Duke researcher Jonathan Wai interviewed me for his Psychology Today blog, Finding the Next Einstein. Below are my answers to two of his questions.Psychology TodayIs it true Feynman's IQ score was only 125?Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the...
Monday, 26 December 2011
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Linus said it best (Luke 2.14) in A Charlie Brown Christmas:And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the...
Thursday, 22 December 2011
This post addresses comments by Sineruse, David Versace, and others on earlier threads here, here and here.I've been pretty busy during my visit to BGI so I kind of lost track of the conversation. But here are my thoughts.I think it is possible that Asian "strength of application" overpredicts later career success*. There could be many reasons for this. For example, it could be that Asian hard work boosts test taking results and grades more than it does real world achievement. It could also be that tests and grades are fair, whereas Asians face...
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Friday, 16 December 2011
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. Almost every journalist who has talked to me about this issue asks "Gee, how long has this been going on?" and are surprised when I tell them at least 30 years! But who cares, those Asians don't make trouble: they'll just work harder ...Applying While AsianTo check or not to check the Asian box? That is the pointed choice faced by Asian-American students applying for admission to what are supposed to be the most tolerant places on earth, the nation’s colleges.The Associated Press ran a report on Asian...
Thursday, 15 December 2011
In the past few years we have seen a large influx of undergraduate students from China. Since UO non-resident tuition is about $20k per annum, these students must come from relatively affluent families there. The conventional wisdom among professors familiar with China is that most of these kids are slackers -- they didn't do well enough on the gaokao to be admitted to a top Chinese university. How good are "slackers" from China? Judge for yourself.Below...
Hmm... pricing in a 30-50% chance of huge vol due to euro credit crisis? If you're sure it's going to happen, some 6-12 month vol swaps might be a good trade. Any experts want to comment? (Are there better instruments for this?) How much further can Merkozy kick the can down the road?On the volatility of volatilityA pro sez to me: "Vol is totally mispriced right now. Lots of funding requirements in the new yea...
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
"The revelation can occur at any time. A poet never rests.He's always working, even when he dreams.Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one.You think you are alone, and as the years go by,if the stars are on your side, you may discoverthat you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friendswhom you will never get to know, but who love you.And that is an immense rewar...
More on elitism and credentialism in an article by Editor in Chief Robert Teitelman at The Deal. Related posts.The cognitive-phonetic dissonance of Asian names for English speakers is on display: I am referred to as "Hsui" and "Hsiu", but never "Hsu" (Hopefully fixed before you read this :-)The Deal: There is a fascinating discussion unfolding across the Internet that reaches into all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies. Its origin is a paper from Lauren Rivera, "Ivies, Extracurricular and Exclusion: Elite Employers' Use of Educational Credentials."...
Monday, 12 December 2011
Gracie breakdown of the Mir-Nog fight. Glad to see even two blackbelts named Gracie had a little trouble reconstructing exactly what happened. You have to give props to Frank Mir -- 260 lbs with technical and explosive jits. I always wondered how Sakuraba got so good with his acrobatic kimura attacks -- to train that would seem to put your partners at a lot of ri...
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Earlier discussion here, here and here.WSJ: ... wages are rising in developing countries such as India ... but remain relatively soft here in the U.S. and the U.K.... The price gap has narrowed between offshore legal processing groups—which charge between $25-$35 an hour for basic legal services such as document review—and domestic services offered by contract review attorneys in places such as the Midwest, which might charge $25 to $30 per hour. ...The glut of new law school graduates in 2012 will likely put offshore legal services outfits at...
WAR Frank Mir!No time to tap. I love his explosive style of BJJ. In training you're taught to let the other guy tap, but a real fight is different. See here for some technical post-fight comments from Frank. (More MMA and BJJ theory at 2:45 here.)The fundamental asymmetry of MMA"F@ck jiujitsu -- I'm gonna break your nose.""Maybe, but if I get my hands on you there's no tapping. I'm tearing your arm off."In MMA, it's unfair that the striker gets to...
Friday, 9 December 2011
In an earlier comment thread someone asked whether Asian-American college performance is commensurate with their SAT scores. If A-A SAT scores are artificially elevated by cramming then one might expect it to under-predict college GPA. (On the other hand, if Asians are more conscientious and hard working overall, one might* expect that to elevate both SAT scores and college GPA relative to other groups.) This data from the College Board shows that...
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Jim Manzi writes about recruiting at elite consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG. The earlier post of mine he refers to is here (click through for more links, including to an even earlier post with excerpts from the Rivera paper).National Review: There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about a research paper by Lauren Rivera that describes how elite professional service firms (top investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms) go about hiring. ...... I’ll focus my comments on management consulting, where I used to...
