Ninja Turtles, Nick Clegg and Market Failure
Christmas is coming. Retailers are beginning to push their offers hard. The first page of a search on Google for ‘Christmas Toys 2012’ is full of sites announcing the ones which will be ‘hot’ or ‘top’. In total, there are over 75 million results available to be perused. Last year it was Mishling Tree Monsters, […]
USA vs China continued… The Influence of Networks (and the Olympics!)
The last three Olympics have seen a titanic battle between the US and China to head the medals table. If you combine the total of the last three Games, China stands just ahead, with 121 golds to the United States’s 116. But, the US topped the table in both 2004 and 2012, while China edges […]
The Olympics, traffic in Central London and a bar in Santa Fe
We all know now about the empty roads and deserted shops, all quite contrary to the official announcements before the Games began. No doubt Transport for London used their massively complicated, expensive models of the transport network to deduce that the system would be under massive strain. But a deceptively simple game devised in the […]
Royal Bank of Scotland fiasco shows the power of networks
The last week or so has seen complete mayhem in the Royal Bank of Scotland and its subsidiaries. A computer glitch has caused their payments systems to collapse. Monies have not been processed, 17 million customers have been unable to access their accounts and pay their bills. The impact for RBS has been catastrophic. So, […]
Political map of London is like America: strong geographic segregation
Thomas Schelling is a brilliant American polymath, who deservedly won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005. One of his most remarkable insights is about segregation in cities, which he published as long ago as 1971. The residential pattern of American cities tends to be pretty sharply divided on ethnic grounds. The population of many […]
Why do films flop?
The Disney sci-fi flick John Carter has become one of the biggest flops in movie history. The studio has announced that the film’s theatrical run will lose $200million. There has been a huge amount of comment in the media about why this happened. On Yahoo!, for example, several reasons were put forward. For example:the advertising […]
