impendia

55 ms·

1. 661.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   I don't really buy this. There are plenty of salesmen, but faculty don't generally believe their pitches. The reason that universities "upgrade" to new versions is that publishers refuse to continue printing the old ones
2. 662.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   > Instead the people who should be "blamed" are the schools/departments/academics. I am an academic. Unfortunately this answer is correct. Still more unfortunately, one reason that this persists is that it's in n
3. 663.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   This is an excellent question. I love travel, and I have experienced this from time to time. I don't offer an answer per se, other than to respect your own feelings. Maybe they will pass; maybe they won't. But in any case it is ty
4. 664.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   At least in my discipline, getting a tenure-track position is the hard part; afterwards, it's very typical to get tenure. (The only consistent exceptions that I know of are at absolutely top schools; and tenure-track faculty there ofte
5. 665.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   I've consistently read that law is a bad bet these days: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-20/the-employme... From everything I've heard about finance, it is a dog-eat-dog world which eve
6. 666.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   If we're going to compare apples to apples, the Yangtze River Delta (including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and other cities, all of which are very close to each other), is substantially bigger. http://en.wikipedia.org/
7. 667.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   > I don't understand why that's good news. This is because of "implicit bias", wherein people discriminate against women and/or minorities unconsciously and unintentionally. For example, here is an article demons
8. 668.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   >Mathematics full professors that are female is a number in the single digits. I'm not going to let this slide. This would be scandalous if it were true; however: http://www.mi.uni-koeln.de/Bringmann/ https:&#
9. 669.▲
   by impendia 12y ago

   Philosophy journals won't accept manuscripts typeset in LaTeX?! Journal publishers charge thousands of dollars for subscriptions to individual journals. It seems reasonable to occasionally expect publishers to, you know, do the work f
10. 670.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    An interesting conjecture. As an academic, it's interesting to observe the relationship between geography and attractiveness to new faculty. As I heard from a UCSD professor, it is extremely rough to live in San Diego/La Jolla on
11. 671.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    This (or, even better, a physical Spirograph, together with a document camera) is spectacular for teaching mathematics. In my calculus class, we wrote down parametric equations defining the curves you get. In my abstract algebra and number
12. 672.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    We'd never had a fire drill in this building, but like all Americans we'd been through dozens of fire drills before, mostly in school. I don't really understand your second question. Our office did not employ or appoint a fir
13. 673.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    In my experience, fire drills make people too calm in the event of a fire. Five years ago, fire alarms rang throughout the office building I was working in. People were nonchalant. Most people left eventually, although some people went ba
14. 674.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    The name of the country, and of the language, in Estonian is Eesti .
15. 675.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > a lot of fun for the profs to conduct these interviews They can be. But it can get boring if your colleague wants to see the details of some boring computation. And, more seriously, it can be painful if the candidate is doing poorly. F
16. 676.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    I'm a math professor. I like to point students to this when they have a rough time with their quals :)
17. 677.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    Here's another directly related phenomenon. Look at the function f(n) = n^2 + n + 41. Now start plugging in nonnegative integers. You get 41, 43, 47, 53, 61, 71, 83, 97, 113, 131, 151, 173, ..... All primes?! Well, not quite, plug in
18. 678.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > the opportunity Everyone has opportunities, just of different natures. If, for example, someone had gotten a 3.5 GPA at a state university while working 40 hours a week and caring for an aging parent, I would judge that they had done s
19. 679.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > What about the regular type that doesn't have much to show, but wants to do great things? People who want to do great things, and who have the right combination of talent and drive to actually do them, have usually done great thin
20. 680.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    A large proportion of my students work part time jobs for 20+ hours a week. I don't really understand how they can afford tuition + room + board but need the $140 (less taxes) a week, but as it turns out this is very common. It made a
21. 681.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    Would somebody please disrupt the textbook publishing industry? http://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Applications-Susa... $264.39, for students that work part time jobs at $7.00 an hour (before taxes). Not only studen
22. 682.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    The whole reason for the housing bubble is that companies who want to build apartments are prohibited from doing so. If zoning laws were relaxed, the bubble would disappear real fast.
23. 683.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    I believe that Peter Thiel doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He seems to have confused mathematics and new age philosophy. "There are no specifics in probability and statistics"? I would call this statement
24. 684.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    Up to ten minutes to pay? Does anyone actually put up with this? In India autorickshaws are ubiquitous, extremely cheap, and I never had any problems paying. I was never tempted to try to find a taxi instead, although if I was there for mor
25. 685.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > The Japanese identified the problem and created a vocalic language from Chinese, the kana. This is not quite accurate, kana are basically just an alphabet (two alphabets actually) that can be used to write Japanese. To my knowledge kan
26. 686.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    I have heard that this varies by jurisdiction.
27. 687.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices. This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is
28. 688.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    I wonder if this is going to increase the political will for additional housing to be built in San Francisco, as indeed is very badly needed?
29. 689.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > However, one side of the market is unemployed people, who are generally desperate and willing to submit their resume just about anywhere. Indeed: I think that this is the opportunity that the OP has! It is interesting that eHarmony is
30. 690.▲
    by impendia 12y ago

    > Sexism in tech will start to become less of a problem once people recognize that it's an issue. I completely, totally, 100% agree. And not only in tech, and the same with racism, homophobia, and other related issues. But I don&#x2