Watch Nassim Taleb debate Twitter’s greatest tech jargon parody account.

What the world needs now is a Twitter fight among Nassim Taleb (the pretentious author of The Black Swan), Prof Jeff Jarvis (the parody of new media evangelists staged by Rurik Bradbury), and the real Jeff Jarvis (the Web guru who proves how far you can get with lots of jargon and few results).

What if academics followed the new model of @nfergus and @nntaleb and got paid based on #controversy and #engagement?

— Prof. Jeff H Jarvis (@ProfJeffJarvis) August 12, 2014

@ProfJeffJarvis @nntaleb Re. Taleb – either you fail to appreciate the high-stakes epistemic issues or you don’t care. Polemics justified.

— Lynn Layman (@lynnlayman) August 12, 2014

@lynnlayman @ProfJeffJarvis Thanks Lynn, “prof” Jarvis commits 3 fallacies, implies shouting truth => seeking controversy, not byproduct.

— Nassim N. Taleb ن (@nntaleb) August 12, 2014

via Watch Nassim Taleb debate Twitter’s greatest tech jargon parody account..

I now have a new job (well, sort of)…

I now have a new job (well, sort of). Starting the new academic year with a function, co-director and co-founder of the EXTREME RISK INITIATIVE, which should develop into an Extreme Risk Institute within NYU School of Engineering.

The initiative will include a collection of collaborators. Co-director Charles Tapiero.

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION

In spite of the importance of extreme/hidden risks, there has not been a rigorous methodology to deal with them; statistical or mathematical approaches have not been formally reconciled with real-world decision-making the way engineering has traditionally integrated mathematics and real world heuristics. Extreme risks require both more mathematical and more practical rigor..

The “Extreme Risks Initiative”, ERI, is an NYU-School of Engineering interdisciplinary open research agenda, based on research axes defined by its members and a global research collaborations. Its approaches are at the intersection of the technical and the practical, based on a rigorous merger of theory and practice across interdisciplinary lines. These may include financial and economic engineering, urban risk engineering, transportation-networks, bio-systems, as well as global and environmental problems. A selected series of research axes as well as publications drawing on members’ Initiatives are included in the ERI a working paper series as well as current research enterprises.

via I now have a new job (well, sort of). Starting… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Some parts of Lebanon are greener today than they were a generation ago…

Some parts of Lebanon are greener today than they were a generation ago. People in Lebanon keep bemoaning the degradation of the environment, overbuilding, etc. These are true, but, outside of urban areas, parts of the countryside seem greener today than 120 years ago, something obvious when we look at old pictures (and paintings). This picture is the back country between my ancestral village (Amioun) and the Mediterranean (Shekka), taken during the winter. When I was a child, the hills were completely barren. The greenplan planted trees 35 years ago: this is the payoff.

Reason: Irrigation during the summer months, planting of cypress tress, and the disappearance of the goat (which wrecked the Mediterranean after the elimination of the lion that kept the numbers in check).

This may not be true for the Bekaa valley and AntiLebanon. I haven’t been there since my childhood.

via Timeline Photos – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.