Sharing the knowledge burden

Published July 11, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Do check out this site soon:

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ALBERT EINSTEIN was a singular genius. The Albert Einstein model of discovery, however—the solitary mind producing remarkable insight—was not particularly unusual for his time. For much of the period from the beginning of the industrial revolution, scientific and technical advances—including the occasional stroke of brilliance—were within the reach of the diligent amateur and the garage tinkerer. That is no longer the case. As the stock of human knowledge increases, the time needed to move oneself to the knowledge frontier grows. In a 2009 paper, Benjamin Jones noted:

If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity-a greater reliance on teamwork-and negative implications for growth. Building on this “burden of knowledge” mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behaviour. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge, while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort.

The growing “burden of knowledge” needed to move science forward has increased the age at which researchers begin making contributions, while also increasing instances of collaboration on research. This helps explain why a huge increase in resources dedicated to research over the 20th century didn’t lead to an acceleration in productivity growth. The productivity of research itself has been falling. Or to use Tyler Cowen’s phrase, the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Mr Jones implies that this may have negative implications for long-run economic growth. It could, but I’m not certain that it must. I’ll give you a couple of reasons why.

Who will get PTSD?

Researchers are trying to predict one of war’s most unpredictable tragedies. But how we should use that information is anything but clear.

If the day was pleasant, and even when it wasn’t, the two boys would march themselves into the forest, in the shadow of the Black Hills in South Dakota, and hunt. They were no more than 8 at the time, so they took BB guns—all their parents allowed them—and looked for small game, squirrels mostly. The challenge of it turned the boys, Brian Baldwin and his cousin Chuck, into sportsmen, and then best friends.

After high school, Chuck went off to Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. Brian started college and joined the ROTC on campus. By the time he got his commission and completed flight school—to be a Medevac pilot—the war was almost over.

Nevertheless, Brian’s military career took off: He found that he loved the officer’s life. Chuck, though, struggled. He came home from the war quick to anger, and drank too much, moved around a lot, and watched his marriage dissolve. When Brian saw him around the holidays, Chuck would want to talk about the war. Brian always switched the subject.

One night in the 1980s in his home in Rapid City, S.D., Chuck drank too much again. Only this time, before he passed out, he pointed a gun at himself. When he pulled the trigger, he left behind a second wife and a young son—just a few years removed from his first hunting trip.

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The incredible shrinking pay raise: Wages can’t keep up with inflation

Pay raises are getting smaller, but consumer prices continue to rise. If the trend in shrinking worker pay raises continues, it could mean stalled consumer spending and a halt to economic growth.

In this April 2012 file photo, auto workers at the Ford Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights, Ill., stack the inner door panel for a Ford Explorer. 20,000 salaried Ford workers in the US and Canada received a modest pay raise this year – something that is becoming all too rare for the average US worker.

Earlier this year, some 20,000 salaried workers of Ford Motor Co., mainly in the United States and Canada, got their first hike in base pay in two years. It wasn’t much: a raise of 2.7 percent, on average. But the Dearborn, Mich., automaker threw in some bonuses in 2011 and again this year.

Dumbass Statist

A Georgia homeowner allegedly awoke to an unusual scene on July 2 — a county code compliance officer yelling at her over the state of her lawn from the doorway of her bedroom.
“I woke up, I didn’t have my glasses on or my contacts in and all I see is this big burly figure standing in my doorway,” Erica Masters explained. “A big huge guy with a grey shirt. It scared the mess out of me.”
She elaborated: “[He] yelled at me to wake me up, to let me know that I needed to come back outside and sign the violation notice,” informing her that her grass was too long.
“I could have been coming fresh out of the shower. I mean, if I’m not answering the door, maybe it’s because I can‘t hear you because I’m in the shower,” she later pointed out.
To top it off, the whole scene can be viewed on Masters’ home surveillance cameras.

Who does this douche nozzle think he is? Talk about power hungry! He has been fired, but he was VERY lucky. If I wake up and someone I do not know is in the doorway of my bedroom, there is a great chance they are going to have an extra hole in them.
- SOURCE

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Democrat House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer ready to raise taxes on those who earn less than $250,000 per year

Still think Obama and the Marxist Democrats just want to “protect the middle class?” If you were stupid enough to believe that load of bull, maybe the following video of Maryland Democrat and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer will finally convince you. The Democrats aren’t only interested in taxing the so called evil rich. They want to tax everybody, including the “middle class” and poor.House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said Monday he would support tax increases on those who earn less than $250,000 at some point in the future.

“The president initially has it about right, at the ($250,000 level),” Hoyer said, following a speech at the Center for American Progress. “But I would be prepared to go lower at some time in the future than that.”

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War Is Betrayal

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Those I knew in prep school did not seek out the military and were not sought by it. But in the impoverished enclaves of central Maine, where I had relatives living in trailers, nearly everyone was a veteran. My grandfather. My uncles. My cousins. My second cousins. They were all in the military. Some of them—including my Uncle Morris, who fought in the infantry in the South Pacific during World War II—were destroyed by the war. Uncle Morris drank himself to death in his trailer. He sold the hunting rifle my grandfather had given to me to buy booze.

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How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven

NOTHING about 1209 North Orange Street hints at the secrets inside. It’s a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one.

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Exclusive: Top General Proposed Corruption Probe He’s Accused of Blocking

Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell shakes hands with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a graduation ceremony for Afghan military officers, March 2010. Photo: Flickr/ISAF

The allegations seemed simple: One of the Army’s most promising officers covered up a corruption probe to curry favor with the White House. But internal correspondence between two of the leading U.S. generals in Afghanistan paints a more complicated picture. The officer in question may have invited the probe he’s accused of blocking.

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who until recently supervised the training of Afghan soldiers and police, is accused of obstructing an inquiry into widespread corruption within the Afghan military’s medical staff. Caldwell allegedly scolded his staff for inviting the Pentagon inspector general to join a probe that would occur at a politically sensitive moment — the eve of U.S. congressional elections. President Obama himself “calls me Bill,” Caldwell is alleged to have boasted.

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Krauthammer: Liberals Wants Us “Living at the Tit of the Government”

Scintillating: Rielle Hunter sells only 6,000 books

Romney strikes back at Obama’s transparency calls: Where are the Fast and Furious documents?

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