A Google employee blogs:
A fantastic post about disrupting education.
Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi “calls out” a comment I left on his blog. The comment excerpts from this blog entry of mine.
From After the Frat, a blog:
A brilliant idea by Frank Ruscica about how to finally get out of this economic quagmire.
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From the Princeton University Press web page for Fault Lines — How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy:
Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it’s tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren’t fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown–made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners–were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose.
He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America’s growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy’s long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
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, as usual, his insights were nervously appreciated and then promptly forgotten.
Elsewhere in the book:
Young people have always shown an uncanny knack for allocating their time and energy to emerging new modes of trait display that bring them the highest social and sexual payoffs.
…To young people today, mobile phones, social networking and MMOGs are awesomely efficient ways to short-circuit consumerist conventions of trait display. Instead of spending years to get an education credential, to get a high-paying job, to buy premium products, to display one’s intelligence and personality traits to potential mates and friends, the kids are just displaying their traits directly through the new communications technologies.
Note to self: market Adver-ties.com in Spain.
Education payola:
From a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center:
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 of material in half the time when the online coursework is added. More students stick with the class, too. “We now have the technology that enables us to go back to what we all know is the best educational experience: personalized, interactive engagement,” Dr. Smith says.
From elsewhere in the article:
P2PU’s mission isn’t to develop a model and stick with it. It is to “experiment and iterate,” says Ms. Paharia, the former executive director of Creative Commons. She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.
Er, like prices that reflect peer ratings of work samples, and rankings in prediction markets? 
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 can find it.
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 sourcing specialist) that will send your name to the top of recruiters’ searches.
At the same time, you can connect your online professional interactions in one place, joining groups on the site (LinkedIn has more than 500,000 of them, based on companies, schools, and affinities), offering advice, and linking your Twitter account and blog updates to your profile.
From elsewhere in the article:
More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That’s why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.
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 who were going to be on staff the whole year. We’d discuss what we were trying to say, but we were really having a current-events/ideology/political argument. The writers didn’t all think the same. We weren’t in lockstep on the issues of the day, whether it was the drug war or public education or the media. So we had to discuss the issue as an issue first. Never mind the characters, never mind plot.
…If there’s anything that distinguishes The Wire from a lot of the serialized drama you see, it was that the writers were not from television. None of us grew up thinking we wanted to get to Hollywood and write a TV show or a movie. Ed [Burns] was a cop, and then he was a schoolteacher. There were journalists on the writing staff. There were novelists. There were playwrights, too. Everyone began somewhere else.
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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. By the end of 2006, according to the PerTrac Hedge Fund Database Study, there were 13,765 hedge funds reporting results, and thousands of other types of institutional investors allowed to invest in credit default swaps. Yet only a hundred or so of them dabbled in the new market for credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Most bought insurance on subprime mortgages not as an outright bet against them, but as a hedge against their implicit bet on them — their portfolios of U.S. real estate-related stocks or bonds. A smaller group used credit default swaps to make what often turned out to be spectacularly disastrous gambles on the relative value of subprime mortgage bonds — buying one subprime mortgage bond while selling another.
…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 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 development of a series, when the executives charged with paying for production have their say. “On one script,” Overmyer says of an experience developing a show with a different network, “I counted it up: I actually got 72 separate sets of notes — from the production company, the studio, the network — many of them contradictory.” The most memorable note Overmyer ever received was from an executive very high up at a network. “She said, ‘They’re being so unpleasant with each other.’ And I said: ‘Well, that’s drama. That’s conflict.’ And she actually said, ‘Could we have the drama…without the conflict?’ ”
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 that extend their abilities. Rather than simply adding more and more people to their Rolodex, rising stars need…to know how to increase and decrease connectivity in ways that enhance productivity and performance.
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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 from English to chemistry.
Tutoring is common in Asia, where intense emphasis on grades and exams means parents are willing to shell out. More than half of Hong Kong’s youths get assistance outside school, a recent survey found.
The industry here is especially competitive and commercialized as tutors mimic the city’s showbiz industry to attract students and grab a share of the $460 million market.
“Those images of fame and stardom have been sustained and re-invented in different forms, resulting in tutors now packaging themselves as the superstars of the education sector in order to appeal to students,” says Gerald Postliglione, a professor at the University of Hong Kong.
Star tutors spare no costs on publicity. Even tutors who belong to one of the four major chains here must self-promote. But successful tutors can command hundreds of students.
Those at the very top see their lives splashed across the pages of the city’s gossip magazines, revealing how many luxury cars they drive or properties they own. Some reports put their salaries as high as $1.5 million a year. One English tutor, Richard Eng, is famous for his love of Ferraris.
A guest post of mine on popular blog Zero Hedge
Part one of a two- or three-part series. Written in the ZH style…
To learn about Zero Hedge, see this feature story from the September 27, 2009 issue of New York magazine.
UPDATE (2/15/10): Part two is online at ZH.
UPDATE (2/26/10): ZH is one of “Ten Wall Street Blogs You Need to Bookmark Now,” according to a February 25, 2010 article on the website of the Wall Street Journal.