Todd Suomela › Comments

This unraveling may not occur for a while, as easy money and excessive global liquidity can push asset prices higher for a while. But the longer and bigger the carry trades and the larger the asset bubble, the bigger will be the ensuing asset bubble crash. The Fed and other policymakers seem unaware of the monster bubble they are creating. The longer they remain blind, the harder the markets will fall. - Todd Suomela

OVER the past 80 years, the United States government has engineered not one, not two, not three, but at least four rescues of the institution now known as Citigroup. - Todd Suomela

by Paul Graham - Todd Suomela

The Data Audit Framework (DAF) provides organisations with the means to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are managing their research data assets. DAF combines a set of methods with an online tool to enable data auditors to gather this information. DAF will help ensure that research data produced in UK Higher Education Institutions is preserved and remains accessible in the long term. - Todd Suomela

Clipperz is a free and anonymous online password manager. Local encryption within the browser guarantees that no one except you can read your data. - Todd Suomela

Practitioners in informal science settings--museums, after-school programs, science and technology centers, media enterprises, aquariums, zoos, and botanical gardens--are interested in finding out what learning looks like, how to measure it, and what they can do to ensure that people of all ages, from different backgrounds and cultures, have a positive learning experience. Surrounded by Science: Learning Science in Informal Environments, is designed to make that task easier. Based on the National Research Council study, Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits, this book is a tool that provides case studies, illustrative examples, and probing questions for practitioners. In short, this book makes valuable research accessible to those working in informal science: educators, museum professionals, university faculty, youth leaders, media specialists, publishers, broadcast journalists, and many others. - Todd Suomela

The GOOD 100 - Todd Suomela

Some book recommendations about writing- Goldberg, King, Hart, Lamott, etc. - Todd Suomela

We’re very excited to announce the Public Terabyte Dataset project. This is a high quality crawl of top web sites, using AWS’s Elastic Map Reduce, Concurrent’s Cascading workflow API, and Bixolab’s elastic web mining platform. - Todd Suomela

I’ve always believed that Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of Americans fear that we’re becoming a declining great power. Everything from our schools to our energy and transportation systems are falling apart and in need of reinvention and reinvigoration. And what people want most from Washington today is nation-building at home. - Todd Suomela

So, back to the gedankenexperiment. Currently, a random meat probe dropped on the Earth's surface has something like a 15% chance of finding it survivable. But a random sampling over the historical epoch would return a survivability probability of around 1%. And over the future epoch, it's likely similar, unless we're erring massively on the side of pessimism about the prospects for our atmospheric composition remaining stable. Ergo: to a space probe searching for somewhere that our kind of life can thrive, a truly random sampling of the Earth's surface (distributed over both time and area) would probably result in the conclusion that the planet is uninhabitable. - Todd Suomela

While technologists are actively thinking about, and writing books about, intelligent machines, the idea that technology will ever truly replace a large fraction of the human workforce and lead to permanent, structural unemployment is, for the majority of economists, almost unthinkable. For mainstream economists, at least in the long run, technological advancement always leads to more prosperity and more jobs. - Todd Suomela

So what's the problem? First, in exchange for apparent stability, the central-bank-backstopped "great moderation" has rendered asset prices unreliable as guides to real investment. I think the United States has made terrible aggregate investment decisions over the last 30 years, and will continue to do so as long as a "ride the bubble then hide in banks" strategy pays off. Under the moderation dynamic, resource allocation is managed alternately by compromised capital markets and fiscal stimulators, neither of which make remotely good choices. Second, by relying on credit rather than wages to fund middle-class consumption, the moderation dynamic causes great harm in the form of stress from unwanted financial risk, loss of freedom to pursue nonremunerative activities, and unnecessary catastrophes for isolated families. Finally, maintaining the dynamic requires active use of policy instruments to sustain an inequitable distribution of wealth and income in a manner that I view as unjust. - Todd Suomela

Let me start out by summarizing a long-standing PIMCO thesis: The U.S. and most other G-7 economies have been significantly and artificially influenced by asset price appreciation for decades. Stock and home prices went up – then consumers liquefied and spent the capital gains either by borrowing against them or selling outright. Growth, in other words, was influenced on the upside by leverage, securitization, and the belief that wealth creation was a function of asset appreciation as opposed to the production of goods and services. - Todd Suomela

The thing is, the left should be ambivalent about democracy, at least in its current forms, for two reasons. First, in prioritizing stated preferences over justice, it gives too much weight to the interests of the noisy but wrongly discontented privileged and not enough weight to those of the silent poor who have resigned themselves to their fate. Secondly, cognitive biases research has shown that Marx was wholly correct on an important point. There are mechanisms which generate false beliefs, and these beliefs tend to support the existing order and hostility to the worst-off. - Todd Suomela

Unfortunately, our pseudo-democracy does just this. It gives too little weight to the quietly oppressed, and too much to the noisy but discontented privileged. - Todd Suomela

By overlooking cuts in research and development, product design, and worker training, GDP is greatly overstating the economy's strength - Todd Suomela

These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair. - Todd Suomela

If you maintain the illusion that you're going to get something done, you should know that most of what goes on on the Internet is divergent. There are zillions of ways of being distracted. Lots of tidbits of information are drifting by, lots of people are rotating in your periphery. A lot of this is interesting and gives you new ideas about what else you could do, or what you could study, or what you could talk about, or how you could be entertained... Divergence isn't bad. It is great for many things. The only problem is if you only have divergence tools, and nothing e - Todd Suomela

Part of a series on reinventing/revisioning the university to combine with technology. Refers to the Open University model. - Todd Suomela

But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness. - Todd Suomela

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries - Todd Suomela

[The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand] In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. - Todd Suomela

Started by Lou Marinoff - Plato Not Prozac. - Todd Suomela

Discussion of the history of the term "political correctness" - Todd Suomela

So why do dopamine neurons treat information as a reward? It’s easy to see how treating information this way might be a useful evolutionary adaptation. For many animals, each day consists of numerous decisions that pertain to eating, reproducing and socializing. Obviously, having access to more relevant information – such as knowing where the food is located - allows animals to make better decisions. Furthermore, having access to such information might give us better control over our environment, thus increasing our chances of survival. - Todd Suomela

The internet is enabling massive changes in the relationships amongst fans, artists, and industries. On this site, Nancy Baym keeps an eye on trends and provides a space to discuss what works, what doesn’t, and what to make of it all. Sometimes she writes about other social internet issues too. - Todd Suomela

1. Reasonable people are not fanatics, so they don’t push their views hard, whilst stupid people do..... 2. The media select bad ideas, as these provide scare stories....  3. The benefits of freedom are often dispersed and unforeseeable, whilst the (alleged) benefits of restrictions are often more concentrated and salient.... 4. Politics is a forum for cheap talk, and anything that’s cheap is of low quality. - Todd Suomela

That's a major hallmark of chaos. It's not just that given arbitrarily close together starting points, they'll eventually be far apart. That's not chaotic. It's that they'll be far apart at some times, and close together at other times. - Todd Suomela

Contrast between "Learning as a Network" LaaN versus Social Constructivism a la Vygotsky. - Todd Suomela