Arabic weather term ‘haboob’ is apparently troubling for some Texans
It didn't sit well with some residents.
Simple Set Game Proof Stuns Mathematicians | Quanta Magazine
A new series of papers has settled a long-standing question related to the popular game in which players seek patterned sets of three cards.
Hasnain says:
"Now, however, mathematicians have solved the cap set problem using an entirely different method — and in only a few pages of fairly elementary mathematics. “One of the delightful aspects of the whole story to me is that I could just sit down, and in half an hour I had understood the proof,” Gowers said."
Posted on 2016-05-31T22:41:44+0000
Moving Forward on Basic Income
We have a few updates we want to share on our Basic Income Project: Our Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes is joining Basic Income Project as our Research Director. She recently...
Hasnain says:
"We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs—no matter what, especially if there are enough resources to make it possible. We don’t yet know how it should look or how to pay for it, but basic income seems a promising way to do this.
One reason we think it may work is that technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources. Although basic income seems fiscally challenging today, in a world where technology replaces existing jobs and basic income becomes necessary, technological improvements should generate an abundance of resources and the cost of living should fall dramatically."
Posted on 2016-05-31T17:15:15+0000
The New Napster: How Sci-Hub is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry - The Art of Ass-Kicking
There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in Kazakhstan), the site has seen a major uptick in the last year. In February 2016,...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-05-30T21:01:01+0000
The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development
About MeI’ve been working in software development for twenty-eight years. My current position is Senior Development Director at a software consulting compa…
Hasnain says:
An engrossing read on managing software developers.
"Even worse is when bug fixes are included in completed work item counts when those bugs are fixed by the software developers that caused them in the first place. For example consider a project that developer #1 is likely to complete in ten days with a low or nonexistent bug count vs. developer #2 who is likely to complete it in five days but the feature ends up with four bugs eventually being discovered, each of which take two days to patch. Not to mention the extra support costs and negative customer experience that will result from those bugs.
In this scenario developer #1 only completed one work item in ten days and developer #2 completed five work items in thirteen days. Which developer is more productive? Your own completed work item metrics are probably lying to you. Don’t trust them and absolutely don’t publicize them."
Poverty: What Does It Mean To Be Poor? - SPIEGEL ONLINE
Poverty is measured on the basis of income, but that is often too one-dimensional for such a complex phenomenon. Researchers have developed better ways of defining who falls below the poverty line, but do those concepts stand up to the test?
Boys who live with books ‘earn more as adults’
Italian economists find access to books can materially affect earnings compared with those who grew up with few or none
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-05-30T00:47:13+0000
We need to challenge the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators
In this article Andrew Sayer revives some concepts – ‘unearned income’, ‘rentiers’, ‘functionless investors’, and ‘improperty’ – to explain why the very rich are unjust and dysfunctiona…
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-05-29T17:15:25+0000
Backreaction: The Holy Grail of Crackpot Filtering: How the arXiv decides what’s science – and...
Where do we draw the boundary between science and pseudoscience? It’s is a question philosophers have debated for as long as there’s been science – and last time I looked they hadn’t made much progress. When you ask a sociologist their answer is normally a variant of: Science is what scientists do.…
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-05-28T05:50:09+0000
I’m a black man. Here’s what happened when I booked an Airbnb. — Stay Woke
This is a story of an AIRBNB experience I recently went through. I met this awesome lady Crissie in my Facebook Group. Super nice lady…
Hasnain says:
"So I had a white friend book for my same dates and all of a sudden her plans changed back hahaha. Approved immediately! LOL"
Ouch
Posted on 2016-05-28T04:54:37+0000