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My wife enjoys the "Great Courses". This piece is a look at the business of creating and marketing them, including the tidbit that the best screen for choosing professors to record is RateMyProfessors.com.
Made me laugh.
I don't know the late Mr. Conquest's writings, but this bit of his verse made me laugh.
“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,
But for some even that’s out of reach:
They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em
To teach other people to teach.
Then alas for the next generation,
For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.
Where psychology meets education
A terrible bullshit is born.
I rise to defend my former employer. What the heck is wrong with brick?
As for "Next to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC State looks especially sad": it's easier to look good when you are a bunch of cheaters!
UPDATE: link included now.
The EJMB boys figure out the reason behind Econometrica's policy.
Also from EJMB: "Forget your pathetic Big Data, Georgetown has the Massive Data Institute!".
Just amazing: "Using the WMAP data, scientists estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, plus or minus 59 million years."
By the consistently excellent Ed Driscoll (posting at Instapundit).
Tell the college kids.
Remember Econ 101? Remember the "market failures" that could be fixed by government action? Fred Foldvary explains why technology is fixing them without government.
Much government intervention has no economic rationale and is due instead to pressure from special interests. However, some interventions have a public-welfare justification, backed by conventional economic theory. Textbooks in the field normally present four such rationales: asymmetric information, external effects, public goods, and monopoly.
Advances in technology are fast rendering these arguments obsolete.