linhir

I would look at http://datawithoutborders.cc/ if you want a data science element or http://codeforamerica.org if you want a more development angle.

Fun fact, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is the largest cultural funding agency in the nation, with an expense budget in Fiscal Year 2012 of $152 million, larger than NEA.

I went through the Codeacademy exercises even though I can program reasonably well (i.e. I can do everything I need to, but I would never call myself a software engineer). I did this partially because I do not know js and partially because I wanted to see how the systems work. The “Oops, try again.” message can be very frustrating because, as the author points out, often the output they want is opaque. They have a great idea, but it seems that they sometimes prefer brevity in their instructions over specificity.

Totally agree, R studio has made my life much easier.

I do a good bit of R programming, and R in a Nutshell has been the best quick reference guide I have found.

The Boston Globe is owned by the NYTimes company, I wonder if this design might be a preface to a more fluid design of that site.

I've been using TileMill recently and their focus is mainly web/html. The static maps (PNGs) are pretty, but there is also some frustrating aspects. For example, PNG/PDF exports don't include legends and they don't have plans to implement that feature presently.

I would suggest Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop.

I am most excited about the machine learning course, since I could use the structure to go through Andrew Ng's lectures; also the ones from 2008 are already out of date.

As for the AI course, I'm skeptical, frankly. Sign-up right now has meant putting your name and email address. There is a big difference between spending 2 second to fill that in, and spending the amount of time necessary to finish the course. You come to a website that sounds like making robots and turns out the class is about developing pruning heuristics for search trees, do you stick with it? Maybe...but I'm going to save my awe for how many people complete.

I praise Stanford (CS) for thinking up this idea. Like Khan, they are going to reach a lot of people, and I think its particularly useful for motivated learners who, for whatever reason, are stuck in a place that you can't take a good AI course or can't afford one. Ultimately, though, the course is going to require drive that a lot fewer than 65,000 have.

By that metric, I think the choice is pretty clear. The quality of the discussion has gone up since the scores haven't been displayed. In an ideal world we could all be adults, and there would not be people trying to score points through fights (I would make semantic case for "arguments" being good, "fights" being bad), but that has not been the case as the community has gotten larger and larger.

The article reminded me of this quotation from JFK: "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

I've always been annoyed that the list doesn't include one of the foundational books of modern statistics/casual inference, such as Ronald A. Fisher's The Design of Experiments (1935). What do people think are some books from 2000-2010 that might make such a list in 2100?

I sent a screen shot of this to PG last month. He responded that he's aware, he just hasn't had time to fix it yet.

I guess I'm just unwilling to grant the point that the idea of closed government is dead. If anything, the reaction to this leak may be worse than the disease. But, nonetheless, these were a ton of `secret' cables. They were embarrassing, they make it more difficult to conduct foreign affairs, but they were not actually that destructive or informative. For two key reasons:

1) The cables are the opinions of low-level functionaries, no matter how good they are at their job. These were not TS cables, they did not include a shocking set of information. In fact, it is all sort of "meh, we pretty much knew that.

2) "The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation."

The first point is that we pretty much didn't learn anything, and the second is that it won't really matter.

Can someone explain to me how Wikileaks changed the world? I'm not trying to be provocative, but seriously what is all that different now than it was two months ago?

Not to be callous, but no matter how tragic one war crime is, it doesn't rise to anywhere near the level of either the more recent Wikileaks data or, well, a lot of other news events from the year. That is to say, if the Baghdad air-strike video was the only thing Wikileaks did this year, than you wouldn't think Assange should be person of the year.

In short: cables are the official record and communication tool of the diplomatic corps. As several other replies have pointed out, cables are a form of electronic communication, but they aren't emails. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but in the everyday business of the department it is real. If you work at DOS, you usually have two email addresses--one on the unclassified and one on the classified network. Additionally, you can have access to a system to read, review and send cables. Think of them as official inter-office memos, or something like that. They're formatted in a specific way, and they do not, under any circumstances, travel on any communications systems not completed operated by the US Government. You get the sense of what I mean by format if you look at some of the documents on the NYT site (or sit down, as I have, and read a few thousand cables in a row). If you're the Ambassador to Country X, and you have a meeting with the President of X, you write a memo, in a particular format, with each paragraph classified U/SBU/C/S/TS, and in a pretty particular tone. That memo (cable) then gets sent to, who knows, the Assistant Secretary for the Region X is in, an Undersecretary or two, the OPs center, the Deputy, etc.

