25 OCT 2017 by ideonexus
CREW Method of Curation
CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors—the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its ... 1 
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notes08 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
PhDs Lack Skills for Surviving Outside Academia
Inefficiency arises from the fact that substantial resources have been invested in training these scientists and engineers. The trained have foregone other careers – and the salary that they would have earned – along the way. The public has invested resources in tuition and stipends. If these ‘investments’ are then forced to enter careers that require less training, resources have not been efficiently deployed. Surely there are less expensive ways to train high school science teachers than to...
1 19 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
How the Finance Industry Hurts the Economy
In perhaps the starkest illustration, economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote in a recent paper that every dollar a worker earns in a research field spills over to make the economy $5 better off. Every dollar a similar worker earns in finance comes with a drain, making the economy 60 cents worse off.
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...the growth of complex financial products has served primarily to boost income for the firms themselves, Philippon said. A new paper from researchers in t... 1 notes
notes15 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
The Conflict of What We Desire to Do and What We Are Able...
What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer?
What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering?
There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don't coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?Folksonomies: purpose
Folksonomies: purpose
1 notes
notes27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Why Economists Will Continue to be Wrong
Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many ...They make models based on past data, and when they fail to predict the future, they adjust them to match the new past data. The problem is that so many models will match the past data, there could be no end to the number of models they throw out.
11 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
How China and the West May Compliment One Another
The distinctive merit of our civilization, I should say, is the scientific method; the distinctive merit of the Chinese is a just conception of the ends of life. It is these two that one must hope to see gradually uniting.
Lao-Tze describes the operation of Tao as "production without possession, action without self-assertion, development without domination." I think one could derive from these words a conception of the ends of life as reflective Chinese see them, and it must be admitted that...The West has science, which is the essence of rationality, while China has the ethics, an outlook on life that cherishes knowledge and happiness over material gains.
03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
A Positive Spin on Automation
Our labor world and all salaried workers, including school teachers
and college professors, are now, at least subconsciously if not
consciously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They
are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living,"
which is short for earning the right to live. This term implies that
normally we are supposed to die prematurely and that it is
abnormal to be able to earn a living. It is paradoxical that only the
abnormal or exceptional are ... 1 notes
notesBuckminster believes in automation because it will create more freetime and allow more adaptive behaviors in human beings, but he fails to take into account capitalist society where livings must be earned.
14 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Celebrity Economy
This century's last great trend was noted by acute observers in 1996, yet most people failed to appreciate it. While business gurus were proclaiming the new dominance of creativity and innovation over mere production, the growing ease with which information was transmitted and reproduced made it harder for creators to profit from their creations. Nowadays, if you develop a marvelous piece of software, everyone will have downloaded a free copy from the Net the next day. If you record a magnifi...Folksonomies: art information economy
Folksonomies: art information economy
2 Endless channels of media allow for more celebrities, but to smaller audiences. In order to make money from media, celebrities must sell more than their works. Their works must serve as advertisements for something else, like paid performances or lectures.
24 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Information Aggregation as Oppression
More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occ... 1 notes
notesProvocative idea from Lanier that by contributing to social networking sites and financial aggregates we are enslaving ourselves for other's gain.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Marvelous Invention of Indian Arithematic
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped...Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
Quoting Pierre-Simon Laplace.
