"Such deliberate cluelessness and misrepresentation – it’s unfortunate the U.S. News & World Report will publish nonsense generated by someone who’s clearly only using half a brain."

"Causal state reconstruction has an important advan- tage over VLMM methods. Each state in a VLMM is represented by a single suffix, and consists of all and only the histories ending in that suffix. For many pro- cesses, the causal states contain multiple suffixes. In these cases, multiple “contexts” are needed to repre- sent a single causal state, so VLMMs are generally more complicated than the HMMs we build. The causal state model is the same as the minimal VLMM if and only if every causal state contains a single suffix. This is the case for the process in Fig. 3, where CSSR and VLMM methods will give the same results."

"And now, not surprisingly, they refer to him and his family as insects — "unwelcome creatures" infesting the White House that require quick and absolute extermination so that the natural order of things can be restored.

Newsmax should be wary of printing this kind of crap right now, given that just a few weeks ago they rushed, uncharacteristically red-faced, to take down a post which seemed to advocate a military coup against the president of the United States. I'd have to assume its only Pat Boone's status as a walking punchline that's leading them to leave his own bit of eliminationist wishful thinking up on their site for the moment. Regardless of who says it, though, it's wrong to beat the drum this loudly against a sitting president, to show the office — not simply the man and his family, but the office — so little respect. "

"“We have this very strange situation today in America where we have given banks hundreds of billions of dollars and the president has to beg the banks to lend and they refuse,” Stiglitz said. “What we did was the wrong thing. It has weakened the economy and has increased our deficit, making it more difficult for the future.”"

"Take the example of higher-education teaching, where deprofessionalization has meant that persons who need a reasonable return on education (ie, they work to live) increasingly leave faculty work to those who have another source of income. This means that campus employers sort for persons who can subsidize themselves, or find a corporate sponsor.

Even from a straight-up liberal perspective, this has major harms, advantaging corporate-driven curiousity–see Washburn.

Similarly, turning college teaching (back) into philanthropy functions as a significant economic discrimination that, in the U.S. also works to segment campus labor by gender, ethnicity, and age. In turn, this affects student learning, and the nature and quality of research."

"System disruption leverages network structure and dynamics to turn small attacks into large events. Selection of the best point to attack is based on an analysis of the network's design and flows. The term to describe this point is: the systempunkt. Essentially, the systempunkt is the point in the network, that if attacked, will yield the maximal possible impact."

"If we dealt with the pincer movement of lower state aid and higher enrollments by imposing admissions standards — say, by refusing to do remediation anymore — the economics (and prestige) of the operation would take off. Blocking developmental students would, all by itself, result in a wealthier student body. We would have much higher retention, graduation, and transfer rates. We would have much less call for special services for students with severe learning disabilities. Our financial aid spending would drop dramatically, as would our spending on tutoring. We'd run proportionally more sophomore-level classes, to the understandable delight of the faculty. As our graduation and transfer rates went up, our standing as a college of first choice would go with it. And we could both impress our politicians and insulate ourselves from them, just like the University of Michigan has. "

"We plot explicit support for allowing same-sex marriage broken down by state and by age. Seven states cross the 50% mark overall as of our current estimates, but the generation gap is huge. If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage."

"Zimpl is a little language to translate the mathematical model of a problem into a linear or (mixed-) integer mathematical program expressed in .lp or .mps file format which can be read and (hopefully) solved by a LP or MIP solver."

"Consider the following optimization problem: we are given n jobs, a time horizon T, and one machine M with processing capacity Cap >= 2. Each job has a processing time (pj), release date (rj), due date (dj), machine utilization (cj), and weight (wj). We would like to schedule all the jobs on machine M while making sure that: (i) all jobs obey their execution window [rj,dj] (to a certain extent; see possible objectives), and (ii) we respect the machine capacity at all times (i.e., given a time 0 <= t <= T, the sum of cj over all jobs running at time t is always less than or equal to Cap). Possible objective functions are: minimize makespan, minimize total (weighted) tardiness, minimize total number of late jobs, minimize total (weighted) delay, etc."

"Our reports reviewed, systematically, 13 models of learning styles and concluded that this area of research is theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused. I listed in the reports 30 dichotomies, such as “activists” versus “reflectors”, “globalists” versus “analysts”, and “left brainers” versus “right brainers”. We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them. You can check that. Shake your head gently. Does the left hemisphere of your brain move independently from the right? Or do they seem connected?"

"There is no required textbook for this class; I will post electronic copies of relevant papers to this web site as the course progresses. Meanwhile, here is a list of background references, primarily surveys and textbooks. Key references for the course are hilighted. Many of the other references focus on material that we will not cover at all in the course; I include them primarily to give some sense of the diversity of the field."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"Rather like a huge block of Post-Its, the Paper Chair's sheets can be scribbled on and removed during phone-call doodling; another cool features is that, since the block is not laminated together, magazines or newspapers can be stuffed between the sheets of paper like a bookmark. Just don't stuff a document in there, or good luck finding it again."

"In case you wondered about what we in the US pay for health care compared with those unfree unfortunates who suffer under various forms of socialized medicine, here are some graphs showing the advantages of what Republicans here tell us is “the best health care system in the world.”"