Many are concerned about the rapidly rising cost of higher education. Recently this problem has gained a lot of attention, being somewhat integrated into the #occupy platform (insofar as there is one), and leading to abusive pepper spraying. The problem is that college tuition costs are rising far faster than inflation, putting it out of reach [...]
...full articleI’ve been invited to give a talk at the Spring meeting of the Pacific Northwest Association for College Physics. The theme of the conference is “The Unknown Physicist.” Along those lines I will be giving a talk about Physics at Google, and how a background in physics helps to solve Google’s engineering challenges. [...]
...full articleAs I draw my graduate educational experience to a close (tonight is the last class of my MBA!), I’d like to send an open suggestion to all educators who ask their students to produce written assignments. Let’s assign essays with a required word count instead of a page count. I’m guessing the page count is a throw-back to days when some students hand-wrote their assignments. This was true for me in high school 20 years ago. But today, turning an essay written in long-hand is unthinkable. Professional writers and editors usually consider the length of a document by the number…
...full articleThe UW Business School recently got a name: Foster. Michael G. Foster to be exact. Although just “Foster” is perhaps more fitting since 3 generations of the Foster family have contributed to making this possible. Just how much does it cost to get a prominent business school named after you? About $50 million. Here’s how it went down. It all started way back in 1928 when Albert Foster graduated from UW Business School. Not too long later, he founded the brokerage firm A.O. Foster & Co. which was successful enough to enable his family to get into the philanthropy business….
...full articleI’m writing this post from an OLPC. It’s on wifi here at Foo camp running a gecko based browser. First impressions -it’s hard to type on. I’m switching to 2 finger mode. The browser is a bit slow but runs ajaxy sites well. Hardware looks good. Screen is nice. A number of folks in our discussion group led by Ian Bicking wants to send a bunch of these prototypes to burningman to see how they hold up in a harsh physical environment. More later on a better keyboard…
...full articleI generally find CES exhausting. It’s amazing how far you have to walk to get anywhere in Vegas. It’s about a half mile walk from the hotel lobby to the elevators to get to your room. And there’s this inflation field caused by everybody living on an expense account — $4 for a small bottle of water or $10 for a small sandwich. It’s worse than an airport. So while I’m always happy to go there and get some hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy…
...full articleTranshumanist Morality is the idea that we should consider the impact of our actions in the context of the millennium-scale history of humanity. Specifically, I think the only way we will avoid some kind of dystopian apocalyptic fate is by seeking salvation through technology. In this context, moral actions are those that increase the probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow ourselves up. I’d like to explore what this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and considered and seen my friends do over the years. SEO for e-Commerce…
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Leo is a professional geek who looks forward to the robots taking over. For more current, less coherent thoughts, follow him on twitter