I knew the author of this article when she was an assistant professor at UO. Since then, she moved to UIUC (Illinois), received tenure, became a department head, left academia and moved back to Eugene. Her web site.Karen, stop by and see us some time! :-)Chronicle of Higher Education: Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you're not doing your job.Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those...
Friday, 30 September 2011
Soros outlines his proposal for solving the eurozone crisis. It seems to me that the best informed people are the most alarmed by the current situation. I notice Pimco just went into "risk-off" mode.Financial Times: Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation. They need to regain control and they need to do so now.Three bold steps are needed. First, the governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common Treasury...
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Satyajit Das on what's ahead in the eurozone: videoPossible chain of events: More pain ahead for Greece, culminating in a big write down for its creditors. ECB solvency challenges. Sovereign debt crises for Italy and Spain. Global recession followed by debt deflation. A lost decade worse than what Japan experienced in the 1990s.Larry Summers interview with Martin Wolf: vi...
I wonder what Apple's response will be to this. Perhaps we'll see a "split-browser" update of (mobile) Safari soon. On the desktop I switched over to Chrome 1-2 years ago because it feels faster and it runs Google apps flawlessly. If Silk tries to do things too aggressively it might break a few applications or web pages (very tough to QA stuff like that). But probably there are speedups (e.g., smart pre-caching of popular content) that can be achieved without risk of breaking functionality and which can be exploited within a more conservative...
Sunday, 25 September 2011
A fine essay on Hemingway by James Salter, a review of the new book by Paul Hendrickson.NY Review of Books: ... From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing,...
Friday, 23 September 2011
Excerpts from an interview with Edward Luttwak.... Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities and nothing else.I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has...
Thursday, 22 September 2011
I was wondering when they would get around to this. Australian Aborigines are one of the most unique human populations. Many people have been curious about their genetics and deep history.Although I was just recently at BGI (where this sequencing was done), no one told me anything about a hair sample!See also Razib's discussion.Science: We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal...
A good interview with Ron Suskind about his new book Confidence Men. I believe what Suskind wrote about the Bush administration has been largely vindicated. Suskind comes across as very careful with his sourcing. (So does Joe McInnis in this interview about his Palin bio The Rogue.) Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top ;-)Fresh Air: ... Suskind says Summers' style of leadership at the White House was to "control the show" and "lead by fiat.""A young economist ... [once told me that Larry once said] 'Here's the way it works....
Monday, 19 September 2011
From Fermi Remembered. The insightful biographical sketch at the beginning of the book, by Emelio Segre, includes details of Fermi's early (self) education and entry into Scuola Normale Superiore.Murray Gell-Mann: When Fermi lay dying in Billings Hospital, I realized how much I cared for this brilliant, funny, difficult man. I was on leave in the East, and I invited Frank (C.N.) Yang to come with me to Chicago to see him. When we got to the bedside, Enrico kept telling us not to be downcast. "It is not so bad," he said. He told of a Catholic priest...
Saturday, 17 September 2011
The other day I was discussing the Israeli Talpiot program with another Caltecher. I thought it would be great if we had a similar program in the US. He said it sounded like Ender's Game :-)If anyone out there is an expert on the Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (their SAT-equivalent), please contact me. We're trying to determine the +3 SD cutoff (relative to the US population) for our GWAS.See earlier post on Talpiot and Israeli startups. USAToday: ... The "Talpiot" program is perhaps the best reflection of the army's technological drive.The...
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
The next project with my colleague Jim Schombert is to see whether student personality inventories increase our ability to predict college GPA. In previous work we found a .4 or so correlation between SAT score and upper division in-major GPA. (Other studies, which focus on freshman GPA, typically find lower correlations but this is partly because academically stronger freshmen usually take harder courses. At the upper division level, majors typically...
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Is this true? Let's say the top 400 families average a few billion each. Then the average net worth for the bottom 50 million families would have to be about $20-30k. Seems possible.Guardian: ... In fact, so staggeringly unbalanced has America become that the richest 400 American families have the same net worth as the bottom 50% of the nation.If this outrages or saddens you, I recommend Who rules America? If you believe this is a just, pareto optimal outcome, I suggest graduate school in economics, perhaps in Chicago ...
It's rough at the top! But, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.I guess I'm an alpha trying to adapt to living beta. Nothing like a steep drop in testosterone level to help with this ...WSJ: One evening a week, a group of CEOs meets in a Manhattan psychiatrist's office and engages in an ancient ritual. Ostensibly, it is a support group. Inevitably, it becomes a battle for dominance."Whenever you put alpha males together, the most aggressive will overpower the others," says T. Byram Karasu, the veteran psychiatrist who has run the sessions...
Monday, 12 September 2011
No wonder I feel so wimpy :-(NYTimes: ... Testosterone was measured when the men were 21 and single, and again nearly five years later. Although testosterone naturally decreases with age, men who became fathers showed much greater declines, more than double the childless men.And men who spent more than three hours a day caring for children — playing, feeding, bathing, toileting, reading or dressing them — had the lowest testosterone.Below is the abstract from the original paper (PNAS).In species in which males care for young, testosterone (T) is...
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Bill Gross of PIMCO writes:During this country’s recent economic “recovery,” real corporate profits increased by four times the amount of working wages in dollar terms, and, as the chart below shows, are 50% higher than at the turn of the century while wages remain relatively unchanged, something that has not occurred since this country’s nuptials were concluded over three centuries ago. Is it any wonder that preliminary battlefield skirmishes in...
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
I've now lost track of how many times I've been here.$10 million in sequencing machines in this room ($500k Illumina HiSeqs). But I think they're just for training. There are a hundred more at the HK lab.An old poster. Monitor Group report whose cover is depicted.Amusing signage (if you can read Chinese). Note the Gattaca background.Shooting interviews for the documentary on our research project.The dreaded baijiu. This brand is called "Red Sta...
Monday, 5 September 2011
A friend who is starting graduate school asked for some advice.1. There is often a tradeoff between the advisor from whom you will learn the most vs the one who will help your career the most. Letters of recommendation are the most important factor in obtaining a postdoc/faculty job, and some professors are 10x as influential as others. However, the influential prof might be a jerk and not good at training students. The kind mentor with deep knowledge or the approachable junior faculty member might not be a mover and shaker.2. Most grad students...
Sunday, 4 September 2011
Dune is my favorite science fiction novel. But I never finished any of the sequels, which I found tedious. I more or less stopped reading science fiction when I was a kid, so perhaps my opinion about the sequels is unreliable.The appendix below hints at a larger framework (see last sentence) that is not revealed in the first book. (Nor in the Wikipedia entries on Dune, as far as I can tell.) What is this larger plan, in which the Bene Gesserit are only pawns? Is it revealed in later books or in interviews with Frank Herbert? Appendix III: Report...
Saturday, 3 September 2011
At the beginning of the debate you get to hear a bunch of Brits at the LSE shouting "Yo Keynes!" and "Yo Hayek!" in support of their respective sides. No one seems capable of convincing the other side of anything, but the discussion is entertaining. Keynes v HayekSpeaker(s): Professor George Selgin, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Duncan Weldon, Dr Jamie Whyte Recorded on 26 July 2011.How do we get out of the financial mess we're in? Two of the great economic thinkers of the 20th century had sharply contrasting views: John Maynard Keynes believed that...
Friday, 2 September 2011
Shenzhen municipality key laboratory -- cognitive genomics research.Supposedly this means I'll get a special visa and won't have to keep applying for a new one every 12 months.Note this distinction doesn't mean our group is part of the Chinese government, as some paranoids have claimed. BGI is a private institution with both for-profit and non-profit ar...
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