auferstehung

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/policies/opensociety/

It seems the break is between redistribution and regulation. They argue that redistribution tend to result in lower regulation.

*n cameras

I think n = 8

This essay is interesting for two reasons.

0. I was surprised that I submitted this link because I typically submit a link not to submit a link but to find the link already submitted. My intent was search not submission.

1. I ruminated recently on a slightly tangential cud here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-determine-what-important-...

And the cycle continues swinging back and forth. "Let them eat cake" is not sustainable either. It usually ends in violence despite the rationalizations of the elite.

For all you wanna be world changing entrepreneurs, if you are not doing it him, you are doing it wrong.

"In contrast, the doctor has certifications, a professional order, etc. So does the lawyer."

That is the entire point. A Professional Engineer is the equivalent of a board certified medical doctor, or a lawyer admitted to the Bar in a particular state. In Ohio, a Professional Engineer is defined as http://www.peps.ohio.gov/4733/473301.aspx Restrictions are outlined at http://www.peps.ohio.gov/4733/4733021.aspx Note the exception for train engineers. You can use the term engineer as long as you don't confuse anybody into thinking you are a real engineer, i.e. sanitation. I like to call myself the Doctor of Love, but no one is going to think I'm claiming to be a real medical doctor.

There are legal consequences for claiming that you are an engineer when you are not. Check out the 2014 consequences in Ohio at http://www.peps.ohio.gov/NewsReleases/2014.aspx You get your name in print and in public for being incompetent and unethical. It is similar in all the other states.

The disciplines that can become Professional Engineers are listed on the right hand column here http://www.peps.ohio.gov/Exams/ExamDates%7CDisciplines.aspx Unfortunately, software engineering didn't make the list, although, electrical and computer did. I can think of circumstances where you would want software engineers to make the list. This is probably the result of corporate influence. PEs are more expensive. And a blanket Certificate of Authorization (CA) is cheaper. If you are an engineer via a company CA, you are only an engineer while working at that company.

You might claim that this is just rent seeking similar to a barber certificate. Yet, not many people die or have their lives ruined by barbers. You might get lice though.

It is interesting that you can no longer become a PE with a 4 year degree anymore that I am aware of. You used to be able to, although your apprenticeship was considerably longer.

This reminds me of the 34th Street wall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Street_Wall

http://arxiv.org/help/submit

http://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/recent

Wait around for the end of the current interglacial period?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial

Is it just me or did I see a filter in the lower left corner of the box?

GE has a jet engine plant in Durham, North Carolina that has 170 employees and one boss. It seems to work well. Although I have not heard that the concept has propagated to other parts of the company

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/28/ge.html

This should be a boon for Despair, Inc. http://despair.com/

The width of your thumb at arms length is a very natural unit of measure. As the article states, it is approximately 2 degrees of solid angle. If you ray trace your thumb at arms length back into your eyeballs, the image of your thumb will cover the fovea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea The fovea is the little dimple on your retina responsible for sharp vision. This happens to be the solid angle that is used to define the CIE color charts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

If I am not misremembering, two degrees solid angle (your thumb at arms length) also covers the angular width of the sun and moon.

It is my understanding that the hard part is when m/n ~1 (P/N~1 in wikipedia terms). Does your O(sqrt(2)^N) algorithm work well for 1000 numbers between 1 and 2^1000. Wikipedia says, "We give efficient algorithms for both small N and small P cases below," which would seem to imply the answer is no.

Regardless, the most interesting aspect of the article to me was the existence of a phase transition between easy and hard parts of this type of problem. I found the reference to Stephan Mertens work relating this computational problem to statistical physics, specifically spin glasses, the most interesting. See samples of his work at http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+stephan+mertens/0/1/0/a...

Incidentally, Angell has a new paper out on the glass transition. http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.4233

NPR: you can't beat radio for multitasking. CSPAN: I like my political news relatively unfiltered. Hacker News: this is anthropormorphic. if not true, this comment wouldn't exist. Slashdot: consistent quality. the response of /. on 9/11 made a lasting impression on me. Google News: general overview.

Rob Malda and the Slashdot crowd deserve kudos for blazing a trail and for sticking to their guns. they seem to have weathered Digg and the like just fine and will most likely outlast them all. I still stop by Slashdot regularly, but haven't visited reddit for almost a year now.

Slashdot seems to have found at least a local minima in balancing editorial selection and audience participation. Firehose, a nod to Digg, is an interesting spin on democratized story selection.

"...then State governments will have to pick up more of the slack."

The sad thing is State governments are doing the same thing. I reference the illusory "let us fund education with lottery money" mentality many states follow forcing universities and colleges to seek funding elsewhere.

Case in point, Truman State University, the university formerly known as Northeast Missouri State University. Several years ago this institution embarked on a re-branding excercise to become a self-proclaimed "little Harvard" in order to survive. From a financial and quality of education standpoint it has been a successful exercise. "Truman State University's quest to become the nation's leading public liberal arts university" is a demonstrable success regarding national ranking and all the metrics that go along with that ranking. It is serving the nation well as an institution of higher learning. I don't know if the same can be said for Missouri's citizens, especially those of northeast Missouri, whose children are no longer admitted.

I predict that education at public universities will follow the path that their affiliated extracurricular sports programs have followed as they compete for corporate largess. Their will be a "Top 20" group of winners and everyone else. Unfortunately, the Top 20 cannot educate all the students in need of an education.

