http://rianjs.net Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:49:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I spend a lot of time thinking about incentives, so I chuckled when I saw today's For Better or for Worse: http://rianjs.net/2009/09/economic-incentives-in-comics Today, Bob Herbert in the New York Times had a piece on Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed by lethal injection for the arson murder of his children. Analysis published on August 17, 2009 by Dr Craig Beyler concluded: in the end, the only (basis) for the determination of arson ... ... http://rianjs.net/2009/09/the-death-penalty-in-civilized-society Quote of the day: High performance people are generally self-improving through experience, observation, introspection, reading and discussion (As long as they have stunning colleagues and big challenges) Slide 115 of 128 from the Netflix culture presentation. http://rianjs.net/2009/08/on-high-performance I read an article last night by Michael Nielsen entitled "Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?" It was probably one of the best articles I've read in at least a month. This morning I woke up earlier than expected, and I decided to check out the author's background, and ... http://rianjs.net/2009/06/michael-nielsen I've never really been a huge fan of undersea exploration, but I did always find it strange that we deploy so much capital (human, financial, intellectual) exploring space while largely ignoring our oceans. As a longtime subscriber to the TED talks video podcasts (HD podcast), I fell in love with these ... http://rianjs.net/2009/06/ted-talks-ocean-exploration The Center for Science in the Public Interest -- an organization I've wanted to work for -- is pondering a soda tax. It's not a new plan... I first had the idea in the fall of last year, though I didn't write about it, and Ezra Klein has written about ... http://rianjs.net/2009/05/pigovian-soda-tax At the end of November, I mused about public sector's problem of attracting and retaining top-notch talent: Ben Bernanke's salary as chairman of the Fed is just over $191,000. Henry Paulson as CEO of Goldman Sachs made $16.4 million according to Forbes. [...] I find it very hard to believe that ... http://rianjs.net/2009/03/revisiting-talent-in-the-public-and-private-sectors BU's GPA requirements for their Economics PhD students: GPA Requirements All courses must be passed with a grade of B- or higher. The core average must be pi (3.1416) and an overall grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 for the M.A.P.E. and the Ph.D. must be attained in all courses taken after ... http://rianjs.net/2009/03/bu-economics-phd-gpa-requirements The full interview with President Obama on Jay Leno from Thursday, March 19, 2009. Well worth watching whether you're conservative or liberal. He's going to be fun a fun president when he's out of office... I don't know how long the Hulu embed will be good for, so get it ... http://rianjs.net/2009/03/obama-on-leno-the-full-interview I'm trying to do some analysis on car accident statistics with respect to at-fault collisions for people driving vehicles with automatic transmissions vs those who drive stick. While the NHTSA has a surprisingly advanced query system set up that allows you to drill down to pretty specific results without much ... http://rianjs.net/2009/03/accident-statistics-transmission-type