Consider the annexation of Crimea. That's what happens in a power vacuum or a reduction in the belief that the US and the global community will retaliate against land grabs.
What happens when the US's eleven supercarriers are not in the Strait of Hormuz or floating around the Pacific. The threat is enough to guarantee countries think twice about annexing their neighbors provinces.
"Consider the annexation of Crimea. That's what happens in a power vacuum"
Yeah, let's consider it.
It's a direct response to the US-sponsored coup in the Ukraine and the threat of NATO expansion into Ukraine.
The Crimea was (arguably) illegally taken from Russia and assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954 when they both were a part of the USSR, the Ukraine refused to give it back when it declared its independence and yet Russia did nothing about it for a quarter of century and paid huge rent for Russian naval base located in Crimea.
The prospect of American military bases appearing in the Ukraine was unacceptable for Russia and what happened next you've read in the news.
That's what happens when the US meddles around the world.
"The threat is enough to guarantee countries think twice about annexing their neighbors provinces"
But who would protect countries from the American threat?
The US with the support of its navy invaded Iraq in 2003, bombed Libya, protects its allies (Turkey, Saudi Arabia) when they sponsor terrorists in Syria. The Turkey has de-facto annexed part of Syria, the US are controlling oil fields in another part of Syria, over a million are dead in Iraq, Libya is in a state of civil war ever since American bombing.
Regarding the time difference you might think of offering freelancers the option to highlight when they ARE available for calls by setting up a) Calling times b) Their current desire for calls.
I.e Bob might be looking for a job and is willing to accept calls between 12pm and 1pm, but not at 3am.
Or Jane may already have enough leads and does not want to accept any calls (too busy) but normally is available between 3pm and 4pm.
Twin studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study) aim to examine the differences due to genetics vs environment. One naive method is to look at identical twins who have been separated, and see if there is a difference in exercise levels.
So students can place bets to whether they'll get a high GPA or a low GPA (i.e. short-sell their own grades).
I'm going to find all the students that go to schools that grade on a curve and I'm going to take the opposite side of all those short-sell bets, package it into a derivative and sell that! I'll open a bunch of firms and call it "Ivy Street".
With all these prediction markets being opened up, with film companies hedging their movie scripts, I haven't looked but there's probably a market for betting on record sales. Who bets on these things? I can understand people with an edge (insiders etc), but how can there possibly be retail investors for these markets? Are stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options, futures, ETF's not enough to speculate with?
Reading your responses below it sounds like you want to work on interesting problems that have a quick turnaround in terms of real-life implementation.
I'm in a similar situation and I'm looking into doing a graduate degree in Operations Research (OR) or Industrial Engineering, which is usually offered either in Business schools or Engineering schools. You essentially do research on solving real-world problems with quantitative methods.
Many of the OR graduates (even those with PhD's) end up not in academia but in business. If you have more questions feel free to email me.
An interesting option is MBA-PhD in OR from Stern NYU. Which is something i am seriously considering. I have looked at a profile of a guy there who did MS CS. Worked for topcoder or did research about it. And now studies in Stern. This could be the golden mean which i seem to be looking for.
To sum up the derivation for those looking for crib notes; model the problem as choosing k items u.a.r. from [1..N]. Compute P(max = i), and from this compute the expectation of the max. After simpliciation this is given in terms of k and N, and hence we have an estimator for N in terms of k and max.
I'm betting that Google or a 3rd party will eventually piggy back a for-pay educational tool on the existing Google Apps school customer-base through their Marketplace.
Most poeple will look at which ones are the biggest.
Everyone should take note the fact that Education is the at the bottom in both starting and median salary.
Wikipedia says he's one of the most highly cited people in the world.
I 'know' him better through his ideas of grammars (Chomsky Normal Forms) and their applications to bioinformatics.
The article itself is interesting, a bit wordy. Chomsky is a well known academic in the sense that his work on linguistics is seen in many places from Psychology to Computer science.
The fact that he's also anti-government is new. I liked one line from the article (towards the end of page 1):
What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, ... They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.
If nothing else the article is a bit thought provoking and I think most people could use a bit more thinking in their daily lives.
When you say "The fact that he's also anti-government is new", I have to assume you mean the fact that he's opposed to the current administration, as Chomsky's opposition to the US government in general is long standing.
In my eyes, the article reads largely as a hagiography. The only "news" I see in it is that Chomsky compares the current situation in the US to the Weimar Republic. I am not an expert on either pre-WWII Germany, or modern US politics, but it seems contradictory to me to compare the US today with the effectively powerless Weimar government while simultaneously decrying the US as the most powerful government in the world. While there may be some parallels in terms of public attitudes, to me this seems like a more literate example of Godwin's Law (except not on Usenet).
You mention that Wikipedia states that "According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source." This seems like an argument to authority. It occurs to me that the period chosen ('80 - '92) corresponds to the Reagan and Bush administrations, and that these citations may therefore reflect the amount of discourse among administration opponents as much as they reflect Chomsky's intellectual stature.
To be clear, I would be just as unhappy about someone posting an article on HN reporting that Pat Robertson thinks that the Obama administration is massing troops in Cuba for a "socialist" overthrow of the US government. That would be "thought provoking" too. Of course, the bias among HN reviewers (and comments) makes this pretty unlikely. My own preference would be that political stories on HN have at least some technology angle, and a modicum of reporting, rather than just editorializing (for example, the recent stories about Wikileaks have both).
For people interested in this kind of analysis I recommend Mathletics by Wayne Winston. He's written a blog and a book about similar subjects.
The book itself is approachable with a basic knowledge of mathematics, probability, and statistics. It provides a good introduction to things like Sabermetrics (for baseball), and applications to the NBA and the NFL.
What happens when the US's eleven supercarriers are not in the Strait of Hormuz or floating around the Pacific. The threat is enough to guarantee countries think twice about annexing their neighbors provinces.