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Insights from evening with Wine and Jam session with Adriene and Dennis, Birthday party with Konstantine

From Tommaso on Machine Learning - Economics

- Study was done on Italy
- Voting patterns can be leading indicators for credit spread
- When a political party is stable, Eigen distance between votes of party members will cluster together, even for bills that are not critical for parties
- When a political party becomes unstable, the Eigen distance between vote on non-critical bills by party members will increase
- Alignment will increase before a wild swing to misalignment

periods of high alignment leads to very tight credit spread
- tight credit spread indicates a very high price for bond

- Misalignment will decrease before consolidation towards alignment

periods of low alignment leads to very wide credit spread
- wide credit spread indicates a very low price for bond

- proposed strategy:

when alignments increase, short bonds in anticipation for forthcoming misalignment
- when misalignments increase, long bonds in anticipation for forthcoming alignment

From Tommaso on Machine Learning - Micro-biology

- Started studying how presence specific bacteria affects health at an aggregate level
- Studying ancestral tree of bacterias help estimate the distribution of bacteria in the gut of different individuals

On sales

- Mormons are one of the best sales people due to their coming to age ritual.
- They typically will get rejected many many times during their passing through rite

On human cyborgs

- Neil Harbisson is an artist who is color blind, he implanted a device into his brain which allows him to see colors

On hardware and biotech with Andrew

- To design printed circuit board install IDE which allows easy assembly, simulation and coding - DesignSpark
- Firmware for micro-processors are written in C. Firmware controls where signals are past to when incoming signals are received
- Micro-processors are installed on circuit board
- Can be printed in China and shipped over in 5 days - PCBWay
- BioCurious and another biotech hacker space up in Berkeley have managed to train yeast to product cocaine and THC

Related readings

- [*Entropy Dynamics of Community Alignment in the Italian Parliament Time-Dependent Network*](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sYixPw8AAAAJ&hl=en), Tommaso Furlanello
- *Advances in Financial Machine Learning*, Marcos Lopez de Prado
- *Educated*, Tara Westover