xel02

What happens when the US's eleven supercarriers are not in the Strait of Hormuz or floating around the Pacific. The threat is enough to guarantee countries think twice about annexing their neighbors provinces.

I.e Bob might be looking for a job and is willing to accept calls between 12pm and 1pm, but not at 3am.

Or Jane may already have enough leads and does not want to accept any calls (too busy) but normally is available between 3pm and 4pm.

I'm going to find all the students that go to schools that grade on a curve and I'm going to take the opposite side of all those short-sell bets, package it into a derivative and sell that! I'll open a bunch of firms and call it "Ivy Street".

With all these prediction markets being opened up, with film companies hedging their movie scripts, I haven't looked but there's probably a market for betting on record sales. Who bets on these things? I can understand people with an edge (insiders etc), but how can there possibly be retail investors for these markets? Are stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, futures, ETF's not enough to speculate with?

I'm in a similar situation and I'm looking into doing a graduate degree in Operations Research (OR) or Industrial Engineering, which is usually offered either in Business schools or Engineering schools. You essentially do research on solving real-world problems with quantitative methods.

Many of the OR graduates (even those with PhD's) end up not in academia but in business. If you have more questions feel free to email me.

Wikipedia says he's one of the most highly cited people in the world.

I 'know' him better through his ideas of grammars (Chomsky Normal Forms) and their applications to bioinformatics.

The article itself is interesting, a bit wordy. Chomsky is a well known academic in the sense that his work on linguistics is seen in many places from Psychology to Computer science.

The fact that he's also anti-government is new. I liked one line from the article (towards the end of page 1): What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, ... They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.

If nothing else the article is a bit thought provoking and I think most people could use a bit more thinking in their daily lives.

The book itself is approachable with a basic knowledge of mathematics, probability, and statistics. It provides a good introduction to things like Sabermetrics (for baseball), and applications to the NBA and the NFL.

Yes: it undermines income streams. In the second year, purchases fall, and in the third year there are none at all. If the second-hand market could be eliminated, books would last longer than 3 years and could be cheaper. There is a way: to produce electronic books [e-books] and kill them after a year.

That answer bothers me, a lot. Especially when in the beginning he says a textbook should be a lifelong companion.

Frankly a good textbook shouldn't HAVE a substantial secondhand market. As a student I do a lot of research into which textbooks to buy, occasionally I forego the 'required' textbook and get something that is more recognized by the industry or other academics.

I've found that if I ever buy a textbook I intend to keep it.

A good way is to look at maybe the lecture notes of an undergrad functional programming course. They usually present it quite simply.

Unfortunately the course at UBC does not post the lectures online openly but rather through a restricted CMS.

The majority of microbial species in the world cannot be cultured due to a lack of understanding in the nutritional requirements. This means microbiologists have a very difficult time studying them, one way of getting past this is studying the genetic makeup of a population.

However the best way to understand microbes is to grow them, a lot of bacteria are easy to grow (beef broth) others impossible.

Then there are ethical considerations in 'giving' people bacteria that are not well characterized.

It is a pretty well supported theory that exposure to bacteria is important for the development of the immune system, it is also pretty well accepted that the normal flora of humans is important in preventing infections.

How antibiotics, probiotics etc. affect humans are however much harder to characterize and understand.

I say this because I just read in a book (A Drunkards Walk) how seniors in a home who could arrange their rooms the way they liked and could choose a plant to take care of were measurably happier and lived longer.

Restricting machine names, removing snacks, clocking in and out these all contribute to a negative environment.

Which employee (all other things being equal) is more likely to burn out: a) Diligent and responsible employee is essentially free to do what they need to do to get their job done. b) Diligent and responsible employee who gets shuffled into a 'highschool' scenario: hall-passes, attendance reports, dress code.

Obviously some places feel they require these restrictions. Maybe in a large corporation you'll end up hiring employees who you can't trust to show up on time, etc. But isn't that also HR's fault?