Humans Need Not Apply– Great discussion of automation and robots and how they may affect the future job market. Highly recommended.

Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened– Heroic efforts to solve a problem at a last second gets the hero rewarded with a promotion. Soon, managerial ranks are full of people that “are good in a crisis” and who value similar work. As a result, no one ends up doing the incremental improvement or maintenance that keeps crises from happening in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle.

Books from The Great Books of the Western World that are available for free to download: If you’re not reading something technical for your job, read these classic books and make yourself a better person.

If you do want to read something technical for your job, let me suggest Think Complexity. It discusses graph algorithms, scale-free networks, fractals, and the game of life. It contains Python code, so it will also help you be a better programmer. I read most of it while awaiting assignment at Booz Allen.

First Time on the Market? This page is a collection of essays written for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I jumped around a read a few. There are many good ideas about how to conduct a job search, interview, and deal with offers or rejection. Just note that each article is a sample size of one and your situation might not fit their suggestions perfectly.

Craig Holden’s Career Resources Page: Professor Holden teaches finance courses at Indiana University, and I took his “Asset Pricing Theory” course in Spring 2014. Some of the links on this page are specific to finance grad students, but many of the links to suggestions about how to write papers and find relevant papers are applicable for many students.

Trio of Calvin and Hobbes links:

Suggested searches for the Calvin and Hobbes search engine: Calvinball, snowmen, and math.

Maria and I saw the Bill Watterson exhibit at Ohio State recently.

Bill Watterson came out of hiding to draw Pearls Before Swine for a few days.

Yay Calvin and Hobbes!

Word Frequency Counter: Figure out which words your use too much in your writing. Then buy a Thesaurus. Because Thesaurus salesman need your business.

Learn to program in R and Python: Bare-bones ideas for getting started in R and/or Python. I have some of my own thoughts on the topic, but this is a good roadmap.

What I’m Reading from Farnam Street Blog: Well-read and usually well-written blog about wisdom from books. Use the linked-to page to get ideas for some books to read.

Inception Noise: Make Putin dance to the noise from Inception. Because, why not. Use speakers. Preferably loud speakers.

Some Thoughts on Grad School by Cal Newport. Some great thoughts about what is important and what is not while finishing your doctorate.

Vintage Business Motivational Posters. Some great stuff. To the point. Don’t make excuses.

Posts from this week:
Code Monkey Monday- Eclipse and PyDev
Life Tips- Bouncy Ball Chair
Two Links Tuesday
Theory Tuesday- Prospect Theory
An Ode to Subjective Power Rankings
Theory Thursday- Little’s Law
Project Updates- June 5, 2014
Book Review- Why I Left Goldman Sachs
Travels- Colorado Weather in Late May 2014

ACM Web Science 2014 Conference at IU. This conference is coming to Bloomington June 23-26. It is a single-track conference that is a little far afield from what I usually study, but I plan to try to sneak in nonetheless. If you want to come with me and cause a diversion while I sneak in, that would be appreciated.

How far your paycheck goes in various cities. How is Bloomington the poorest city (via median income) in the country? That doesn’t seem right. Are they counting in all the part-time students income? I think Bloomington is about 40k students and about 40k permanent residents, so the median might get significantly pushed down by including all the part-time students.