rishubhav | 10 years ago | on: It Depends What You Study, Not Where
rishubhav's comments
rishubhav | 10 years ago | on: A chilling mathematical model of inequality
The model in the paper is offensively dumb. A basic explanation (taken from a web-forum where economists hang out):
The paper says
The model consists of N agents, each with capital ci with i = 1, . . . , N. Agents are allowed to trade among themselves M objects. Each object m = 1, . . . , M has a price πm.
Starting from a feasible allocation matrix A, we introduce a random trading dynamics in which a good m is firstly picked up uniformly at random among all goods. Its owner then attempts to sell it to another agent i picked up uniformly at random among the other agents. If agent i has enough cash to buy the product m, that is if `i > πm, the transaction is successful and his/her cash decreases by πm while the cash of the seller increases by πm.
In other words:
1. Prices cannot vary. The price a good is set in stone.
2. Agents do not purchase things they want. They "pick up" goods and immediately try to sell them.
3. They sell them at these pre-determined prices to other people, whether the other people want them or not. Well, there's no such thing as "want" in this model.
4. Nor is there any planning by agents. No ability for them to say "Crap, I only have $5 left. Better not spend it on this vase this guy is selling."
Original discussion source:
http://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/physicists-model-economic...
rishubhav | 10 years ago | on: An AI system has become the third-most important signal to Google search results
One of the most annoying for code searches is that the engine seems to ignore punctuation, even in quotations. For example, searching for
"the quick brown fox; jumped over the lazy dog"
returns hits for the version without the semicolon
rishubhav | 11 years ago | on: College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to E-Readers
I'm suprised that no one's mentioned this yet, but I've found that even for linear prose-text, my recall of what I've read is much better with paper books than with ebooks.
My working hypothesis for why this is true is that it's easily the mentally differentiate the paper books I've read: when I try to remember a book, often the first thing that comes up in my mind is the cover art. My mental records of paper books are indexed by a multitude of factors---what the cover looked like, what the paper felt like, approximate size, typeface, etc.---that just aren't there for ebooks
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All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.