Via FuturePundit:
Have you ever sat down to work on a crossword puzzle only to find that afterwards you haven’t the energy to exercise? Or have you come home from a rough day at the office with no energy to go for a run?
A new study, published today in Psychology and Health, reveals that if you use your willpower to do one task, it depletes you of the willpower to do an entirely different task.
Wow, from Stumbling and Mumbling:
[...] Which raises the question: what impact do different governments really have upon public spending?
The answer might be: less than you think. A new paper by Allen Drazen and Ari Brender has looked at changes in the composition of government spending across 12 different categories in 68 democracies between 1972 and 2003. And they’ve found something remarkable:
“We find no evidence that a change in government leader results in a larger change in the composition of government expenditure in the first two years after the change relative to no change in leaders. If anything, a change in leaders is associated with less change.“
Via Treehugger:
Electric Supercharger Boosts Torque 50% and Reduces CO2 by 20%
An interesting hybrid connection … and of course I’m surprised that a supercharger would be an environmental win.
Via Treehugger:
IBM Proves Smart Grid Reduces Energy Use By At Least 15%, Reveals Key to Success
Fifteen percent nationally would be huge.
An interesting roundup, via Economist’s View:
Output, Productivity, Employment, Household Debt, Consumption, and Wealth
This is an old theme on the blog, now endorsed by a French President and a US Nobel Prize winner:
The Stiglitz report recommends that economic indicators should stress well-being instead of production, and for non-market activities, such as domestic and charity work, to be taken into account. Indexes should integrate complex realities, such as crime, the environment and the efficiency of the health system, as well as income inequality. The report brings examples, such as traffic jams, to show that more production doesn’t necessarily correspond with greater well-being.
It’s not that GDP is a “bad” number, but that it isn’t always the most useful number. We’ve been living through some weak “recoveries” in the US, with poor job growth and even falling middle class income. They were called “recoveries” because GDP went up …
From my reading, Barry Ritholtz is the only one to call it for what it is:
The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed halting high frequency and flash trading.
In response, Nasdaq (and others) are now prohibiting flash orders. Supposedly, the NYSE is also considering banning the practice.
This was a given. The real question that remains unanswered and demands a thorough investigation is this: WHAT EXCHANGE OFFICIALS APPROVED THIS? WHO BELIEVED THAT ALLOWING FAVORED FIRMS TO FRONT RUN OTHER INVESTORS WAS OK?
The Economist quoting David Leonhardt:
At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.
Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm
(Also see the post earlier today on reinventing universities.)
.
From Justin Fox, the Curious Capitalist:
The Census Bureau’s annual look at income and health coverage (based on surveys conducted in March) is out today. The rise in the poverty rate and in the percentage of Americans without health insurance got the headlines. But here’s a fact that for some reason the Census Bureau didn’t emphasize: The median household income in 2008 was $50,303. The median household income in 1999, expressed in 2008 dollars, was $52,748.
You’ve got to figure 2009 will see another decline in income, in which case Americans will end the decade significantly less well off than when they started it. We’re not just treading water. We’re going backwards.
Can we put it down to globalization, and a migration to “the global wage?”
I’ve been waiting for this long enough (10 years?) that I’d come to think we were stuck.
Maybe things have been changing off my radar:
“The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros,” says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, “is the biggest virgin forest out there.” Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world. “The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field,” says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT’s project. “We’re changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.”
But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT’s courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation’s students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world’s most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,” says Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days’ growth of beard, coined the term “edupunk” to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education. “Edupunk,” he tells me in the opening notes of his first email, “is about the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions and the means by which they are financially cannibalizing their own mission.”
“the utter irresponsibility and lethargy of educational institutions?”
Could be.