Whatever you may think of how Anne Hathaway and her co-host James Franco did as hosts of the newer, younger, hipper Oscars, one thing appears to be certain: When Anne Hathaway makes headlines, the stock for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway goes up.
Virginia Heffernan from the NYT:
Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture.
Tech-Talk Tech-Talk Tech-Talk.
We further show that short-term fluctuations in average payments are partly explained by exogenous weather changes. We provide evidence that-in line with work in psychology – weather-induced changes in mood affect payments.
The bagel is in the basket, it’s raining outside. Do you pay more or less?
Third, I find it striking that American mobility peaked sometime in the 1980s. Today there are people moving to find jobs, but not at anything like previous levels in earlier downturns. Some of that results from “the problems are in many different places” and that’s bad news. But some of it is also “being jobless today involves some greater cushions than in earlier times.” Very few people are facing potential starvation. For instance many more men have working spouses. Durable goods have become more durable, or in other words your car is less likely to break down and that makes joblessness somewhat easier to bear.
Makes sense.
Success is probably due to hundreds of different factors, all interacting with one another. But the end result is that if you take 100 aspirant athletes in Kenya, and 100 aspirant athletes in the USA, and expose them to the same training, you will not see anything like the same success rate. And that is due to genetic differences that are too complex to discover with the approach that has been adopted so far.
Interesting refutation of one of the ideas put forth in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
David McKenzie from the World Bank:
This evidence is thus consistent with the view that blogging helps build prestige and recognition in the profession, with bloggers being more likely to be admired or respected than other academics of similar (or in many cases better) publication records. This is of course only a correlation, and there are several caveats to consider. First, to the extent that blogging serves to increase the RePEc ratings by increasing own downloads (as seen in our previous post) and citations, the observed correlation will be a lower bound on the causal impact of blogging. However, if bloggers are also more likely to be engaged in other activities of a public intellectual, such as media appearances, writing books etc., and if these don’t all arise directly as a result of blogging, the estimates will conflate the impact of blogging with the impacts of these other activities, thereby overstating the impact of blogs. Nevertheless, given the large magnitude of the coefficient observed, it does not seem likely that all of the observed impact of blogging just reflects omitted variables, and therefore we view this evidence as strongly suggesting that blogging increases the influence, respect, or public image of the blogger.
Look at all of those potential lurking variables they’ve identified.
However, the study also warns there is a significant shortage of qualified workers to analyze these data sets adequately. According to the report, a shortfall of about 140,000 to 190,000 individuals with analytical expertise is projected by 2018. The study also predicts a need for an additional 1.5 million managers and analysts by that same date to fully engage the true potential of the currently available data.
Perhaps your students are these future qualified workers.
Rachel Quigley from the Daily Mail:
Mr Rich details the myriad ways in which Ms Ginther could have gamed the system – including the fact that she may have figured out the algorithm that determines where a winner is placed in each run of scratch-off tickets.
It pays to know Stats.
The theory underlying Fitbit is that once you know where you’re failing, you can begin to make healthy changes in your life. And these changes don’t have to be very big — for instance, mulling the Fitbit data, I noticed that on the weekend I recorded more than twice as much daily activity as I had on the weekdays. But I don’t recall working especially hard on that weekend — I’d just walked around the garden a couple times to water the plants. And this was the point: I didn’t even have to do anything strenuous to get in slightly better shape.
Voila. To measure is to manage.