This tournament is obviously bad for the losers, who end up shut out of a self-satisfied “meritocratic” elite. But it’s bad for the winners, too, because it trains them to compete on old career tracks such as management consulting and investment banking instead of doing something new. And it’s worst of all for society at large because our economy stagnates when its leaders jockey to collect rents...
Thanks for ruining a cool feminist moment for us, bullies.
Sadly, the brouhaha over Taylor’s shirt overshadowed not only his accomplishments but also those of his female teammates, including one of the project’s lead researchers, Kathrin Allweg of the University of Bern in Switzerland. More spotlight on Allweg, Grady, Alexander and the other remarkable women of the Rosetta project would have been a true inspiration to girls thinking of a career in...
One measure of student selection effects : $2,000 flights to Guam
Big changes are coming to the Medical College Admission Test, or MCAT, in 2015. Starting next spring, the MCAT will be overhauled for the first time since 1991. The revised exam will add sections on the social and behavioral sciences as well as more critical analysis and reasoning. The new, more “holistic” test is expected to take six and a half hours, as compared with its current...
Quants bring social justice to Durham
Yet if it sounds as if Durham might have become a harbinger of Ferguson, Mo. — where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer led to weeks of protests this summer — things took a very different turn. Rather than relying on demonstrations to force change, a coalition of ministers, lawyers and community and political activists turned instead to numbers. They used...
Finally, big data that is not bullshit
The god of skeptics
Great article on the Amazing Randi in the NY Times. I can’t believe he is still going strong at 86. After Wang left the stage, Randi, who is 86, told me he was glad it was all over. For almost 60 years, he has been offering up a cash reward to anyone who could demonstrate scientific evidence of paranormal activity, and no one had ever received a single penny. But he hates to see them lose...
Peter Thiel on big data
Number of drinks per week in the U.S., annals of the top ten percent
The top 10 percent of American drinkers – 24 million adults over age 18 – consume, on average, 74 alcoholic drinks per week. That works out to a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels, 18 bottles of wine, or three 24-can cases of beer. In one week.
No comment on where I fall on this distribution.
Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper?
More here:
Customers are racists, not firms
Numerous resume studies have documented racial disparities in callback rates for interviews. This study tries to figure out why: Black applicants faced major discrimination when applying for jobs with a customer focus. Researchers looked for jobs with words like “customer,” “sales,” “advisor,” “representative,” “agent,” and “loan officer” in the description. For jobs such as these, the...