photon137

In my view, as an investor in Japan, these firms are the best entry points to getting access to business relationships (and key projects) across Asia. One can imagine these to be huge aggregators of business relationships and as central points (besides the banks which are getting away from cross-shareholder relationships) into the major _keiretsus_. This is the entry fee for being really in the know in corporate Japan.

And, as another commenter mentioned, getting a sweet arbitrage on the low borrowing rate and earning a nice dividend yield doesn't hurt.

Adding a common deterministic trend to two random time series does not make them correlated. Intuitively, you still cannot predict the deviation from the trend of one timeseries using the deviation from the trend of the other timeseries.

His statement (after adding the constant trend) is misleading:

"Now let’s repeat the same tests on these new series. We get surprising results: the correlation coefficient is 0.96 — a very strong unmistakable correlation"

What he's calculated is the correlation between a set of points from y_1 and y_2 - and that will be large, of course - their (deterministically increasing) means have correlation 1.

The quantity that qualifies as correlation for predictability purposes is actually the correlation between the deviations from mean.

This is all fairly clear if you use the actual formula (Pearson correlation):

E[(y_1 - mu * t)(y_2 - mu * t)] / (sigma_y1 * sigma_y2)

Peak-power output would be less for an inclined rail (vs the vertical shaft solution).

Using a cluster of Owin (self-hosted) servers with NancyFx on Mono to host REST APIs behind nginx for a distributed-computing solution on AWS. Also use EntityFramework on Npgsql+postgres - experience has been positive.

Only downside is that for something like a customer-facing portal, the identity-management is tied to Windows-specific features, for now - so have had to build a custom solution for this that runs on Linux. Waiting for ASP .NET vNext and its Identity solution when it becomes slightly more mature.

EDIT: Also evaluating a move to Azure. Primary driver (for choosing the .net stack) has been prior experience with C#, .NET and Visual Studio

Great universities.

English as the primary language (great learning resources available for it all across the globe).

Real economic mobility - you can really make it big if you're smart, persevering and slightly lucky. Who you know matters to a certain extent in all countries, but the significance of that factor is less in the US as compared to the other countries, in my opinion (others may disagree, of course).

With Chrome rolling out AES GCM (and other browsers likely to follow suit) - this seems to be a really plausible future state of the world.

No you can just download the free isolated/integrated Visual Studio shells - PTVS works just fine. And, imho, it's the best Python IDE I've worked with (I mostly use pandas/numpy/scipy)

Yes, but what is a non-differentiable curve if you and I don't even have the same definition of a curve? What about a curve which is differentiable in one coordinate system but not so in another?

EDIT: My point is - mathematics is axiomatic in its very basis - the axioms have to be agreed upon by people who agree upon a conclusion derived from those axioms.

Education here is not an overriding factor. The way a congenitally blind person "imagines" abstract representations of shapes is substantially different, primarily because the physical wiring of the visual cortex and indeed a lot of the brain would be very different when compared to a person who could see. The dimensionality of their world, despite being the same as that of the sighted ones, may not involve the same descriptive system - ie maybe "polar" (just an example) coordinates would be more "natural" to them than a Cartesian system.

It's simply a problem of what gets mapped to what in the absence of mapping channels we take for granted.

Education is probably not a significant variable here.

But the principal eigenvectors can change if scales are changed - and the directions in which they may then point can be completely different.

That's also true. But having the ability to hire people who can hit the ground running with production code is an advantage.