US Public Universities seem to be going down the same path as the US Postal Service (an interesting topic in itself as the USPS is established in the Constitution). The government is cutting them loose. I am wary as to whether this is a good idea or not. Private Universities can take care of themselves, but Public Universities, especially land grant universities (e.g. the entire University of California system), were created for a specific purpose and to serve a specific constituency. It is debatable whether or not large multinational corporations are included in this constituency or if they are appropriate entities that should be driving Public University policy.

I find the following technologies interesting:

1. SERS 2. MEMS 3. Taggants 4. Ground source heat pumps 5. OLPC 6. NMR/MRI 7. ERP

Except for 5 maybe 7, not common topics of interest here.

Grades do not matter. Accomplishments matter. If you have no other accomplishments, grades will be the default accomplishment that you will be judged against for comparison. So really, you are in complete control of whether or not grades will matter. Of course this means applying yourself.

Likewise, your future degree has an expiration date. I would estimate about a year from walking. Your degree will start to smell if you have no accomplishments to back it up. Each year past graduation, the education section of your resume should be bumped farther down the page. Eventually, it should become a matter of whether or not you have room to include your education at all. Your education should become a trivia fact. A small talk subject before discussing what you have done.

PS: I am of the opinion that anyone completing a four-year degree with a 4.0 grade point average did not get their money's worth out of college.

Enterprise software sucks because it is a hard, extremely complex problem space. Enterprise software is hard in the same way that it is hard to create and maintain an effective and useful quality system. Each individual (successful) business is uniquely organized and operates in a manner peculiar to itself. The unique qualities of a business is what gives it a competitive advantage. A successful businees is not going to adapt its business practices to some generalized, abstracted ERP system. To do so would risk the loss of its competitive advantage. All the ERP systems I have seen suck at the ability to be easily adapted to the unique and peculiar qualities of a specific business. Many businesses spend a lot of money on services or consultants in attempts to adapt general ERP systems to their business without much success.

I wonder if this dissonance between what businesses want from an ERP system and the capabilites of ERP systems is due to programmers desire to elegantly abstract and generalize software. Businesses want ERP software to be specific to their business. Motorola, Nokia, GE, Sam's Muffler Shop do not want to be generalized into MyAbstractBusinessClass.

Ties are an abomination. They are the apex of everything that is wrong with western civilization; the culmination of fluff utterly drained of whatever utility they once may have had. Ties are the peacock feather of man. OSHA should ban them as an occupational hazard. An MSDS should be required to be provided with each tie sale.

It is a little known fact that the B-Ark contained all the neckties from Golgafrincham in additiion to the hairdressers, telephone sanitizers and others. The Golgafrincham neckties were initially considered as the form of legal tender on prehistoric Earth, however, it was discovered that it was too difficult to tie a proper Full Windsor with a leaf.

"People with ropes around their necks don't always hang."

Marc is telling it like it is, even if it is a little difficult to hear.

A Ph.D. is a huge opportunity cost with an extraordinarily high risk/reward ratio. I have often had undergraduates ask me if they should pursue a Ph.D. I first ask them if it is their desire to teach at a research university. This desire is a little like becoming an NBA player especially in certain technical fields like physics. A horde of Ph.D. candidates is good for tenured Professors and research universities, but not necessarily for the students. Post-doc hell is left as an excercise for the reader.

If they don't have a burning desire to be a professor or happen to dislike trees, I don't really see the point of a Ph.D. I tell them to at least take a hard look at the costs of their decision either way: real financial, opportunity, time, etc. An objective tally will rarely be in favor of a Ph.D.

But a feedback loop is exactly what is desired. The hard part is to amplify the signal while suppressing the noise. Up/Down voting also creates a feedback loop that I would argue provides a very noisy signal of quality at best and an irrelevant signal at worst. The thesis under consideration is whether comments can provide a better signal corresponding to the item commented on. If this is true, it is desirable that items commented on climb higher and generate more comments,

If you consider comments to be analogous to links, the quality of a news item (or comment) can be extracted as easily as pagerank determines the quality of a webpage. Controversy can not be distinguished from quality because they are orthoganol measures. Many controversial issues (to VC or not to VC) are of high interest to readers of this site and would be considered high quality while off topic political controversies would probably not be considered high quality for this site. In general, most interesting things are controversial.

The existence of noisy comment threads (jokes and snark) is a good point. I would think that some form of Bayesian spam filtering could penalize these comments. Off topic comments could be penalized similiarly if a Bayesian filter was trained using the text of the news item.

I disagree that disagreeing or disliking is disagreable. I would call it conversation.

I don't think a bigger algorithm is the answer. One with a good impedance match would suffice.

I agree. That is why I purposely did not equate quality with up and down voting, but left it undefined. Perhaps a solution could be that the quality of a comment was ranked by the number and quality of sub-comments. We would have the beginning of a highly ranked comment thread, for example.

I think a method of ranking news based on the number and quality of comments would be better than voting up and down. This method would be somewhat analogous to page rank in that the rank of a story (webpage) is indirectly determined by the comments (links) and quality of the comments. Writing a comment is arguable less reflexive than clicking an arrow.

Also interesting news that was generating a good discussion could tend to persist and stay near the top. This would encourge thoughtful comments as you are not penalized for taking some time to think about the matter rather than hastily shooting from the hip.

Reason's for public education:

1. An educated citizenry is critical for a functioning democracy.

2. An educated citizenry is critical to the economy of a nation.

One aspect that bothers me about the educational system is the educational system's education for educator's. Educational "theories" seem to follow fads that wax and wane in popularity every decade or so. (Reminiscent of the latest "Quality System" fad: the nuts and bolts remain the same but they are arranged differently.) One would think that educational techniques would converge over time rather than bouncing around. An educational degree strikes me as largely a waste more suited to a minor.