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Wednesday, February 03, 2021

A 2011 dictionary is reshaping the language of corporate reporting

What Happens To Whistleblowers Who Outed Their Arts Organizations?

After the open letters are published, the articles are out, and the declarations are made on social media, what happens to the people behind them? Artnet News spoke with a number of whistleblowers to find out what followed their news-making efforts and the emotional costs of going public. – Artnet 



Yeats Now: How WB’s poetry still echoes in our lives

Yeats’s great gift, and one which poets are still learning from, would seem to be his ability, acquired “labouring in ecstasy”, to achieve maximum intensity with minimal means, using simple nouns and verbs as well as basic metres, turbocharging rhetoric to make some of the most memorable – and most-often quoted – lines in the English language.

 

A 2011 dictionary is reshaping the language of corporate reporting

The paper, which builds on an earlier version released last October by the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzes nearly 360,000 10-K and 10-Q documents filed with the SEC between 2003 and 2016. It shows how companies are trying to phase out words that, like “restatement,” are judged to have negative connotations by financial analysis algorithms. “Corporate disclosures and reporting have been reshaped by machine readership,” Baozhang Yang, one of the paper’s authors, said. The dog-eat-dog nature of markets has always tended to favor those with an extra sliver of information. When everyone has access to the same, structured sources of data—published reports, earnings figures, profit-and-loss statements—the appetite for alternative data, of even the least merit, can turn very keen. 

Sometimes analysts and investors try to latch on to such alternative data using their own intuition. Nils Paellmann, a former vice-president for investor relations at T-Mobile, recalled how, on one earnings call, the company’s CEO—known for cursing freely and often—was far less profane than usual. “I got a lot of calls from investors, asking: ‘What’s wrong? Why wasn’t he his usual self? Is he less confident about the company’s outlook?’” But the real thrust has come with the advance of automation. In the past decade, the channels of obtaining alternative data have grown, as has the raw computing power to crunch and weigh such data. 

Within the industry, practitioners tell wild stories—of trading equities by using satellites to count cars in parking lots, as a proxy for economic activity; or of planting an infrared camera outside a Tesla plant, to determine how busy it was at night and therefore how full its order book was. Some of this is what one expert calls “innovation theater,” but investors also glean genuine value out several of these strategies…”


Reflecting the Authoritarian Climate, Washington Will Remain Militarized Until At Least March Glenn Greenwald

 

Destructive protests by anarchists and extremists signal divided left as Biden administration begins WaPo. “… the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit policy research group…”