OUCH: DISCORD AT THE SUPREME COURT IS DEEP AND PERSONAL. “Conservatives feel a sense of betrayal. They feel that Roberts changed his mind for the wrong reasons.”
He chose . . . poorly.
Archive for 2012
July 8, 2012
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Health, Fitness & Dieting.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there.
Michelle Amaral wanted to be a brain scientist to help cure diseases. She planned a traditional academic science career: PhD, university professorship and, eventually, her own lab.
But three years after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she gave up trying to find a permanent job in her field. Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.
That reality runs counter to messages sent by President Obama and the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists.
As noted here earlier, we don’t need more scientists, we need better ones. “I was talking with someone the other day who advanced the proposition that there are probably only 50 really first-rate scientific minds produced in the United States every year. And then came the question: Does the current system of training and funding scientists encourage those 50 to stay in the game, or to find something else to do?”
CORPORATE SELF-ABUSE: The Terrible Management Technique That Cost Microsoft Its Creativity. “One former Microsoft engineer says that his performance reviews were ‘always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.'”
IS MOVEON.ORG A PAPER TIGER? ANTI-ROMNEY/KOCH BROTHERS DEMONSTRATION IS AN EPIC FAILURE.
CAN CATS drive women to suicide? At least in the world of provocative headlines, they can!
SCIENCE: Above-normal weight alone does not increase the short-term risk of death: study. “When compared to those with normal weight, people who were overweight or obese had no increased risk of death during a follow-up period of six years. People who were severely obese did have a higher risk, but only if they also had diabetes or hypertension.”
YOU KNOW WHO ELSE ATTACKED “GREEDY RICH PEOPLE?” HITLER!
Meh. Yglesias was calling me a Nazi — for blogging about graffiti on New York Times news racks, just like Hitler did! — back in 2004. Welcome to the club, Mitt. It’s not a very exclusive one.
UNVETTED PRESIDENT INTRODUCED BY UNVETTED EMCEE: That Magic Touch: Man Who Introduced Obama At Rally Owes $500G To Former Employer.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Scott Walker Prepares To Reform Higher Education. Walter Russell Mead comments:
Change has to come. After World War Two the United States built its modern university system by extending a model that was originally intended to groom the sons of a social elite to succeed their fathers as government and business leaders to manage the preparation of tens of millions of people for the business of life.
The template doesn’t work in many cases, and the result increasingly is that training and job preparation takes too long and costs too much. The problem isn’t that America has “too much” education. The problem is that a 21st century society needs to be able to teach more skills to more people at a much lower cost and in much less time than our 20th century institutions can manage. It’s really that simple. The most urgent business of a state university system at this point must be to reform and improve the kind of education (in many cases, training) that can enable the state’s citizens of any and every age to acquire skills and prepare themselves to flourish in a rapidly changing economy.
SAY, I WONDER IF THERE ARE ANY IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL RACES HERE? Unemployment Rate Dropped In Every State That Elected A Republican Gov. In 2010. “The job market in these Republican states is improving 50% faster than the national rate.” Nah, I guess it’s just one of those quirky fun facts.
FOR ONLY $40,000, Jane Austen’s ring can be yours. “A gold and turquoise ring that belonged to Jane Austen, a Mozart among English novelists if one thinks about the dazzling perfection and brilliant invention of her prose, or perhaps a Vermeer if one considers the intense observation and painstaking description of her portrayals, is being auctioned off at Sotheby’s next week in London. The ring’s provenance seems pretty well established; this is a rare chance to buy a serious piece of real literary history.”
SURE, THEY MAY HAVE FOUND THE HIGGS BOSON, BUT WHAT HAVE THEY DONE FOR US LATELY? When Ice Cream Attacks: The Mystery Of Brain Freeze Baffles Scientists.
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I NEVER HAVE THIS KIND OF LUCK: Man Finds 100-Year-Old Whiskey In Attic.
LOOKING AT BMW’S 3-Series Hybrid. “We’ve learned to expect that hybrid vehicles will produce lower emissions and fuel-consumption scores than their standard gasoline-burning siblings. What we generally don’t expect, however, is for that same hybrid to be quicker to 60 than its turbocharged brother or for it to make more overall horsepower. Such is the case with the BMW ActiveHybrid 3, which offers up 340 horsepower and 332 pound-feet of torque from its 3.0-liter twin-turbo inline six and electric motor combination – useful gains from the 300 hp and 300 lb-ft in the 335i.”
A NEW RECORD FOR NATURAL GAS: “King Coal is meeting its match: natural gas. Power plants fired by natural gas have set a new record by producing as much electricity in the United States as those run by coal, long the nation’s dominant power producer.” Natural gas is much cleaner, too, which explains America’s plummeting carbon emissions. Yay, fracking!
DEREK THOMPSON: How Consumers Get Screwed Over With Aid From Their Lousy Math Skills. So get better at math.
But actually, many of these problems have equally troubling application in politics. And we see the results of that all around us. . . .
LAWS, AND TAXES, ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “The governor insists Maryland State Police Superintendent Marcus Brown’s home is Maryland, but he and his family are receiving tax breaks for claiming primary residences in two different states, I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller said Wednesday. A dark-colored Crown Victoria that’s owned by Maryland taxpayers is the take-home car assigned to Brown, Miller reported. The 11 News I-Team took pictures of the car on Memorial Day — not in a Maryland neighborhood, but in Camp Hill, Pa. — a suburb of Harrisburg. It’s one of two places Brown can call home.”
THE GOD-HELP-US PARTICLE: IowaHawk: DNC Scientists Disprove Existence of Roberts’ Taxon. “The landmark experiment in Quantum Rhetoric began early this week after legal particle cosmologist John Roberts published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Tortured Logic that solved the long-debated Pelosi’s Paradox in Universal Health Care Theory.”
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PHIL BOWERMASTER: Post-Credentialism: “Imagine a meritocracy… actually based on merit. Yes, it’s a shocking idea. But we may very well be headed there. And not a moment too soon.”