angdis

I really don't believe that anyone has "control" of our public schools-- unless their intent is to simply run them into the ground by failure.

Yes, I agree.

There's another nuanced advantage to this kind of tool, however: the ability to perform "reproducible" analysis.

With an excel spreadsheet, the person doing the analysis typically pulls in some data (usually by copy/paste), and then performs a series of manipulations on it. These manipulations are NOT recorded. A the end of the analysis the author sends the spreadsheet in an email or maybe copies the spreadsheet into the body of an email. Recipients, if they're going to evaluate the analysis have a lot of work to do over and aren't necessarily able to determine what, exactly, was done to the data.

Something like this puts everything into a console, javascript libraries, and tables-- as long as the author manipulates data from the console and the functions, it should be possible for someone to follow what was done to the data, reproduce results, and go further with the analysis.

I like!

One thing that I am hoping for however is some kind of notebook-like interface for doing small, ad-hoc data analysis projects. This looks fairly close to that.

Mathematica pioneered "the computational notebook" concept, and now we have similar stuff with R/Rstudio, IPython/Jupyter, matlab, and jmp. Those are all really nice and powerful, but they're somewhat large in scope and very ambitious.

It would be soooo cool to be able to just make notebooks that contain spreadsheets, related manipulation and analysis code and also text that can render to well-formatted html/pdf documents with really nice tables.

This tool looks like it can get there... if it can develop the ability to render documents sort of like Knitr for R.

I've looked at some recent high school algebra textbooks. What a disaster. These books are literally written by committee, the "author's" page in the front has a dozen headshots complete with bios. The content inside the book is a mishmash of color photographs, historical information, brain teasers and junk.

The texts are distracting and takes away from what SHOULD BE an uncluttered exposition of the basics of mathematical reasoning.

Good for Apple! Its about time the big carriers got their comeuppance. We come some way since the days when the business model of carriers was little more than $5 ringtones, un-installable crapware, and nickle-diming every feature. There is still a way to go.

While those are all "text posting on the internet", they're VERY distinct forms of text. He certainly has a deep understanding for writing and how writing can work on the internet. More power to him !

Yep, and I would go further and say that interviewing is something which has NOT been (and may never be) objectively "figured out" even though industrial psychologists have floundered for decades on how to best evaluate candidates.

Interviewing is very much a people-skill.

Why can't folks take a joke anymore?

I am sure it was a blast, but it was NOT done "for fun" to amuse the engineering staff. Nor is it an effort at "home automation".

This is part of a marketing campaign not unlike the office depot "easy" button, except they've designed an actual button that sort-of works.

The point is to get people excited about the idea of a Netflix marathon and create some buzz among geeky subscribers. It doesn't matter how many people actually create or use "the button".

Indeed, all you have to do is to read up on who's murdering who. Drugs and violence are intimately tied together at least in the USA. The laws are set-up to punish drug offenders based on the quantity of drugs in one's possession. Beyond a certain quantity, the offender crosses a threshold into "distribution" rather than "use"-- and long histories of violent, organized crime is typical for those folks.

I think that technical hiring managers tend to get obsessed with finding the "ultimate" interview question as a short-cut for evaluating candidates.

The problem is that such a question doesn't exist, or rather, that it may very well be a different question for every possible combination of interviewer and interviewee. The OP and those who take his advice are going to get lost in the weeds if they try to read too much into the answer to this "super question". Just pay attention to what the candidate is saying, their background, their responses to behavioral questions, their personality and their aptitudes. There's no shortcuts and there's a huge heap of subjectivity required to assess somebody for "fit".

Modern organizations have been hiring people for decades. If there were actually a "best way" to hire/evaluate people, everyone would be using it.

Yes, in the short-term, being up written up in the NY times for what they are is the best way to deal with most egregious unethical behavior from scum like Turing Pharmaceuticals. It will be interesting to see if the prices goes back down as a result of this exposure.

Sadly, that can't prevent pharma companies from arbitrarily jacking up prices less dramatically on many other drugs and going "under the radar" as far as public outrage is concerned. For that, you need careful and assiduous regulation. But in an era where people run companies that do real things like a hedge fund, I am doubtful things will get better anytime soon.

Maybe that's the best thing that ever happened to him? If he had gone to Harvard, he could very well have ended up as a well-paid, well-connected cog in a huge corporation.

Whatever, I find it useless to think about what 1-in-a-billion entrepreneurs do or don't do. Harvard is a fine university and anyone who gets admitted should count themselves lucky and privileged. Those that don't, well, there's plenty of other excellent options.

Actually, there are _very_ significant and growing manufacturing operations in Mexico for automotive and electronics.

If the discussion is about gaining an increasing measure of understanding and an ability to control biological systems for particular purposes, sure, that certainly makes sense. And, yes, manufacturing when you look at it closely is really all about mitigating variation (randomness) with the understanding that everything is a trade-off. However, to stretch that into the idea of "eliminating randomness" in our lives is absolutely asking to be bitch-slapped by philosophers and scientists--- that's something that money-people like Thiel may need from time-to-time (its not a bad thing).

