Archive for the ‘education’ Category

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

And what is good, Phaedrus,

And what is not good…

Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

.:design.caltech.edu->

Engineers Grow Nanolasers on Silicon, Pave Way for On-chip Photonics

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Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a way to grow nanolasers directly onto a silicon surface, an achievement that could lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors, as well as to powerful biochemical sensors that use optoelectronic chips.

They describe their work in a paper to be published Feb. 6 in an advanced online issue of the journalANature Photonics.

"Our results impact a broad spectrum of scientific fields, including materials science, transistor technology, laser science, optoelectronics and optical physics," said the study's principal investigator, Connie Chang-Hasnain, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.

The increasing performance demands of electronics have sent researchers in search of better ways to harness the inherent ability of light particles to carry far more data than electrical signals can. Optical interconnects are seen as a solution to overcoming the communications bottleneck within and between computer chips.

.:newscenter.berkeley.edu->

The Economics of Science Fiction

Academic discussion of the non-immediate future seems almost non-existent. Yet the topic is of widespread popular interest. Why? The explanation seems obvious: it seems very hard to say anything rigorous about the topic, and individual academics avoid the topic in order to distinguish themselves from the sloppy wishful thinkers who seem to dominate the topic.

Most discussion of the non-immediate future seems to take place in science fiction, and the small subset of science fiction where authors try hard to remain realistic is calledAhard science fiction. Loosely associated with hard science fiction is an intellectual community of people who try to make projections which are true to our best understanding of the world. They work out the broad science and engineering of plausible future space colonies, starships, virtual reality, computer networks, survellience, software assistants, genetically engineered people, tiny machines made to atomic accuracy, and much more.

Unfortunately, few if any people of these people know much social science. So their projections often combine reasonable physics or computers with laughable economic assumptions. This often seriously compromises their ability to make useful projections.

Professional economists, on the other hand, do understand social science, and often do talk about the future. Quite a few of them are even paid a lot to think about what the next hot technology will be. Economists, however, seem to almost completely ignore the longer-term implications of specific envisionable technologies. When looking more than a few years out, they almost always abstract away from specific technologies and think in terms of aggregate economic processes, which are assumed to keep on functioning much as they do today.

This leaves an unfilled niche, which I call the "economics of science fiction", or the "economics of future technology." This is economic analysis of the sorts of assumptions typically explored in science fiction. It is distinguished from the typical hard science fiction analysis by using the tools of professional economics, rather than the intuitive social science of the typical engineer. And it is distinguished from most economics by taking seriously the idea that we can now envision the outlines of new technologies which may have dramatic impacts on our society.

.:hanson.gmu.edu->

Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

The idea that we learn by interacting with our environment is probably the first to occur to us when we think about the nature of learning. When an infant plays, waves its arms, or looks about, it has no explicit teacher, but it does have a direct sensorimotor connection to its environment. Exercising this connection produces a wealth of information about cause and effect, about the consequences of actions, and about what to do in order to achieve goals. Throughout our lives, such interactions are undoubtedly a major source of knowledge about our environment and ourselves. Whether we are learning to drive a car or to hold a conversation, we are acutely aware of how our environment responds to what we do, and we seek to influence what happens through our behavior. Learning from interaction is a foundational idea underlying nearly all theories of learning and intelligence.

In this book we explore aAcomputational approach to learning from interaction. Rather than directly theorizing about how people or animals learn, we explore idealized learning situations and evaluate the effectiveness of various learning methods. That is, we adopt the perspective of an artificial intelligence researcher or engineer. We explore designs for machines that are effective in solving learning problems of scientific or economic interest, evaluating the designs through mathematical analysis or computational experiments. The approach we explore, calledAreinforcement learning, is much more focused on goal-directed learning from interaction than are other approaches to machine learning.

.:webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca->

The Brains of NFL Players

Under the microscope, the tan image with brown splotches resembles a burned map, its edges singed and riddled with dark squiggles that shouldn't be there. This is a piece of brain from a 45-year-old man: former National Football League linebacker John Grimsley, who suited up for the Houston Oilers for nine years and absorbed at least 11 concussions during professional and college play.

