How much per hour does it cost to get an OK Cobol programmer to come fix stuff versus an OK Java programmer?

There are lots of possible reasons for the disparity, including, as others have pointed out, that a "line of code" doesn't mean the same thing between Cobol and Java, but if it's going to be reported in dollars instead of hours, then it needs to be made meaningful by the difference in costs for the two languages.

O wait, no I don't.

"Economic models are always wrong", geez. So, when interest rates fell people didn't take out more loans? When unemployment is high, overall demand doesn't tend to drop? When cellphone service is provided by just a few carriers prices don't rise?

*Some* models are very sensitive to their parameterizations. And yeah, they'll be really tricky. Lots of economic models are really, basically, correct.

At my university, I own the copyright by default, but when I tried to either do it public domain OR creative commons, the office which handles such things flipped out. They weren't angry or anything, they just didn't get it. It came down to doing things the usual way OR being late submitting and so not graduating. So, I have a typical copyright on my thesis.

However, now that I think about it (and you could do the same thing), since it's my copyright, there's nothing to stop me (or you) from re-publishing with a Creative Commons license after-the-fact. Hmmm....

Ben Goldacre talks about these "equation for the perfect X" stories which turn up regularly: formula for fame, equation for a neckline, perfect "wiggle", a particularly bad propagator.

It's bullshit non-science to generate publicity.

It turns out not to be needed for our kid, who loves a bunch of different books, but I tried to motivate learning to read by nearly refusing to read him comics. That wasn't because I think they're bad, but because comics (once that use the medium well, at least) don't read aloud easily. As the reader, you constantly have to be deciding the chronology of which sounds/thoughts/voices come when, and whether to whisper, and when to say, "and Batman's thinking..." or whatever. And then you've got maybe a bunch of panels with no words at all, and do you say anything for them or let the pictures speak for themselves?

Blah, It's just not fun for me reading those aloud. So, they're reserved for solo reading.

OK, maybe overstated. But I think it was 2 years ago or so that I saw Conan O'Brien interviewing Quentin Tarantino, and WOW, those are two enormous nerds. From what I've seen of Tarantino, he can't help himself, and maybe O'Brien can but instead makes fun of himself for it. These are the people defining pop culture, and they're us (well, except they're a lot better at it than me, but...)

Stick to short stories, exclusively or almost exclusively. Short stories have always been the medium which best captures SF, gets to the point the, "here's an idea, let's explore it some" nature of SF, while when things expand out to novel size it loses some of that (in spite of many great SF novels).

Plus, doing short stories makes it easier to keep people's attention, and less likely to lose people who've fallen a few chapters behind in the reading. Either you've read the story or you haven't. Changing stories day by day / week by week / whatever means you can get different styles in that appeal to different kids and break any monotony. It also gives you more flexibility to change your mind about course direction in the middle-if it seems like a good time to change direction, you don't have to finish slogging through the current novel first.

Also, you're not going to be able to cover the span of what you'd like to cover in one class, you'll have to leave things out. If you go with novels, you'll have to leave more things out.

It seems to me that one doesn't need to solve some grand philosophical question to resolve this. The developer who objects would be within their rights to simply take the source, build the app, and put it at the App Store for free. No?

Following up further from web searches, the world population in 1918 was about 2B (maybe 1.8B). According to this, 21,642,274 are estimated to have died. That's a higher proportion than 47M/6.7B.

I haven't done any research on stats beyond following the bIONG bOING link in the grandparent, but that said, "28 per cent of Canadians and Americans contracted the Spanish flu". That means they caught it. The 5% death was also going from the grandparent as translating "Well over 9 of 10...". For the 47M I used the lower bOING bOING stat of 2.5% deaths, "Worldwide, an estimated 2.5 per cent of the sick died of complications".

It's obviously a wildly rough estimate, which doesn't take into account things which would make it better or worse now, or better or worse in some places than others, but as a wildly rough estimate it's not way off. And it's just intended to point out that the framing of the statistics which is supposed to make us feel better is in fact saying that it was a horrible plague--not on the scale of smallpox or the black death, but still a horrible plague.

I remain very agnostic about how bad this sine flu will be, though.

This reminds me of those experiments which phrase questions as, "Would you accept a treatment which has an 80% survival rate?" versus "Would you accept a treatment which has a 20% fatality rate?"

Or, around the university here, "social norms" marketing things like "65% of students don't drink and drive."

If 7 of 10 don't catch the flu (3 in 10 do, a very high rate), and (say) 19 in 20 who catch it fully recover (1 in 20 dies, pretty serious bug!), then your chance of dying from this specific thing in a pretty short time-window are better than 1 in 100.

Using the bOING bOING numbers of 28% infection and 2.5% fatality, it still kills 7 out of 1000 people, or about 47 million people worldwide. I think AIDS is killing around 2 million people annually.

So, yeah, those stats don't make me feel any better.

If you've got a good (meaning clear and predictive) mathematical model and it turns out wrong, then that's also useful to know. If you've got intuitions and stories and pictures of data which seem good when explained by the right person, and those turn out wrong--well, that could just be that you were misunderstanding, couldn't it? Can you prove that the approach was wrong when it's fuzzy?

Math will always have an important place in finance, because it can be understood and judged. The alternative way to judge results is by looking at who makes the most money, but even that can be very noisy and misleading at times.

The question isn't whether math will be important in finance. It's (a) whether the particular tools/models commonly used will change a little or a lot, and (b) whether the people using the models will have the understanding and wisdom to apply them only as appropriate.

(a) means if you want to be involved in financial math, try to be broad enough that very different approaches won't be completely alien to you, and (b) means you should study some economics / psychology / business so you can connect the models to the reality.

A rule for assigning a value to something--when you come right down to it, an arbitrary rule, even if it turns out to be useful--is not a law. Sheesh!

I fall into the scared shit about global climate change thinking we should get on the ball with a vengeance to try to fix it camp.

BUT, I don't entirely trust my own motivations in this regard. Partly it's risk-aversion--if there's a reasonable chance of the nasty predictions, it's worth trying to fix it. Largely it's accepting that the authorities who understand this shit mostly agree. I DON'T understand this shit.

That's different than, for instance, the role of vaccines in causing autism. There's really clear data that it doesn't. Even if I don't understand the mechanisms, all I have to trust is the studies weren't fraudulent and I can be quite comfortable that getting my kids vaccinated won't give them autism.

I haven't seen the equivalent for climate change. Our sample size is awfully small, even if you try to convince yourself different eras are separate samples.

I might be missing something, but if I am, I REALLY want someone to point it out to me, and to the skeptics. Where's the climate change equivalent of the vaccine studies?