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…
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…
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…
According to Dan Pink, John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. predicted several things: Among his calls: Americans will be taller. (True) There will be no C, X, or Q in the alphabet. (False) Photographs will be telegraphed from large distances. (True) Rats and mice will be gone. (False). Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and…
A friend posted the Internet Explorer users ‘have below-average IQ’ story on Google+. On the one hand, I love the idea of bashing IE users as incapable computer users who ought to get off the Internet. But then my Psychology background screams at this study as generally worthless. The lack of a statistical analysis ought to…
Facebook and Google+ both have ways of categorizing people for targeted sharing. The first way I attempted to handle my Facebook lists was basic categories like Coworkers, Family, Friends, Internet, and Locals. Then I switched jobs. It became a little weird to gripe about the new job to both, so I went down the crazy…
Got a couple of feet close to this anole. They seem to trust me enough to get close enough to grab them like I did as a kid. These days I just take a photo. (Not as traumatizing for both when grabbing results in getting bitten.) Also, this was about halfway the color change from…