The title is "What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" The subtitle is "A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class." I made is the HN headline something like "What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America's middle class" since no one knows who Aiyana Stanley-Jones is...and the title makes less sense without the subtitle.

Well, the real answer is that you learn roughly the same quality of things no matter what college you go to, not that you don't learn anything anywhere, just that Harvard College's distinguishing factor is not its education vs. UMass-Amhert, it is the admission process itself.

Neither of our statements re:admission is exactly correct, but what I meant is that admissions wasn't anywhere near being fair until at least the early 1960s (and that's being generous to Harvard), so the 60 years I was referring to was from 1900-1960. Buuuut, that's not quite right because when Eliot was President things were a little more competitive, but whatever.

I don't really see how signally is bullshit from the examples you've given. Harvard College does make a a decision to cultivate a class composed of the best students, that's sort of the entire point. Acceptance to Harvard College ends up being a signal for those things it selects for, not necessarily those things one actually learns. The gateway is admissions, not what Harvard actually imparts.

Since the admissions standards of Harvard Extension school are lower, it doesn't matter that the students can do the same work. It matters that the students weren't selected in the same way. Selection itself matters to the signal that the education is sending.

As for Harvard (etc) not selecting for Jews and Asians, very explicitly throughout the first 60 years or so (Anyone particularly interested in the topic should read Karabel's The Chosen), that's also, exactly as you point out, a signal sent if you went to Harvard in those years. That doesn't make the policy right or wrong, it just means that if you graduate from Harvard in 1930 you're likely a WASP, and, indeed, that item on you resume is signally to all sort of employers that a good Harvard WASP interviewed you and deemed that your character is fit, that saves a step when they want to hire you at their White-Shoe law firm circa 1935.

If your resume says that you went to Columbia College (the undergraduate college of Columbia University) when you actually went to the School of General studies then you are lying, pure and simple. Now maybe you can get away with it and maybe many employers do not know the difference, but many do and the two do not look the same. College education at the elite level falls in line with the signaling model of education. If you get into Columbia College as an undergraduate it doesn't matter to many employers what you actually learned, its merely a signal for other things--like that you can learn reasonably easily, that you value education, that you're a relatively smart person, etc. If you go to a general studies program that signal, at least to those who know, is greatly diminished. I can earn an online BA from the Continuing Education School of Harvard University, does that seem the same to you as attending Harvard College?

I just want to note, as Brown grad (he specifically points to Brown rather randomly), that unless your parents are "rich" but won't give you any money, you will never have 100k in debt from Brown or any "elite" school. That's just not how it works. Now I'm not saying you don't leave with debt--most of my friends have 20k or so in debt. I have about 9k, but that not the radically high number that is being quoting. The only person I know who has a huge amount of debt is from a family who has the money to pay full tuition (retirement funds, home equity, savings, etc) but would not pay a dime for their child's education. Now, maybe that's their right, but that friend (and former roommate) is the only person I know who graduated with such serious debt that they'd go to San Jose state for grad school (although he ended up with the mindset that what's the difference between 100k in debt and 250k and is getting a masters in Great Britain before likely going on to to law school).

The problem is not the ultra-elite schools--Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, Williams, Brown, etc--with large endowments and need-based financial aid. The problem is the private schools in the middle, places that charge 50k a year but don't have generous aid programs. If your choice is between your state's university and Lehigh or GWU and you don't have money, by all means take his advice. But if you don't have money, and you can get in to Brown et al, then go. It is a deal. I grew up in an incredible working class family, and I had to pay Brown $650 a semester, my father had to pay about the same amount, and I graduated with 10k in debt...I did alright and hadn't won any fancy college scholarships.

