Author Archives: Frank Ruscica
2009 book: “Contemporary higher education is…an absurdly expensive, time-consuming way to guarantee intellectual and personality traits that could be measured far more easily, cheaply and reliably.”
From 2009 book Spent — Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior:
Contemporary higher education is…an absurdly expensive, time-consuming way to guarantee intellectual and personality traits that could be measured far more easily, cheaply and reliably by other means. Thorstein Veblen explained most of this perfectly clearly in his 1914 book The Higher Learning in America, but, [...]
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OECD: 19.1% of American jobseekers under 25 are unemployed.
Note to self: market Adver-ties.com in Spain.
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NY Times:”The average G.P.A. at private colleges and universities today is 3.3. At public schools, it is 3.0.”
Education payola:
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NY Times: Customized education doubles the pace of learning.
From an April 18, 2010 article in the New York Times:
Virtual simulations, labs and tutorials allow for continuous feedback that helps the student along. The student’s progress is tracked step by step, and that information is then used to make improvements to the course. Several studies have shown that students learn a full semester’s worth [...]
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2010 book: “153 million students are now enrolled at universities around the world, a 53 percent jump in just nine years.”
From the forthcoming book The Great Brain Race — How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World:
153 million students are now enrolled at universities around the world, a 53 percent jump in just nine years. With many nations unable to keep up with this growing demand, students have strong incentives to seek higher education wherever they [...]
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LinkedIn implements “living profiles” that incorporate entries from the profile-owner’s blog
From an article in the March 25, 2010 issue of Fortune magazine:
As companies turn to the web to mine for prospective job candidates, it’s no longer advantageous to refrain from broadcasting personal information. Instead, the new imperative is to present your professional skills as attractively as possible, packing your profile with keywords (marketing manager, global [...]
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David Simon on writing The Wire
From an interview published in the December 2009 issue of Vice magazine (the interviewer’s questions and remarks appear in bold):
Can you outline, even really roughly, the process of scriptwriting?
There would be a series of planning sessions. First, at the beginning of every season, we did a sort of retreat with the main writers, the guys [...]
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The Big Short, by Michael Lewis: “A smaller number of people — more than ten, fewer than twenty — made a straightforward bet against the entire multi-trillion-dollar subprime mortgage market and, by extension, the global financial system. In and of itself it was a remarkable fact: The catastrophe was forseeable, yet only a handful noticed.”
From The Big Short:
The thing Eisman had found was indeed a goldmine, but it wasn’t true that no one else knew about it. By the fall of 2006, Greg Lippman had made his case to maybe 250 big investors privately, and to hundreds more at Deutsche Bank sales conferences or on Deutsche Bank conference calls. [...]
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TV exec’s note re: a pilot script: “Could we have the drama…without the conflict?”
From a March 21, 2010 article in the New York Times about David Simon, creator of acclaimed HBO series The Wire:
By spring 2008, two and a half years after the pilot was ordered, they agreed on a draft that they would take to HBO, beginning what tends to be a perilous stage in the [...]
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Top performers focus on building high-quality professional networks, rather than large ones
From an advance copy of forthcoming 2010 book The 2020 Workplace:
According to Dr. Robert Cross, a professor of management at the University of Virginia, the high performers in an organization focus on building high-quality social networks rather than large ones.
From a 2006 paper (.pdf) co-authored by Rob Cross:
Most high performers succeed by developing targeted networks [...]
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CS Monitor: In Hong Kong, star tutors leverage media/PR to earn $1.5 million salaries
From the March 2, 2010 edition of the CS Monitor:
Their confident faces smile out from billboards across the city. Their promotional grins are plastered across double-decker buses, subway light boxes, even on TV.
These are Hong Kong’s “star tutors,” accorded near-celebrity status for their ability to make learning fun and help students pass exams in everything [...]
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2010 book: “Unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril.”