As he tried to show them the problem with this, he gave the following story:

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek - even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” - and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ’science’ here in Brazil.”

Does this sound familiar? This is why I’m so disillusioned by our educational system. No one is here to learn, only to get good grades so they can get a good job. How do they get good grades? By memorizing.

Some of you might know that I consider studying a form of cheating. If you’re being tested over your knowledge of a subject, studying is the means by which you fake that knowledge. That isn’t to say I don’t study - I don’t study much, but I do skim my notes before a test. Our educational system has devolved from testing your knowledge to testing your memorization skills. Studying isn’t cheating because you’re not being tested for knowledge.

I try not to let school get in the way of my education, and do a good deal of learning outside of class through things like the BIL Conference. BIL was so exciting because it was a gathering of really smart people who wanted to learn. While the lectures were great, I most valued the hallway conversations. It’s so refreshing to spend time with people who have a passion for learning.

I often feel like I’m missing out on the real college experience, and that Texas A&M University isn’t a “real” college. I want to hang out around Stanford, Princeton, and MIT and have those interesting and random conversations with intellectuals, which I was always told college was like. I want to take classes that are interesting and actually learn something, without worrying how the class will affect my GPA. I want to spend my four undergraduate years in an environment similar to the one we created for two days at BIL.

Now that I’m almost done with school, I feel like Texas A&M cheated me of an education. Everything I’ve done and learned these past few years have been despite this institution, not because of it. I want to take a few years getting a “real” education - go to a great university and sit in on classes that interest me. I don’t care about grades or a degree, I just want the knowledge.

When you work for a grade, you’re learning for someone else. Whether you have to get that 3.5 GPA to get a job with one of the Big Four, or you need a 4.0 to get into some graduate program.

True learning is internal. I learn because I want to learn. Selfish, I know.

I have been repeatedly disappointed by my formal education, and I now turn to my informal education to teach me.

There’s still a few things I want that they either don’t have or I haven’t found yet:

• Maps - Users can put their location in their profile, but I can’t seem to find a way to use this. I’d like to have a map that shows all the BIL’ders around the world, and allows them to easily connect with others nearby.
• Events - We want some way for people to sign up for different BIL Conferences. Right now we’re using a google form, but if we’re using Lefora I’d like some way to associate a user with an event (no reason to have them enter information we already have).

These two points are important because they are the main purpose of the BIL Community: connecting local like-minded individuals to encourage them to start their own BIL, and to create discussions with BILders throughout the world.

I’ll keep digging into it and see if it can help us.

For one of my classes (FINC 421) we started our own hedge funds. We were given $30M in a program called StockTrak with the ability to buy 50% on margin, access to Bloomberg, and a few basic QUANT rules. Over 3 months we were able to generate over 20% return, which is amazing.

Our professor started this project to see if a student-run, QUANT-based hedge fund would be possible here at Texas A&M. After these great results, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll be getting a hedge fund here in the next few years. We already have a student-run stock portfolio (The Tanner Fund).

Here’s the presentation we’re giving tomorrow on our results:

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‘The Real American Gladiators’ is the name of our Hedge Fund; I’m not sure who came up with that name.

For those that are interested, here’s a few details on how we made so much:

• We downloaded the most recent data on about 7000 stocks from Bloomberg, rated them based on (Free Cash Flow)/(Enterprise Value) and Return on Invested Capital, then sorted them from most undervalued to most overvalued.
• After eliminating all with a market cap below $1B, we went $30M long on the first 10 and $30M short on the last 10. This long-short strategy allowed us to make money despite market conditions. In effect, we were betting that one group of stocks was relatively mispriced against another.
• After 2 weeks we closed out our positions and repeated.
• After about 4 trades we integrated Reversal into our strategy - that is the concept that the best performing stocks this month will be the worst performers next month (see graph in slideshow for more details).
• Towards the end of the presentation we show what “our fees” were. This is based on a management fee of 20% profits + .5% of assets under management.
• I was amazed at how well these QUANT strategies worked. We had such great results because we were unemotional (never using our “gut”) and made our trades a few hours after computing the data, while it was still fresh and relevant.
• While the annualized return is 115%, I don’t think we could expect that high of a yearly return. I think our portfolio did so well because of the increased volatility in the market recently. I don’t think these results are typical; however, I do think the QUANT strategies would continually beat the market. Just not as much as we were able to do over the past 3 months.

