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How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2

“I was on campus speaking to a student who was a computer science and math double major, who was thinking of shifting to an economics major because the computer science courses were too difficult. I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load. That student will be one of our interns this summer.”

“She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the training.”

We have neither the mental capacity nor the understanding to decipher the full web of cause-and-effect relations in our social existence. So our daily behavior and reactions must be based on incomplete, and occasionally misleading, mental models.

Social scientists – and economists in particular – analyze the world using simple conceptual frameworks that they call “models.”

Useful social-science models are invariably simplifications. They leave out many details to focus on the most relevant aspect of a specific context.

New Truths That Only One Can See

Given the desire for ambitious scientists to break from the pack with a striking new finding, Dr. Ioannidis reasoned, many hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong

Taking into account the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable.

Why Do Americans Stink at Math?

The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.

In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.

“We’re focusing on the trade impact,” said Mr. Lin, a professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Peking University’s School of Physics. “Trade changes the location of production and thus affects emissions.”

“Dust, ozone and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins in California and other Western states,” the statement said.Black carbon is a particular problem because rain does not wash it out of the atmosphere, so it persists across long distances, the statement said. Black carbon is linked to asthma, cancer, emphysema, and heart and lung disease.

The study’s scientists also looked at the impact of China’s export industries on its own air quality. They estimated that in 2006, China’s exporting of goods to the United States was responsible for 7.4 percent of production-based Chinese emissions for sulfur dioxide, 5.7 percent for nitrogen oxides, 3.6 percent for black carbon and 4.6 percent for carbon monoxide.

But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply.

No one is certain why Goss’s wilt has become so rampant in recent years. But many plant pathologists suspect that the biggest factor is the hybrids chosen for genetic modification by major seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. “My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”

About 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States comes from seeds that have been engineered in a laboratory, their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Almost all American corn, for instance, is now engineered to resist the powerful herbicide glyphosate (often sold as Roundup), so farmers can kill weeds without killing their corn.

As farmers grow more corn to satisfy the demand for ethanol, they are rotating it less frequently with other crops.

South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters