I've got two guilty pleasures regarding science on the web: Olivia Judson's blog and TEDTalks.  From the latter, we have this weekend's intellectual candy and food for thought, with Sir Ken Robinson answering the post title's question in the affirmative.  Very well done.

Enjoy!

Word.

It never ceases to amaze me how vacuous these 100-faculty academic petitions can be. Cochrane's conclusion is spot on:

Milton Friedman stood for freedom, social, political, and economic. He realized that they are inextricably linked. If the government controls your job or your business, dissent is impossible.  He favored, among other things, legalizing drugs, school choice, and volunteer army. To call him or his political legacy "right wing" is simply ignorant, and I mean that also as a technically accurate description rather than an insult.

(Of course, Friedman also has a legacy in economics as a first-rate researcher, which is what the MFI will do and honor. The consumption function and the monetary foundations of inflation, are as important to 20th century economics as the discovery of DNA was to biology, quantum mechanics to physics or plate tectonics to geology. But the letter-writers didn't have anything to say about any of this, so neither will I, here. )

Anne Applebaum describes the generation of students coming of age these days as "The Busiest Generation" in her op-ed in The Washington Post today.  Since one of the best parts of my job is that I get to teach and mentor members of this generation at Dartmouth, I figured I would chime in with a few observations.

First, the op-ed makes note of how competitive it is to gain acceptance to top universities.  But the set of institutions with extremely low admit rates is not particularly large.  (See this post from Vox Baby last year.)  There are plenty of opportunities to attend fine colleges and universities without forsaking the freedom of childhood.  And many of our brightest leaders come from these institutions.

Second, I have nothing against a competitive process, but I do regret that the competition takes place in the form of "more is better."  More activities, more time spent on those activities, more lines on a resume.  I wish the competition took place along the dimension of "better is better."  Students should spend their time finding their true intellectual passions, which necessarily involves trying many different activities.  But it also involves prioritizing them, committing to just a few of them, and letting the rest go.

This is a site that is long overdue in my profession:

The goal of this site is to encourage instructors to take price into account when shopping for texts.

Like doctors prescribing drugs for their patients, college instructors selecting textbooks for their classes have little incentive to pay attention to prices that they themselves do not pay.

Textbook publishers do not advertise their prices. Often it is even difficult to find prices on their websites. Nowhere have we been able to find current price lists for a full selection of competing texts.