” There is a decision maker who makes decisions over time horizon $t = 1, 2, \ldots, T$. We expect $T\to \infty$ to be asymptotic in our analysis. There is a set of “actions” — $\lbrace L, H\rbrace$ (assume two for now). ...

The Easiest Solution: Follow along when everyone else starts clapping. This rule works surprisingly well! In any audience, there are usually seasoned aficionados who know the piece well enough to clap at just the right moments. Following their lead generally does the trick. By Genre: Concert In classical concerts, it’s customary not to clap between movements of a single piece—especially in large, serious works like symphonies, concertos, or sonatas. These pieces are designed to flow uninterrupted, creating a cohesive experience for the listener. ...

A small piece for midnight metropolitan, messed with rain and blurred neons.