For my final project in Computer Science 175: Intro to Graphics, I created a maze game with a buddy of mine. Click here for the project website – you can check out screen shots and even download the source if you’re interested!
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This paper was written for Economics 1339: Generating Wealth of Nations, a Harvard undergraduate course taught by visiting professor Jeffrey Borland.
Introduction
The convergence hypothesis at its most fundamental level posits that countries with lower productivity will tend to grow at faster rates than their more productive neighbors. This theory follows directly from the law of diminishing returns, which explains that the marginal output of a production factor progressively decreases as the factor is increased. Following this logic, a less productive country can exploit the same techniques utilized in more productive countries to achieve a greater output for any given level of input. While theoretically sound, the convergence hypothesis relies upon one key assumption that is not brought to bear in the real world – either no other determinants of productivity growth exist, or countries with varying productivities are equal in all other aspects. Empirical evidence runs contrary to both possibilities. For example, in the period from 1870 to 1913, America continued to increase its already well-established lead in productivity, while the average productivity level of laggard countries in Europe fell. Following the Second World War, however, Europe’s rapid growth and convergence with the United States seems to validate the hypothesis. These discrepancies imply the existence of other important determinants of growth. This paper seeks to examine the mechanisms by which convergence occurs to uncover the characteristics that explain why some laggard countries experience accelerated growth rates, why others with high productivity remain leaders, and why still others fail to ever catch up.
I recently found myself with the need to connect to a Mongo DB instance from a PHP application running on Amazon EC2. The PHP docs led me to this MongoDB extension, which seemed to be a good fit for my needs. Still, the matter of installation was a little bit less clear, considering that the EC2 instance was pretty barebones and lacked a fair number of the “standard” libraries that would enable this single line installation to work.
After a bit of finagling, I got everything to work via the steps I’ve outlined below.
Sometimes I leave processes running which take up ports on my local machine (e.g., Redis server). I won’t be able to use the port until it’s freed up, but it’s sometimes a chore to figure out how to kill the process by port.
I found the following snippet super useful to kill a process by port in Mac OS:
lsof -t -i tcp:[port] | xargs kill
Just replace the [port] above with the actual numbered port (e.g., 6379).
I’ve been very busy developing a couple projects over the past couple days, but here is a quick little trick to get around one of Drupal’s quirks. If you’re unfamiliar with Drupal, it’s a fantastic CMS (content management system) built on PHP and MySQL. For those blog-savvy among us, it is to general websites what WordPress is to blogs. I use Drupal to get sites up quickly and with great functionality, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to build powerful, custom websites without “re-inventing the wheel.”
Anyway, Drupal has this strange quirk in its source that creates a small grey border on the top of tables inserted in a page’s content. A quick trip to my inspector revealed how to remove the top border from Drupal tables. Simply add the following line to your CSS.
body tbody { border-top: none; }
All there is to it. 🙂
