Memrise.com (primarily for learning the vocabulary of another language) combines spaced repetition with mnemonics. When learning a particular piece of vocabulary it will offer up an ordered list of suggested mnemonics based on their popularity in other sets. Extremely effective for its use case.
"Vista has yet to unload some of its biggest bets,"
Translation - the majority of the returns reported here are based on estimated valuations calculated by Vista rather than actual returns resulting from business sales. It goes without saying that 99.99% of the time this means the returns are inflated. It is possible that they've only calculated returns based on companies sold, but unlikely.
So not only can they manipulate the valuation on firms they haven't sold to make their funds look better. Even with that + the ability to fudge IRR numbers, their last few fund returns are not so mind blowing that we should believe these guys have a magic formula.
Small child in business school here - in our vernacular, this means remove lines of business not turning a profit. Many are kept around either in hopes they'll get better or because executives think they round out a basket of offerings and maybe people are more likely to allow us to perform their cancer surgery if they know we also do neonatal surgery. So even though our neonatal unit loses money, let's keep it. The Vista camp here would say - that's a bs theory, let's focus on getting better at what we're good at rather than trying to make a business line profitable we've already spent 5 years demonstrating we don't know how to make profitable.
Instead of debating the criteria for entrance into these elite schools, why not look at what makes them such great schools and replicate that elsewhere? Sure, in so far as being surrounded by top students who study all the time improves the environment, the current elite is likely to remain the elite and the admissions criteria should still be discussed. But if the gap between the quality of those schools and the others wasn't so vast, it would no longer feel like the difference between being guaranteed success in life vs. being doomed to failure.
Nyc is full of amazing public high schools, as I mentioned in another comment. Moreover you can apply to virtually any public high school in NYC and be admitted based on whatever criteria they set up, meaning you aren’t forced in that case to go to your zoned (regional) school.
These articles misrepresent the situation. There are only three schools that use this test, and they often get the “I studied really hard but I was bad at homework and class participation” student. Luckily there is a mechanism (for now) to catch some of the potential of these students.
The value of a good education lies in its signalling power too.
There are plenty of good professors in non-elite schools, many undergrad classes are approachable enough that a self-motivated student could absorb a lot of content with little supervision, and a lot of schools make their material available through online platforms. All these are great for learning but replicating the signaling part is more difficult.
"when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity."
On the contrary, Tribe by sebastian junger has me fairly convinced me that the irony here is that people band together, find a sense of belonging and often psychological well being under strenuous circumstances more naturally than they do in peaceful, every man for himself and his or her own pursuit of happiness times.
While that may technically he the case, the USPTO has allowed the "application" of ideas to be so broad as to effectively be just a patent on ideas.
There are a million different ways you could implement a "one click checkout" yet the USPTO granted a "one click checkout" patent to Amazon. And countless similar parents exist today. (podcast patent, online shopping cart patent, a patent on making 'toast' and on and on)
Having a patent doesn't mean the patent is valid. I think something like 50% of patents are declared invalid during litigation. (This obviously doesn't mean 50% of patents are invalid, since you probably don't go to trial unless you think you have a reasonable chance of winning).
Plus, a lot of those software patents are not valid[0]. The validity of software patents in general and what qualifies as patentable with regards to software is still an open question.
A meaningful idea in software engineering at least is, in many many cases, an algorithm (until we're talking about ideas like "lets make the best compression") Straightforward implementation of the algorithm in say C is hardly a novel thing on it's own. So what is patentable here as an implementation, and what -
isn't as an idea? (Note: I do have several crappy ideas software patents myself :)
But I think the point is that if there is really only one viable implementation of an idea, they’re effectively patenting the idea via the implementation.
I'm trying to wrap my head around your distinction - is pseudo code that demonstrates Quicksort different than an actual implementation of it in, say, C, C++, Python?
How about where the line's even thinner - Amazon's infamous 'one click purchase' 'algorithm' - which they managed to patent - would you call that an 'idea'? An 'implementation'? A 'process'?
I think anything, including ideas can be patented - and if Google is trying to go by the spirit of the law rather than being Pharisaic about it, they need to cut this guy in for a percentage of the patent of his idea, rather than shafting him because they can.
Clinical trials and regulatory approval are independent of the patent process. This should make sense because a patent is a right to exclude others, not a right to do something. For example, just because you have a patent on a new drug doesn't mean you can actually sell it to patients.
You don't have to have a physically working thing to patent it. You can patent something that's just an "idea" as long as the idea is physically realizable. Ideally the patent examiner knows enough about the field that patent is in to decide whether something is likely to work in practice or whether it is just some bogus invention that has no chance of working.