In the years leading up to his death, Grimsley had changed. He became forgetful and scattered, quick to anger, flying into a rage over household garbage, certainly not the man Virginia Grimsley had married. When he forgot about the engagement party for his son and future daughter-in-law, Virginia knew something was gravely wrong. "We'd been talking about the party every day for the past week," she said at the time. "I was shocked."

Ann McKee, a School of Medicine associate professor of neurology and pathology, slips the sliver of brain from the microscope and pulls another from a wooden tray of slides. In the viewfinder, there are brown commas, tangled grammar everywhere. "This is his frontal cortex," she says. "This is the part responsible for insight, judgment, and intellect. It's completely congested and filled up with tau, an abnormal protein that forms tangles that strangle and destroy brain cells."

In February 2008, Grimsley, an outdoorsman who'd grown up with guns, shot himself in the chest while cleaning his firearm. Police ruled his death an acci dent. A week later, when McKee looked at his brain, she found the congestion, evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It was her first discovery of the degenerative brain disease in a former professional football player. As an Alzheimer's researcher based at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., she had seen CTE in the brains of boxersashe knew the condition as dementia pugilistica, more commonly known as punch-drunk syndrome. She'd also read about it in battered wives. Conventional wisdom held that if you avoided the ring and abusive husbands and always wore a helmet, you'd be OK. The codirectors of BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy took readers' questions about concussions in youth and adult sports and their effects on the brain. ARead their responses.

"When I showed the results to my brother, who is also a doctor and played football, he said, 'You're going to ruin football,'" recalls McKee, a diehard Green Bay Packers fan, with Brett Favre bobbleheads on her shelf to prove it.

: Continue reading :

Five Startup Lessons from Aaron Levie

Having started Box.net in his college dorm room, CEO Aaron Levie has learned some valuable lessons. In this clip, Levie elaborates on five lessons: 1) Do something that was not possible three years ago, 2) Do something you are extremely passionate about, 3) Don’t compromise, 4) If you feel comfortable, you’re probably not doing it right, and 5) Don’t write your obituary too early.

.:ecorner.stanford.edu->

U.S. Manufacturing: Output vs. Jobs

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This week, Veronique de Rugy examines changes in employment and productivity in the American manufacturing sector.A Since 1975, manufacturing output has more than doubled, while employment in the sector hasA decreased by 31%. While these American job losses are indeed sobering, they are not an indication of declining U.S. competitiveness.A In fact, these statistics reveal that the average American manufacturer is over three times more productive today than they were in 1975 - a sure sign of economic progress.

The true cause of dwindling American competitiveness is a tax code that puts domestic firms at a clear disadvantage - not a lack of skill or innovation on the part of the American worker.

.:mercatus.org->

Dropping Out for Entrepreneurship

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Fred Wilson and I, on the way back from an Etsy board meeting, were talking about how many entrepreneurs had dropped out of college. Rob Kalin, Etsy’s founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey — the founders of Twitter — are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And of course Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. As an angel investor, I’ve invested in two college dropout founders this month. What gives?

College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.

Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company, and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes. A small number of people — maybe in the high hundreds or low thousands — have the knowledge of how to start and run a tech company, and things change so fast, only people in the thick of things have a sense of what is going on. Take a few years off and you’re behind the times. Some publishers have askedAChris to collate his blog posts on entrepreneurship into a book, but he said, What’s the point, it’d be out of date by the time it hit the bookstores.

.:caterina.net->

What is Who Rules America?

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Who Rules America?, the book presents detailed original information on how power and politics operate in the United States. The first edition came out in 1967 and is ranked 12th on the list of 50 best sellers in sociology between 1950 and 1995. A second edition, Who Rules America Now?, arrived in 1983 and landed at #43 on the same list. Third and fourth editions followed in 1998 and 2002, and the fifth edition came out in 2006.

The sixth edition of WRA was published in 2010, and is available at Amazon.com (and other bookstores). This new edition has information on the rise of Barack Obama, his campaign finance supporters, and the nature of his administration. The last chapter focuses on the potential for serious challenges to class and corporate dominance. It does not have answers, but it raises the key questions and states the possibilities, noting that the strategies and tactics adopted by activists are an essential part of the power equation.

.:sociology.ucsc.edu->