MetaFilter posts tagged with education and economics

Sinking.

The Whelk — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 09:05:21 -0800

How Venice's 1% put an end to social mobility, and what the US can learn from it - SLNYTOP

"all this amazing wealth is fragile, a castle built on sands of illusion...."

blue_beetle — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:24:13 -0800

Has the Higher Education Bubble Popped? According to the CSM, the boom in demand for bankers, barristers, and bureaucrats is over.

זו הכלכלה, טמבל

zarq — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:53:18 -0800

Over the past three weeks, Israel has experienced what may perhaps be the largest, spontaneous / grass roots social protest of the secular middle class that it has witnessed in decades. Thousands of demonstrators in cities and towns throughout the country have been protesting cuts in government funding to health care and education, and massive, exorbitant rises in taxes and housing costs -- and demanding change. Tent cities have sprung up in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and in public gardens and parks throughout the country. And they may not be going anywhere: polls indicate Israeli support is "exceptionally high". Protests and demonstrations are common in Israel, but they are nearly always focused on issues of war and peace. International media outlets don't seem to be paying much attention. In response, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the protestors were a "populist wave" and right wing parties have implied the protestors are trying to topple the government. But now, Netanyahu's base may be throwing their support behind the protestors. Many of Israel's Orthodox Jewish organizations and leaders are remaining silent, although that seems to be changing. From the Guardian link: "The current uprising has given Israeli liberals a voice again.... But the apolitical character of the protest is being challenged. Netanyahu is already claiming that the protesters are driven by political motivations. His intent is clear: he wants to delegitimise them and claim that their real goal is to topple his government. This, he hopes, will weaken nationwide support for their demands. On Monday, members of the Likud central committee started to say that the demonstrators are just a bunch of sushi eaters with nargilas (Arab pipes) – ie leftist radicals – and that the media was exaggerating their numbers.... If the Likud and Yisrael Beitenu step up their attack, the protesters will not have any choice but to confront the current coalition in the political arena as well. They will have to say that taxpayers' money in Israel has been spent lavishly in the occupied territories; that billions of shekels go to child support for the ultra-Orthodox, most of whom do not contribute to the economy; that the silent collusion of Israel's governments with the settlers is ruining the country morally, politically and economically. In the end, the call for social justice and the demand to reinstate liberal values in Israel cannot be separated."
The New Republic: What Caused the Current Wave of Economic Protests Across Israel?

Scarcity - "More noms plz."

Phire — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:21:34 -0800

The concept of "Nom Nom Nom" is central to EcoNomNomNomics.

Yada Yada Yada

Phire — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 12:10:15 -0800

The Economics of Seinfeld strives to illustrate basic economic concepts using scenes from the famous sitcom. "Seinfeld ran for nine seasons on NBC and became famous as a “show about nothing". It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses." The site itself doesn't host clips, unfortunately, but does provide a summary of each episode and how the economic concept applies, and information on where to find the specific clip in the episode.

Student Evaluations Get It Wrong When It Comes To Professor Quality

scunning — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:58:01 -0800

"Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors" by Scott Carrell and James West is the title of an interesting new study in this month's Journal of Political Economy, a leading journal in economics. (For a summary of the paper, see this review. An ungated version, too). The authors are interested in determining the role of "professor quality" in student learning. They do this by exploiting an unusual institutional feature of the Air Force Academy whereby all undergraduates are randomly assigned their professors, and all professors use the same syllabus. The authors also have the professor's student evaluations, as well each student's subsequent performance in the follow-up classes. To keep it simple, they focus only on Calculus I and the follow-up courses in Calculus (which are mandatory), though they note that an earlier study that looked at Chemistry and Physics found similar things. They find a few things that are worth consideration. First, they find that professors with higher student evaluations have students who do better on "contemporaneous examinations". Nothing new there. But interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the "teaching to the test" that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. They attribute this effect to "deep learning" that is the focus of the professors with the lower student evaluation scores. Thirdly, the factors that predict student learning in the longrun were not the student evaluations, but rather, were teacher qualities like years of experience, higher academic rank and teaching experience.

building nothing out of something? or...