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Today I’m giving a talk on the moral issues associated with Aubrey de Grey’s research into “curing” aging. He’s approaching aging as a disease that needs to be cured, and while the science behind his work is relatively uncontroversial, many people are fundamentally opposed to life extension.

More information on this topic can be found here:

• TED Talk - Aubrey de Grey
• The Immortalist: Aubrey de Grey on Aging - briefly discusses how no one has been able to scientifically discount Aubrey’s hypotheses.
• Aubrey’s slide deck - A more scientific presentation than the one he gave at TED
• Sens.org - The research being done by Aubrey and his team

If you’re interested in hearing him speak, he will be at Texas A&M in the fall (we’re still working out the date). Send me an email if you’d like to know when we have more information on this talk.

• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Upgrades your wordpress install to the lastest version
• Audit Trail - Keeps a versioned history of posts, pages, and any other changes to the site, and let’s you revert to an older version.

Here’s what I’m doing right now:

• Events
  • BarCampTX - We’re having BarCamp Texas in Downtown Bryan tomorrow. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. Someone needs to drive down to Houston to grab the shirts, and we need to build 2 walls tonight! We’re in a huge room that we want to break up into three rooms, and just this week found out we’d need to build these walls.
  • BIL - aka, “The Other TED.” We’re reaching critical mass with this one. We have some amazing speakers already lined up and word is spreading throughout the science and technology community about it. Two days ago we finally confirmed the location - we have a conference center reserved for March 1 & 2. I’m working on promotion mostly right now. Getting interesting people to actually commit to a topic and add themselves to the wiki. We have a little over a month until BIL happens!
  • Trip to California - Cody and I are going to California for a week (two of those days being BIL). We’re setting up meetings with all the people and companies we know but haven’t met in person. If you’re interested in meeting up, send me an email.
• School
  • Two quizzes on Monday
  • Paper due on Tuesday
  • Still have work to do in moving my midterms around. I’ll be missing three midterms while I’m in California for BIL. I was able to get BIL considered a “University Sponsored Event” but I still have to work with my professors to move the midterms.
• Reading - some of this falls under school, some pleasure
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - I’ve heard great things about this book for years, and started reading over the Christmas break. I’m only about 150 pages into it (it’s over 1000 pages long), and it’s on the back burner now.
  • Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill - for Philosophy 111
  • Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant - for Philosophy 111
  • The Little Book that Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt - for Finance 421
  • The Game by Neil Strauss - This one is about the art of being a pickup artist, and “the community” behind it. One of my friends is friends with a leader in the community, and I thought I’d read up on it in case I run into him. Very interesting book about the psychology of women.
• Work
  • Still webmaster at Mays Business School. Working on some video stuff at the moment.
  • About to relaunch Coursevote, my facebook application.
  • We’re launching A blank site at BarCampTX.
  • Working on Activist Apparel, a clothing line owned by Always Creative and I.
  • Creative Space stuff. We’ve been doing a lot of networking and meetings in Houston recently.

So yeah, that’s a quick summary of what I’m up to. Busy Busy Busy

BIL is an open, self-organizing, and emergent science and technology conference. The best way to describe it is that BIL is to TED what BarCamp is to FooCamp.

Find out more on the website: http://bilconference.com

How did it get started? Cody and I wanted to go out to Monterey while TED was going on to hopefully interact with some of the attendees afterwards, and just spend some time catching up with all of our friends in California. I invited a few of my friends who might want to come, and Todd Huffman had the idea to hold our own conference while TED was going on so that we would have “something to do.”

