We cooked food from Hungary two weeks ago but I forgot to post the photos. Having been to Hungary twice, I was looking forward to this. I especially loved langos which is fried pizza but we did not make it this time. Here were the dishes we made:
Chicken paprikash – Chicken with paprika sauce. It reminded me of other Spanish dishes like fabada which typically added paprika. 7/10. Recipe here.
Makos guba – poppy seed pudding. I love poppy seeds. Everytime I visit countries where it is staple, I love buying pastries that use them. 8/10. Recipe here.
We cooked food from Azerbaijan this weekend. I found the food great!
Plov – rice pilaf with chicken and various dried fruits. I really liked the blend between sweet and savory. The only problem was that we overcooked the rice since the instructions were not very clear. 9/10. Recipe here.
Dolma – meat wrapped in grape leaves. I have tasted an Arabic dish that only contained rice and did not like too much. This one though, I liked as it’s basically meatball covered in grape leaves. 7/10. Recipe here.
Pakhlava – baklava from Azerbaijan. Like always, we overbake things and they don’t turn out as nice as they should be. 8/10. Recipe here.
Strategic and cultural contexts of real options reasoning in innovation portfolios – Options thinking is something I’ve heard a lot recently. From what I understand, it’s about maximizing a company’s flexibility in making decisions, trying to delay committing into something as much as possible. This article is a good introduction to what it is about. They explain that it includes three main aspects:
Approval of project budgets per phase instead of the entire project
Setting of project goals is based on demonstrating feasibility to inform whether opportunity is worth committing
New and ongoing projects should compete for resources
Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors’ R&D Failures – firms can integrate outside information to avoid making the same mistakes that other firms are doing. As the study finds: “competitor failure news from within the same market and same technology area [leads to ] more than doubling their propensity to terminate drug development projects in the wake of this type of information”
Avi Loeb podcast interview on Skeptic Michael Schermer’s show – Avi Loeb recently published a book on Oumuamua, hypothesizing that it’s evidence for alien life. Therefore, he argues that more resources should be allocated to fund this type of research. This interview is witnessing science as a process live. Michael and Avi are debating his claims in the context of the Sagan standard – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
“Within emerging markets, entrepreneurship within the formal sector tends to benefit those who are already advantaged, while exclusionary institutions prevent those in the informal sector from participation.”
Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children? – Typical explanation is good genes, better parenting and safety nets. This study however controls for genes by studying children born in Korea but adopted by Norwegian parents. I cannot access the article itself but the abstract is already informative: “We show that family background matters significantly for children’s accumulation of wealth and investor behavior as adults, even when removing the genetic connection between children and the parents raising them.”
A wealth of discovery built on the Human Genome Project — by the numbers – It’s the 20th anniversary of the human genome project. Researchers are then revisiting its impacts on science and medicine. This article notes that instead of researchers exploring widely the genome, attention was given only on a few promising ones (probably responding to incentives). As always, the visuals produced Barabasi’s group are incredible to look at.
Global citation inequality is on the rise – Following the Matthew principle. the rich becomes richer, also in the sciences. The study finds that the most cited scientists (top 1%) have grown their share of citations from 14% to 21% from 2000 to 2015. Not really surprising considering successful researchers are able to attract better collaborators, brighter graduate students, more funding and goodwill from publishers. The only problem though is when these inequalities hinder more novel research areas from being explored.
Reinventing Innovation Management: The Impact of Self-Innovating Artificial Intelligence – the author introduces the concept of self innovating AI, which refers to the use of AI to create or improve new products from continuously assembling and analyzing data from multiple sources. With data attracting more data, this is once again a source for future inequality across firms. Those who are already leveraging data now would be better prepared for this future.
Deep Tech: The Great Wave of Innovation – just a great primer on deep tech by Hello Tomorrow and BCG. With deep tech going to transform the future, businesses and governments needs to invest in these technologies to avoid getting left behind.
We cooked food from Pakistan last Saturday. It was our first time to have to throw something. We were making kheer, a rice pudding, but we left the heat too high, burning it. In the end, we just had two dishes. However, we bought from a restaurant naan (bread) and biryani (rice with lamb).
Nihari – beef curry stew. It had so many types of spices. I liked it a lot. 9/10. Recipe here.
Lassi – yogurt-based drink. Miriam used to buy it often in the Nepali restaurant near our house. 9/10. Recipe here.
Product diffusion – examine progression in life cycle
Roadmapping – uncover relationships between markets, products and tehcnologies
Opportunity analysis – recommend new business ideas
Scenario analysis – generate different concepts
Technology risk – evaluate returns and risks
Robots, AI, and Related Technologies: A Mapping of the New Knowledge Base – a patent study of AI and robotics. The researchers find that AI and robotics’ knowledge base builds on previous paradigm instead of being a technological revolution altogether. Interesting too is that the two are very much coupled that the authors argue that the two should just be considered as one general-purpose technology.
Universities and start-up creation by Ph.D. graduates: the role of scientific and social capital of academic laboratories – 6.7% of Italian PhD graduates engage in startup activities. Their involvement with entrepreneurship is related to whether they had business experience during their PhD and whether their lab had some interest with business. Following one of the articles in the previous week showing that those who worked in small companies tend to have lower human capital, I was already thinking that those who become entrepreneurs were going to be those who cannot find other options. However, it’s great that the researchers in the study controlled for unemployment rate in the region to account for this.
What is the Eisenhardt Method, really? – in any bibliometric analysis of the management literature, one paper will show up whatever topic or domain you are studying, the eisendhardt paper. Useful reflection by the author, especially the different ways to choose cases – common antecedents, matched pair, racing, polar types .
Cancer research needs a better map – introduces an ambitious project called the Cancer dependency map that would cost 30-50 USD over a decade to complete. On a meta-level, I just find it fascinating how scientists also have to be good lobbyists in order to mobilize resources to fund their projects.
Technology Forgiveness: Why emerging technologies differ in their resilience to institutional instability – the researchers introduce a new term – technology forgiveness, which refers to “resilience of the adoption process for a new technology in the face of institutional instability.” They propose that it is dependent on technology (investment, uncertainty, range of applications) and industry (risk aversion, entry barriers, geographical concentration) – related factors.
Data sovereignty: A review – It’s a term that has been thrown around a lot. This review explores the various perspectives by which this term has been used in research.
Do Startup Employees Earn More in the Long Run? – I would have thought that startup employees would earn more, but this study in the Danish context found that startup employees ended up with less 17% less salary over the next 10 years. They attribute these to the following factors: selection effects of people who go to startups, the high failure rates causing unemployment periods and inability to return to larger employers.
The Sequence Effect in Panel Decisions: Evidence from the Evaluation of Research and Development Projects – the book “When” summarizes how timing affects how people evaluate things like who would get a scholarship or who will win a competition. If you are evaluating 10 things and you already said yes three times in a row, you would probably tend to say no to the next one just to “balance” things out. Even experts are not immune to the sequence effect as shown by this study.
Artificial intelligence and management: The automation–augmentation paradox – When technologists discuss AI, they talk about how many jobs would be replaced due to automation. When economists discuss AI, they typically focus on how such transformational technologies are not new and that as history suggests, it would probably just augment the performance of workers. This article talks about how these distinction between automation and augmentation is false as these two are interrelated.
An empirical meta-analysis of the life sciences linked open data on the web – talks about the Life Sciences Linked Open Data cloud which enables researchers to seamlessly discover and integrate data from multiple data sources that had been openly available online but had previously been disconnected from one another.
