A Modern Mind

There is a review of a really cool device over at Tech Report. Unfortunately the review and comments are pretty stupid. My first thought is that this is fantastic. Here is a device for disabled people to be able to play games, etc.

Here at UNR we have a professor in the Computer Science department, Eelke Folmer, who does research in accesssible gaming stuff — very cool!

So after many months I noticed Carl Icahn’s blog has gone live with several interesting article’s about, as you might guess, the incompetency of CEOs and the failings of corporate governance. Interesting reading.

Interesting story at the New York Times today. I thought it would be an article about the need for engineering expertise in data mining, etc. But it turns out to be an article about the growing demand for mechanical and environmental engineers to build the physical infrastructure that our virtual infrastructure runs on.

They feature a quote from Dr. Jon Koomey, who is the author of one of my top three books (probably #1) for data analysis: Turning Numbers into Knowledge.

Not optimal traversal of trees; rather a tree that shows sketches the field of optimization.

Browsing the web I came across the NEOS Optimization Tree at Argonne National Labs. It hasn’t been updated since I wrote my first web page, but the graphic is a nice overview of the different areas (and let’s be honest, a lot of that math was figured out before the web even came around).

From the medical journal Anesthesiology:

Expertise is more than simply having extensive factual knowledge or competent skills. Experts have specific psychological attributes such as self-confidence, excellent communication skills, adaptability, and risk tolerance. They also have specific skills, including highly developed attention to what is relevant, ability to identify exceptions to the rules, flexibility to changing situations, effective performance under stress, and ability to make decisions and initiate actions quickly based on incomplete data.