March 2008 Archives

1. The final sentence
   

   Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -

   So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

2. Tom and Daisy
   

   They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

• heatmap control
  A GUI control that tracks changes in heatmap display
• expenses application for home
  Convert Excel spreadsheet to
• order management system
  Simulate actions of an order management system like Charles River
• trading application
  Simulate a trading application with FIX protocol transactions and an open source FIX protocol server
• investment manager/picker
  Develop program to pick equities according to strategy
• portfolio translated into mutual fund
  Keep track of portfolio worth by translating to virtual shares and tracking portfolio return as gain in virtual share value
• python library of financial analytics
  Create library of financial analytics from:
  
  • [Fabozzi - Fixed Income Math]
  • [Hull - Options, Futures and Other Derivatives]
  • [Haug - Complete Guide to Option Pricing Formulas]

Excerpts from How Not to Talk to Your Kids:

[...] those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized-it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student [has] reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

Students turn to cheating because they haven't developed a strategy for handling failure.

Take-home points lifted from here:

• Don't tell them they are smart... tell them they worked hard.
• Don't praise them for being good at something... tell them they are getting better through practice.
• Don't tell them they are bad at something... tell them how to do it right.