Newmark's Door

How has life turned out for Charles Webb, author, 44 years ago, of The Graduate? Not well, but he says he "wouldn't have had it any other way".

Meet the supposedly real Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Supposedly the song had nothing to do with LSD.

Yeah, right.

"Top 10 English Grammar Myths and Superstitions in Essay Writing".

You probably don't need this, but if you do, it's handy: fonts used in major-company names.

If you really, really want to get away from . . . everything, Forbes has some suggestions.

Some vintage muscle cars now sell for more than $1 million.

Real estate agentry is changing.

(The article mentions that some realtors now let people access MLS listings on the Net for free. What it doesn't mention is that most of the realtors that do this require you to register. If you're looking for a real estate agent in the Triangle area that gives away access to the MLS and doesn't require you to register, check out Brick and Garden Real Estate. Very cool.)

B. Weinberg, B. Fleisher, and M. Hashimoto, "Evaluating Methods for Evaluating Instruction: The Case of Higher Education," NBER Working Paper No. 12844.

Measuring learning using grades in future courses, we show that student evaluations are positively related to current grades but uncorrelated with learning once current grades are controlled.

One more sign that the grading system is broken: Florida cheerleader graduates with a GPA of 8.08. And she states that she could have done better. (But then again, she "plans to continue cheerleading at MIT next year," so this is an unusual student.)

One way to fix it that I think schools should consider is Valen Johnson's "Achievement Index".

UPDATE: first link is now fixed. Thanks, John Henry.

Bill Russell's commentary on this year NBA's playoffs. You know that he knows.