The US publishes financial statements for free on EDGAR. But then you have to parse the unstructured data, normalize it so you can compare a bank to an airline to a manufacturer and then you have to accommodate mergers and acquisitions throughout history and every revision a company makes for prior periods, and then you're starting to talk about real money and the price of Cap IQ or Compustat or Factset starts to look pretty attractive, especially if your alpha doesn't come from your proprietary methods of databasing financial statements.
Y latency doesn't matter if a human is looking at something. By the time your caveman-speed brain reacts, an FPGA sitting in an Equinix data center has made a hundred trades.
Seems that something's been broken. The normal way to look up ticket images manually at https://wmq.etimspayments.com/ no longer works, returning "Unauthorized" even after properly getting past the CAPTCHA.
Indirect rates are negotiated. What are the incentives for the government negotiators to get the lowest possible rate? I honestly don't know; I'd like to understand more about the underlying drivers here.
Why does any business' requisitons staff manage their purchases? Because it's quite literally their job. They have limited money to allocate based on their budget, and their lifelong career is trying to make that money work as effectively as possible at keeping the American research "institution" powerful. That's why grants have application processes and contract negotiations
And it's also why it's so insulting to just dismiss this whole process and claim rampant fraud with zero evidence. It's basically accusing thousands of people of being lazy and felonious and maliciously negligent. It's telling thousands of researchers who struggle for funding that they're apparently just morons for not getting in on the "infinite cash" we purportedly hand out like candy. It's saying universities don't need buildings or janitors and shouldn't take bulk discounts on their raw materials. Etc.
This isn't even getting into the absurd misunderstanding of economics of treating a government grant like a hamburger purchase. The US gives money to a US university which purchases US materials and pays US staff that are all taxed to give money to the US government. And their findings develop knowledge and cultivate skilled labor in the US that produce higher value exports for the US which are taxed to the US government. They aren't buying a hamburger, they're taking on what has proven to be one of the best investments in world history.
Programs like Stars College Network (https://starscollegenetwork.org/) and Questbridge (https://www.questbridge.org/) help to bridge this gap in knowledge. They are really good programs, based on my limited to exposure to them as a Caltech alumnus. It was an incredible stroke of luck that I knew Caltech even existed growing up in a very small town pre-Internet, and these programs take some of that luck out of the equation.
Agree on the sensitivity wrt traditional (East Coast) media. Imagine what it takes for the president (and provost, and general counsel, and chief communications officer, and ...) of Caltech to send out an email at 8:30pm on a Sunday night. This article (finally) rattled something at the Institute. However, they are still defending this program, in court, and in the press, as a wonderful thing Caltech is proud to put its name on. 4.6 out of 5 stars! (How many NSF and NIH grants get funded if they are rated 4.6/5 by reviewers? Hint: zero)
You've got faculty calling it a major embarrassment[0] and alumni aligned 100% against this grift. One has to ask, if faculty and alumni (and I presume current students) don't want this program, then who is advocating for it? One can only assume the worst.
My belief is that this is one of Tirrell's (the provost) programs given the timeline of when it happened. Bhattacharya may have also had a hand in this - I think he's the current vice provost covering teaching, which tends to also include some outreach-related stuff.
When I was a student, that outreach was mostly citizen science (a very caltech-appropriate form of outreach).
Interesting - I have a contact in the CTLO (the real teaching-oriented group) and they have said they have no contact with the CTME and are discouraged from interacting with them.
While the provost may have approved it, this whole thing is another example of administrators running roughshod over faculty (who are, admittedly, disinterested in this sort of thing). I do (hazily) recall that back when I was a frosh, there was some sort of professional program that focused on engineering management and was a joint effort with places like Hughes and The Aerospace Corporation. Given Caltech's long history with the Southern California aerospace industry, this is at least plausible. This was done through the Industrial Relations Center (page 21 here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/121/1/1992-1993.pdf)
I agree wrt outreach. It should be Watson lectures and setting up telescopes, etc. This isn't outreach, is an obvious money grab.
Yeah, the CTLO is not involved with the CTME, but the vice provost of teaching has much more than just the CTLO in their purview - that is a relatively small group. They are also not involved with a lot of other forms of outreach, like the Watson lectures and much of the other science communication Caltech does, as well as a lot of the citizen science done by the institute departments (at the time).
People at Caltech don't realize how much influence JPL has on how the school runs, but it is 3/4 of the annual budget of the organization.
32% of 2023 graduates had any debt at all; the average total indebtedness (over all four (or more) years) of that 32% was $15,896[0]. Not bad for a school that costs $86,886 _per year_[1].
One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2]
This (seemingly elegant) Virginia-class implementation feels like an inheritance of the Rickover and SUBSAFE philosophy. Not sure how the surface Navy would accept anything less.
At Caltech, students from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study).[0]