While we haven’t officially announced it until now, a lot of people have expressed interest in the conference. I’m not going to name any names (I’ll wait until they add their names to the wiki), but believe me, it will be worth the trip out to Monterey.

The conference is going to be March 1-4. Cody and I will be in California a few days before and after the conference, so if you’re interested in meeting up send me an email.

Hope to see you there.

We got a virus or something about a month ago, which had been getting progressively worse. It got to the point where I’d get popups while watching TV. So after Christmas I decided I’d fix it by formatting the computer and reinstalling everything. It’s been two weeks and I’m still working on it.

First, I formatted it with the dell restore cd that came with the computer. It reinstalled windows, but didn’t come with any drivers. I couldn’t get online to download them because I didn’t have drivers for the ethernet. It came with a Drivers CD but that didn’t work.

I get on my mac and talk with dell support. Talk about terrible support.

Bill Erickson: “I formatted my Dell using the provided restore CD, and now I’m trying to install the drivers. the Drivers CD crashes every time it tries to load. I tried downloading the eithernet driver from dell.com, putting it on a flash drive and trasfering it to the computer (because it can’t connect to the internet without the ethernet driver) but that didn’t work either.
Bill Erickson: “can you provide me with an ethernet driver that will work with my computer, so I can connect to windows update and get all the other drivers?”

That was the first thing I said in the chat. It took over 30 minutes for them to actually give me a link to the driver. BUT, I finally got it.

Once I’m able to get online, I go to Windows Update to do all the updates and get all the drivers working. Then I try to install BeyondTV. It freezes toward the end of the installation and I’m forced to end the task. I try to relaunch the installer but it says it’s already installed. I try to use the software but it never loads after clicking the icon. I try to remove the program from Add/Remove Programs but it doesn’t show up in there.

I format the comptuer again. I keep the ethernet driver on the external drive connected to the computer (the one that holds all my movies and recorded shows). Format, install driver, windows update, install BeyondTV. Everything’s going well, but then BeyondTV says there’s a problem with my TV tuner card. I have the driver for it, and it shows up in the list of TV cards in BeyondTV, it just doesn’t work. So I give up for the night.

The next day I take a look at it and there’s all these errors on the screen. “Can’t write file to D:/[something].” I try to open up My Computer but it freezes. I restart, and the external drive doesn’t show up. Hoping it’s a problem with the computer, I take the external drive to the other windows box and see if it will work there. No luck. I don’t know what happened to it but none of my computers are able to see it. Which means I’ve lost all my movies and tv shows.

I’m seriously considering buying a mac mini and just using front row to watch movies and DVD’s. No TV any more. There’s no good shows out there anyway, and if I do hear about one I like I can download it.

I am so tired of working with windows. When I fix one problem, another shows up, and they progressively get more difficult (or important). I feel like I’m playing a game I’ll never be able to win.

My blog is now at http://blog.billerickson.net and running on Wordpress. I’ve imported all the content from my old blog, and I’ll be blogging from here now. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, the feed is the same as it was before: http://feeds.feedburner.com/billerickson. I’m not sure how often I’ll be blogging, but I’m guessing it will be once or twice a month.

http://www.billerickson.net is now my tumblr feed, which pulls from my blog, flickr, twitter, del.icio.us, any comments I make on other blogs, or anything else I find interesting. This will be updated much more often than the blog, probably 1-10 posts per day. If you’d like to subscribe to this, here’s the feed: http://www.billerickson.net/rss.

We’ll see how long this lasts before I change it up yet again.

This Thursday we’ll be having Amazon come and talk about their Web Services. If you’re a developer or interested in building scalable web applications, you don’t want to miss this.

We’re doing it at Mays Business School, Room 182, 7 P.M. on Thursday. Seating is limited to about 70 people so get there early if you want a good seat.

More information here.