corruption

I would do electronics, computer science & mathematical statistics, but then get some deep subject knowledge in a soft domain that really interests you (e.g. med, biochem, genetics, pharmacology, neuroscience etc).

There are soooo many problems out there just waiting to be solved by skilled engineers/mathematicians/statisticians, but the sad thing is that most of these people have no subject matter knowledge, and therefore are ignorant of the opportunities. Likewise the subject matter experts without the statistical/engineering background are unable to grasp what could be done, so never even contemplate the questions. Even "top" researchers in some of my fields are completely unaware of the possibilities. They are ignorant and unaware of it, and sadly even collaborations do not seem to help.

There's gold in the intersections of disciplines.

Edit: But, this is only one approach, and assumes that you want to break new scientific ground as well as make money.

Daftpunk suits. Go el wire!

An aptly named blog for the analysis.

You know, an even better method might be for the problem statement to be open to the public. People could then submit their solutions, and if no one came up with the same idea then it's patentable.

This way if it truly is something with a massive inventive step, then people can get the patent. If it's something as simple as what you describe, then there's no way it would be patented in the first place.

There are no good guys. Is there such a thing?

From what I understand WL offered the US government the chance to clear names of informants. They refused. They obviously wanted to pressure wikileaks not to release the information.

I have no problem with any patents assuming they are truly innovative. The biggest problem with patents is that the non-obviousness step is almost ignored from my experience.

What they need is a way to determine whether an invention is an obvious extension or not. I suggest they do this probabilistically. Let's say it's a non-obvious idea if only 1/100 skilled practitioners would come up with it given the generic problem statement. Then it's easy to test. This would increase the cost of patents (a good thing imho) and dramatically decrease the number of spurious patents.

The interesting thing would be what proportion of inventions would qualify under this scheme. I have a feeling very few.

Due to homeostasis, a diet or exercise programmes effectiveness is inversely proportional to the length of time you have been using it.

Average minds think alike, great minds think differently.

Someone I know was considering dropping out of university for the same reason. Instead of agreeing with them (the papers they were taking were pretty easy), I told them to seek interesting work within the department, and stop taking easy papers.

Within a few weeks, he had a ton of extra work with a top researcher, and ended up with coauthor status on a lot of papers. And this was an undergraduate. All it took was him showing interest and offering time. He even got paid.

As a lecturer, you are always looking out for students who show the slightest interest, and will open many doors if the student is capable. And if someone from highschool came and offered to help out, I'd certainly do my best to let them!

Multiple video summary tool. Condenses many videos into one short, concise summary, with the ability to jump into the "full" video at a click.

Users watch the source video. They click and hold a button to determine which parts are important as a summary. The software builds a model of which parts most people find most beneficial as a summary.

The system then creates a single video out of these, first version could just be a simple playlist with time in/out markers.

The idea would be to condense entire sections of khanacademy to 10-20 second summaries, so you can see where you are lacking quickly and then jump into the detail.

Just another one of my ideas I don't have time to try :)

He should put the project on kickstarter and let the people speak :) I'd throw in some money, as would every type-1 I know.

I can understand that position. If he's correct, it would seem like a small task to search the computational landscape and find automata that predict biological behavior or physics systems better than current models. Is this his approach? I don't see many (any?) papers like this in any of the fields I'm involved in - so has it been successful?

So what's the big deal - why does Wolfram seem to think they are the answer to the world's problems? I'm confused - there must be something there, as he's obviously a smart guy.

Question to those in the know: I've done a lot of data mining, statistics and inverse problems, but I've never even looked at cellular automata. Am I missing anything?

What are they used for - what problems can they solve that other methods can't?

The science states that they don't understand empathy until age 7. I would hazard an alternative explanation: it takes years of training to become empathetic.

Most skills do take a long time to master.

No it wouldn't. Immediate red cards for "faking", determined by the video ref, would solve all the problems soccer has in an instant.

The number of refereee interventions would go down, not up, and the number of games won by theatrics instead of skill would drastically decrease.

Do you know if there is a place to download historical "real time" data for testing?

Parsimony.

Mark, a little advice. Focus is underrated and oh-so-powerful. Pick one. I'd choose branchr.

There is surprisingly a lot of innovation going on in the field - "magic" is a broad field though - could be anything from stage to mentalism on the street.

Yigal Mesika has done a lot in the field recently, check out his website www.yigalmesika.com

Very cool stuff to play with.

Natural selection is directionless, therefore it makes no difference under any scheme. What happens happens.

I definitely do not agree they are equally dystopian.

In the "pay for yourself" dystopia, the poor and uneducated continue to eat poorly and die early, horrible deaths. [I know this is hyperbole, but is somewhat supported by literature on type II diabetes risks etc]

In the "tax the risk" dystopia, the poor and uneducated are essentially given a prodding to make better choices, while still leaving that choice as an option.

In the current system the true cost of poor choices is deferred onto the rest of the population. We currently all pay the tax for poor choices of individuals. This gives no real incentive to change behaviour, and given what we know about ego:willpower interactions doesn't help a large portion of the population.

Absolutely. Then people have a choice, and if they still have the condition after making good choices society looks after them, so we aren't penalising for genetics/random effects. Win win.

Taxing activities in proportion to their chance of future burden on society makes sense to me (i.e. healthcare costs), as I believe individuals ultimately choose their lifestyle.

If it were up to me, taxes like this would be based on the same modelling that insurance policies are. People would choose what they lived like and the price would reflect the risk they are undertaking.

I thought zoho was started by a company with 9 figure revenue already? It's not like they started zoho out of a bedroom.

I.e. they are the same people behind www.manageengine.com www.webnms.com etc.

I wasn't meaning that they had no CS backgrounds, but had a cross-discipline background. I've never hired someone without a degree in computer science, but the best had a multidisciplinary background (e.g. cs + english, cs + a biological science, cs + psychology etc)

Honestly, I'm in two minds about it. If I didn't have the domain knowledge I do (I did a masters in another field before starting cs, and since have performed research in many varied fields of interest) I wouldn't be half as successful or have anywhere near the range of experiences to draw on.

Of the ~50 or so coders I've hired over the years for my co, the best were always ones with domain knowledge from another field. They weren't the best coders from a technical point of view, but were the best at being able to deliver working software to clients faster. More often than not the ones without extra knowledge were unable to grasp the domain problems, and their solutions always needed rejigging.

Edit: By being unable to grasp, I mean that the distance from their solution to the optimal solution was always quite large. More often than not their design, while designed for extensibility was flexible in a dimension that didn't move towards the optimal solution. So the extra engineering time was wasted.

I don't know that I would hire a pure CS grad again, and all the interns I have now I strongly recommend they concurrently study other fields. Computers are a means to an end. I suggest studying both the means and the end.

Umm what type of world are we living in where you can't take a picture of kids having fun!

I'm shocked at your reaction. It's kids in a pool for crying out loud.

What were the conclusions of these studies? It's not my area so would appreciate any insight you can give.

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It's free for 5 or less participants

The question is, if you include rationality with an IQ test, which I imagine is relatively easily to do, does this correlate even more strongly with "life success" than IQ alone.

Do you know of any research along these lines?