Month: August 2011
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TED Talk: How language transformed humanity
Language is our genes talking; getting things that it wants. … Social learning is visual theft.
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Google Needs a -1
Did a search for “behavioral economics phd” and looked at a site that put some for-profit Master’s at the top of the list. Going through its “Perfect School Match”, it does not have behavioral economics PhD listed. The closest is applied economics at all for-profits. Lame. Useless. Went back to the list and noticed the…
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Ctrl+F
From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…
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Is Tiger Blinking?
Watching The Brain. In talking about Tiger Woods’ putt, they guess that he really has consciously removed all anxiety by entering “The Zone”. (Must be old.) The physical manifestation of this is supposed to be his lack of blinking. Now that Tiger is not doing so well, does this mean he is blinking a lot…
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Tea Party = Demosthenes?
Ender Wiggin’s sister, Valentine plays the role of fictional Demosthenes online in several of the books by Orson Scott Card. She would play the role of an extremist to whip up the gullible Americans, while her power hungry psychopath brother Peter played the role of Locke would be the moderate. In reading Ender in Exile, a speculative train…
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Soft Skill Sell
Student workers made up most of the IT work force when I was working at a university. The labor was cheap (no health or retirement benefits, $7-15 an hour) compared to hiring staff. For the grunt work, in my case making web pages and moving files, it was convenient. Sure training them was a hassle,…
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GRE Cheating
Reuters had an interesting article on Chinese students gaming the GRE by setting up networks to share questions. Basically those who take the test post the questions online. Blogs and SEO ensures those seeking the questions can find them. Because ETS takes forever to ensure each question properly measures what it should, the questions are…
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TED Talk: How Algorithms Affect Shape Our World
60 Minutes said most stock trades are made by computers without human involvement designed by math wizards for pennies of profits per trade over billions of trades. Milliseconds become important to beating the competition (other computers) by being faster. Getting close to or in the stock exchange buildings has physical effects. Of course, a bad algorithm…
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Children of the Mind
Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card My rating: 4 of 5 stars Plikt’s speech of Ender’s death reveals something about all of us. That was Ender’s life, unpeeling onion of life. Only unlike most of us, he knew that there was no golden kernel inside. There were only the layers of illusion and…