Category: rePosts

Wow reading this really got me excited. Hope this becomes a normal practice. Its innovations such as these that would help maximize the potential that the information age has brought us!

The working record of the Polymath Project is a remarkable resource for students of mathematics and for historians and philosophers of science. For the first time one can see on full display a complete account of how a serious mathematical result was discovered. It shows vividly how ideas grow, change, improve and are discarded, and how advances in understanding may come not in a single giant leap, but through the aggregation and refinement of many smaller insights. It shows the persistence required to solve a difficult problem, often in the face of considerable uncertainty, and how even the best mathematicians can make basic mistakes and pursue many failed ideas. There are ups, downs and real tension as the participants close in on a solution. Who would have guessed that the working record of a mathematical project would read like a thriller?
via Massively collaborative mathematics : Article : Nature.

This has me thinking how shallow specialization really is, and how the real specialist are the people pushing the field at its boundaries.
I remember an exchange between Hank Pym  and Reed Richards (from memory excuse my lameness)
Hank: You needed me?
Reed:I need your help, You are the world’s foremost expert in biochemistry.
Hank:Why?
Reed: I need a whole week of study to get up to speed with this, we don’t have that long.
(If Hank had a thought balloon he would have said WTF one week I’m gonna kill this MottaFckr, who does he think he is)
ASIDE: It’s been written about how hard it is to be a polymath these days. I think this is true, but is mainly half or part of the story. The fact is knowledge is multiplying at a frightening pace yet the way we learn and the way we teach the kids have just not kept up. We are really failing the future, or It is because of our inadequacies that the future is not coming as fast! When will the singularity come?

You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job
I believed that good marketers used their own products. I got facile enough with a few of the applications that I could even run some of them myself. I could build simple finite element models with Patran and set up a run of the Nastran analysis codes.
Later on in the company’s life I went to give a lunch-time seminar to Chevron’s La Habra research center on the use of graphics supercomputers in petroleum applications. I spoke about the state of the art in computational reservoir simulation and what could be accomplished using finite difference and finite element methods on the new class of machines that were coming from companies like ours. During the question and answer session my heart was in my throat since like any good marketer, my depth of knowledge was no more than one level away from being a complete idiot. At the end of the talk the head of the research facility came up to me and said, “That was a great talk. We’re glad your company hired a real petroleum engineer to come speak to us. We hate when the sales and marketing types come down and try to get us to buy something.”
For one of the few times in my life I was at a loss for words, and I was completely unprepared for what came next. “Here’s my card, if you ever want to consider a career in Chevron research. We’d be happy to talk to you.”
Marketing was really fun.
via Ardent War Story 4: You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job « Steve Blank.

This was from an excellent post about aging. Read the whole thing.

This is something I’ve long wanted to write about, but it seemed difficult to do so without coming off as vain. But I know Bitchphd would want me to soldier on anyway, so what the fuck. There’s this famous quote from Joan Collins that the problem with beauty is that its like being born rich and getting poorer. I sometimes wonder if aging is going to cause people to treat me radically differently than they do now, and if I’ll be able to deal with it.
via Unfogged.

One sentence take-away: “Luck is what you make it” or “We make our own luck”

In one experiment, Wiseman planted a specific number of photographs in a newspaper and asked both types of people (those who considered themselves to be “lucky” or “unlucky”) to count how many were hidden within the pages. It took the unlucky people an average of 2 minutes while only 2 seconds for the lucky group.
Why?
Because on the second page in a major headline he wrote “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The unlucky people focused so heavily on the task at hand—rather than approaching the situation more openly—that they missed the message completely, as well as a second one further in which offered £250 if they stopped counting to redeem their prize.
Wiseman’s research has determined that unlucky people are generally more tense and that anxiety works against one’s ability to notice the unexpected. He also noted that lucky people tend to exhibit four main characteristics that seem to create the luck they experience:
1. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities
2. They make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition
3. They create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations
4. They adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good
The good news is that Wiseman has also proven that you can train yourself to be lucky. Lucky people can become luckier, and unlucky people can catch up to those who seem to have better experiences.
via If you’re reading this, you’re lucky < Steven Kovar.

This is a fucking give away to delinquent employers! There must be a better way,  Condone the workers who probably knew too late that their employers were not paying their share but the company officers must be held accountable. This cannot simply be a freebie to the companies (dare I say of probably the congress people/politician themselves who also have companies.).

Arroyo urged to sign SSS condonation bill into law
10/15/2009 | 01:04 PM
A lawmaker on Thursday urged President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to immediately sign into law a measure seeking a one-time amnesty for penalties on unpaid employers’ remittances to the Social Security System (SSS).
In a statement, Quezon Rep. Lorenzo Tanada III said the bill, which the House ratified on Wednesday, should be immediately signed into law to help ensure that ordinary and privately employed individuals can avail of SSS benefits in light of the devastations caused by tropical storm “Ondoy” and typhoon “Pepeng” over the past few weeks.
“In the light of Ondoy and Pepeng which brought devastation to a lot of areas in the country, it is important that the benefits of SSS members such as calamity, housing, and other loan packages, be made available. That can only happen if payments are now considered up-to-date. This bill hopes to do that,” said Tanada, principal author of the House version of the measure.
via Arroyo urged to sign SSS condonation bill into law – Nation – GMANews.TV – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News.

To discover great hacks, we must always be searching for the true nature of our reality, while acknowledging that we do not currently possess the truth, and never will. Hacking is much bigger and more important than clever bits of code in a computer — it’s how we create the future.
Or at least that how I see it. Maybe I’ll change my mind later.
via Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking”.

What a contrast between Borlaug and the Wall Street financial wizards that brought the world to the brink of ruin. They argued that they had to be richly compensated in order to be motivated. Without any other compass, the incentive structures they adopted did motivate them — not to introduce new products to improve ordinary people’ lives or to help them manage the risks they faced, but to put the global economy at risk by engaging in short-sighted and greedy behavior. Their innovations focused on circumventing accounting and financial regulations designed to ensure transparency, efficiency, and stability, and to prevent the exploitation of the less informed.
There is also a deeper point in this contrast: our societies tolerate inequalities because they are viewed to be … the price we pay for having incentives that motivate people to act in ways that promote societal well-being. Neoclassical economic theory, which has dominated in the West for a century, holds that each individual’s compensation reflects … what he adds to society. By doing well, it is argued, people do good.
But Borlaug and our bankers refute that theory. If neoclassical theory were correct, Borlaug would have been among the wealthiest men in the world, while our bankers would have been lining up at soup kitchens.
Of course, there is a grain of truth in neoclassical theory… Nevertheless, the simplistic economics of the 18th and 19th centuries, when neoclassical theories arose, are wholly unsuited to 21st-century economies. In large corporations, it is often difficult to ascertain the contribution of any individual. Such corporations are rife with “agency” problems: while decision-makers (CEO’s) are supposed to act on behalf of their shareholders, they have enormous discretion to advance their own interests — and they often do.
via Economist’s View: “Skewed Rewards for Bankers”.