vitaminj

19 ms·

121.
by vitaminj 18y ago
That graduate school is increasingly viewed as training for a professorial or teaching position is the greatest failing of the system. The noble pursuit of knowledge, which I think is the ideal of graduate study, has been supplanted by the
122.
by vitaminj 18y ago
"... with all the attached room for anti-capitalist hatred..." In some ways, YC represents the purest form of the capitalist ideal - people risking their OWN money and resources to help develop a productive enterprise, and then reaping the
123.
by vitaminj 18y ago
I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road recently. I found it compelling and disturbing at the same time. Definitely recommend it.
124.
Next: A Medical Wikipedia(pcworld.com)
1 points by vitaminj 18y ago|0 comments
125.
by vitaminj 18y ago
This is the link to the actual study: http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf Note that the study title is "Aspirations, Attainments and Satisfaction", not the nebulous and broadly defined "Happiness" as reported in the article
126.
by vitaminj 18y ago
Either you didn't read the books, or I'm afraid you completely missed the point. His investment advice is to invest most of your money (say 80%) in T-bills, and the rest in speculative investments (Taleb does it through derivatives). The ra
127.
by vitaminj 18y ago
A lot of the guys I knew that were good at maths were labelled nerds, so to admit to being good at maths is to risk being labelled a nerd by association. On the other hand, to say that you suck at maths implicity says things about you that
128.
by vitaminj 18y ago
A bit off-topic, but there was a study recently claiming Giffen behaviour in China concerning rice staples. The classic textbook case of the Irish potato famine was always difficult (if not impossible) to prove, but this is apparently some
129.
by vitaminj 18y ago
Believe it or not, formal education and self-study aren't mutually exclusive... you can do a combination of both and benefit from the value of each style of learning. One of the good things about most tertiary institutions is that you're no
130.
by vitaminj 18y ago
I come to HN mainly for the general interest stories (as opposed to the strictly "hacker news" posts), so I'm glad this is on here. Most of the time the comments from HN contributors are of equal interest to the story itself. They are gener
131.
by vitaminj 18y ago
Statistical randomness is pretty well defined. Say you have a set of independent and identically distributed (iid) random numbers, then if you plot a long run histogram it should resemble the probability density function of the distribution
132.
by vitaminj 18y ago
I don't know, nor do I think a good metric necessarily exists. Teaching doesn't fit in neatly with the typical production metrics we use in industry, eg. widgets per hour. Those outputs are directly measurable. But what is the unit of outpu
133.
by vitaminj 18y ago
The title of this story is a bit misleading. From the Urban Institute website, the Teach for America teachers were "high-achieving college graduates ... [who in North Carolina] tended to have graduated from more selective colleges and unive
134.
by vitaminj 18y ago
Electrical engineers mainly. I don't typically deal with cables at these voltages, but I've had to purchase subsea cables at 33kV and all the manufacturers tend to have these glossy brochures. Oil-filled cable manufacturers wouldn't be any
135.
Evolutionary Economics: Bottom Up Solutions to Business Problems(fastcompany.com)
1 points by vitaminj 18y ago|0 comments
136.
by vitaminj 18y ago
GDP per capita overstates the average income (because it's skewed by high income earners), which only reinforces mynameishere's point that 50k is a decent wage in Germany.
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Scientists Discover the 'Memristor'(reuters.com)
1 points by vitaminj 18y ago|0 comments
138.
by vitaminj 18y ago
Parking inspectors aren't even supposed to deal with customers. Why should they be trained to "pretend to care"? Sounds like a waste of money to me.
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by vitaminj 19y ago
Performance targets can be a double-edged sword. When the Blair government introduced performance targets for the public service, it resulted in a mixture of improvement and unintended consequences (ie. gaming of targets). Manipulation of t
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by vitaminj 19y ago
These kinds of studies are ridiculous. First there's the element of subjectivity and discretion in the "trained coders" that rate a person's attractiveness. On a single overall number scale no less. But more importantly, how do they even ho
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by vitaminj 19y ago
Yep, there's a whole area of psych research on that: learned helplessnes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness ). Seligman's famous experiment of conditioning dogs by electric shock demonstrated this... something you could pr
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by vitaminj 19y ago
I'm not sure that GDP per capita is the right measure for assessing correlations between average income and education, which is what I presume you're trying to get at. After all GDP per capita is often skewed by the very rich. Take for exam
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Selfish play doesn't pay in the big economic game(business.theage.com.au)
1 points by vitaminj 19y ago|0 comments
144.
by vitaminj 19y ago
Disclosure: I work in the oil industry and have worked for ExxonMobil in the past. ExxonMobil may be the world's largest publicly traded oil company, but it is nowhere near the largest oil producer, nor does it have the the largest reserves
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by vitaminj 19y ago
Firstly, fiscal policy pertains to government spending and/or tax policy, none of which a central bank is involved in. Central banks are strictly in the business of monetary policy. Secondly, most western central banks (though not the Fed)
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A Gentler Capitalism(latimes.com)
5 points by vitaminj 19y ago|3 comments
147.
by vitaminj 19y ago
Yeah fair enough
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by vitaminj 19y ago
I certainly agree that logic, set theory, etc are the formal bases of mathematics, but I wouldn't say they are the basics. It'd be like learning the syntactic rules of grammar before learning words and constructing simple sentences by rote.
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How good should your business be?(economist.com)
1 points by vitaminj 19y ago|0 comments
150.
by vitaminj 19y ago
I've had a gutful of this reductionist tripe. Yes, Web 2.0 allows uneducated fools to become movie directors, artists, musicians, writers, etc but let me tell you NOBODY is mistaking this stuff for high art or culture. Quality will still ri

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