Displaying post 1 to 50 of 123
from
mefi
The Face of Student Debt: Natalia Antonova
stopped paying when she realized that it was the loans or
her child. (The
response has been telling.) Kristin Rawls
demands solidarity. Glenn Reynolds says
colleges should pay for defaulters.
"The proportion of freshmen and sophomores at four-year colleges who will default on federal loans over their lifetime is estimated at between 19 and 31 percent, depending on the type of loan and when it was written, the [DOE's] Office of Inspector General wrote in a 2003 audit."(doc)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:14 AM on December 16, 2011
(221 comments)
Robert Paul Wolff is most famous as the author of
In Defense of Anarchism and as the "
only person on the face of the earth who has read, cover to cover, Immanuel Kant's Inaugural Dissertation, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, and Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation."
His memoir has also drawn considerable
interest. But as a part of his
blogging he has habitually offered "micro-tutorials" to encourage his readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of
Marx,
Freud,
Weber,
Ricardo,
Mannheim, and
others. His newest micro-tutorial, on Durkheim's
Suicide,
begins today.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:38 AM on December 8, 2011
(25 comments)
Between 1987 and 2003, Fugazi played over 1000 concerts in all 50 states and all over the world. Over 800 of these shows were recorded by the band's sound engineers. The goal of
this project is to make each of these recordings available to download for a small fee. The standard suggested download price is $5 a show but they also offer a sliding scale option where you can set your own price. (
Bonus Banter)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:00 AM on December 1, 2011
(58 comments)
Achievement Porn
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:13 PM on April 27, 2011
(87 comments)
Every year, nine million children under five die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria. Often, the treatments for these diseases are cheap, safe, and readily available. So why don't people pick these 'low-hanging fruit'? Why don’t mothers vaccinate their children? Why don’t families use bednets, or buy chlorinated water? And why do they spend such large amounts of money on ineffective cure instead?
Poor Economics is a book and website by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It has maps, graphs, and data drawn from the research at MIT's
Poverty Action Lab. It is currently being
reviewed and discussed (
1,
2,
3) at the Economist. BONUS: Duflo
discusses the book and
Randomized Controlled Trials (Wikipedia:
RCT).
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 11:11 AM on April 25, 2011
(46 comments)
Comment OR Vote: "A civilized cyberspace being necessary for the sanity of a free state, the right of the People to be secure against unreasonable Internet comments shall not be infringed. No person leaving a comment, or any legal incident thereof, on any web site shall vote in any federal, state, or local election within two years, or within such lengthier period as the Congress or the legislatures of the several states shall direct."
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 10:30 AM on March 18, 2011
(44 comments)
Via the
Economist: the
top twenty papers from
100 years of the
American Economic Review. (This post is mostly pdfs.)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:50 AM on March 10, 2011
(28 comments)
A list of warning signs that your opinions function more to
signal loyalty and
ability than to
estimate truth. (
Previously)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:21 AM on February 14, 2011
(100 comments)
50 Best Humanities Blogs
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:34 AM on January 30, 2011
(14 comments)
Kwame Anthony Appiah
discusses honor, moral revolutions, and the
condemnation of future generations. His new book
The Honor Code chronicles how the concept of honor has been crucial in the fight against immoral practices like dueling, foot-binding, and slavery. (See also
1,
2)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 2:49 PM on September 28, 2010
(14 comments)
New
evidence of religion's
reproductive,
cooperative, and
personal benefits militates against the belief that religion is a "
virus of the mind."
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:42 AM on September 19, 2010
(315 comments)
After
America Speaks gave
3500 people the opportunity to
address the budget deficit, the CEPR has invented its own play-at-home version, the
Deficit Calculator.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:28 AM on June 30, 2010
(28 comments)
The Mother of All 'Daily Show' Ambushes.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:03 AM on June 10, 2010
(60 comments)
Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama by Melanie Gilligan (of
Crisis in the Credit System) set in a future much like the present. Here, however, all exchange transactions and social interactions are overseen by a system called ‘the Spirit’. A rash of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe. They often take place in public but witnesses never see an assailant. Just as mysteriously, groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together everywhere, amassing new members rapidly. Unaccountably, they feel a deep and persistent sense of connection to one another. (
via)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:56 AM on May 26, 2010
(3 comments)
In the debut of The New York Times'
new philosophy series,
Simon Critchley asks, "
What is a philosopher?"
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:47 AM on May 17, 2010
(117 comments)
Two years ago, Police Officer
Adrian Schoolcraft, an officer in Brooklyn's 81st Precinct, became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. Initially he carried the recorder to protect himself from the
civilian complaints that can result from street encounters. But then he began to document things happening in the precinct that bothered him. After he ran afoul of precinct politics, he recorded what he viewed as retaliation by his bosses. The
Village Voice is releasing portions of the tapes in batches and is also publishing several stories to deal with the issues that the recordings present.
In this week's installment, the Voice looks at the roll calls at the Bed-Stuy precinct and the conflicting instructions given to street cops, who must look busy at all times, while actually suppressing crime reports.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:45 AM on May 6, 2010
(93 comments)
Is My Thesis Hot or Not?
