Azores
http://www.inolongerlikechocolates.com/cul-tour-texts.htm
http://www.lhcdefense.org/WHAT_SCIENTISTS_SAY.html
Lord Martin Rees: Our Final Universe
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/article?name=CERNBulletin&issue=16/2008&number=1&category=News%20Articles&ln=en
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR04.08E.html
ESTJ Personality type
Dominant Extraverted Thinking
ENTJ & ESTJWhat is it like?
By Danielle Poirier www.RebelEagle.com
© copyright Rebel Eagle Productions
“Creating order out of chaos” is one extraverted thinker’s way of describing her volition. Determined, logical, critical, they love a challenge, especially one that will allow tangible improvement in productivity, efficiency or profitability. They are direct, finding the quickest, most direct path between what is and what should be.
They excel at implementing ideas and are often on the lookout for good ideas worthy of their attention. They are quick to organize, orchestrate, find resources, coordinate, and follow through to the end of a project. They love a problem, especially one that will make full use of their competencies, their logic and sense of order, justice and fair play.
Many find competition to be stimulating and fun. “These are the rules of the game now let us play.” Fairness is sharing and respecting the same set of rules, so may the best one win. And since they readily acknowledge that there will be a winner and a loser, they would simply much rather be the winner. So they hone their strategies on the fine knife of experience and sharpen their skills to meet the next challenge head on.
They love having greater challenges bestowed on them as a result of having successfully met the last, as this attests to their competence and skills. They appear dispassionate because of their impersonal and objective approach, but close observation will reveal deep passion and enthusiasm as well as sensitivity, especially to cherished ones. However they expect others to roll up their sleeves as they do and meet the task in spite of personal hardships or discomfort.
They have little tolerance for personal whims that threaten a smooth running operation. They are direct and honest with most things that displease them and expect others to do the same. Their humanity shows in their sense of fairness and justice as well as their love of humour.
Meaning of 444 - Pattern Spotting - Applied to Finance
Seeing 444 repeatedly is very common and normal. The article below gives some ideas as to how this works and why we try to make sense of the ocurrence. Hope this helps those of you intrigued yet open minded enough to admit there is nothing “paranormal” going on.
“Making false causal connections will bring only short-lived [yet needed] comfort.”
Magical thinking is a non-scientific method which attempts to make sense of a situation by linking two events in a false effect-cause relationship. Beware: magical thinkers run rampant in the financial world. This kind of cavalier causal analysis should not be taken seriously. It causes anxiety and mistakes. Fortunately there’s a way you can effectively dodge these bullets.
Pattern-spotting is deeply ingrained in our human psyche. It’s a survival tool; those ancestors who were able to spot patterns found the most food, avoided danger, and safely nurtured the greatest number of healthy offspring.
Today we dominate as a species because we use our unique pattern spotting ability not only for survival, but also to generate new knowledge and to expand: by anticipating potential opportunities or adverse outcomes in the future, we can position ourselves accordingly. Each day we use this vital instinct to make sense of the world of data that surrounds us.
We humans are very uncomfortable in chaos. We strive to domesticate disorder; we feel compelled to process and distil information so we can interpret the events that happen in our world. We yearn to make surrounding events mean something, and our unique pattern spotting ability facilitates this.
Pattern-seeking is an instinct we can’t turn off: we’re wired to forecast. After just two iterations of a sequence, separate areas of our brain are triggered to anticipate repetitive or alternating patterns. This is a powerful advantage in environments where conditions are repetitively reliable, but neuroscientists have shown that when an expected pattern is broken, neurons in our brains flare up, causing us to experience a feeling of anxiety.
This is why we dislike randomness; our continually thwarted attempts to find a decipherable pattern spark uncomfortable emotions in us. In the financial universe, while longer run cycles become clear over time, short term price movements are random and unpredictable - because tomorrow’s prices will change in reaction to tomorrow’s (random and unpredictable) news. Simply: you can’t predict tomorrow’s prices because you can’t predict tomorrow’s news.
