NeilCJames

The difference is the word 'unrestricted.'

I would add the course: "Reading Code."

Reminds me of Louis Benezet's experimental elementary math education system (ca. 1930s), and Sanjoy Mahajan's Street Fighting Mathematics. What a clever idea.

saas-class.org is up as well.

Much earlier ('91, I think), but a better read for those with a technical mindset (but still accessible) is Thaler's The Winner's Curse.

While funny, that is the worst advertisement for learning math I have ever read. If you are of anywhere near normal intelligence, and put in anywhere near normal effort and don't 'get math', your parents, teachers, superintendents, school boards, and departments of education sucked, not you.

Applied math is about finding, stating and solving problems. Strategy instead of tactics. Writing a cookbook, not reading one. Teaching mathematics-as-recipes is the reason most people don't "get" math, even if they score decent grades in school. It is the reason they don't think they will use math in "real life"--because they learnt a bunch of equations, and didn't learn what they mean, because they don't need to know what the equations mean to pass the exam. So, because the exam sucks, and teachers have to teach to the standard exam, the teaching sucks, students have to study textbooks that suck, do homework problems that suck, and take tests that suck. Imagine that: Most of the students end up sucking! Instead of fixing it, let's have yet another round of blame the victim!

Mine has gotten hot once, when I had it in an enclosed space while charging it. If the grandparent had a hot one in his hand, it certainly wasn't from what I've experienced in normal use.

Just checked for Pennsylvania (2009-10 academic year), and while the biggest spenders are over double the lowest spenders, there are no order-of-magnitude-difference pairs. Also, only two of the top ten spenders (per student) were in the top 10% academically.

Better headline: "Google obeys court order"

This is nonsense. I'm all for civil disobedience, but the author is demanding that others defy courts on his behalf. The sense of entitlement is at least impressive.

Certainly, if anyone is to defend Mr. Sfarzo's speech in an Italian court it should be Mr. Sfarzo himself. If anyone wants to host his writing and take on potential liability, let them do so willingly (as, indeed, they have since the linked article was posted).

I am editing a forthcoming book in the field, written by a teacher who earnestly believes in MI. Evaluating this teacher's data, his approach is clearly working for his students, but I think because of better engagement, more individual attention, and more interdisciplinary projects. Ultimately, I think we're cutting most of the MI stuff from the book as unsupported, although he will cite Gardner as inspiration.

The data I've looked at is more consistent with variation in subject performance primarily correlating with interest and personality, rather than MI.

What makes Golub's point so misleading is that he counts consumption taxes, payroll taxes, state taxes, and even future estate taxes when he pays them, but only looks at federal income tax to get the "half the people pay nothing" line.

The closest thing in the Android Market terms is this: "You may not use the Market to distribute or make available any Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Products outside of the Market." So, no, there is nothing that compares to the Facebook policy on Android.

Part of that reaction: Congress limited habeus corpus petitions, extended the time a suspect could be detained without charge, and expanded what electronic communications or data could be retrieved without a wiretap order with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

I am learning things with moderate success. I double-majored in econ and physics, but want to add CS principles to my toolkit. I've been using open course material to do so, and I've found it very valuable.

It isn't so much the lectures--they are useful, but only as valuable as a real lecture (utility varies with your learning style). It is the rest of the support material that makes sharing this stuff so valuable for independent learners.

An example from iTunes U: Berkeley's CS61A has webcasts, but nearly the entire course is online. You have the textbook (SICP, available free online), and can download the lecture notes, homeworks, labs, old exams, and scheme libraries from the course website. You have most of the course (except the most valuable parts: office hours, discussion section, and no TA in your lab).

But the value is in the structure of the material: learn this, build this, learn this, now build this, learn this, do this project. It slows you down, necessary because you can probably read much faster than you can 'do.' When just reading a textbook, it is too easy to burn through it and not force yourself to practice the material. With the course materials, you have a reason to pace yourself, test yourself, and have discrete goals to work toward.

note: There are freenode channels (#sicp, #scheme), and StackOverflow that may give you help that approximates office hours.

I read that comment too, but I am not sure 'broken windows' truly applies here. Although I believe there is net public harm from US post-9/11 "security" policies, when you consider that: a.) the spending being done on security is entirely public deficit spending not offset by tax increases or cuts in other departments, b.) the economy has been well below full employment (~58-62% employment-pop ratio during the period) and full capacity utilization (~68-81% capacity utilization during the period), c.) no other expansion of public employment and spending would have likely occurred in the past decade absent the 9/11 attacks (arguable, but there really isn't a political consensus for expanding the US welfare state), and posit that the 2000s growth rate would have taken essentially the same path absent the 9/11 attacks, then it would appear that much of the security theater policies have had a small medium-term stimulative economic effect (small because it is largely offset by increased consumer travelling expenses and time, dampening productivity). The three keys I mention above violate the pretext of the broken window fallacy (at least in the medium term, and probably in the long-term because of historically low interest rates). In a full employment situation, there would be significant deadweight loss, and in a balanced budget situation, there would be significant economic impact due to either increased taxation or offsetting spending cuts. But neither of those conditions applies to the recent US situation. The BWF assumes that the money would have been spent doing something else (more profitable), and I am pretty certain that will not be the case until the debt needs to be paid, which is unlikely to ever occur (I think the assumed future policy is to continue to roll the debt over until the singularity).

