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What's Wrong With the American University System - Culture - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. We saw it at Evergreen and other places that have this emphasis. I teach at a city college in New York, where we come very close to allowing virtually anybody who applies to walk in. I say, 'This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job." Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it's remarkable how you can make up the difference.
Tags: education, academia, college, teaching, america, academics, humanities, highered, research, tenure Saved by: admin
The Atlantic | April 1988 | Did the Universe Just Happen? | Wright
Information, they will tell you, is just one of many forms of matter and energy; it is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings, things like newsprint and radio waves, and that is that. Others talk in grander terms, suggesting that information deserves full equality with matter and energy, that it should join them in some sort of scientific trinity, that these three things are the main ingredients of reality.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/88apr/wright.htm
Tags: physics, philosophy, history, math, article, science, biography, technology, atlanticmonthly, complexity Saved by: admin
Information, they will tell you, is just one of many forms of matter and energy; it is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings, things like newsprint and radio waves, and that is that. Others talk in grander terms, suggesting that information deserves full equality with matter and energy, that it should join them in some sort of scientific trinity, that these three things are the main ingredients of reality.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/88apr/wright.htm
Tags: physics, philosophy, history, math, article, science, biography, technology, atlanticmonthly, complexity Saved by: admin
The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | How America Can Rise Again | James Fallows
We could start by being very clear about our strengths, as revealed not simply by comparison with others but also through the pattern of our own rise. The mutually supportive combination of public and private development; the excellence of the universities; the unmatched ability to attract and absorb the world’s talent—these are assets we can work to preserve. We could reflect on how much more attainable our goals are when the world works with us—economically, diplomatically—rather than against us.And a longer-term perspective would mean doing all we can to address the “75-year threats”—the issues for which we’ll be thanked or blamed two or three generations from now. Rebuilding the infrastructure, so that it’s an asset rather than a drag. Reinvesting in research, for the industries our grandchildren will found.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/american-decline
Tags: politics, culture, toread, history, america, decline, usa, future, us, gov20 Saved by: admin
We could start by being very clear about our strengths, as revealed not simply by comparison with others but also through the pattern of our own rise. The mutually supportive combination of public and private development; the excellence of the universities; the unmatched ability to attract and absorb the world’s talent—these are assets we can work to preserve. We could reflect on how much more attainable our goals are when the world works with us—economically, diplomatically—rather than against us.And a longer-term perspective would mean doing all we can to address the “75-year threats”—the issues for which we’ll be thanked or blamed two or three generations from now. Rebuilding the infrastructure, so that it’s an asset rather than a drag. Reinvesting in research, for the industries our grandchildren will found.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/american-decline
Tags: politics, culture, toread, history, america, decline, usa, future, us, gov20 Saved by: admin
The End of Men - Magazine - The Atlantic
Recently Ericsson joked with the old boys at his elementary-school reunion that he was going to have a sex-change operation. “Women live longer than men. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery. Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
Tags: gender, education, culture, politics, feminism, business, society, economy, toread, demographics Saved by: admin
Recently Ericsson joked with the old boys at his elementary-school reunion that he was going to have a sex-change operation. “Women live longer than men. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery. Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
Tags: gender, education, culture, politics, feminism, business, society, economy, toread, demographics Saved by: admin
Rent a White Guy - Magazine - The Atlantic
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/rent-a-white-guy/8119
Tags: china, business, economics, interesting, job, theatlantic, toread, social, atlantic, awesome Saved by: admin
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/rent-a-white-guy/8119
Tags: china, business, economics, interesting, job, theatlantic, toread, social, atlantic, awesome Saved by: admin
Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders - Science and Tech - The Atlantic
Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation's stock exchanges. What they do doesn't show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light. The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/
Tags: finance, analysis, economics, hacking, stock, trading, ai, algorithms, data, market Saved by: admin
Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation's stock exchanges. What they do doesn't show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light. The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren't doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/
Tags: finance, analysis, economics, hacking, stock, trading, ai, algorithms, data, market Saved by: admin