jasonmorton

Administrators and staff is the likely answer. From 1975 to 2005 there was no change in faculty-to-student ratios, but students per administrator dropped from 84 to 68 (and pay increased) and students per professional staffer dropped from 50 to 21. Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Faculty-Benjamin-Ginsberg/dp/...

I think Tex is wonderful just as it is. It does have a learning curve, like any powerful system, but so does e.g. html+css or any programming language. Emacs is a great editor and I run it with a simple inotify script to get automatic compilation. The error messages could be better, but that too comes with experience; I can almost always tell exacty what is wrong from the error message. Tex is so well suited to the purpose of producing mathematical documents that I really think asking for a modern replacement is like asking for a modern replacement for HTML. If you are not interested in becoming an expert user, go with a front end (the equivalent of frontpage or dreamweaver or similar). For the heaviest users, learning Latex is not a big deal relative to the other arcane knowledge one must acquire to write something worthwhile with it. As others have said, the investment is paid off in beauty, speed, and control.

I find it somewhat astounding how much we are still reliant on blowing stuff up whenever we want to go fast. At least this is being somewhat mitigated on land with electric cars. I'll venture that we won't see any deep improvements in space propulsion until we get a better (i.e. quantum) understanding of gravity. However this beaming power idea is interesting.

Fun place, thanks for putting it together.

Happiness is the sensation of gradient ascent.

This is a huge problem to address, and could be the thing that changes the dynamics of search. Google has become useless to me for a lot of searches -- many things that attract "MFA" -- because of the overwhelming amount of search spam. The problem has gotten much worse over the last few years because of the content mills presumably. Fortunately Google's still great for sufficiently obscure things that don't lead to transactions (like research papers).

and 640K ought to be enough for anybody. Seriously, if you want to move things like working on a big chalkboard or with papers spread out on a big desk to the computerized version, it makes sense to have space to work.

I'm an academic, so it is mostly black-and-white and some data visualization.

Just came across this discussion. I'm one of the authors, and if anyone is interested, I'd be happy to answer any questions about the paper (jason@math.stanford.edu). It originated in me hearing from Andrew Ng and other folks in the ML community about how powerful deep belief nets were, and wanting to quantify that power more explicitly. The first step, for mathematicians, is to understand what a RBM can represent. As you point out, the paper is written for a math journal and so emphasizes certain things. I presented a poster from a more ML perspective at the ICML workshops. Cheers!