Help with daughter!

Or dropping back to the old limit... is what I heard. Maybe just a scare tactic, so Obama can whack the banks without the public getting aroused?

...Jim Thompson

Worse is the House bill that just passed.[*] It lets bankruptcy judges arbitrarily reduce someone's mortgage to something they can afford...the embodiment of "to each according to his need."

This is simply theft: if you, Joe-sloppo, default on your mortgage, you get to steal the money from your lender.

But who really has the bubble money, the money made from selling all these over-priced homes? The SELLERS, obviously. Not the banks-- they gave their money to YOU, the BORROWER. They made a couple points in fees, and that's it.

So if you want a refund, get it from the person YOU PAID THE MONEY TO, not the bank. THE BANK DOESN'T HAVE IT.

Prediction: 1) this bill would kill the banks. They simply can't survive such losses, not even close. 2) They'll have to be nationalized.

James Arthur

That's Comrade Obama's purpose. These cretins want to take the country to full communism.

Where are all those worshippers of Comrade Obama now?

They certainly were "mouthy" last Spring when I was noting that the stock market was already starting to slide just on the fear of a leftist weenie administration.

Where oh where is that leftist weenie cretin now, you know, the one who was so fond of calling "W" a moron ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

amdx wonders

As I understand it, American degrees are broader than UK ones so I won't suggest something to broaden her mind as she'll get that at college. Unless you want her to get life experience / immunise her against human bad behaviour by reading some useful works of literature like biographies, or a psychology / sociology primer. And she might find books like Freakonomics or Quirkology engaging and stimulating. Don't try to ram "great literature" down her throat though, you'll just put her off it permanently.

You could ask her to do a practical project like writing a website or program to conduct secure financial transactions over the Web. That would teach a broad range of stuff - not just technical but some financial and human engineering too.

You haven't mentioned biology among her achievements. What about a first aid course? Might teach her the consequences of excess.

If she was British I'd suggest learning German as the other major European technical language. But in the States I guess I'd recommend Spanish.

I always feel the students with the biggest advantage at university are the ones with an extra bit of maturity - for example the ones who have taken a year out and done some travelling on their own, before going to university. They seem much more focused than the students who arrive straight from school.

al

or

=A0 =A0...Jim Thompson

Mike, My suggestion would be to ask your daughter. After all the best motivation for self study comes from the self. What does she want to do?

George Herold

I remember seeing one of the 'hard luck' cases, where she had been 'persuaded' to refinance every year for four years, each time taking out about $20K of equity. Now, her note was way more than she could pay, and they were making a big deal out of how the 'lender' was to blame for letting her get that mortgage. Nothing was ever said about what did she do with all that money she was getting!

Charlie

Mortgages will become hard to get and "the poor" will find it impossible. Basically, a borrower will have to be "bankruptcy proof" to get a loan. Not good for property values. Since property is the last refuge for wealth, Obama has a clear field to full Marxism. The leftist cretins in Congress haven't figured out that their wealth is now threatened too?

Except that the seller is also a borrower.

It will kill all real estate. As far as nationalization, the Obominables have gotten their way. I don't think they'll like it, but that's "George Bush's fault".

I've seen literally hundreds and hundreds of foreclosed homes. I saw about thirty yesterday, maybe more.

They're usually trashed. Not just vandalized--vandals don't explain peeling paint, water-stains, rotting timbers, termite nests, rusty plumbing, calcified shower fixtures, etc. They're often just plain dirty.

A very few, possibly five, have been nice: real people lived there & fell on hard times. Those people have my sympathy.

The rest treated their $540,000 houses like apartments, never cleaned nor maintained them, then took off when the bill came due.

Many, many of the real estate records reveal owners actively refinancing to get the equity out, several times as the bubble expanded. Then they split, leaving the bank with the bill.

I guess the theory of the new House bill above is: "If you lend money foolishly, you deserve to get burned."

There might be some sense to that, but it seems REALLY wrong, unfair, and a bad example that the irresponsible get discounted houses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, at what ultimately will be taxpayer expense.

Spread the wealth.

James Arthur

That's because it has the most remote possible relationship to anything real or factual, that they can still get away with calling "mathematics".

Cheers! Rich

"If anything happens to my daughter, I've got a .45 and a shovel. I doubt anybody would miss you." (from _Clueless_)

About 1962 or 1963 (make that 11 or 12) when the bills started comming with punch cards, i knew then that computers had taken over. Having a good springboard in electronics already, i started lining up my life accordingly. And it has been nothing but surprises since.

It has my direct repeated experience that the typical statistician doesn't know a damn thing about probability and statistics.

Did you conduct a statistically-valid survey of statisticians to determine what is a "typical" statistician.

Most people's views regarding statisticians tend to be based upon reports (either government publications or, worse, media reports thereof) which have been through several levels of filtering between the statisticians and the reader.

Useful? Yes. Most essential? Hardly.

For analogue electronics, calculus would have to be the most essential subject. You aren't going to get anywhere without understanding at least the basic concepts of differentiation and integration, and you'll be severely limited without understanding e.g. Laplace or Fourier transforms.

For the digital side, pretty much any aspect of discrete mathematics will have some real-world application. Some of it is even more important for EE than for computing generally; the difference between an optimal and sub-optimal algorithm could mean the difference between working and not working when you have very limited memory and clock speeds.

...Jim Thompson

I have a friend who -- with his statistics degree in hand -- went to work out for college for a group of analysts. The question they'd ask perspective clients was along the lines of, "What data do you have? And what would you like it to show?"

:-(

He didn't work there long, choosing to quit and retain some integrity.

I think that for a lot of analog electronics, it's really regular old algebra that gets the most workout. True, there's plenty of working with phasors or the somewhat more general Laplace transform, but I suspect that fewer than one in ten practicing EEs could immediately answer a question along the lines of, "if I feed a triangular waveform to this linear circuit of yours, what's the output going to be?" Actually, not being able to immediately answer that question isn't a big deal, but I suspect that fewer than half of those practicing EEs could even give you the basic outline of how to solve the problem (go look up/remember/derive Laplace transform of triangular waveform, figure out the circuit's transfer function, multiple the do, do an inverse Laplace transform to get back to the time domain).

Then again, probably at least... mmm... 7 out of 10 could come up with, "Well, if you give me a SPICE simulator, I can solve the problem for you in 10 minutes or less!" :-)

Effectively, advances in technology have allowed many "brute force" solutions to become viable when traditionally you needed a lot more "book learning."

---Joel

Which is why the analog consulting business is picking up so rapidly ;-)

...Jim Thompson