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Stay Curious.
Make the most of your college experience.
Jeff Hulett
Curator, The Curiosity Vine
Stay Curious.
The Curiosity Vine is an idea incubator.
Our contributors have experience and interest in a variety of high-impact topics, such as science, technology, conservation, mathematics, data science, public policy, economics, and others. Our objective is to promote early-stage ideas, enable idea collaboration, and test idea purchase.
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TCV platform is curated by Jeff Hulett.
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Join our team - become a TCV contributor!
Learn about why you should join The Curiosity Vine.
TCV's ideas are used to provide seminars, write books, build businesses, and especially to help people.
So take a look around the site, feel free to ask or answer your own questions, and enjoy your own curiosity exploration!
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Featured Posts
Economics Personality: An Evolutionary Process
My Economics Personality I study and "do" economics all the time. But have you ever stepped back and thought about your economics personality? For me, it has been evolving throughout my life. When I was younger, I would have identified much more with economists like John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson—focusing on centralized equilibrium models, state intervention, and macroeconomic levers. Today, my economic personality has evolved toward liberty, spontaneous order, and rea
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Demystifying Backpropagation: The 300-Year-Old Calculus Rule Powering Modern AI
Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on an underlying algorithm to learn: Backpropagation. Whether predicting text, recognizing images, or translating languages, neural networks depend on this universal mechanism. The core mathematical mechanism behind backpropagation is not a recent invention. The algorithm relies on a calculus rule formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1676: the chain rule. To understand how modern AI works, we examine how this centuries-old mat
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Bridging the AI Divide: Moving Higher Education from Hesitation to Integration
"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." — Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus) Educators have long questioned how new tools alter human cognition. Socrates was not warning against algorithms, but the newest technology of his era: the written word. New classroom technologies seld
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Making the Invisible Hand Visible: How Choice Architecture Operationalizes Economics
The Invisible Hand is an observation of our human nature. Adam Smith studied how people naturally operate within social settings. He then applied those behavioral insights to explain how societies generate lasting wealth. Long-term empirical trends support his core insights. Over the past two centuries, global economic data reveals unprecedented rises in real gross domestic product per capita alongside dramatic increases in global life expectancy. In 1776, Adam Smith publishe
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Economics Personality: An Evolutionary Process
My Economics Personality I study and "do" economics all the time. But have you ever stepped back and thought about your economics personality? For me, it has been evolving throughout my life. When I was younger, I would have identified much more with economists like John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson—focusing on centralized equilibrium models, state intervention, and macroeconomic levers. Today, my economic personality has evolved toward liberty, spontaneous order, and rea
Jeff Hulett
1 hour ago1 min read
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Mortgage Rates Update: October 15th, 2026
The mortgage market for the week ending October 15, 2026, demonstrated classic sticky primary pricing behavior as consumer borrowing rates remained steady despite falling benchmark yields. As an experienced economist tracking interest rate transmission, I observe the classic rocket up, feather down phenomenon in full effect, where primary mortgage rates are quick to rise alongside Treasury yields but hesitant to follow them lower. While the benchmark 10 Year Treasury Note rat
Jeff Hulett
4 days ago1 min read
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Treasury Rates Update: October 8th, 2026
In my decades monitoring fixed-income markets, a muted reaction to a sharply negative economic datapoint reveals a market that has already priced in considerable policy drag. Despite the October 2nd jobs report delivering a surprisingly low print of just 29,000 new positions, the Treasury curve held remarkably steady this past week. Rather than triggering a flight to quality, yields across most maturities experienced minimal movement as investors looked ahead to upcoming infl
Bill Knudson
4 days ago1 min read
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Treasury Rates Update: October 1st, 2026
In my decades monitoring fixed-income markets, extended multiday selling pressure usually reflects a fundamental recalibration of market expectations. Over the past two weeks, the Treasury market has experienced an intense, unrelenting surge in yields across nearly the entire term structure, with very few days offering any downward relief. Investors are aggressively pricing in persistent inflation risks and higher-for-longer policy rates. The benchmark 10-year Treasury rate c
Bill Knudson
Oct 41 min read
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Mortgage Rates Update: October 1st, 2026
The mortgage market for the week ending October 1, 2026, delivered the significant rate catch-up that our capital market indicators anticipated last week. As an experienced economist tracking interest rate transmission, I observe primary lenders fully adjusting consumer borrowing costs upward to realign with recent surges in benchmark bond yields. Over the past week, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate jumped by 25 basis points to 7.28 percent, while the benchmark 10 Year Treasur
Bill Knudson
Oct 41 min read
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Demystifying Backpropagation: The 300-Year-Old Calculus Rule Powering Modern AI
Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on an underlying algorithm to learn: Backpropagation. Whether predicting text, recognizing images, or translating languages, neural networks depend on this universal mechanism. The core mathematical mechanism behind backpropagation is not a recent invention. The algorithm relies on a calculus rule formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1676: the chain rule. To understand how modern AI works, we examine how this centuries-old mat
Jeff Hulett
Oct 38 min read
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Bridging the AI Divide: Moving Higher Education from Hesitation to Integration
"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." — Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus) Educators have long questioned how new tools alter human cognition. Socrates was not warning against algorithms, but the newest technology of his era: the written word. New classroom technologies seld
Jeff Hulett
Sep 308 min read
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Treasury Rates Update: September 24th, 2026
In my decades monitoring fixed-income markets, a decisive breach of psychological threshold levels often signals a fundamental shift in market sentiment. Following the prior week's flattening trend, the Treasury market experienced an aggressive bear steepening wave this past week, completely breaking through previous resistance levels. Yields surged across all maturities as selling pressure intensified across intermediate and long-term bonds. The benchmark 10-year Treasury
Bill Knudson
Sep 261 min read
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