Draper University

The latest news on Tim Draper's Draper University:

Draper and his project team will host a neighborhood meeting tonight to discuss the temporary pilot program at the hotel, located at 44 E. Third Ave. The incubator program is designed to support the successful development of startups through an array of business support resources and collaborative mentoring with the university’s network of contacts. 

Recently, the city just relaxed its downtown retail requirements that mandated storefronts on ground floors be used solely for retail purposes. 

Before the city relaxed the rules, however, the former owners of the Collective Antiques building, the Musich family, asked the city for a variance to allow a startup, SnapLogic, to operate on the ground floor. 

Some residents, however, urged the City Council not to grant the variance to keep downtown pedestrian and retail oriented.

Big Data to Create 1.9M IT Jobs in U.S. By 2015

From CIO.com :

Big data, which refers to data collected and analyzed from every imaginable source, is becoming an engine of job creation as businesses discover ways to turn data into revenue, says Gartner. By 2015, it is expected to create 4.4 million IT jobs globally, of which 1.9 million will be in the U.S. 

Applying an economic multiplier to those jobs, Gartner expects that each big data IT job added to the economy will create employment for three more people outside the tech industry in the U.S., adding six million jobs to the economy. That's the kind of estimate that presidential candidates, if they focused on IT's impact on the economy instead of fossil fuel fracking and pipelines, might jump on. 

But Sondergaard's estimate included a caveat -- namely, that there's a shortage of skilled workers. Only a third of the big data jobs will be filled.

Why you can't vote online

From MIT's Technology Review:

A decade and a half into the Web revolution, we do much of our banking and shopping online.   So why can’t we vote over the Internet? The answer is that voting presents specific kinds of very hard problems. 

Even though some countries do it and there have been trial runs in some precincts in the United States, computer security experts at a Princeton symposium last week made clear that online voting cannot be verifiably secure, and invites disaster in a close, contentious race.

Comment : Comment to Chris Langan, the "smartest man in the world"

Below are some comments I made to Chris Langan. Chris Langan who? Well, Chris Langan was dubbed "the smartest man in the world" in one Youtube video and "the smartest man in America" by Esquire magazine. He has an amazingly high IQ - estimated to be between 195 and 210.

For years, Langan has been developing a theory he calls the CTMU ('Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe'). It took me less than three hours to find the mistakes in his theory, a mistake which basically dooms it. Here are the comments that I made on the blog 'Three Quarks Daily'. Note the times at which I made my comments. The first one came at 3:18:00 PM and the follow up came at 5:37:00 PM.

Comment : comment to Prof. Sieg Hecker

Here are some comments I sent to Prof. Sieg Hecker, a world expert on nuclear weapons.

=+=

In the case of India, I have been surprised that India continues to adopt what I would term an 'underdog' stance. India talks about nuclear 'have's and 'have-not's and justifies its own nuclear own program on this basis. I believe this to be a mistake. I think it would be better for India to adopt a policy of 'persistent ambiguity' (or, if you prefer, 'calculated ambiguity'). 

China is building a 100-petaflop supercomputer

From Infoworld :

As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015.
China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed.

Predicting what topics will trend on Twitter

From MIT news :

Twitter’s home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are “trending,” meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume. A position on the list is highly coveted as a source of free publicity, but the selection of topics is automatic, based on a proprietary algorithm that factors in both the number of tweets and recent increases in that number.
At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student Stanislav Nikolov will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before.