That which is measured

"That which is measured, improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially." -Karl Pearson

I think these ideas are important.

Recently, Bill Gates wrote the following on the need for metrics other than "dollars spent": 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578261780648285770.html

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances. Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."

This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.

He goes on to talk about some projects he's involved in, public health and education, which have benefited greatly from being able to measure progress.

-Max

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Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Celibacy

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/09/14/staying-celibate-before-marriage-was-best-thing-ive-ever-done/

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Re: Learning to program

Z.,

You mentioned

> "studying to learn" vs "studying to obtain certification". 

which reminds me of a story: not everyone is enamored of college degrees. From http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/, a fun anecdote (emphasis added):

When I first went into the Boeing Company nearly half the aeronautical engineers at Boeing were not university graduates: they began as draftsmen right out of high school and over the years learned the job. The other evening I saw my old friend Paul Turner, one of the last non-degree engineers from the space program. He retired from North American Rockwell as project manager of a small but significant station in Shuttle. You don't have to have an expensive university degree to be a good engineer. It often helps – we used to have the slogan that the half-life of an engineering graduate was about seven years – but it also helps if you acquire the habit of staying current in your profession. The non-degree engineers always did. The best of the university graduate engineers did also, but there was also a significant number who stopped learning when they left university, and their half life was indeed about seven years.

The United States has the capability of regaining its position as the leading academic nation on Earth; but we have to change the accreditation system along with the whole notion of academic control of credentials. We need to get back to the notion that the best credential for doing a job is the ability to do it well. That particularly applies to teaching the young: our colleges of education, fully accredited, are shameless messes producing illiterate children. Shame.

I'm trying to be the kind of learner who doesn't have a half-life...

-M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Testing something new

This is the canvas dummy content

Good

Neither

Bad

William Law

In his final speeches and writings at Nauvoo, the Prophet occasionally mentions William Law, his estranged counselor as someone with a grudge against Joseph. This story helps put those statements in perspective.

http://scottwoodward.org/josephsmith_williamlawtriestokillinNauvoo.html

Joseph Smith had asked Charles Stoddard, age 14, to serve as a house boy for William Law. William Law was one of the Prophet's enemies, and felt by many to have led the charge on Carthage. Joseph would have Charles keep his eyes and ears open and report back to him what he heard William Law planning.
________________________________

[The following was recorded by Sarah Woodward Stoddard, mother of Charles Stoddard, in April 1844].

Dear Diary,

Charles had another faith promoting experience last night. Early in the morning, even while the darkness still hemmed out the light of day, Mr. Law, after he had been drinking and planning with his associates throughout the night, got Charles out of bed to clean and oil his gun. He said he was going to shoot the Prophet—only William Law called him "Old Joe Smith." Poor Charles was frightened beyond description, but Mr. Law stood over him and prodded him with his foot when Charles hesitated through fright and anxiety. Finally, when Mr. Law was satisfied with the way the gun was working he put one bullet in. He boasted he could kill the prophet with one shot. He sent Charles to bring the Prophet. He ran as fast as he could and delivered the message, but he begged the Prophet not to go to Mr. Law's as Mr. Law was drunk, and Charles was afraid he would carry through on his threat to shoot the Prophet in cold blood. As they walked the few blocks from the Mansion house to the Law residence, the Prophet assured Charles that no harm would come to him that day. Charles was frightened, and he said that it kept racing through his mind, "I am the one that cleaned the gun that is going to be used to kill the Prophet," until he was sick with fear. The Prophet, in the final attempt to calm my dear son, uttered the fateful words, "Mr. Law may someday kill me, Charles, but it won't be today."

