Category: personal AnGoL

I think I’ve written about this same study before.

That male chauvinism works to the advantage of men in a male-dominatedmarketplace shouldn’t be surprising. But the magnitude of the effect took the study’s authors by surprise: sexist men earned, on average, $11,930 more per year than their egalitarian male counterparts over a 25-year period.
The effect works in reverse for women. While they still earned slightly less than egalitarian-minded men, women who believed in gender equality earned $1,052 more per year than women who held more “traditional” views.
In the Battle of the Sexes, Partisans Outearn Peacemakers – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

People get the leaders we deserve. What have they done to deserve such people.

The basic problem here is that too many people don’t understand the seriousness of the situation.
Americans fail to understand that they are facing the real prospect of a decade of little or no economic growth because of the bursting of a credit bubble that they helped create and that now threatens to bring down the global financial system.
Politicians worry less about preventing a financial meltdown than about ideology, partisan posturing and teaching people a lesson. Financiers have yet to own up publicly to their own greed, arrogance and incompetence. And leaders of foreign governments still think that this is an American problem and that they have no need to mount similar rescue efforts in their own countries.
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In the coming weeks and months, all of these people will come to understand how deep the hole really is and how we’re all in it together.
They’ll come to understand that the giant sucking sound they hear is of a massive deleveraging of the global economy and the global financial system as households, governments, businesses and investment funds adjust to living in a world with less debt and more inflation.
And they will come around, reluctantly, to the understanding that the only way to get out of these situations is to have governments all around the world borrow gobs of money and effectively nationalize large swaths of the financial system so it can be restructured, recapitalized, reformed and returned to private ownership once the crisis has passed and the economy has gotten back on its feet.
Steven Pearlstein – They Just Don’t Get It – washingtonpost.com.

This is nice to hear, I know I’ve been transformed by reading the alchemist.
Thanks to my sister. I think I know what I’ll be giving people at the fast approaching holiday season.

In 2003 the city of Arendal was going through a rough time financially, and the motivation among the employees sank dramatically. The city council ordered 3.000 copies of The Alchemist and hoped for a miracle.The unorthodox plan turned out to be a success.
“After reading The Alchemist we all became aware of the importance of our visions, and that it is possible to make them happen.” Kjell Sjursen, leader of the city council
Alchemy in Arendal at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

Need to FAST TRACK our research on this! I think this maybe something I maybe involved in for a couple of years!

The pressing question, then, remains: What’s going to replace oil?
Let’s draw up a specification for the ideal replacement. We’d like a fuel with the energy density of oil, or better. We’d like the only per-unit cost to be sunlight, because that’s the only thing that’s 100% renewable and (unlike tidal, hydropower, and geothermal) available everywhere. Ideally, we’d like the stuff to not require a huge, expensive conversion job on our energy infrastructure.
Happily, I think this spec can be filled. There are demonstration plants making synthetic oil from algae at a per-unit cost not far above that of oil, and plenty of venture capital looking to fund more. As this technology scales up, algal-synfuel costs will drop below that of oil. At that point, the free market will have solved the problem.
Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Why Alternative Energy Isn’t.

Tell me about it. It seems that pareto principle is present in the number or time my parent spends on each patient.  80% of the patients take up only 20% of their time , whilst 20% of the patients consumes 80% of the time.

September 26, 2008, 1:50 pm
So That’s Why Doctors Don’t Use E-Mail
By Stephen J. Dubner
I’ve known several doctors who refused to read e-mail from patients. They said it was simply a bad use of their time.
I also used to have a doctor who hated it whenever you came in and asked questions about some article you’d read in The Times about Lyme disease or some such. He’d get a pained look on his face — here we go again; patients pretending to be doctors — and then ignore the question.
So Thats Why Doctors Dont Use E-Mail – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

This reminds me I’m up for my quarterly blood chemistry for cholesterol, etc. Hope everything goes well.

One way was made clear yesterday, when, as a (temporary) citizen of Bonn, Germany, my wife received a letter saying she had been scheduled for a free mammogram at a particular time and place. With a preset appointment, no effort is required to arrange things; this arrangement would certainly not exist for most people at home.
Substituting the small cost of preventive care for the large costs of curative care for all citizens seems like a sensible way to contain medical costs under a universal health care system.
Maybe, as I think will happen, the U.S. will finally provide access to health care for all citizens; and it may be possible to do so without shifting still more resources into this sector.
Your Country Would Like to Treat You to a Doctors Appointment – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

Me and my brother and sister went home to the province to surprise our dad on his birthday. I would say it was tiring but it was worth it!  I mostly slept to and fro.
It was amazing that it took us less than an hour and a half to go home thanks to NLEX and SCTex. we averaged 120kph and if it weren’t for the heavy rains we would have been ale to shave about 15 minutes from our travel time.
I seem to miss my parents a lot right now, and with an under two hours travel time by car, i’d probably be going home more often.
An incoherent post from someone who has less than two hours of sleep in 36 hours. hehehe!

