“I know that all the shits’ fabricated” – breathin Ariana Grande’s “breathin,” the ninth track from her 2018 album Sweetener, stands as a quintessential pop anthem. Despite its conventional ABABCB song structure and the use of familiar chord progressions and motifs, the track has resonated deeply with a broad audience, many of whom regard it as a highlight of the album. While the song’s pop sensibilities might seem overly straightforward to some, its lyrical depth and the uplifting nature of its theme offer a surprising layer of relatability. Ariana Grande herself described “breathin” as an intimate reflection on her personal struggles with anxiety. I was surprised at how reflective it is just to feel being seen out of a vexed situation. This aspect of the song has, on occasion, provided me with a sense of encouragement during moments of anxiety. ...

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. Mariah Carey though (see her reply in the lower left corner), still uses the gramatically correct way of typing, even on Instagram. ...

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. Hence, how to detect such trickery is a live topic among ai researchers. There are two primary ways of detection: some firms offer software that aims to spot machine-generated media; others, like the makers of big ai models, meanwhile, are searching for ways of “watermarking” their output so that real pictures, video or text can be readily distinguished from the machine-generated sort. ...

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. They are usually family-friendly comedies, are specifically designed for holiday viewing and might not hold the same appeal outside this context. This creates a marketplace with diverse goods (of small variance), almost invariable supply, and flexible pricing mechanisms—ticket prices can fluctuate, and cinemas have the autonomy to schedule screenings. ...

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. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by Blackwell. Initially, the data buyer has only partial information about the payoff-relevant state of the world. A data seller offers additional information about the state of the world. The information is revealed through signaling schemes, also referred to as experiments. In the single-agent setting, any mechanism can be represented as a menu of experiments. A recent paper by Bergemann et al.[8] present a complete characterization of the revenue-optimal mechanism in a binary state and binary action environment. By contrast, no characterization is known for the case with more actions. In this paper, we consider more general environments and study arguably the simplest mechanism, which only sells the fully informative experiment. In the environment with binary state and m≥3 actions, we provide an $O(m)$-approximation to the optimal revenue by selling only the fully informative experiment and show that the approximation ratio is tight up to an absolute constant factor. An important corollary of our lower bound is that the size of the optimal menu must grow at least linearly in the number of available actions, so no universal upper bound exists for the size of the optimal menu in the general single-dimensional setting. We also provide a sufficient condition under which selling only the fully informative experiment achieves the optimal revenue. ...

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. ...