by Bill Hayes
Fareed Zakaria interviews journalist Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, about What Finland can teach America about education.
by Bill Hayes
The New York Times’ Room for Debate lets various knowledgeable contributors discuss news events and other timely issues. One recent debate covered: Is Wall Street Too Giddy?
The stock market reaches record highs as incomes stagnate. Tech companies with no revenue are valued in the billions of dollars. More analysts are seeing something unpleasantly familiar.
Are we in a stock market bubble that could soon burst? [more]
For a related free classroom lesson, see “Tulipmania and Economic Bubbles.” It is available from our Bill of Rights in Action Archive. It is currently only in PDF and you will have to register (if you haven’t already), which is free.
by David De La Torre
In Winds of change, The Economist reviews Data Points: Visualisation That Means Something. By Nathan Yau.
Big data, the idea that the world is replete with more information than ever, is now all the rage. And the search for fresh and enlightened ways to help people absorb it is causing a revolution. A new generation of statisticians and designers — often the same person — are working on computer technologies and visual techniques that will depict data at scales and in forms previously unimaginable. The simple line graph and pie chart are being supplemented by things like colourful, animated bubble charts, which can present more variables. Three-dimensional network diagrams show ratios and relationships that were impossible to depict before. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In The Science of Swarms, Wired magazine looks at how the study of “swarms can help us fight cancer and predict the future.”
For more than a century people have tried to understand how individuals become unified groups. The hints were tantalizing — animals spontaneously generate the same formations that physicists observe in statistical models. There had to be underlying commonalities. The secrets of the swarm hinted at a whole new way of looking at the world.
But those secrets were hidden for decades. Science, in general, is a lot better at breaking complex things into tiny parts than it is at figuring out how tiny parts turn into complex things. When it came to figuring out collectives, nobody had the methods or the math.
Now, thanks to new observation technologies, powerful software, and statistical methods, the mechanics of collectives are being revealed. Indeed, enough physicists, biologists, and engineers have gotten involved that the science itself seems to be hitting a density-dependent shift. Without obvious leaders or an overarching plan, this collective of the collective-obsessed is finding that the rules that produce majestic cohesion out of local jostling turn up in everything from neurons to human beings. Behavior that seems impossibly complex can have disarmingly simple foundations. And the rules may explain everything from how cancer spreads to how the brain works and how armadas of robot-driven cars might someday navigate highways. The way individuals work together may actually be more important than the way they work alone. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Why Authors Tweet, an essay for the New York Times Book Review, Anne Trubek looks at how social media is affecting the writing profession.
When they use social media, authors have as many personae to choose from as they do in their other writings. Some strike poses that effectively increase the distance between them and their readers, foiling voyeurs. Gary Shteyngart (4,187 followers), whose first tweet was posted on Dec. 1, is charming yet enigmatic (“grandma always said to me, ‘boytchik, do not start a meth lab.’ but i guess i had to learn the hard way”), and often writes in the voice of his dog (“woof!”). When I asked if he enjoys interacting with readers on Twitter, Shteyngart responded: “There are so many clever people out there. I love each one of them. Many times I laugh with them.” Humor is common and welcome in authorial tweets. One of Twitter’s funniest is Mat Johnson (39,712 followers), who told me he consciously becomes “Mat Johnson, author and humorist,” on Twitter. (“Teenagers hanging out at a playground, laughing to each other at how ironic they’re being. I want that made illegal.”) [more]
by Bill Hayes
The UK’s Prospect magazine ranks the Top ten brains of the digital future.
1. TIM BERNERS-LEE
In March 1989, the British engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published a research paper outlining his concept for “a universal linked information system” that would “allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important.” It’s an event that numbers among the most significant in recent history, for Berners-Lee’s proposal introduced what would come to be known as the world wide web: the greatest communications project in history, and an open system that today contains over a trillion unique locations and that is used by almost a third of humanity.
Born in London in 1955, Berners-Lee studied physics at Oxford before working in telecoms, software engineering and technical design. In 1984 he became a fellow at Cern in Switzerland, where in 1989 he first conceived of the system that would change the world. Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 for his achievements and is revered today as “the father of the web.” [more]
by Bill Hayes
Patt Morrison, a Los Angeles Times columnist, interviews author A. Scott Berg, who has written a new biography of President Woodrow Wilson.
Hard to believe, but as a teenager, you had a Wilson poster on your wall. What surprised you about him during your research?
