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Education

The New American Divide

Charles Murray is taking a tour of the opinion pages, stumping for his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I've been looking forward to this book for some time now. Murray is arguing that Americans of all classes used to share a common civic

In-sourcing

The big business news of the moment, other than cheap oil and gas from fracking, is the continuing growth in US manufacturing. What this hasn't meant is a ton of new jobs. The reason for this is pretty simple, US workers are about three times more efficient than

Education for slackers

A couple of years ago, I posted an essay about Dorothy Sayers' Lost Tools of Learning. An aspect of her argument that I didn't pull out in that essay, but that struck me at the time, was how unstructured her program of education really was: Towards the

Grit

John D Cook linked to an article on "grit" by Venkatesh Rao. This article really got me thinking. Ever since I discovered the utility of psychometrics for personality, I have spent a great deal of time pondering the relationship between the gifts we are given, and what we

The Big Lie about the life of the Mind

One of the most frequent questions asked in the Physics Forums career section is: "should I pursue a PhD in [insert subject here]". Example. The usual answer that comes out of the assembled geek experts is: "only if you have great passion around [subject] and will never

Another Salary Report

From Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce comes another salary report by undergraduate major. No serious surprises here, but I do like their methodology. The CEW breaks down earnings by both occupation and field of study, since in many cases a major in college is not vocational.

A Better Way to Teach Math

Is it possible to eliminate the bell curve in math class? Yes, but probably not in the way most people would think. Steve Sailer linked to an opinion article in the NY Times about a revolutionary math curriculum called Jump Math. Jump Math makes some pretty bold claims for itself: