John Hennessey (Stanford president) and Salman Khan (Khan Academy) discuss higher education and digital technology.Learning or Credentialing? Signaling or Sorting? Some comments: 1. Internet technology can enhance learning. However, I think the largest impact will be on cognitively gifted or very motivated individuals who will be able to accelerate their education (see, e.g., Khan Academy). For average students, the main barriers to learning have to do with self-motivation and I am not sure that streaming video of lectures, or even...
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Feynman once said there's Plenty of room at the bottom (nanotechnology).In the context of human genetics, it's clear there's plenty of room at the top -- possibly as much as +30 SDs based on existing variance in the human population! (Compare to the result of selection in maize.) This is the last slide from my BGA 2012 talk:At some point I may be able to post the audio, as all the talks were recorded. The slides may be a bit hard to...
How finance sucks human capital from more productive activities. FT Alphaville:... a bloated financial sector can also suck in more than its share of talent, hampering the development of other sectors.8That last sentence is a smack in the face, isn’t it? FT Alphaville was dying to know what Footnote 8 would contain.Here it is:8 See S Cecchetti and E Kharroubi, “Reassessing the impact of finance on growth”, BIS, January 2012, mimeoSo we looked it up. From the introduction:… in our examination of industry-level data, we find that industries...
Friday, 22 June 2012
This is the physics building at Edinburgh University, where I gave a talk:A portrait of Peter Higgs:The opening reception for BGA 2012:BGA talks at the Royal College of Physicians: Archival interview with twins research pioneer Tom Bouchard:Robert Plomin on twins and modern SNP-based heritability:My last evening in beautiful Edinburgh:...
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Monday, 18 June 2012
Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Von Neumann, Feynman and Ulam, back in the day. (Probably Santa Fe or Los Alamos.) Some Ulam quotes from his autobiography Adventures of a Mathematician. One of the luckiest accidents of my life happened the day G. D. Birkhoff came to tea at von Neumann's house while I was visiting there. We talked and, after some discussion of mathematical problems, he turned to me and said, “There is an organization at Harvard called the Society of Fellows....
The afternoon of June 20 we have a break from ICQG 2012 (International Conference on Quantitative Genetics). I'll be giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh, in case anyone is interested. Both Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell started their higher education at Edinburgh. It's quite an honor to give a lecture in the James Clerk Maxwell Building! :-) Mmmm... doughnuts! Roberts Funded Lecture Introduction to technology startupsSteve Hsu Professor of Theoretical Physics & Director, Institute for Theoretical Science University...
Sunday, 10 June 2012
In a week I'll be attending ICQG 2012 (International Conference on Quantitative Genetics) and BGA 2012 (annual meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association), both in Edinburgh. If you want to meet up, let me know!The title of my talk is Some results on the genetic architecture of human intelligence. I will post my slides on the blog at some point. For now, here are a few (click for larger versions). As a physicist and quantum mechanic it is...
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
My review of George Szpiro's Pricing the Future: Physics, Finance and the 300-year Journey to the Black–Scholes Equation is in this month's Physics World. I'll post a link to the review itself if and when they make an ungated version available. Until then you'll have to content yourself with the excerpts below (click for larger version). See related post with some notes I made for the review. Financial Weaponry Almost every physicist or mathematician...
Monday, 4 June 2012
Our biggest astrophysics projects are a rounding error in the spook budget. NYTimes: The phone call came like a bolt out of the blue, so to speak, in January 2011. On the other end of the line was someone from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. They had some spare, unused “hardware” to get rid of. Was NASA interested? ... Sitting in a clean room in upstate New York were a pair of telescopes the same size as the famed Hubble Space Telescope, but which had been built to point down at the...
Sunday, 3 June 2012
The Nike Prefontaine Classic was in Eugene yesterday. The wife and kids went but I'm not that big on live sports. We'll have the Olympic trials here later in the summer.Liu Xiang tied the world record at 12.87, but it was ruled wind-aided at +2.4m/s. This field was world class, only missing current world record holder Dayron Robles of Cuba. David Oliver, the US record holder, was a WR at Howard and is huge for a hurdler at around 200 lbs. Ashton Eaton, in lane 1, is a top decathlete who competed at U Oregon as a collegian. My kids got to play...
Saturday, 2 June 2012
Tom Doctoroff, an ad man working in Shanghai, has good insights into modern Chinese culture. This interview with Leonard Lopate is worth a listen:ChinaSmack: ... After 13 years here, I am fundamentally convinced that there is a unifying “Confucian” conflict — between self-protection and status projection — that brands have a fundamental role in resolving. Unlike practically any other country (Korea and Vietnam come closest), China is both boldly ambitious (ladders are meant to be climbed and meritocracy is a cherished value) and regimented, with...
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