Sunday, 4 December 2011
I am ecstatic at now having thousands of books, both technical and non-technical, available in searchable formats on my laptop, tablet and iphone.I came across this brief Borges piece, originally published in 1960, by accident while surfing through my digital book collection. A quick trip to my shelves showed that I had this in physical form, but somehow had never read it.See also the perils of precocity.The WitnessIn a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the...
A commenter linked to this Guardian interview with a UK quant. I found a number of his comments interesting enough to post here. See the original for more detail about the software he develops. I always felt that if I went into finance it would be as a trader, but with quant skills ;-)"My parents discovered that I was of a mathematical bent aged three when I was apparently lining up my toys in order of size and then colour. I was one of these terrible, precocious kids who did their mathematics O-level aged 12. After a long academic career I ended...
Friday, 2 December 2011
True story. Theoretical physicist saves enough money during 5 years of postdoc to retire -- living entirely from investment income at $7k per year of expenditures (budget).I simply saved more than three quarters of my income for five years. The math works out. If you save 83% and spend 17%, you need 25*0.17/0.83 ~ 5 years of savings, where 25 is the inverse of 4%, which is a safe withdrawal rate for at least 30 years.While enjoying frugal living and retirement in his mid-30's, this former physicist starts a widely followed blog and authors a book:...
Increasing numbers of Asian-American college applicants understand the odds are stacked against them, and react by not declaring their ethnicity or (in the case of mixed race applicants) checking any box but Asian.See previous related posts: here , hereI'm Not Asian (AP): Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white."I didn't...
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
NYTimes reports: DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data. Spooks and other scientists have similar problems. See also here.NYTimes: BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day.BGI churns out so much data that it often cannot transmit its results to clients or collaborators over the Internet or other communications lines because that would take...
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
This paper presents evidence in favor of the signaling (as opposed to human capital building) model of elite higher education. Of course, the data is quite crude and different fields may tilt more in one direction or the other. For example, I think most science and engineering students who attend MIT or Caltech are doing it because they feel it will develop their human capital (i.e., they will learn more and receive a perhaps painfully rigorous education) than because of the signaling value, although the latter is non-negligible.See earlier posts...
Friday, 25 November 2011
This detailed study concludes that law school grades, not prestige, have the strongest correlation with career success. I'd be interested in reactions from attorneys to these results. See earlier post credentialistm and elite performance, and links therein. Compare to success of graduate programs in physics in placing theoreticians.The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness and School Performance Shape Legal CareersRichard Sander and Jane YakowitzAbstractIf...
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
I found this here, but it is originally due to Raymond Smullyan. I first learned about Godel's theorem when I read Douglas Hofstader's book Godel, Escher, Bach in high school. I still remember lugging the thick volume around in my backpack, and working through the early chapters on predicate logic. This treatment is much more compact! :^)We have some sort of machine that prints out statements in some sort of language. It needn't be a statement-printing machine exactly; it could be some sort of technique for taking statements and deciding if they...
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Friday, 18 November 2011
This is a nice result. I haven't checked the calculations, but I like the logic very much. I'm kicking myself for not having tried harder to precisely formalize what the authors refer to as the "statistical interpretation" (note: this is quite a confusing terminology for most people -- see Further comments below) of the quantum state. Apparently, once you formalize this interpretation, it is easy to prove that it has to disagree with the predictions of ordinary quantum theory.This "statistical interpretation" (e.g., that the wavefunction, or quantum...
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Nice discussion on Econtalk. I suspect Baumeister has slightly stronger opinions than he expressed to Russ.Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and the author of Is There Anything Good About Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the differences between men and women in cultural and economic areas. Baumeister argues that men aren't superior to women nor are women superior to men. Rather there are some things men are better at while women excel at a different set of tasks and that these tradeoffs are a product of evolution and cultural...
Monday, 14 November 2011
My vote for best recent dystopian fiction featuring genetic engineering goes to the An Orison Of Sonmi 451 chapters of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Can't wait to see the big budget movie. Will they retain the Korean peninsula setting? Honorable mention: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities. This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.“Comfort”? How do you mean? To enslave an...
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
I've always hated Joe Paterno and Penn State's holier than thou sham. Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top.NYTimes: ... I have a hard time understanding why a 28 year old man, the grad student, did not go straight into that shower and rescue the kid. He is a coward. Law, lawsuits and all the oversight in the world is valueless unless people step up. This creep Sandusky was “caught” several times, in each case the so called men who witnessed it, quietly back away. Shame on them all. Shame on Mr. Paterno whose god status created...
Monday, 7 November 2011
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Two good articles on the state of higher education. The first dares broach the "higher education bubble" question.a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false">NY Review of Books: ... In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their...
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