As they approached their destination, Mr. Law came staggering out of the house shouting out what he intended to do. The Prophet said kindly and unafraid, "You sent for me, Mr. Law?" To which Mr. Law replied with oath that now he was going to do the whole world a favor by disposing of the Prophet with one shot. Calmly, the Prophet unbuttoned his shirt and bared his chest, and then said, "I'm ready now, Mr. Law." Charles said at this point he nearly fainted. Sick fear strangled him until he was speechless and paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. Mr. Law paced a few steps, turned, aimed, and pressed the trigger. There was complete silence. Then the air rang with profanity and Mr. Law turned on Charles, accusing him of fixing the gun so it would not go off and threatened to kill even Charles—my innocent, frightened, but faithful son. The Prophet, to divert Mr. Law's blame of Charles, suggested that a can be placed on a fence post for Mr. Law to take a practice shot. Relieved, Charles ran for a can and laid it on its side on a post. Mr. Law paced back, took aim, and fired. His one shot streaked through the exact center of the can. Even Mr. Law was quiet as if stunned. The Prophet buttoned up his shirt, gave Charles a meaningful look, and then said, "If you are finished with me now, Mr. Law, I have other things needing to be done." (As quoted by Robert H. Daines at BYU-Idaho Devotional, 28 May 2002)

-Max

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Scala vs F#

I suspect the reason why people say Scala is more OO and F# is more functional actually has little to do with functional programming per se: it's because F# is more oriented toward ADTs and Scala is more about OO. Since ADTs package functions in modules instead of object scopes, this gives F# a more applicative, function-oriented feel, even though there's really no technical difference between F# and Scala in terms of what you can express functionally. It's not that you can't do OO in F# or ADTs in Scala, it's just a matter of the native idiom leaning one way or the other.

If you want to understand ADT vs OO, the best paper I know is here:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf (hat tip to Lambda the Ultimate). Essentially, in ADTs there is a hidden, shared implementation: the black box obscures the class implementation, but doesn't obscure the objects within the class from each other. (This is like C++ "private".) In OO, the public interface is the ONLY interface: every object is a black box. ADTs are suitable for efficient abstractions like sparse matrix multiplications which need access to each other's internals. When people say "object-oriented" they are often not clear on whether they really do mean object-oriented programming or ADT programming. Certainly C++/C#/Java/etc. are schizophrenic about which style they are trying to support. (For example, an "abstract class" in C++/C#/Java is a hybrid of interface and implementation, which makes it neither/both OO nor ADT. However, a Java interface is pure OO.)

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Technological advancement

[Cc J. and K.]

Great, unusually-insightful article on American manufacturing. I view this as the quintessential 21st century social dilemma: in a world where unskilled labor can be cheaply automated, what do you do with unskilled workers? As far as I can tell, the way education is lagging behind technological advancement is the chief cause of inequality growth, even though it gets blamed on other, politically-convenient factors. We need better, faster ways of learning.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/?single_page=true

Some good quotes:

I had come to Greenville to better understand what, exactly, is happening to manufacturing in the United States, and what the future holds for people like Maddie—people who still make physical things for a living and, more broadly, people (as many as 40 million adults in the U.S.) who lack higher education, but are striving for a middle-class life.

There's a joke in cotton country that a modern textile mill employs only a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.

Standard will not drop a line in the U.S. and begin outsourcing it to China for a few pennies in savings. "I need to save a lot to go to China," says Ed Harris, who is in charge of identifying new manufacturing sources in Asia. "There's a lot of hassle: shipping costs, time, Chinese companies aren't as reliable. We need to save at least 40 percent off the U.S. price. I'm not going to China to save 10 percent."

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don't all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat... Throughout much of the 20th century, simultaneous technological improvements in both agriculture and industry happened to create conditions that were favorable for people with less skill. The development of mass production allowed low-skilled farmers to move to the city, get a job in a factory, and produce remarkably high output. Typically, these workers made more money than they ever had on the farm, and eventually, some of their children were able to get enough education to find less-dreary work. In that period of dramatic change, it was the highly skilled craftsperson who was more likely to suffer a permanent loss of wealth. Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the "Great Compression," the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled. The double shock we're experiencing now—globalization and computer-aided industrial productivity—happens to have the opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.

-M.

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

"Knife control"

This is what comes of focusing on symptoms ("gun control") instead of root causes. You just wind up with a different set of symptoms.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/british-doctors-call-for-ban-on-long-kitchen-knives-to-end-stabbings/

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.

"We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect."

-Max


--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.