It is more of a continuum than an A or B question, and it would be a bad idea to get religious over the question. From a pragmatic perspective, B should be favored when either production constraints (capital investment, etc) or distribution costs are tangible at the margin. So durable goods and long-term services (e.g. insurance) should lean toward B. A is favored if and only if iterative cycles can be accomplished without additional capital investment and distribution costs are near-zero. So, basically anything that could be delivered digitally that is not embedded in a durable good should be released when "good enough" (and then only improved if the iteration creates more value than the development of a new good or provision of a new service--iteration as rent-seeking is wealth-destructive).

I was stumped for a second, then remembered. Brass Eye, brilliant!

I like this. A lot. If I could add a bit of advice from a domain of personal interest, I highly recommend pulling economics papers from repec.org as well as from individual journals. Right now the best way to stay on top of new papers in econ is the nep.repec.org mailing lists, and I'd much prefer to pull them down via RSS. Good niche, and I like the presentation.

To get less horoscopey: Kanazawa and Perina found a correlation between "eveningness" or being a "night owl" with higher childhood IQs, in a study of about 15,000 adults. They conclude that the correlation is due to more intelligent people being more likely to espouse "evolutionarily novel values." The paper is here at LSE: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/PAID2009.pdf

The video lectures and problem sets from the UC Berkeley course (CS 61A) taught by Harvey are very good (and freely available), although you will need to use Berkeley Scheme to get the most out of it. Two months is ambitious, but you can get a lot out of it in that time even if you don't finish.

What I wrote is not wrong unless, when you wrote: "So given 2 children, there are only 3 possibilities ... boy, boy girl, girl boy, girl" you are asserting that in the absence of any information about the sex of either child, 2 boys is a 1/3 probability, instead of (1/2)*(1/2)= 1/4.

Older/younger doesn't exactly enter into it, but some ordering is necessary to properly describe the set of probabilities. This can be arbitrary, but birth order makes the most intuitive sense. The set of probabilities of sex distribution in two-child families is [(B, B), (B, G), (G, B), (G, G)], for any arbitrary ordering, this cannot be reduced to [(B,B), (B,G), (G,G)] as you have done without adding a variable to double the probability of (B,G).

Assuming a coin-flip probability for boy/girl distribution, you get the 1/3 answer if we select for two-child families where at least one child is a boy: [(B,B), (B,G), (G,B)]. If we don't pre-select for having at least one boy, (i.e. if we select the family because we just met the father socially), the probability rises to 1/2, because we have two cases to consider, each with a 1/2 probability: [(B,B), (B,G)], and [(B,B), (G,B)].

For an overview of mainstream modern econ, if you read nothing else, read Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan. For a good introduction to the major economic schools of thought check out Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson (he has written a new one on the same subject that I haven't yet read). To get into behavioral economics, I'd recommend Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely and The Winner's Curse by Richard Thaler. Tread carefully, there is a lot of polemic posing as economics on bookstore shelves.

FTA: "We've got a lot of work to do," Mehdi said during his presentation. "It's not like people wake up in the morning, and say, 'Dang, I wish I had another search engine.' "

This is the problem with Bing, not anything technical. Why start a business built around a service that you don't think anyone wants? A product which beats the market leader in one or several clearly defined niches has a chance in the long run, but no one wanted Bing except Microsoft. It was and is a product looking for a market. It would take catastrophic failure at Google for Bing to split the market.

I am not rooting for one team or the other, nor am I against diversity in the market. I just think the quote above reveals something about the product development process at Microsoft that I'd be wary of if I were an employee or investor.

Short answer: yes, ten of the previous twenty years, and fourteen of the last thirty (as a percentage of GDP). http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.ht...

I use 'singular they' because at some point 'one' started to connote pretentiousness. I don't see how Spivak pronouns solve that problem, but this off-topic sub-discussion has convinced me to go back to using 'one' (for disambiguation's sake).

Count on economists to have the lamest jokes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whats_that_got_to_do_with_the.....

For the purposes of the CBO report, corporate taxes are counted towards the total tax burden on households, proportionate to their capital holdings, based on interest, dividend, capital gains and rent income.

I am stunned that "below market salaries for employees" is a red flag for a startup. Is there any correlation between throwing gobs of money at employees early on and medium-term viability?