Cheap at sea, pricey on the plate: The voodoo of lobster economics
Amid an unprecendent glut, Larry the doomed lobster is followed from a Nova Scotia trap to a Toronto table
Hasnain says:
This is a great read on how lobsters go from the sea to your plate.
Posted on 2014-07-19T07:00:53+0000
Rachel Aviv: A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About No Child Left Behind
According to statements later made by teachers and administrators, the cheating process at Parks Middle School, in Atlanta, began to take the form of a routine. During testing week, after students had completed the day’s section, principal Christopher Waller distracted the testing coordinator. Then,…
Hasnain says:
This is a sad story about how No Child Left Behind and data-driven teacher evaluation policies forced over a hundred teachers at forty plus schools to cheat and modify standardized test scores (at times without the students' knowledge).
Posted on 2014-07-19T06:48:37+0000
Foul Territory
Fred Fletcher doesn’t watch baseball anymore, but one night in May, he got a text from a friend: Something had happened at that evening’s
Hasnain says:
"How fast was it going? We don’t know for sure, but a line drive from a major league batter can easily exceed 100 miles per hour. We know some other things. We know that a baseball weighs five ounces. We know that force equals mass times acceleration. We know that Fred Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter, whom he will identify only as “A,” was sitting precisely 144 feet from home plate. The laces on her sneakers were knotted in neat bows. And she—well, not just she, but everyone around her—had less than one second to react to Cabrera’s line drive."
Posted on 2014-07-19T06:36:31+0000
Programming is not math, huh? • Jeremy Kun
You’re right, programming isn’t math. But when someone says this, chances are it’s a programmer misunderstanding mathematics. I often hear the refrain that programmers don’t need to know any math to be proficient and have... | Jeremy Kun | ∈ Mathematicians ∩ Programmers
kqr/gists
gists - With way too messy gist.github pages this is an attempt to organise my snippets
Hasnain says:
"A Gentle Introduction to Monad Transformers
Or, Values as Exceptions"
Posted on 2014-07-18T05:18:51+0000
Evan Sultanik | A Page of Personl Deification (and Other Self-Deprecating Incongruities)
Sometimes taking the easy way out isn't nearly as bad as it might seem!posted Thursday February 13th, 2014 at 08:19:00Tagged: Math
Hasnain says:
"That's really surprising, especially realizing that this applies for all NP-hard problems, if formulated correctly. So, simply choosing a random solution is often effectively as good as the best approximation algorithms that are currently known. In fact, in our paper we linked above we present some empirical evidence suggesting that the random solutions are often even closer to optimal than ones produced by state-of-the-art approximation algorithms."
Posted on 2014-07-18T00:57:30+0000
Seth Mnookin: Fighting a One-of-a-Kind Disease
What do you do if your child has a condition that is new to science? Until recently, Bertrand Might was the only known patient with a certain genetic disorder. His parents began searching for others.
Hasnain says:
This is really really moving. A story about a couple's fight to figure out what was wrong with their son.
The father in question is Matt Might, famous for "An illustrated guide to a PhD" and "Hunting down my son's killer".
Posted on 2014-07-18T00:50:44+0000
LLVM Project Blog: FTL: WebKit’s LLVM based JIT
blog.llvm.org
www.eecs.harvard.edu
eecs.harvard.edu
Gamasutra - The History of Civilization
[Gamasutra is proud to be partnering with the IGDA's Preservation SIG to present detailed official histories of each of the first ten games voted into the Digital Game Canon. The Canon "provides a starting-point for the difficult task of preserving this history inspired by the role of that the U.S.…