Crisis Central
Slowly taking over the world.#
I met a communist at a party who said he hated money, but then refused to open his wallet and give me his. Why? He then said he didn't need money because he could come to my house and steal food any time he wanted. I invited him to try, but advised him that I'm heavily armed and that I'm not likely to get many opportunities to shoot a communist.
Chaos in the Markets - Moral, Legal & Economic Signals in Three Fantastic Bubbles by Christian Day:#
Garber speculates that an exogenous event—the Bubonic Plague—prompted the Tulip mania and brought common, unsophisticated investors into the futures market. From 1635-1637 the plague devastated the Netherlands. Over 17,000 people were killed in Amsterdam in 1636 (1/6 of the population). Leiden lost over 14,000 (1/3 of its 1622 population). The Dutch faced a heightened probability of death by plague and imminent invasion by Spain during 1635-1637, when Tulip mania was at its height. The rumors of war and the hideous plague caused a gambling outbreak. Gamblers, with death at the door, would have nothing to lose by speculating in tulips. Because of the legal prohibitions, the contracts remained unenforceable. If the gamblers "won," they'd receive a windfall. If they lost, they could ignore the contract because they did not have to worry about being excluded from the bourse. Under such circumstance, these Dutch under perceived death sentence could "bet the house" without recourse or remorse.
Will Wilkinson writes about the sad Cornel West.#
British Kung Fu via Michael Feldman.#
Philip Greenspun writes about what is wrong with Computer Science curriculums.#
Grade inflation is so rampant at most good schools that a transcript is no longer meaningful. Students should be graded exclusively by outsiders. In some cases it will be a computer scanning the results of their Microsoft certification test. In some cases it will be an external client for whom a student team has built a project. In some cases it might be professional engineers or academics in a low-wage foreign country applying written standards. But in no case should it be a teacher whose salary is being paid by the student's tuition. The potential for conflict of interest and therefore grade inflation is too high and furthermore we want the faculty to be regarded as coaches rather than evaluators.
All student work should have the character of an engineering project: client talks about a problem; student team prepares a written plan for solving the problem; student team discusses the plan with the client; student team builds a prototype; student team tests the prototype with the client and users; student team refines the prototype in response to the testing; student team documents its results. Everything in a standard engineering curriculum can be taught with this process. For example, students building a flight simulation game might need to refer to a Physics textbook and do some practice Physics problems in order to learn enough to build their prototype. This makes it a bit tough for the faculty, who need to be clever enough to weave such courses as Physics, Calculus, and Biology into engineering projects. The payoff is that by the time the student graduates he or she will be completely comfortable with the engineering process of listen, design, discuss, implement, test, refine, and write up.
James Robertson, among others, links to the story about Prehistoric Hobbits.#
Scientists have discovered a tiny species of ancient human that lived 18,000 years ago on an isolated island east of the Java Sea -- a prehistoric hunter in a "lost world" of giant lizards and miniature elephants.
These "little people" stood about three feet tall and had heads the size of grapefruit. They co-existed with modern humans for thousands of years yet appear to be more closely akin to a long-extinct human ancestor.
Researchers suspect the earlier ancestor may have migrated to the island and evolved into a smaller dwarf species as it adapted to the island's limited resources. This phenomenon, known as the "island rule" is common in the animal world but had never been seen before in human evolution.
Aaron Swartz and a girl. Humour ensues.#