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in response to this statement from jaafgie:

The fact that less than 20% of the initial block makes it to grad day means that there’s either something wrong with the selection process, the curriculum, or the quality of education and teaching.

Probably the problem is with selection and the program.
I read somewhere that in Harvard they had a projected grade that few people deviate from. You probably had to be someone who couldn’t take the pressure and ultimately failed or someone like bill gates who just had to conquer the world (In a way.)
In another interview I read that the head of an Ivy League institution alumni fund raising head probably Princeton or Yale commissioned a research  on donors. He wanted to know what were the profiles of the students who donated money later on.
What they found out was very interesting, it wasn’t the ones with the highest grades or the best in everything that were the most likely to donate 20 million later on in life. The people who donated the most were the were jst good enough to get through the selection wall and had other skills. They were the ones who were presiednt of an organization, already doing nonprofit volunteer work, people who had what they call soft skills (leadership, management, communication).
The thing is if you graduate from eee of up, you went through a very challenging set of hoops, and (specifically for someone) you are one of the smartest people anyone of us would probably know personally. The problem is that I feel that the “future donors to the department” are somewhat being turned away because the hoops are more apt to produce college professors (Nothing wrong with this i love my professors) rather than future stewards of industry. Think of it this way, circuit and erg consistently place at the top 6 of the freshman orientation rankings, and those two organizations are not pushovers in the engineering week overall championships. We have some of the best if not the best students in our department, but we seem to not let them fly. We burden them with stuff that they probably would be forgetting a semester removed. I read something from a professor I think a canadian school, he said “Joy First Theory Second”. And forgive me for saying this but in eee its, “Theory First, Your lucky if you find Joy”
If I were to regret something, it was that if I graduated on time I would probably never have found the time to love science, engineering , technology and research. If i graduated on time I would have been lacking most of the soft skill that I believe I now possess. The course was hard enough to really limit interactions and joy of work.
The thing is Ideally I shouldn’t have had to graduate 2 years later than expected to just have a full college experience.

I so long to be a teacher. and when the time finally arrives. Hell I’m going to be one hell of a teacher.  hope I do become one and I’m going to be using this as a criterion.  Do I change the people that I teach?

Successful designs shape those for whom they are designed. In designing structures for people, we design them, their possibilities.
I wonder how often we who make software think this sobering thought. How often do we simply string characters together without considering that our product might — should?! — change the lives of its users? My experience with software written by small, independent developers for the Mac leads me to think that at least a few programmers believe they are doing something more than “just” cutting code to make a buck.
I have had similar feelings about tools built for the agile world. Even if Ward and Kent were only scratching their own itches when they built their first unit-testing framework in Smalltalk, something tells me they knew they were doing more than “making a tool”; they were changing how they could write Smalltalk. And I believe that Kent and Erich knew that JUnit would redefine the world of the developers who adopted it.
What about educators? I wonder how often we who “design curriculum” think this sobering thought. Our students should become new people after taking even one of our courses. If they don’t, then the course wasn’t part of their education; it’s just a line on their transcripts. How sad. After four years in a degree programs, our students should see and want possibilities that were beyond their ken at the start.
Knowing and Doing: September 2008 Archives.

Sometimes its all about the money. I wish I started bloggin before bloggin was about the money, but sadly I was too preoccupied then.

Recently an econoblogger emailed me to ask about a website which had been stealing his content without his permission. He asked them to stop, and they did — but he was still unhappy; I told him that the best thing to do was simply not be unhappy.
It’s the nature of blogs to put intellectual property out there, on the web, for free. If you do that, there will be lots of unintended consequences. Don’t sweat them. If Barry really thinks that Seeking Alpha wouldn’t have used the phrase “The Big Picture” were it not for the existence of his blog, then, well, that tab over at seekingalpha.com is just another one of thousands of unintended consequences that Barry’s blog has had.
Bloggers can control the content on their own sites; that’s hard enough. It’s just not worth it to start getting upset about content on other sites, especially when that content isn’t doing you any harm.
Blogonomics: Brand Theft – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com.