Marginal Revolution :: Tyler Cowen :: Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the United States?
Simplified analogy: I'm not bidding up the price of quadcopters. That doesn't mean that if we had more of them I wouldn't find cool stuff to do with them.
(For other takes on this see Ian Hathaway and Alex Tabarrok.)
The paper Cowen is responding to states: "The annual number of computer science graduates doubled between 1998 and 2004, and is currently over 50 percent higher than its 1998 level." Another way to describe this situation is "The annual number of CS graduates has fallen by a quarter in less than a decade." That gives a rather different spin than the authors formulation.
◊ Uncrate :: Information Graphics by Sandra Rendgen
Recommended. Both useful and pretty. There aren't many books I've gotten from the UMD library for work that I'm happy to leave on the coffee table.
As a general rule, I'm skeptical of papers that make heavy use of vocabulary like "problematise." But another general rule is that Borges' "Library of Babel" is amazing, so...
HBR Blogs :: Grant McCracken :: Is Timex Suffering the Early Stages of Disruption?
Bloomberg :: Virginia Postrel :: Dove’s Fake New 'Real Beauty' Ads
Dove did a great job of rhetoric but then they had to go and dishonestly cloak it in the banners of Science.
Physics Buzz :: Chris Gorski :: Physicist Proposes New Way To Think About Intelligence
Wissner-Gross calls the concept at the center of the research "causal entropic forces." These forces are the motivation for intelligent behavior. They encourage a system to preserve as many future histories as possible. For example, in the cart-and-rod exercise, Entropica controls the cart to keep the rod upright. Allowing the rod to fall would drastically reduce the number of remaining future histories, or, in other words, lower the entropy of the cart-and-rod system. Keeping the rod upright maximizes the entropy. It maintains all future histories that can begin from that state, including those that require the cart to let the rod fall.
I'm not sure I buy this, but I'll hold judgement until I read the Phys Rev Lett paper. I do know this though: there are already about 10,000 different definitions of "entropy" in different fields, and that causes no end of inter-disciplinary confusion. I'm not looking forward to having to keep track of another.
Growth Matters :: Clement Wan :: Experiments in Education
io9 :: A map of U.S. roads and nothing else
