In his blog post commenting on risk-adjusted bonuses, Dominic Connor has this to say on caliber of some bank's board members:

A clear factor in the recent calamities has been the lack of expertise at the very top levels of banks. Reviewing the publicly available lists of board members at many firms, I observe that most of them not only have never taken an active role in trading, analysis or risk management, but that today few would even be accepted as a trainee in a less prestigious organisation than they ran into the ground. In effect we had mediocre cavalry officers in charge of nuclear bombers.

Image by tiarescott

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Imran from Bradford, a festive phone-in caller to BBC Five Live, probably gets my vote for the most off-the-wall offering of “Things we would like to see in 2005” when he said, seemingly in all seriousness, that he would like Jose Mourinho to be Britain’s next prime minister. “He is honest, a great leader and he calls it how it is” was the gist of the argument. So, step aside Mr Blair.

It is an interesting, if slightly bonkers, concept. But the stubbly chinned one would certainly cause a stir. The Chelsea manager’s Portuguese nationality might count against him. But in his favour Mourinho is a man who clearly knows what he wants; he has an uncanny knack of realising his ambitions and is not exactly hamstrung by self-doubt or false modesty.

John Rawling in Guardian

It’s nice to see our man is famous among neutral supporters. ;)

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That is what the singapore press called it, and I expected nothing else. In fact, my only surprise is that it has taken this many days before the story was splashed across the front page.

Singapore might have been friendly when their leader visits Thailand, but they are never slow in painting the country brutal and uncivilized in local and international press. Many times in the past, such story were picked up by CNN and friends not from their correspondences in Thailand, but from singapore press. Why? The version here sounded much more gruesome. Many people has explained Singapore’s action with conspiracy theories against Thailand. And I’m beginning to believe it more everyday.

What is it with not allowing any thing to be said about your own government, yet stories with little or no research about other countries are encouraged. Lee Kuan Yew once said

“democracy and a free press did not necessarily lead to a good government”Read more

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In old chinese stories, stars on the sky represent the lifes of people on earth. When there is a shooting star, someone has just passed away.

There were two shooting stars in my sky in the past two days. One is the star of my Chiangmai relative, and one is of my late teacher, Prof. Rainer Radok. Both were bright and charismatic stars and I will miss them.

My auntie leaves me fond memories, my prof that and some. In his long academic life he has written up countless pieces and spent amazingly long time putting them online. (even more amazing was that he was already over 60 at the inception of the internet.) These he wrote or translated.

• Life of Rainer Radok
• Experiences of theTwentieth Century Saga
• Physics and Mathematics for Everybody
• An anthology of the discovery of Australia
• Australia’s coast and environment

• Flinders University’s Earth Sciences 1963-1972

It feels different looking at his work knowing he has gone to better places (as we said in Thailand).