Link Archive 12/25/13 – 1/20/14

Remember Moneyball? Rather than using voodoo and gut-feelings to hire baseball players, some quants went and crunched a lot of data and did math, resulting in an outstandingly successful team and revolutionizing how baseball management is done? Fascinating results from a company that actually uses data & math to compare performance on various jobs, to help hiring managers in other fields. Insights: Résumés are no better than reading tea leaves. No significant correlation between a college degree (or masters degree) and performance as a software developer. No significant correlation between previous experience in a call center and performance as a call center employee. But there IS correlation between whether you used Firefox/Chrome to take the test, as opposed to Explorer. I think we might have an NSA problem in this country. "This morning I spent an hour in a closed room with six Members of Congress [...] Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me -- as someone with access to the Snowden documents -- to explain to them what the NSA was doing." Why haven't we given Snowden a medal of honor and blanket immunity yet? No, seriously. Later this year will be the 100th anniversary of the event that kicked off WW1. An event that has shaped the entirety of the modern world. Would you like to know a little bit more about it before that day comes, so you can seem more informed to your friends and relatives? Would you like for you education to be delivered by Charlie Fucking Sheen, or at least a guy that sounds like him? I present to you: Hard Core History! This is a history podcast. This particular episode is 3 hours long, so really good if you're doing a lot of boring work. Or you can break it up over several days. Told in an entertaining and arresting fashion, while not being fluff. YouTube is basically just marketing now - a way to get people excited about buying your DVD/CD/Tshirt/Book/whatever. The actual ad revenue it produces on its own can't support anything worth doing. That being said, there's a living to be made if you can get people to buy your merch. Want more happy posts! GOOD NEWS: 14 Reasons 2014 May Be the Best Year Ever Thank you vlogbrothers!! Sports Go Sports! I totally care who wins! (music) What if the X-Men were black? "Neil Shyminsky argues persuasively that playing out Civil Rights-related struggles with an all white cast allows the white male audience of the comics to appropriate the struggles of marginalized peoples. He concludes that, “While its stated mission is to promote the acceptance of minorities of all kinds, X-Men has not only failed to adequately redress issues of inequality – it actually reinforces inequality.” " WTF? Does traditional publishing actually work this way? How do they still exist? (Hugh Howey on some of the many failings of SF publishers) Satanic Temple unveils 7-foot goat-headed Baphomet statue for Oklahoma Capitol. The supposed "rebuttal" from Rep. Earl Sears? -- "This is a faith-based nation and a faith-based state." I don't think he understands how funny that is. :) "Thor is the new Superman. Thor feels more connected to humans in his movies, more their champion. More their Superman. Thor smiles; naturally, even." I would love to teach, but... ... I set my expectations high, I kept my classroom structured, I tutored students, I provided extra practice, and I tried to make class fun. At this point, I was feeling alright with myself. I quickly rose through the ranks of “favorite teacher,” kept open communication channels with parents, and had many students with solid A’s. It was about this time that I was called down to the principal’s office ... I ended up assigning stupid assignments for large amounts of credit, ones I knew I could get students to do. Even then, I still had students failing, purely through their own refusal to put any sort of effort into anything, and I had lowered the bar so much that it took hardly anything to pass. According to the rubrics set forth by the county, if they wrote a single word on their paper, related or not to the assignment, I had to give them a 48 percent. Yet, students chose to do nothing. Why? Because we are forced to pass them. “They are not allowed to fail,” "

We should give free money to everyone. The human race will have to go here sooner or later, and I think pre-revolution would be preferable.

Why you should care about education. "Whether they sprang from your loins or not, whether you like it or not, you will be sharing the world with all of these kids and their ability to think or not will affect you and all other living things on this planet in ways you cannot even begin to imagine." To the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street. I have the same problem with Goodfellas, which it turns out was also a Scorsese flick. Seems he loves to glorify and glamorize awful people. (Oliver Stone does it a lot too  >< ) A Christmas Poem Seussian and Secular. "Every Jew down in Jewville liked Christmas a lot But King Herod, who ruled over Jewville, did not."