Building a Better Teacher – NYTimes.com. this is one long article. interesting stuff about the lack of training teacher’s receive.

nzakas’s computer-science-in-javascript – GitHub. guy has a bunch of standard CS algorithms (binary search, base64 encoding, etc) in javascript for teaching purposes. Come to think of it, javascript is pretty good language for teaching programming at a high school level. Code in notepad, run and debug in Firefox and it’s applicable to making your myspace profile even uglier.

Bill Moyers Journal . Greg Mortenson. great interview with the author of Three Cups of Tea about what should be done in Afghanistan.

On the Way to the N.F.L. Draft, a Year of Fulfillment in England for Rolle – NYTimes.com. a rhode scholar who played safety at Florida State. crazy.

Study Shows New York Charter School Students Score Better – NYTimes.com. the report is interesting in that it compares kids who applied to charter schools but divides them based on whether or not they got accepted. “selection bias” has been long argued why charter schools perform better on standardized tests.

Academic Earth – Video lectures from the world’s top scholars. index of video lectures from a bunch of schools. if TED wasn’t occupying enough of your time.

Star’s Vow to Win or Pay Stirs Women’s Basketball – NYTimes.com. Girl playing Oklahoma basketball has vowed to repay her scholarship if they don’t win the tournament this year.

Gallup : On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution. this is in the US. Poll includes education level and church attendance breakouts. i’m wondering how 11% of postgrads can “not believe in evolution”. via boris.

globeandmail.com: Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job. he gave everyone an A+.

Strike to Lose – Torontoist. about the absolute clusterfuck that was the York strike. I wouldn’t hesitate to transfer if I went there.

ACM Names 44 Fellows for Contributions to Computing and IT. Congrats to Prof. Ian Munro, who made the list. I took my only grad course (CS840 – Advanced Topics in Data Structures & Algorithms) with him. The course kicked my ass and taught me a valuable lesson: don’t go to grad school.


Branford Marsalis: “What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit”. via rethink.

Springwise: A being space for learning English. a gym-style membership to a language learning lounge. kinda cool.

collapse of the middle class

I came across this fantastic lecture by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren from UC Berkley entitled The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. Warren seems to be the media’s go-to lately when talking about bankruptcy and credit card debt. I’ve seen her in several New York Times articles, on Frontline, and in the documentary Maxed Out.

The lecture talks about the change in the middle class from the mid-70s to today and presents some really interesting data. Warren spends the majority of the lecture talking about the decline in savings rates and asks the question “where is all the money going”. Around the 15-minute mark she starts going into different items and shows how basically all consumer goods (like clothes, food, home appliances, etc) are 20-50% cheaper today (inflation adjusted) than back in the mid-70s. Where the money is going is in mortgage payments (up 75% excluding upkeep costs), owning a second car (50% increase), and health care costs (up 75%). She then spends quite a bit of time talking about why the increase in housing and health care costs create a “living on the edge” situation for dual income families.

The part which I found really interesting was her discussion about education and bankruptcy in the middle class. On education, she mentions how in the mid-70s the majority of Americans believed you could enter “the middle class” with a high school diploma and a strong work ethic. Today, twice as many Americans believe the moon landing was faked than believe you can make it into the middle class on a high school education. She then goes on to discuss how that means, in a generation, getting to the middle class went from 12 years of taxpayer paid education to 2 years of paid pre-school, 12 years of taxpayer paid education, and 4 years of paid post-secondary.

The numbers on bankruptcy filing was genuinely surprising to me. Ninety percent of families file for bankruptcy because of one of three reasons: job loss, medical problem in the family, or family breakup. Nearly half of those who filed had two of those three. “More children live in homes that will file for bankruptcy this year than live in homes that will file for divorce. This has been true since the late 1990s.” Put another way, “you know anyone who got divorced in the last 6 or 7 years? Know any children who come from divorced families in the last 6 or 7 years? Than statistically speaking, assuming you know a random cross sampling of Americans, you know more people whose family has filed for bankruptcy.” She goes on to mention how there is an enormous stigma attached to bankruptcy. Also telling, in some research Warren had done, 85% of people they spoke to who had filed for bankruptcy had kept it a secret from their parents, a best friend, or their children.

Here’s the full video. It’s an hours long so you might want to get in a comfy seat. Also just wanted to give a hat tip to Little Bites of Point for the link. That blog comes across some great youtube content concerning economics.


YouTube – Interview with Ricardo Semler. interesting stuff about education, the modern work environment, and how to look at a career.

Serfs of the Turf – New York Times. Michael Lewis on the hypocritical business of “amateur” college football.

Malcolm Gladwell on Race and IQ scores. it’s gladwell, of course you should read it.

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Over the last few weeks I had heard about this “last lecture” by Randy Pausch, a 47 year old professor from CMU who’s dieing of cancer. I stumbled across it this evening and I’d recommend it to everyone to watch.

Kyle commenting on George Lucas, commenting on the state of education.

Bates College | Address by Dean Kamen. a friendly reminder of what you should be doing with your education.