About five minutes into my class Wednesday, my cell phone rang. I silenced it right away, but recognized the number as the kids’ day care. And I knew right away what it was: The Pip has had a bit of a cough for a while, and wasn’t all that happy that morning. Sure enough, when… Continue reading You Don’t Know How Valuable Preschool Is Until You Don’t Have It
Category: Politics: Economics
How Fast Should I Drive?
We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate’s mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out… Continue reading How Fast Should I Drive?
On Class and Skills and Education
In a comment to yesterday’s post about the liberal arts, Eric Lund makes a good point: The best argument I have ever heard for doing scholarship in literature and other such fields is that some people find it fun. I single this out as a good point not because I want to sneer at the… Continue reading On Class and Skills and Education
Financiers Still Aren’t Rocket Scientists
Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that “numbers guy” Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn’t the only one to take, just… Continue reading Financiers Still Aren’t Rocket Scientists
Trickle Down Science
A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including… Continue reading Trickle Down Science
EBooks and Agencies
The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the “agency model” of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges,… Continue reading EBooks and Agencies
In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
In comments to Friday’s snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but… Continue reading In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
Shameless Innumeracy
On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were… Continue reading Shameless Innumeracy
Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of… Continue reading Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
Fracking Liars
Back at the AAAS Meeting, I was really annoyed by a session on fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deep underground. As I wrote at the time, regarding the industry shills who spoke: I left before the whole thing had wrapped up, because it was that or start throwing stuff… Continue reading Fracking Liars