Information Processing

Ever wonder how Jamaica, a country of 3 million people, can compete with the US and totally dominate all of Europe and Asia when it comes to...

I thought I'd also link to some interesting data from a paper by UT Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh, discussed here on the NYTimes F...

What good is higher education? The conventional view is that, in addition to producing a well-informed citizenry, it builds important human ...

Interesting comments from Judith Warner of the Times, as she reports on a brain science workshop for journalists, held at MIT. The audience...

Calculate your social status using this tool from the NY Times. (Click on the components of class tab.) The inputs are occupation, educati...

Guess where they're headed instead: NYTimes : At M.I.T., a 2007 survey showed that 28.7 percent of undergraduates were headed for work i...

Somehow I don't think he and Jared Diamond share the same view of indigenous peoples. From The Descent of Man: The main conclusion ar...

This BBC documentary follows Mark Everett, the rock singer son of Hugh Everett III (the discoverer of many worlds quantum mechanics) as he ...

The vexing question of average differences between groups of humans has been the subject of scrutiny for a very long time. Differences in ...

I'd thought I'd share a link to this somewhat obscure WIRED article written in 1996 by science fiction author Neal Stephenson , abo...

Which is the better long term investment, equities or real estate? The conventional (but not necessarily correct!) wisdom for a long time ha...

Eminent biologist Erwin Chargaff was extremely bitter about not receiving a Nobel for his important work on DNA, which contributed to Crick...

Very, very middle brow discussion of the Singularity here at the NYTimes. Yes, I mean by Kurzweil as well as others: Kurzweil : For example...

Ever wonder what's behind the horrible experience of buying a car at a dealership? What the negotiation looks like from the other side? ...

This NYTimes article starkly illustrates the gap between rich and poor in India. It depicts a gated high-rise community with its own water...

Edinburgh sociology professor Donald MacKenzie wrote what I feel is the best history (so far) of modern finance and derivatives. In this ar...

If this article by John Cassidy in the New York Review of Books is any guide, Obama's grasp of economics may be orders of magnitude dee...

An entire special issue of IEEE Spectrum has been devoted to the Singularity, with contributions from people like Vernor Vinge, Rodney Broo...

I recently came across this interesting web site maintained by Kamal Sinha , an IIT ( Indian Institute of Technology ) Bombay alum who has ...

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I am digging out after returning from Paris. Here are some sports links I found of interest :-) Ulitmate figh...

A little tourist fun!

Gravitational Scattering, Black Holes and the Information Paradox, May 26 - 28, 2008. Web page here . My slides (pdf). This is quite a ...

In politics, as much as anywhere else, it's all about the benjamins. Obama isn't just smart and charismatic, he had the savvy and vi...

En route to Paris today. Hope the May 22 general strike doesn't strand me somewhere along the way! Summer 2008 Conference fun .

A revealing dialog from Brad DeLong, in which he questions the choice of topics in his spring semester macro course. A must read for all so...