Many investors find this ever-present dose of uncertainty disconcerting. Historians of religion coined the phrase ‘magical thinking’ to describe a type of causal reasoning we humans often use to cope with uncertain, rapidly changing environments. Magical thinking is a non-scientific method which attempts to make sense of a situation by linking two events in an effect-cause relationship. Establishing this explanatory relationship temporarily relieves our broken-pattern anxiety by seemingly making some sense of it all. The problem is that magical thinking takes account of obviously available information, but often not the information we don’t have or haven’t yet seen.
Nicholas Taleb wryly illustrates this beautifully in his wonderful book, Fooled By Randomness: “I have just completed a thorough statistical examination of President Bush’s life. For 55 years, close to 16,000 observations, he did not die once. I can hence pronounce him immortal, with a high degree of statistical significance”.
Such effect-cause reasoning is false causality. Magical thinking is not scientifically sound because it relies on empirical evidence rather than eliminating falsities by disproving them. The danger is that our brains can not always distinguish which patterns are meaningful and which are a result of false causality.
Imagine a Texas sharpshooter who randomly fires a bullet into the side of a barn, then walks over and paints a target around it, with the bullseye positioned directly over the bullet hole. If we had not seen him paint the target, we could falsely assume he’s an excellent marksman by reasoning from effect (bullseye) to cause (he shot the bullet).
Texas sharpshooters run rampant in the financial world. This weekend I logged onto the thestreet.com and randomly extracted some commentary:
Stocks Close Lower After Debt Drama
Blue chips stumbled as Standard & Poor’s downgrade General Motors’ and Ford’s bonds.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 0.43%.
Ugly April Ends With a Bang
A sharp decline in crude prices powered stocks higher Friday afternoon.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 1.21%.
And today, the sheriff of all sharpshooters:
U.S. hedge fund jitters rattle Asian shares
Falls in U.S. stocks weighed on Asian share markets as investors moved into the safety of government debt on rumours of hedge fund losses.
Markets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan were all down by 0.2% or more.
This kind of cavalier causal reporting should not be taken seriously. Financial markets are the result of a vast and highly complex web of dynamic, intricately interrelated global economic relationships. In the first place a 1.5% positive or negative daily market variance is perfectly normal: any movement within this range is statistically insignificant, falling squarely within the parameters of randomness. It’s pointless to try to explain a random result; you wouldn’t try to explain why a coin landed heads. So unless a daily market variance falls outside its normal statistical range, it’s naive to simply paint a bullseye on the nearest obvious headline. Secondly, a true causal relationship is only scientifically valid if it can be expressed counterfactually: if the cause hadn’t happened, then the effect wouldn’t either.
Neuroscientists have proven that staring too closely at the lack of patterns in randomness will cause you unnecessary anxiety. And because we humans are loss averse, the psychological pain of short term loss will soon derail your long term focus. So don’t subject yourself to daily market closes. Instead, concentrate your energy on the work and relationships in your life where you can have a direct and positive impact. If you do feel absolutely compelled to regularly monitor market levels, reduce the frequency with which you observe randomness, and restrict yourself to reading The Economist once a week.
Strategically positioning a portfolio across uncorrelated market cycles counteracts the short term randomness of the financial world. At any point in time there are a number of key global factors which could impact portfolio risk and return. Because we cannot ever know for certain what will happen in the future, we have to position for what might. A properly positioned portfolio will take account of these key factors within the context of your own risk-appropriate objectives, allowing for capitalisation on potentially positive outcomes, while consciously taking carefully formulated, uncorrelated positions to absorb and offset possible shocks. (See our Strategic Investment Overview).
Making false causal connections will bring only short-lived comfort. Instead, methodically rebalancing a portfolio which is properly formulated across uncorrelated markets cycles simultaneously reduces risk and allows you to effectively capture important market cycles over meaningful periods of time. A properly diversified asset allocation allows you to live confidently, within randomness.
Source:
http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=%22pattern+spotting%22+psychology&rd=r1&meta=vc%3Duk&fr=yfp-t-501&fp_ip=UK&u=www.philippahuckle.com/ph/document.php%3Fdocument%3Dmagical_thinking_and_the_tricky_texas_sharpshooter&w=%22pattern+spotting%22+psychology&d=Zbw6pnDuQQ7_&icp=1&.intl=us
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