Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s finances. Some of your options have more short-term savings and some have more long-term savings. When you have closed the budget gaps for both 2015 and 2030, you are done. Make your own plan, then share it online.

via Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com.

seriously?

Computers were originally introduced in trading because they are faster than us in responding to market signals. A human trader might buy up a million shares of Microsoft for $20 a share, and sell them the next day for $21, making a million dollars in profit. However, if the price of a stock is $15.67 in New York and $15.68 in London one moment, but jumps to $15.70 and then $15.69 a tenth of a second later, no human could react quickly enough to buy the stock in New York and sell it in London before the prices reversed.

To solve this problem, traders over the last few years have been building automated high-frequency trading (HFT) systems that compete by making thousands of trades a minute to maximize profit.

But delays in communication over a network can throw a monkey wrench in this scheme. These delays can be caused by many factors, such as slow routing computers, excessive traffic, routes that go through many different computers, and so on. On ordinary networks, like the Internet, these factors add so many delays that the time it takes for a signal to physically traverse fiber-optic cables is only a small fraction of the total latency (delay).

So currently, there are many projects to build faster fiber-optic cables, including one between Chicago and New York, to achieve faster HFT trades...

Because of how HFT operates — generally, the profit from an HFT trading opportunity goes to the first firm to act on it, while other firms get nothing, to beat other traders to the punch, this has led to a race between trading firms to have the fastest hardware and the fastest signal cables. Recently, the time it takes to execute these trades has gone from milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to microseconds (millionths of a second).

via KurzweilAI.

At the age of seven, Jeremy Sassoon was the youngest student at Britain's newly opened Royal Northern College of Music, as gifted at trumpet and piano as he was at math, football, and anything else he set his mind to. The boy prodigy was sent out, in front of the assembled press of Manchester, to hand a bouquet of flowers to the Duchess of Kent, who presided over the opening. Over the next two decades, his rocketing accomplishments appeared to keep pace with his gifts: At 17, wooed by both science and music schools, he made a wrenching choice and decided on medicine over music. By 23, he was a doctor. By 30, a practising child psychiatrist. But then Dr. Sassoon left medicine and spent the next eight years suffering from bipolar disorder. He now can be found on most weekends in Manchester playing piano in restaurants, at weddings, or at nightclubs with his band, Dr. Sassoon's Jazz Prescription.

The trajectory for gifted children is not simply onward and upward; they are as likely to be plagued by crises of confidence as anyone. Perhaps more so: Their intellectual gifts mean they are even more aware of the flaws in their clay, of how short they fall from self-imposed goals.

“People are forever telling me the achievements of my life,” Dr. Sassoon says, “and yet I feel I've accomplished nothing – nothing compared to what I might achieve.” He has put his finger on a thorny issue: Is a gifted child destined to become an exceptional adult?

via The Globe and Mail.

In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper. I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.

via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

To anyone who met him in his prime, Friedrich Nietzsche looked like a genial old-style man of letters: a quiet, dapper, unworldly bachelor, kind to children and exceedingly polite. But those who kept up with his prodigious output of books – he wrote more than one a year once he hit his stride in the 1880s – knew that the mild manner concealed incandescent ambition. The gentle professor liked to think of himself as a wild beast on the rampage, an intellectual terrorist who was going to “divide history into two halves”. His mission: to destroy the last vestiges of Christianity by means of a free-spirited “philosophy of the future” – a brave new pagan philosophy heralding a brave new pagan world. “I am no man,” he said. “I am dynamite.”

via New Humanist.

When Zarathustra and Twilight first appeared, they attracted little interest and Nietzsche’s name remained obscure. During the 1890s, however, they caught the public imagination and Nietzsche became the celebrity of world literature he had always wanted to be. He was admired not as a venerable old philosopher in the high tradition of Plato or Kant, but an outrageous and irreconcilable enemy to religion and morality, especially when they deck themselves in the robes of philosophical reason. By that time, however, he was in no condition to savour his success: back in December 1888, at the age of 44, he had collapsed in a square in Turin, and the remaining twelve years of his life were to be passed in a state of serene insanity.

The calamity of madness did no harm to Nietzsche’s burgeoning reputation: he came to fame as the philosopher who denounced the demands of reason so effectively that at last he lost his own. Twilight could now be seen as foreshadowing the eclipse of an intellect of such power that no one could stand it, even himself, and Zarathustra became a record of insights too deep to be expressed in the ordinary discourse of reason...

Of all the political events in Gandhi’s life, perhaps none is more famous than the Salt March of 1930. That theatrical act of defiance—in protest of the heavy tax on salt imposed by the British in India—catapulted Gandhi to new heights in his political career, as the image of this frail individual challenging a mighty empire captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of people around the world. Yet like many popular conceptions of Gandhi, this image is incomplete. Absent are the 78 members of the Satyagraha Ashram who accompanied him on his march, as well as numerous aides, lieutenants, and volunteers who worked behind the scenes to stage the historic event. There would have been no Salt March, no iconic Gandhi images, without them.

A month before the march, Gandhi’s colleague Vallabhbhai Patel led a team that canvassed arid Gujarat Province to determine the best route. Chief among their considerations were the route’s proximity to salt deposits and to towns where local government officials would be likely to resign their posts on Gandhi’s arrival in support of the protest, as well as easy access for the news media so that it could report on the march’s progress. Gandhi had become a master of employing media coverage to make his efforts successful, and he and his team orchestrated the march so that it would be a sustained media event. They plotted a trail for a three-week trek from Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad south toward the Arabian Sea, paralleling the railway line, which would be the primary means for maintaining communication—by both post and messengers—between the marchers and the ashram headquarters, as well as the conduit for the media covering the march.

Meanwhile, at the Satyagraha Ashram, Gandhi’s secretariat was busy marshaling evidence demonstrating the link between the salt tax and the degradation of Indian society, and publishing it in Gandhi’s weekly journals Young India and Navajivan, where the arguments could be picked up by mainstream media outlets. Parikh and Desai scoured the vast print resources in the ashram—not only Desai’s personal library, but the main library, which housed the thousands of books that Gandhi had brought back from South Africa—for statistics about salt and the Salt Act. Desai used these figures in articles in Young India as well as in Gandhi’s communications with the imperial government and the speeches he helped Gandhi draft. Gandhi himself contributed to the information-gathering efforts, urging associates to send him publications and other sources of information on salt and related subjects.

Gandhi’s personal accounts and other articles from the Salt March and Desai’s pieces in Young India and Navajivan detailing the narrative drama of the march, along with reports and photographs in the mainstream news media,put the Mahatma and his cause before a growing audience in India and around the world. Yet the organizational sophistication behind Gandhi’s dramatic march never got a mention in the headlines the enterprise worked so hard to produce. Its invisibility was partly by design: By effacing their own efforts, Gandhi’s associates reinforced his image as a simple and self-reliant crusader.

via The Wilson Quarterly.

That, my friends, is the Nile delta as seen by the International Space Station on October 28. The station was well south of that area, about 800 km (500 miles) south if I’ve done the math correctly. In this oblique view facing north, you can see Cairo at the neck of the delta, the city lights blaring. The Mediterranean Sea dominates the northern (top) part of the picture, with Cyprus glowing above and to the right of the mighty river. Off to the right you can also see Tel Aviv in Israel and Amman in Jordan. The glowing arc at the top is airglow, caused when molecules disrupted by ultraviolet light from the Sun during the day recombine. It’s a thin layer you’re seeing here edge-on, so it looks like an arc of light.

via Discover Magazine.