Market-based Medicine
The Capital Account show had an episode: How the market can cure the healthcare crisis, with Dr. Keith Smith. In the show, Dr. Smith demonstrated that his Surgery Center of Oklahoma generates reasonable profits which providing slightly below average cost…
Stack Storage and Garbage Collection
Recently, I ran across Mike Vanier’s page containing his opinions on Scalable Computer Programming Languages. I agree almost entirely with his list: garbage collection no pointers or pointer arithmetic a foreign function interface to the C language static type checking…
Gestapofest
On Sunday, I went with some of my friends to enjoy a beer and celebrate Oktoberfest at Alpine Village. When I arrived I was dismayed to find the festivities closely guarded by a squadron of private security decked out in…
Booze Poetry: Three Philosophers
Last night I drank a Three Philosophers Belgian Style Blend (Quadrupel), and decided to write some more descriptive verse: Tonight, I drank up the philosophy of my three Beligan friends. Throughout the night we opined strongly about the mysticism of…
The Hyped Success of MOOCs
I tried to find an experience report written by one of the teachers, because I vaguely remember reading possibly reading one, but could not find any through google scholar. So, I don’t know about the logistics of running the course…
Interesting articles of the week
Depression’s Upside by Jonah Lehrer, posits that ruminative thought may be an adaptive mechanism for a more realistic, attentive outlook conducive to working through social issues. Is Algebra Necessary? by Andrew Hacker, paints a depressing picture about 33% of american…
Rant: A breed of well-informed idiot
I’m not liking the peer review system right now. Since I’ve started grad school, I’ve had every one of my papers rejected. This leads me to the following theory: reviewers are some breed of well-informed idiot. They may be smart…
Financial Networks
According to The Great Revealing post at Divine Cosmos it seems that Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich have released a paper [The network of global corporate control] which executes a version of…
Bayesian Anthropic Law
This one has been on my plate for a long time. There is a popular argument for the existence of God/Creator known as the “Fine-Tuning Argument”. When looking at the universe, we notice that it has a specific construction which…
Notes: CSTA CS+IT Conference
Today I attended the 2012 ACM Computer Science and Information Technology Conference. It was focused heavily on the advocacy of teaching Computer Science material in the K-12 system. I most liked the fact that every session I attended have some…