October 2011
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Why teens are wired for risk
Why teens are wired for risk Kind of important for higher education to think about, no? Scientists typically refer to “the teenage brain” in 13- to 17-year-olds, but that doesn’t mean that college students are totally “adults” yet. In fact, research from the National Institutes of Health has shown, the prefrontal cortex, a region of Continue reading
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Education and Start-ups
From Will Dropouts Save America? If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills Continue reading
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That people can see goods and services in the shop window but have no money to buy them is the classic failure of capitalism. That people have money but there are no goods in the shop window is the classic failure of socialism. Not to be too simplistic but our current problem looks more like the first than the second.
That people can see goods and services in the shop window but have no money to buy them is the classic failure of capitalism. That people have money but there are no goods in the shop window is the classic failure of socialism. Not to be too simplistic but our current problem looks more like Continue reading
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I don’t think you can call it remediation anymore when 1/3 of your students require it. At some point the problem is not the students or the high schools, but that we’ve built a higher education system based on false assumptions about who our students are and what they have when they get here. Our Continue reading
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From Klein’s The student debt crisis in one chart (article here) Continue reading
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The Partisan and the Political
The Partisan and the Political This is right, mostly: But by conflating partisanship and ideology, elite discourse tends to discredit the latter; thus, just as elites tend to cloak their ideological program in the veil of post-partisanship, contemporary popular movements sometimes attempt to do the same. But they, too, are ideological whether they want to Continue reading
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It’s Not How Many Followers You Have, It’s Who Follows You
It’s Not How Many Followers You Have, It’s Who Follows You Yglesias gets it right — a lot of these viral success stories sold as the annals of meritocracy are anything but. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it just happens a lot less than you’d think. Continue reading
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Inequality and economic growth. From the IMF, which I hope is using this to rethink its approach… Continue reading
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The crowdsourcing scalability problem (or the thinness of the cognitive surplus gruel)
I’m sure someone has mentioned this, but the interesting thing if you look at Wikipedia is how many editing hours have gone into each page. Shirky says there’s a hundred million hours put into Wikipedia. There’s an estimated 342,768 full articles in Wikipedia. That’s about 291 hours per article. I don’t know what they get to write an Continue reading
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Leisure Leaf-Diving with fam unit, on a fine New England autumn weekend. Continue reading
Hapgood 