I was raised up believing I was somehow unique Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond …

I’ve written before about attempts in Canada to create more separation between university teaching, on the one hand, and university research, on the other. In 2009, I wrote this opinion piece about an attempt by five university presidents to each acqui…

When we consider the risk in investing, we’re often thinking about volatility: that is, the sometimes dramatic movements in equity prices. But as Alan Fustey explains in his book, Risk, Financial Markets & You, there’s a big problem with equating volatility with risk. One of the biggest shortcomings in financial models is the reliance on standard [...]

Microsoft is developing a system that would make devices and sensors work in concert. Is this the future of your connected home?

If you’ve researched the theoretical foundations of index investing, you’ve no doubt come across Modern Portfolio Theory and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. And if you read the commentaries of active money managers and the financial media, you’ve probably seen countless articles that dismiss both as obsolete. Modern Portfolio Theory is declared dead after every market [...]

[This is an updated and edited version of a post originally published in February 2011. I'm updating it as the original post referred simply to a poster presentation but yesterday the full article was published ahead of print in the Journal ...

“Write what you know” is a common phrase used by anyone giving advice to screenwriters.  But I have never been a fan of the phrase, I have often found it misleading and troublesome. The phrase does have it’s merits.  It … Continue reading →

I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live for a long time, but I’ve been thinking about a classic line from the show’s Weekend Update sketch.

In 2009, the then-minority Harper government smuggled a seemingly innocuous phrase into the federal budget: “Scholarships granted by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) will be focused on business-related degrees.” Yet this humb…

Critics of index investing often argue that the strategy is not sensitive to valuation. They feel that a simple strategy of buy, hold and rebalance is folly: there are times when the market is cheap or overvalued, and it makes sense to shift toward or away from equities accordingly. It’s hard to argue with that [...]

Continuing medical education (aka CME) is a requirement for physician recertification, and there are many different means to obtain it, including online. Medscape is probably the largest online CME provider and by means of smart phone and tablet appli…

How many scientific discoveries have been made by investigators carrying out studies that, in principle, should have merely reproduced known results and/or confirmed the conventional wisdom ? I do not have numbers but I suspect many. Serendipity plays …

[Note: This post was an April Fool's joke!] The volatility we’ve experienced in the last five years has challenged every investor. Yes, diversification can help, but many of the leading minds in finance have been looking for ways to improve on the now discredited Modern Portfolio Theory. I recently met with a quantitative analyst who [...]

It told me that the University of California in San Diego’s PR department is beyond shameless, and that the Archives of Internal Medicine will publish pretty much anything.Here’s the press release in its entirety (highlights are mine), “Regular chocola…

Hard to imagine not, yet….First there’s a brand new study out. I’d tweeted about it when it was released, but thought it was important enough to warrant a blog post. The study was quite straightforward. Measure the blood pressure in both arms of p…

Dear Readers: Your exuberant  reporter is pleased to announce our winner of the day! ———————————————————— By Richard J. Brennan, National Affairs Writer They may look like white pines on steroids, but they’re actually Bell Canada towers. The telecommunications company plans to disguise the towers it erects in cottage country to look like trees so they [...]

Last week, My Own Advisor wrote an interesting post about whether investors should buy companies they’re familiar with. He was responding to a recent article by Larry Swedroe, which argued that “Buy what you know” is a bad strategy. Swedroe himself even joined the spirited debate in the comments section.

The short version of what it told me was that the BMJ is actively and willfully abusing the public’s trust, and it also told me that many low-carb and paleo diet guru bloggers and tweeps don’t care about bad nutritional epidemiology so long as it vilif…

I am occasionally asked that question by friends and acquaintances. I am referring here both to professional scientists, typically working in fields other than mine (I happen to have a lot of friends in this category, through my work), as well as to in…

According to the authors, their study was undertaken because prior studies demonstrating risk to red meat consumption were flawed. Some had utilized populations that weren’t representative of the average, while others didn’t differentiate between unpr…