Eric’s Enlightenment for Friday, April 24, 2015

1. Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart wrote an empirical study of how collateralized debt obligations contributed to $542 billion in losses suffered by financial institutions during the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  This was her honours thesis for her Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard.  Here is her interview about her work with Dylan Ratigan.
2. Instead of money, Toyota offered its engineers to help The Food Bank for New York City to improve its operations.  Thanks to their guidance, the wait time for dinner was cut from 90 minutes to 18 minutes.
3. Unusual, simple, yet effective: Dispensing with loyalty cards or rewards programs, Pret A Manger spontaneously offers free food to reward loyal customers.
4. A fast and simple macro for getting the sample size of a data set in SAS.  (No need to scroll through PROC CONTENTS in case you have many variables.)
5. Jon Chui provides some useful pictorial guides for interpreting infrared spectra and proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectra.