April is National Poetry Month! (Picture Credit: F.E. Guerra-Pujol)
What? No Virtual Boy? (Image Credit: Narendur.)
This semester, we reenacted many pivotal scenes from the film “The Social Network” — and we read Ben Mezrich’s book “Accidental Billionaires” on which the film is based — in order to explore in-depth many legal and ethical issues in the business world. The movie, which was released in the fall of 2010, ends with the following epilogue:
Facebook has 500 million members in 207 countries. It’s currently valued at 25 billion dollars. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world.
That was before Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2012. Today (spring of 2016), Facebook has three times as many active users (over 1.49 billion) and is valued at over 200 billion dollars!
(By the way, for our last class (4/25), students may volunteer to present their final projects in class. Each student or group of students, as the case may be, will be allocated a maximum of five minutes to make their presentations. The class as a whole will select the best final project, and the professor will feature the winning final project on his blog.)
Image Credit: Quartz
h/t: ppbears
Image credit: Jeppe and Birger Morgenstjerne
Update (4/24): Wow! After we reposted a fan video on YouTube of an old performance of “Let’s go crazy,” it took less than 24 hours for the video to be taken down. In any case, we confess that we weren’t really huge fans of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or of the late David Bowie, for that matter), but here is one of our favorite Prince songs (“I would die 4 U”) from when we were growing up. Shout out to Tracye Dukes for her heartfelt tribute to Prince and for her moving version of “I would die 4 U”:
Economist Paul Krugman recently wrote up a short and provocative essay in the N.Y. Times on “Econ 101 boosterism” or the naive application of textbook economics to real-world moral and legal problems. In his essay, Krugman compares the pros and cons of two opposing approaches to reducing global warming or climate change: (a) a regulatory or command-and-control approach (e.g. banning coal) versus (b) a market approach (e.g. cap and trade). At least one of Krugman’s colleagues (Ashok Rao) was quick to criticize Paul Krugman’s essay, claiming that Krugman ignores the effect prices have on consumers’ consumption patterns. But Ashok Rao (and Tyler Cowen, for that matter) commit a major (and common) economic fallacy: they confuse markets with carbon taxes. In defense of Krugman, he wasn’t writing about a carbon tax at all; he was writing about cap and trade. If we’ve learned anything from the great English economist Ronald Coase, it’s that a Pigovian tax is NOT a market solution; it’s just another form of command and control.
Image credit: Wikipedia
What if we just abolished the 50 States or replaced them with seven mega-regions or provinces? (See below for a hypothetical example of what such a proposal might look like on a map.) After all, our northern neighbors in Canada have only 10 provinces. So, aside from historical tradition, why do we still need 50 separate States?
Image Credits: N.Y. Times and Joel Kotkin (boundaries and names of 7 mega-regions)
Welcome to the online home of the IASS
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PhD, Jagiellonian University
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BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH
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Lover of math. Bad at drawing.
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Making it big in business after age 40
Reasoning about reasoning, mathematically.
I don't mean to sound critical, but I am; so that's how it comes across
remember the good old days...
"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences." - Sylvia Plath
a personal view of the theory of computation
Submitted For Your Perusal is a weblog wherein Matt Thomas shares and writes about things he thinks are interesting.
Logic at Columbia University
Just like the Thesis Whisperer - but with more money
the sky is no longer the limit
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prior probability 