kliuless — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:21:22 -0800

Rebuilding Something Better by Barack Obama: "this week, I'll be talking about how we give our workers the skills they need to compete... Part of this goal will be met by helping Americans better afford a college education. But part of it will also be strengthening our network of community colleges..." BONUS -Zakaria: A Capitalist Manifesto -Cowen: Vaticanomics -The X-shaped recovery -Debt, Class Warfare and Entrepreneurship -America's Fiscal Train Wreck and Cassandra's Curse -Skidelsky: Economists clash on shifting sands -Skidelsky: The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission -Skidelsky: The Lost Continent -Obama: A New Moment of Promise in Africa -Sullivan: Barack Obama keeps his cool

Can We Cure the Health Care Crisis?

kliuless — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:43:26 -0800

Search for an Rx - We asked Johns Hopkins administrators, physicians, and researchers about the health of a system Americans rely on to keep them healthy. Afterall, an ounce of prevention...

Can we improve quality while driving costs down? As contradictory as the notion might seem, there is a precedent for doing better work at a lower cost. "The thing that is so hard for people to understand, but that was proven in the auto industry, is that when you focus on cutting costs, you automatically reduce quality. But when you focus on increasing quality, as we've done with safety measures here at Hopkins, you almost always reduce cost. It's counterintuitive," Brody says.

and in addition to finance (and the auto industry) it's probably also applicable to education as well...

There Could Be Blood

kliuless — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:36:53 -0800

Andy Grove on Our Electric Future - "Energy independence [viz.] is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to." Perhaps some infrastructure spending^1,2 is in order? [etc., &c., cf.] also see :P - "Tesla Motors Is Delivering Cars" - "Superconducting Power Grid Launches In New York" - "New heights reached in polymer based solar cell efficiency"

[S]pray a sheet of glass with a mixture of dyes combined with a substance called tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium. In combination, the dyes and the glass act as the waveguide, preventing light from escaping. Meanwhile, the interaction between the different dye molecules and those of the tris(8-hydroxyquinoline) aluminium allows a quantum-mechanical phenomenon, called Förster energy transfer, to come into play. This eliminates the reabsorption loss by ensuring that light is re-emitted at a frequency which the dye molecules cannot then reabsorb. On top of this—literally—Dr Currie and Dr Mapel have come up with another trick: placing a second sandwich of dye and glass over the first. The upper layer of dye intercepts high-energy light, such as ultraviolet. The lower one captures longer wavelengths that have passed unperturbed through the upper, and also any lower-energy light that has been re-emitted within the top layer and somehow escaped. The upshot is a device that, even as a prototype, converts ten times more of the incident light into electricity than a conventional solar cell. [and btw]

cheers!

Floating university moored

divabat — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:07:37 -0800

The Scholar Ship , an international floating university stewarded by top universities in Morocco, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Mexico, USA, and Ghana, have temporarily suspended all voyages due to lack of funds - mainly caused by the withdrawal of main sponsor and initiator Royal Caribbean International. The program ran two voyages in 2007 and 2008 before shutdown. Alumni and prospective students on Facebook and Ning are busily sourcing options to revive the organization, while Semester at Sea is offering spaces to students who were accepted for the now-cancelled voyages. This is reminiscent of 2000, when global education non-profit Up with People were also forced to shut down due to lack of funds. Efforts from UWP alumni and supporters allowed for its reform as the WorldSmart Leadership Program in 2003, before returning to its original performance-based roots in 2006. Will the alumni of The Scholar Ship be as successful in bringing back their beloved experiences? How does this reflect on the finances of international education programs in general, when the pullout of a major backer can spell life or death for the organization?

Econ 101 videos

srboisvert — Mon, 29 May 2006 09:47:55 -0800

Econ 101. A collection of links to videos about economics for those who want to learn more about the dismal science.

Math + test = trouble for US economy

Postroad — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 17:02:47 -0800

Math + test = trouble for US economy For a nation committed to preparing students for 21st century jobs, the results of the first-of-its-kind study of how well teenagers can apply math skills to real-life problems is sobering. American 15-year-olds rank well below those in most other industrialized countries in mathematics literacy and problem solving, according to a survey released Monday

Assistance offered to teachers

plinth — Tue, 20 Jun 2000 10:25:38 -0800

Assistance offered to teachers in Santa Clara, the county with the highest median house price in the US [from fark] See attached flame inside>>>