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 10:40 AM on April 11, 2010
(26 comments)
First, get the Pot. (
via)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 1:47 PM on March 24, 2010
(57 comments)
Google Reader Play
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 1:39 AM on March 15, 2010
(38 comments)
Japan: It's not funny anymore
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:14 PM on March 7, 2010
(198 comments)
Ever wondered what would happen if all those people playing Farmville and Mafia Wars
were trying to save the world instead? Enter
Urgent Evoke, "a ten week crash course in changing the world," designed by
Jane McGonigal (who previously designed
World without Oil) for the
World Bank Institute. Players take on tasks like the
UN Millennium Development Goals.
Wanna play?
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 1:32 PM on March 4, 2010
(37 comments)
What makes a great teacher? Analyzing more than twenty years of data,
Teach for America has found that great teachers had trained in their subject areas rather than in education, and had high "life satisfaction." They also demonstrated five tendencies: they
"constantly reevaluate what they are doing... they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."
This last trait is measured by the Grit Scale,
which has been shown to predict good outcomes in
both teachers and West Point cadets. (
Do you have grit?)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:07 AM on January 31, 2010
(133 comments)
In the name of awareness (
via)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 11:41 AM on January 8, 2010
(81 comments)
Married (Happily) with Issues
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:28 AM on December 5, 2009
(182 comments)
Assault Girl &
Trailer for Assault Girls (
via)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 11:02 AM on September 29, 2009
(30 comments)
The Weak Man Argument or
Getting Duped: How the Media Messes with Your Mind. A variant of the '
Straw Man fallacy,' the 'weak man' doesn't misstate a rival's position like a 'straw man,' but instead chooses "the opposition’s weakest (or one of its weakest) arguments or proponents for attack." Originally proposed by Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin
here. (pdf)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 10:04 AM on September 5, 2009
(71 comments)
The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil: requires registration, but it's worth it.
...dependency on natural resources can poison a country’s economic and political system. Inflows of hard currency push up prices, squeezing the competitiveness of non-oil businesses and starving them of capital. As a result, productivity growth withers (a phenomenon known as “Dutch disease” after the negative effects of North Sea gas production on the Netherlands). Meanwhile, the state institutions in charge of oil often become corrupt and evade democratic control. And oil-rich states almost invariably waste the income it brings, many ending their oil booms deeper in debt than when they started.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:43 PM on August 29, 2009
(32 comments)
Is Barack Obama An American Citizen? "...because Obama’s claim to American citizenship is only supported by evidence and logic, he must not be an American citizen."
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 1:54 PM on July 29, 2009
(243 comments)
The Psychology of Overconfidence
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 5:10 AM on July 27, 2009
(82 comments)
Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:13 AM on July 14, 2009
(568 comments)
Rethink Afghanistan:
Robert Greenwald is releasing
his latest documentary online. Parts
one and
two are already available.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 4:16 AM on March 23, 2009
(8 comments)
Aimee Mullins has better legs than you.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 12:45 PM on March 11, 2009
(52 comments)
Conspicuous Combustion: since May 2007, 292 luxury cars have been burned in Berlin. A simple Google Map at
brennende-autos.de ("Burning Cars") charts the date, model, and location of each.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 9:45 AM on March 2, 2009
(66 comments)
Speaking in Tongues is a terrific piece of writing by
Zadie Smith. It's a little bit about
Barack Obama. Mostly, though, it's about
"world"-traveling and polyvocality. (pdf)
The first stage in the evolution is contingent and cannot be contrived. In this first stage, the voice, by no fault of its own, finds itself trapped between two poles, two competing belief systems. And so this first stage necessitates the second: the voice learns to be flexible between these two fixed points, even to the point of equivocation. Then the third stage: this native flexibility leads to a sense of being able to "see a thing from both sides." And then the final stage, which I think of as the mark of a certain kind of genius: the voice relinquishes ownership of itself, develops a creative sense of disassociation in which the claims that are particular to it seem no stronger than anyone else's. There it is, my little theory—I'd rather call it a story. It is a story about a wonderful voice, occasionally used by citizens, rarely by men of power.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:09 AM on February 26, 2009
(16 comments)
Marc Bousquet does
interviews with "Faculty on Food Stamps." (
1,
2,
3) He also has a
book and a
blog called
How the University Works (pdf) where he writes about
higher education. (pdf) Bousquet recently sat down to discuss
some of these issues with NPR and Goucher College President
Sanford Ungar. (pdf)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 6:11 AM on December 4, 2008
(36 comments)
Rule 10a-1, otherwise known as
the uptick rule, provided that, subject to certain exceptions, a listed security could only be sold short at or above the last sale price. The uptick rule was introduced in
1934 when
the public blamed bear traders for the 1929 crash, and was
eliminated in July of 2007 after a temporary
pilot program.
The SEC is
now considering reinstating the rule, an effort buoyed by
rumours that
downtick short-selling may have facilitated an alleged '
bear raid' on
Bear Stearns.
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 12:04 PM on October 26, 2008
(14 comments)
Literary Dealbreakers: "This book so deeply resonates with your soul that if a potential partner finds it risible, any meeting of minds (or body) is all but impossible."
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 11:00 AM on September 1, 2008
(110 comments)
Who are Muslims? Gallup has conducted a poll "in 40 predominantly Muslim nations and among significant Muslim populations in the West. It is the first set of unified and scientifically representative views from 1.3 billion Muslims globally." They'll be parsing and interpreting this data for years, but for the time being, they've offered some of their key results
online and
in print. See also, the
Muslim-West Facts Initiative. (
via)
posted to MetaFilter by anotherpanacea
at 7:12 AM on July 28, 2008
(37 comments)