The pathos of his life was more intense than I had imagined. Late in his administration, after his stroke, he sits in the East Room watching the documentary footage of his [triumphal 1919] arrival in Paris, and then he gets up and limps out of the room. It was just months earlier, and here was the “savior of the world” now just this completely broken man, physically, mentally, emotionally. I had never seen a book that humanized him, that gave me a sense of his personality. I found him to be more vivid in every respect than I had imagined. He was more of an idealist than I thought, but also more of a Southern racist , and more suppressive of dissent, going after [Socialist presidential candidate and pacifist Eugene V.] Debs the way he did.
Another thing that was revealed to me was his incredible obstinacy. When I started the book, I thought he was charmingly uncompromising, but in the end I realized he shot himself in the foot, or worse, he stabbed himself in the heart. [more]
by David De La Torre
In Broken, The Economist reviews The Death of Corporate Reputation: How Integrity Has Been Destroyed on Wall Street by Jonathan Macey.
[T]he long-held view that financial intermediaries are meant to fill the gap in trust between the entities that seek and those that provide capital. This assumes that investment banks, accountancy firms, law firms and rating agencies in effect “rent” their reputations to issuers, giving confidence to the market. It is therefore in the interest of these companies to develop reputations for honesty and trustworthiness. Those with strong reputations are then less likely to engage in damaging practices, because they have so much to lose. In short, firms will be good if the system rewards them for it. Why is this no longer the case? [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Spaceflight Companies Look to R&D Clients for Repeat Business, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on commercial prospects in space.
The near-weightless state known as microgravity has uncanny and, for researchers, desirable effects on a wide range of technologies. Companies such as Procter & Gamble (PG) and Merck (MRK) have performed experiments in space for years to better understand how their toothpaste ingredients bind together or their engineered antibodies attack disease in isolation, without the complicating effects of gravity. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011:JP) has tested its medical devices in low G and wants to conduct suborbital drug research on animals. Startup Made in Space intends to test whether its 3D printers can work in near orbit. Space also makes stem cells grow superfast: “Give me 30 to 35 days, and I’ll build you a kidney,” says genetic engineer Richard Godwin, the chief executive officer of stem-cell startup Zero Gravity Solutions. [more]
by Bill Hayes
U.S. News publishes its political cartoons of the week.
For how to use editorial cartoons in the classroom, see Teaching With Editorial Cartoons.
by Bill Hayes
PBS’s Frontline reports on the problem of drug-resistant bacteria in Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria.
by Bill Hayes
Adam Platt, New York magazine’s food writer, argues that Restaurants Are Louder Than Ever.
[A]sk any weary gastronaut about the single most disruptive restaurant trend over the past decade or so, and they’ll give you a succinct, one-sentence answer. It’s the noise, stupid. When I began reviewing restaurants over a decade ago, we critics whiled away our days in hushed, cocooned dining rooms, quietly noting the lightness of this or that soufflé in our little leather chapbooks. Not anymore. These days, some professional eaters carry decibel meters with them on their rounds (Robert Sietsema, formerly of The Village Voice and now with Eater, uses two of them). Noise levels in city restaurants are regularly measured at 90 decibels and sometimes higher (Lavo, in midtown, was measured at 96 decibels, louder than the whine of a suburban lawn mower), which means that for those of us whose job it is to eat for a living, hearing loss is officially an occupational hazard, like choking on a chicken bone or suffering a cataclysmic heart attack. [more]
by Bill Hayes
In Boston Strong Man, the New Republic profiles the city’s outgoing mayor, Thomas Menino.
[T]he most striking thing about the Boston of Mayor Tom Menino, right until the bombs went off on Boylston Street, is how quiet it was. He has run the city for a record five terms, and if he hadn’t announced in March that he was finally ready to step down, voters would likely have waved him on to a sixth. But unlike his predecessors, his has been a reign without flamboyance, because for Menino that kind of power was not an option. He is physically awkward, with a froggy mien. His only flair is one for mangling English: “Alcatraz around my neck,” “Martha Luther King,” and the immortal “three or more people conjugating on the Public Garden over the next few weeks will be banned” stand among the local favorites. He was never going to rouse his city to action. Instead, he split the difference between blustering pugilists like Rudy Giuliani and clammy technocrats like Michael Bloomberg, forging a third way of urban boss-hood.
To understand how Menino ruled — and he ruled utterly — you have to appreciate how he rose. [more]
by Bill Hayes
Minute Physics explains: What Is Dark Matter?
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