« December 2003 | Main | February 2004 »

January 31, 2004

Visualize this

If you listen to music on your computer (who doesn't these days?), you owe it to yourself to check out the G-Force visualization plug in. It is quite mesmerizing.

January 29, 2004

Pattern?

Does anybody else see a pattern in the announcement that the Medicare bill is going to cost 1/3 more than estimated? So how much was this Iraq thing supposed to cost? Tax cuts?

Isn't there a saying like once is a mistake, twice is a coincedence and three times is a felony?

January 24, 2004

Neato

Amzon is collecting political contributions on their site for the various presidential campaigns, which is pretty neat. They are going to give the fees they collect to a charitable organization to educate kids about the political process (which is nice).

As far as that goes, the feature is not remarkable, what is funny is the wacko candidates that are listed. Definitely worth a read for the humor content alone.

January 09, 2004

I guess they can become doctors

If people really do respond to incentives (as I was asserting yesterday), then news like this should encourage many more people to study medicine instead of pursuing engineering.

January 08, 2004

Have cake and eat it too

It seems that some tech executives want it both ways. In a Washington Post article that was reposted on Yahoo, the CEOs of Intel and HP complained about the lack of focus on engineering and mathematics in US education and then made the case that their companies (and others) are doing the right thing by moving jobs offshore.

Might part of the decision making process that goes into selecting to study engineering be the potential rewards? If the jobs market in a specific sector looks weak, then people will choose to enter other professions. I'm not a protectionist and I don't really think we would gain overall by precluding offshoring, but the signals given by the market right now are definitely not encouraging people to gain technical skills.

People respond to incentives. If there are no entry level jobs in technology because many have been sent offshore, then people won't choose those careers. Since careers are path dependent (i.e. you build skills as you go), this implies that down the road, the majority of the experienced technical people will be offshore as well.