Common Sense^[1] is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine. It was first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, during the American Revolution. Common Sense, signed “Written by an Englishman”, became an immediate success.^[2] In relation to the population of the Colonies at that time, it had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history.

I just finished this essay. It’s stunning to read this and imagine the time (1776). It reminds me much of The Prince, which I’m about to finish, and desperately makes me want to visit Boston.

Education-focused startup OpenStudy is a platform for “massively multi-player study groups.” What this means is that students who are studying the same subject like math or writing can ask and answer questions on OpenStudy, which uses Facebook Connect to let users interact and learn collaboratively through profiles and group chat.

OpenStudy aims to make education fun by providing users with gamification (yeah I know how terrible using this word is, but I make an exception for things education-related) elements like medals and achievements for completing actions like answering a question quickly or answering  more than ten questions. You can also fan people you’d like to follow, giving users incentive to engage and contribute.

If you’re going to gamify (make like a game) something, and add a Facebook/social element to it–I can think of few better things to do it to.

Minority-admissions programs work not because they give black students access to the same superior educational resources as white students, or access to the same rich cultural environment as white students, or any other formal or grandiose vision of engineered equality. They work by giving black students access to the same white students as white students — by allowing them to make acquaintances outside their own social world and so shortening the chain lengths between them and the best jobs.

Yes. It really is all about the peer group and network. This is what makes college so valuable.

Ideally, people would learn to program the same way “normal” people learn to play instruments: Slowly over several years, with lots of practice. However, this is not practical at the university level.

The foreign language model is closer to being practical. At Grand Valley, students study a foreign language for four semesters before beginning a serious study of literature and composition in that language. In theory, I think a similar model would for programming would be much more effective. As with foreign language, students could test into the appropriate place in the four-semester sequence. However, I see two problems.

Great analysis.

That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors” he said. “And also, they would also have to have citations so that they could be checked in case they made a mistake. Somebody needs to be doing it, and maybe it’s a worthy expenditure of taxpayer money.

I think it’s a great idea.

12,225 11,565 11,703 12,079 11,758 11,383 11,317 11,652 11,567

Participation rate

46.8 45.7 46.1 46.2 46.0 45.1 45.5 46.1 45.5

Employed

10,447 9,809 10,000 10,303 9,963 9,770 9,749 10,059 9,876

Employment-population ratio

40.0 38.8 39.4 39.4 39.0 38.7 39.2 39.8 38.9

Unemployed

1,778 1,756 1,703 1,776 1,795 1,613 1,568 1,593 1,691

Unemployment rate

14.5 15.2 14.5 14.7 15.3 14.2 13.9 13.7 14.6

5%, 8%, 10%, 15%, by levels of education [At least bachelors, some college, HS diploma, no HS diploma]

America has a perverse egalitarian ethic. This wasn’t always so. Hard work used to be respected. Now, we want equal results no matter what the input is.

People don’t care that Asians and Indians have a better home life when it comes to support for education. They want the schools to — magically — make up for this difference.

We should stop this fantasy right now and return to a culture of personal responsibility.

Spot on.

A friend of mine spent a year working in a central LA elementary school that was located in the barrio. Many of his pupils were illegals. I ignorantly thought this would have been a good experience, you know people taking great risk to get to this country, happy to be here, and grateful for a free education. That was wrong. He said it was the worse experience of his life. It wasn’t because of any language barrier, it was because the parents were resentful toward him and could give a shit if their kids learned anything. The students were often hostile to him as the white man, they won’t do any of the work, and his classes were constant disruptions throughout the day. If he tried to do any discipline on the kids or gave them bad grades, the parents would complain to the administration and they even came to school and threatened him.

He lasted one year and then GTFO.

Liberals who are disconnected from reality make me very angry.