As for his larger claim that graduate school trumps undergraduate in employers minds, I think that is true only up to a point. The rankings of graduate schools across subject are radically different, and graduate school can have a lot more to do with circumstance. My wife is working at X, so I had to go to Y, I choose to do Y part-time because I love my job, I wanted to be a lawyer in Iowa so I went to Iowa state even though I got in to Harvard (know someone who did this), etc. But, the signal of what undergraduate school you went to is pretty clear and strong in most employers mind. I'm not under the delusion that Brown taught me much, that I could not have learned anywhere else, but the school you go to sends a strong economic signal about your abilities merely due to the admissions gateway itself. Now, there are special cases where you find yourself in your 20s and all that, but to many employers, being organized and "smart" enough high school so that Brown, Yale, Williams, UChicago accept you, is a relative indication of your abilities, even if you went somewhere less prestigious for grad school.

Most importantly, though, on this second thought, is that the cases are not as clear cut as the author suggests. Signaling and employment are complicated, and they don't boil down to any simple formula like undergraduate reputation < graduate reputation or vice versa.

They should account for men, too, and give more weight to places that have a larger ratio of women to men.

That's true, but I think it is a little worse than just accounting for multiple perspectives. The movies is based on "The Accidental Billionaires," whose author didn't interview most (any?) of the main participants other than Eduardo Saverin. When you combine that with Sorkin's loudly proclaimed internet ignorance, I think you can end up with a great movie, but not one that is particularly related to a careful analysis of the 100 different versions of the founding story of Facebook. In The Accidental Billionaires, "Mezrich allows that he invents dialogue, synthesizes details, and puts imagined thoughts into his characters’ heads." If you want a less sensational book, but one where the author interviewed many of the principals I'd suggest Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect

I've been resolved since I was in college to give away 10% of my income a year. I give to two anti-human trafficking organizations that I know first-hand spend their money wisely and vastly improve the lives of individuals who have been victimized in a way most of us can't imagine: GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (http://www.gems-girls.org/) and Polaris Project (www.polarisproject.org/). I also give some money to NYC arts organizations (NY Philharmonic, etc), but that is mostly because I like the benefits rather than out of any great philanthropic ideal.

I really like Sherwin Nuland's talk on electroshock therapy: http://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_ther...

I've never seen anyone write about this talk, but it is intensely personal story of his depression and recovery through electroshock therapy.

A great article on how the Naymen-Pearson Hypothesis Testing is not particularly useful as a method of inference (e.g. the way most people tend to think of statistics with p-values and 5% significance doesn't say much). Some of what he is saying is a little shoddy, since Fisher actually came up with a much more robust, but less used, method of inference called Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which currently stands with The Bayesian Theory as the competing (yet partially complimentary) theories of statistical inference. Strict, but arbitrary, distinction between the null H0 and alternative H1 hypotheses, which is what p-values suggest, is as careless as the article points out.

You might want to try David Romer's Advanced Macroeconomics (a higher level undergrad text) or Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (lower level grad text).

From http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-452Spring-2007/Syllab... :

Macroeconomics is a rapidly changing field. To get a sense of the geography, you might find it useful to read two surveys (which are already on the verge of obsolescence...):

Blanchard, O. "What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1375-1410.

Woodford, M. "Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics." June 1999. Paper presented at Frontiers of the Mind in the Twenty-First Century, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, June 1999.

For two more recent and more polemical, pieces, you may also want to read:

Chari, V. V. "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice: How Theory is Shaping Policy." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 3-28.

Mankiw, N. G. "The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 29-46.

Greg Mankiw wrote years ago on his blog a good list of introductory high level econ books:

A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

I'd also recommend a good textbook, if you're a little more serious.

You make a key point that is often forgotten when people are arguing about programming languages. As part of the process of designing a program, you should pick which language (or programming paradigm) works best to solve that problem. A lot of intellectual time is spent arguing about preferences, and using one language to program a solution that would be much easier in another.

I do a lot of statistical work, and sometimes I use python, sometimes I use C or Fortran, sometimes I use R or PLT Scheme if I want to have some fun. I would agree that I am not a true expert in any of those languages, whatever that may mean, but I can solve the wide range of computational problems that I need to address quickly and efficiently in one of those languages.

This might just come from that fact that an undergrad class drilled into me a healthy disregard for the idiosyncrasies of syntax, libraries and idioms, and instead instilled in me the idea that semantics is the only serious issue for a student of programming languages.