IMAGINE FOR A moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go? Our hypothetical recruiter knows there’s little sense in judging a nation like the United States by comparing it to, say, Finland. This is a big country, after all, and school quality varies dramatically from state to state. What he really wants to know is, should he visit Finland or Florida? Korea or Connecticut? Uruguay or Utah?

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place—the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future—using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.

We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?

Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.

via The Atlantic.

There’s something about Jonathan Safran Foer that drives a certain breed of dyspeptic New York writer/blogger to drink—more so than usual, anyway. They chafe at the six-figure advances, the visiting professor gigs at Yale and NYU, the majestic Park Slope brownstone. There’s even a catchphrase for it—Schadenfoer! However, those hoping for a colossal career misstep might want to pour another highball, because his latest book, Tree of Codes, is a quietly stunning work of art. The first major title by new London-based publisher Visual Editions, Tree of Codes was created by slicing out chunks of text from Foer’s favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz. The result is a spare, haunting story that appears to hang in negative space on the page. Pretentious? Possibly. But it is also very, very cool. VF Daily spoke with Safran Foer about his delightfully tactile new book.

Heather Wagner: Tell me about Tree of Codes: how did the idea of cutting out words from an existing novel come to you?

Jonathan Safran Foer: A couple of things: One is the book The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. It’s a book I’ve always loved. Some things you love passively, some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it. Then I started thinking about what books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the physicality of books. I love breaking the spine, smelling the pages, taking it into the bath. . .

What inspired the design?

I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.

via Vanity Fair.

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.

Psalm 84:1 How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise! Selah

lectio divina.

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.