eas

Re good dual boilers at the moment, for ~analog I would check out ECM Synchronika with flow control. For ~digital, Decent DE1.

And Niche Zero for grinder.

Opera, called Text Wrap under settings. Works great.

Manulife Asset Management - Boston, MA (full-time)

Looking for an Associate Portfolio Analyst to do interesting data science-y things related to asset management -- from the firm-level ($250B) down to the security-level, and everything in-between. R, Tableau, D3, PostgreSQL, Python.

If you are a creative technology person who is into finance, this is a cool job. (I am a finance person who is into technology.)

http://manulife.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang...

http://www.biadvisors.com sells this behavioral analysis of investor calls as a service.

Here is another free book, which teaches statistics through R:

Introduction to Statistical Thought http://www.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.html

I can also recommend the Statistical Aspects of Data Mining lectures by David Mease (on Google Video & stats202.com).

Scrivener (for the Mac) is one you might try. PersonalBrain (multi-platform) might also do the trick.

Someone please tell me "there's an app for that" on current retail hardware:

Now, Dr. Haritaoglu has come up with a wireless solution to these translation blues: a cellphone or palmtop containing a color digital camera that takes a snapshot of the mysterious text and sends it along to a server. Software on the server identifies and translates the text, sends the English words back, and superimposes them on the screen.

So Dr. Haritaoglu can point and click with his hand-held device at a sign in a grocery store window containing the Chinese characters for ginseng, shark fin and herbs, as he did recently in San Francisco's Chinatown, and, 10 or 15 seconds later, see the words in English on the screen.

> What good is that when show up in Japan and can't read any of the signs around you?

Anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to do an augmented reality iPhone app that would translate these signs, etc., on the fly for you? If I were traveling, I would probably buy an iPhone just for that app.

A quick Google search turned up this NYT article [1] from 2002 about the idea. Does this exist in a retail app already?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/14/technology/what-s-next-poi...

A very interesting and well-done course on many of the vagaries of US copyright law from MIT OCW (video lectures) that might be relevant to the discussion:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Especially lectures three and four:

3) Copyright applied to Music, Computers; Napster®; Peer-to-Peer File Sharing

4) Software Licensing; DVDs and Encryption

I've always wondered why we really haven't seen more franchising of U.S. schools among the higher-tiers (beyond ITT Tech, U of Phoenix, etc.). And what's the real reason we see NYU-Qatar but not NYU-Los Angeles?

For example, is it the risk of brand dilution? Local competition relative to int'l--it's relatively easy money out there? That many schools actually operate at a loss (excluding endowment) ex:[1]? Do you think that the lower costs of int'l education (labor, infrastructure) changes that dynamic, since it seems they are outsourcing everything except the name and "curriculum"? Does doing it internationally make it easier since most of the U.S. alumni won't drive by the franchises on the highway? The benefits of international R&D collaboration and the ready supply of customers as TheTarquin mentions? Just curious.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarthmore_College

Agreed. For good or ill, much of the (monetary) value of education is from what others think of it. You are totally right that if someone has a specific job like that mind, where the education is more a filtering and networking service than anything else, those odds (if you can really calculate them anymore, it's almost just pure recruiting stats at that point) get cut way down.

For those coveted private equity/VC/hedge fund jobs, if you can get in to the Harvard MBA program, you are probably getting pretty close to certain that HBS is the single best school for that (Stanford/Wharton may disagree), all else equal. The individual professors, classes, your learning style, what you actually learn, and any other individual preferences, almost wash away as non-factors in light of the credential. Good point. We may have to distinguish between an education and a degree though?

I probably should have been clearer on that as well--I was just narrowly focusing on the actual knowledge-gaining/learning aspect of education. Worth noting the other side though as we abstract away from pure learning.

Thanks for pointing that out to me, I should have been clearer in my analysis. I've added an update to the bottom, and hopefully that helps: "...also please note that I am talking about the best possible education relative to what could be if you were somehow able to take a series of the best classes offered anywhere. I am sure your education was just great in some absolute sense…just like the Red Sox are pretty good at baseball, even if the All-Star team might be better."

Maybe a web analogy will work better. There is one blog (or group of blogs) today that's the most informative for you. It's a great blog, it's updated frequently, and you like it a lot. Which blogs you read is not random--you've checked out a lot of them, and you know what you like. But what if we could create some sort of blog aggregator that posted links to the best posts of the best blogs? That could be a cool thing, right?

I think you are totally right given the current state of video lectures--they are like the first movies, just awkward translations of stage plays that don't take advantage of the ways that a film can be different and better. I'd much rather see a lecture in person today, all else equal. But I imagine as innovators take advantage of the digital media, we'll see some pretty cool stuff one day: higher production values, Second Life-style virtual worlds, more interactivity, HD, and Discovery Channel-type content that can better compete with live lectures. Right now, though, we are definitely on that second Innovator's Dilemma line where digital lectures only compete with the low end and non-consumption, the way maybe NAND memory used to.

Also, I agree that community is a big deal, and the number one thing we are missing to really take advantage of all the cool content that is coming out. (But I do think other video-based works, like Lost or Serenity or Star Trek, have been able to support both attention and community.)

If dozens of teens started purposely driving their cars into trees then you would probably see those articles.

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman

The only problem is that these funds don't start out trying to be correlated with each other--the most successful strategies are those that no one else is doing, since you, tautologically, get the best prices on broadly undervalued assets. They don't want to hold all the same things, but finance is a small world at people catch on to successful strategies pretty quickly. It just pans out that way since they are built on analyzing historical relationships between assets and what has worked in the past, e.g., buy refiners when the crack spread widens, or high p/e/g ratio stocks. To be independent you'd have to either find that relationship no one knows about, or pick a strategy that hasn't worked in the past.

To put it in web terms, it's almost like these quant funds are just adapting to industry best practices. We see that people like social networking, crowdsourcing, "web 2.0" page layouts, etc., so we see lots of sites racing to add these features--because hey, that's what works, that's what users want. But what happens if people get sick of one of those features (or any other you pick)? The relationship between the market and that feature breaks down. All those sites who counted on that strategy will all fail (or adapt) at around the same time, and many will rush into the next hot area (Pointcast-style "push" technology, anyone?).

Quant funds are basically just advanced machine-learners; you could implement a black box-of-sorts on your website by looking at Comscore numbers/trends for different sites and plotting that out against the features/layouts/topics they use, and instantly adding some new widget to your sidebar or something when you see a positive relationship with traffic generation. (Techmeme is a great example of a web black box, BTW, always on the hottest tech trend.)

In addition to that PG article, you might also be interested in this video lecture by MIT Sloan professor Thomas Malone, where he discusses his book The Future of Work, which is right up that alley. http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/229/ Apparently he's kind of the guy behind "e-lancing"

"In Thomas Malone's optimistic view of the future, the human values of creativity and freedom ultimately triumph, and business leads the way. This explosion of possibilities in work, and everyday life, will flow from the increasing ease and decreasing expense of communicating. Malone sees parallels between the emergence of democracies in political and business worlds, and technological advances in communications. He notes that in the age of the Internet, businesses are growing decentralized, markedly departing from "command and control" organizational models to newer environments where "workers seek advice instead of approval.""

And not to make this the longest comment in N.YC history, but to your microgeography point, you'd like this video with Sandy Pentland of MIT: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/494/

"Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals' interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals."