How to use this in practice? Well, NORMSINV(RAND()) can be used in Excel to pick a random value from a standard normal (Gaussian) distribution. Though accurate, this is very slow as it involves the inverse of an integral.
Americans have always dreamed about being cowboys - a distinctly American profession. Well, if you own this house, you can practice corralling small children or pets! Maybe you could have a rodeo and lasso your cat! Try riding your dog! Or other American Dream fun fill activities.
About the notion of "job".
The ancient Babylonians had a type of slavery in which the slaves worked for their masters and were paid a bit for that. If they so wished, they could sell crafts for themselves to make extra money in their spare time. They also had an option of buying their freedom.
(Slavery conjures images of flogging and hard physical labour, but the above form almost sounds like the life of an employee - you spend 8 hours a day working for your employer.. are free to do what you want in your spare time, even make money for yourself and can retire if you think you have enough money...)
The modern notion of a job was created by the industrial revolution.
In Victorian England, it was scandalous to do a "job". Any self-respecting individual "worked for himself". Obviously the very idea of a job seemed akin to slavery to the people then.
The subsequent boom in "Manufacturing and Services" made the concept of earning a living by working for another socially acceptable.
That brings us to retirement. This is an interesting creation of 20th century America !
In the 20's and 30's, America went into a deep depression. There just weren't enough jobs for people then.
In those days it was customary for people to work as long as they wanted to. It became imperative for the stability of the economy that older workers be replaced by younger ones.
But people just would not stop working voluntarily due to the difficult economic times. Also the elderly who did quit had no hope of gettign a job again because of all the young people in the job market.
So Social Security Act was passed (Roosevelt's New Deal) which made retirement a glorious event - work until age X (59, 60, 55 whatever) and you life after that will be automatically taken care of!
Cessation of work no longer meant abject poverty and penury, instead now there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Proof of extracurricular activities, leadership qualities, letters of recommendation -- we take all these as natural, necessary and even enlightened elements of the college application process, though they cause us endless anxiety. Actually, they don't resemble in the least the way people in Europe or Japan get into college. They're a result of a particular American challenge at the turn of the 20th century, which President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard then characterized as follows: how to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews."By the end of the 19th century, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were committed not primarily to refining the intellect but to welcoming the well-bred, athletic, public-spirited and sociable scions of the privileged -- young men who may not have performed well academically but were destined to be the leaders of the next generation. The result of such measures, at Harvard and elsewhere, was a horrific surprise: too many Jews! Though most of these students were more than academically competent, they didn't fit the usual definition of "gentlemen." The key code word here was 'character', a quality thought to be frequently lacking among Jews but present almost congenitally among high-status Protestants.
Newly established admissions departments gathered increasingly large amounts of "background" data on each applicant. Race? Color? Religious preference? Birthplace of father? Previous surnames used by the family? Mother's maiden name? The need for letters of recommendation was born; so was the interest in extracurricular involvement. Photographs were required, and personal interviews were encouraged, particularly with local alumni who would be most eager to perpetuate the muscular and sociable undergraduate image dear to them. The mechanism was similar to that of self-perpetuating private social and country clubs where new candidates were admitted only if members vouched for them.
Since the number of admission slots was being limited while more and more applicants were meeting the Big Three's academic criteria, the various nonacademic criteria and "intangible qualities" became decisive. One logical alternative -- raising academic standards even higher to get a more brilliant, intellectual class -- was hardly a consideration. By contrast, it was the well-bred students of average intelligence who university elders insisted were more likely to end up as leaders in business and politics -- and to become loyal, generous alumni. Most university leaders made no bones about limiting the "super-bright" to only 10 percent of each class.
Astonishingly, this subjective college admissions system -- designed in the 1920s to discreetly exclude as many "social undesirables" as possible -- is the system we continue to use today. And the central irony of The Chosen is that the very flexibility that was designed to exclude nontraditional students and placate the alumni up to the middle of the 20th century was subsequently available to administrators to accomplish essentially opposite goals.
