Happy birthday to me — at the age of 22! I like the way Talor Swift decribe this age in her song “22”, saying We’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time. I wonder how your life looks like when you’re at this age — would email or text me a picture or a story, and I’ll text back! You can find me at ariana_tang at outlook dot com, or WeChat arianaaa_tang. ...

The GRAMMY nominations for 2025 are out! See the full list here and Billboard’s summary here. Presented by the Recording Academy since 1959, the GRAMMYs are a celebration of excellence, the music community’s highest honor, and its only peer-based award. — The Recording Academy The awards feel freshly minted, covering recordings, compositions, and artists from just September 2023 to August 2024 (well, technically, including remasters—that’s why Beatle’s Now and Then is also nominated for “Record of the year”). There are 94 categories in total, with the most publicized awards like “Record of the Year,” “Album of the Year,” and “Best New Artist” always taking center stage. Yet, the lesser-known awards, tucked away during the non-televised ceremonies, are equally worth a glance. Take the classical categories, for instance—neatly relegated to the tail end, between Category 81 and 94. ...

Here’s a prologue on some comments on the course ‘‘Computer Applications for Financial Management". The course design has won multiple awards, and is made to be an obligatory course for all students in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics—for 2 credits, but 64 hours of course loads for one semester. Basically what it does is teaching one how to do Excel to do some higher-level data analysis. It’s a shallow touch into various data analysis perspectives: database tools, a bit of light coding and some basic visualizations. ...

New York Times got the story: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/11/06/us/trump-election-harris-news?smid=url-share Election Live Updates: Trump Fights His Way Back Into Power Americans awoke Wednesday to the news that Donald J. Trump had once again won the White House, a remarkable political comeback that buoyed investors and drew congratulations from around the globe. His victory was confirmed just after 5:30 a.m. Eastern when he captured the battleground state of Wisconsin, putting him above the threshold of 270 electoral votes. ...

Final of the Carnival of the Animals, by Saint-Saëns. See an earlier introduction and recommendation of recordings here.

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. ...