Yeah, they brush it off as a minor issue, and just conclude Google can handle it!

This sentence makes me dismiss the entire article:

"The trading model and real time issues are just technical problems. Google is smart enough to solve them."

That actually sounds like very interesting fodder for a hit movie.

Stock markets go up and down, so what? Governments can only do so much to keep the economy positive. The real problem with China is repression of its citizens and the complete lack of protections and "safety nets" that is taken for granted in civilized western nations. I don't think that has anything to do with leadership being engineer-heavy rather than lawyer-heavy.

It is a relatively novel method for transmitting signals through the body with applications to body sensors, medical devices and ubiquitous computing. People have gotten PHD's on a lot less. Who are you to say it isn't worthy?

Yes, this is definitely near-field stuff. It can also be done with electric potential!

No, not actually.

I only used the word "trick" because you did. There are NO TRICKS in math. If a practitioner uses the word "trick" its because he's being facetious or joking. The algebraic manipulations which you find challenging are absolutely essential to master inside-out to be able to follow more advanced mathematical reasoning. You'll see these "tricks" again in a profoundly more generalized form if you study Algebra again (abstract algebra, that is).

There is utility in doing algebra on your computer when you're dealing with literally pages for one expression. That is done to save time and reduce the probability of errors-- and NOT because you "can't" otherwise do it. Even then, you'll need to manually sanity-check the work using skills you learned doing all those tedious problem sets.

Those "integration tricks" are introducing you to some of the most basic fundamentals of mathematical thought. Pay attention, kid, you'll have a lot harder time picking up maths in the future if you let it slip now.

It is depressing because it makes dubious assumptions about what is valuable-- as though not getting into MIT or Stanford means "failure".

Achievement does NOT necessarily require playing a nasty, zero-sum competitive game.

OK, very nice, but can someone explain the gloves ???

I am sure that extraordinarily dedicated people can educate themselves in a library or using internet resources as well as in a university, Abe Lincoln did it, right? But for the vast majority of young folks that just isn't going to fly, let alone be "easier" than a 4-year degree.

Perhaps in the future things will be different, the resources just aren't there right now.

Of course :)

I agree that employability is something the students, parents and society _want_ after college.

But look at it this way, if a student decides to major in philosophy, whose fault is it if the student graduates and ends up as a admin-assistant on the first job out of college? It sounds like some want to blame the university system and that's wrong.

If that's really the case, then perhaps universities should just dump all their humanities departments, fire the faculty, and re-purpose the buildings, along with any other department that doesn't produce "outcomes".

And how do you measure "outcomes"? If you measure it by the first job students get out of college, that's very sad and short-sighted. To really understand the outcomes of education on careers, you need to look at the entire arc of a career-- NOT just the starting point.

Employ-ability is really up to the students themselves, NOT their university, and definitely NOT the particular department.

Well, yes, they did lie to you (a little bit).

If you really _just_ want "a good job" there are easier ways to do it than going to a 4 year university.

I think that students who major in something like philosophy or literature are aware of what awaits them after college and are going into it with open eyes. Those that expect more than entry-level jobs immediately after college are simply failing to grasp reality.

That said, a good education, whatever the subject matter is DOES HELP people in their lives in ways which are hard to measure. Bright English lit majors who end up as waiters after college, don't necessarily remain as waiters for the rest of their careers.

Another facet of this problem is misaligned expectations about the PURPOSE of a degree. There seems to be an underlying assumption here that a university degree is nothing other than "job training".

Is a university degree basically a form of "Vo-tech school"?

That's what a lot of students and employers seem to think.

At the same time, many people do just fine in their careers after college even if they majored in English Lit or philosophy. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that "an education" is a separate thing from vocation training?

Obviously, I used emotional hyperbolic language and I admit it. There's no way I (or any observer after the fact) can definitively tell if any one person is guilty or not, let alone make a factual statement about many people.

HOWEVER, having lived in cities and neighborhoods with crime problems (eg Baltimore,Philly), I am aghast at how dysfunctional the criminal justice system is. If you look at public court case records of offenders, you'll see a peculiar pattern. Robbery, Burglary and violent crime offenders are RARELY limited to ONE case. Usually, there are several or even more offenses. The outcome of these cases is almost never a clear-cut "guilty" followed by prison time. Instead they're a convoluted series of pleas, followed by a drastically reduced sentence or PBJ (probation before judgement). A PBJ is effectively nothing to a repeat offender, because many continue to be charged with crimes WHILE ON PROBATION, and there are virtually NO additional consequences for those violations of probation.

The kinds of problems I am talking about are described in detail by Paige Croyder (http://pagecroyder.blogspot.com/). If you're interested how criminal justice "works" in Baltimore, she's the best resource.

The angst felt by the laywer who quit to become a clown, is not a surprise. Anyone who has a conscious will have a difficult time with being a lawyer in a criminal case (this goes for both sides).