As the century unfolds, ... [these] three schools had to process these demands [for diversity in admissions] in terms of its own internal constituencies: faculty pressuring for "more brains," students and the press demanding diversity, and alumni in open revolt against any such changes.
Having decided to change the make-up of their student body in this new direction, each school was successful in doing so because from the 1920s on, admissions officers had at their disposal a variety of nonacademic criteria by which to evaluate applicants. And as Karabel notes, moves to include previously excluded groups were not terribly radical since the Big Three, in fact, "had never been pure academic meritocracies."
Dramatic as these developments appear, they hardly constitute a sea change in how universities make such decisions. University administrations still view a move to completely meritocratic selection as neither in their self-interest nor realistic. Instead, Karabel convincingly shows this new institutional behavior to be the result of constant administrative shifts in order to maintain an uneasy balance among competing demands.
Much has changed in who now constitutes "the chosen" -- the elite prep schools, for example, can no longer count on a high proportion of their graduates getting into the Big Three. "As a consequence, deep apprehension about college admissions now extends to the highest reaches of the upper class," Karabel writes. But much remains the same. "At the same time, the children of the working class and the poor are about as unlikely to attend the Big Three today as they were in 1954. It is no exaggeration to say that the current regime in elite college admissions has been far more successful in democratizing anxiety than opportunity."
[In APL,] a surprising result comes from three applications of the principle of least surprise:1) It should be possible to have an array with no dimensions, and a zero-dimensional array should be the same thing as a scalar.
2) The size of an array should be a vector with one element for each dimension of the array.
3) When you do arithmetic on a scalar and a vector, the result has the same size as the vector.
Choosing the least surprising behavior in these three contexts causes the surprising behavior that the average of a scalar sum(v)/size(v) is an empty vector.
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of ... cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar—so now ketchup was also sweet—and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. ... Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating—about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?
One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that's what programs are: ideas.
What is the common theme among Franklin, the Granite Funds and LTCM? All three depended on exploiting deviations in market value from fair value. And all three depended on "patient capital" -- shareholders and lenders who believed that what mattered was fair value and not market value. That is, these fund managers convinced their stakeholders that because the fair values were hedged, it didn't matter what happened to market values in the short run — they would converge to fair value over time. That was the reason for the "Long Term" part of LTCM's name.The problem with this logic is that capital is only as patient as its least patient provider. The fact is that lenders generally lose their patience precisely when the funds need them to keep it — in times of market crisis. As all three cases demonstrate, the lenders are the first to get nervous when an external shock hits. At that point, they begin to ask the fund manager for market valuations, not models-based fair valuations. This starts the fund along the downward spiral: illiquid securities are marked-to-market; margin calls are made; the illiquid securities must be sold; more margin calls are made, and so on. In general, shareholders may provide patient capital; but debt-holders do not.
Vast amounts of human behaviour can be explained not by causal utility but by symbolic utlity, to use Nozick's distinction. We do many things not because they improve our (or others) objective well-being, but to signal who we are.For instance:
... voters cherish irrational views on many issues ... relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). Economists know that these positions are irrational, because the average person actually benefits from market competition, which provides the best product at the lowest price; from free trade with other countries, which (for American consumers) usually lowers the cost of labor and thus the price of goods; and from technological change, which redistributes labor from less productive to more productive enterprises.
People do not ... vote their self-interest: ... “Precisely because people put personal interests aside when they enter the political arena,” Caplan says, “intellectual errors readily blossom into foolish policies.” People really believe that the country would be better off if profits were regulated, if foreign goods were taxed, and if companies were prevented from downsizing. Politicians who pander to these beliefs are more likely to be elected, and the special interests that lobby for protectionism and anticompetitive legislation are the beneficiaries—not the public. The result, over time, is a decline in the standard of living.
... [M]ost economists peg the optimal level of government involvement in the economy too high, because they overestimate the virtues of democracy. ... some suggestions for fixing the evils of universal democratic participation: require voters to pass a test for economic competence; give extra votes to people with greater economic literacy; reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout; require more economics courses in school, even if this means eliminating courses in other subjects, such as classics; teach people introductory economics without making the usual qualifications about the limits of market solutions.
