Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com
The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.
Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
Whooping cough returns in kids as parents skip vaccines – USATODAY.com
Whooping cough, or pertussis, has been making a resurgence in recent years as more parents decide not to vaccinate their children, says Jason Glanz, author of a study in today’s Pediatrics. In a study of 751 children enrolled in Kaiser Permanente of Colorado, one in 20 children who skipped the vaccine developed whooping cough, compared with one in 500 vaccinated children. In all, 11% to 12% of pertussis cases were in unvaccinated children.
Though more than 90% effective, the vaccine doesn’t protect everyone, says Sean O’Leary, an infectious-disease fellow at Children’s Hospital in Denver.
That’s why vaccinating all children is crucial to creating “herd immunity” for the entire community, including newborns who are too young to be immunized, O’Leary says.
A study in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal in March found that 91 babies under age 1 died of whooping cough from 1999 to 2004. More than half were under 2 months old, the age at which infants get their first in a series of whooping cough shots.
TnHomeEd homeschooling in Tennessee
TnHomeEd is a comprehensive and independent clearinghouse and network of homeschooling ( home education) information specifically for Tennesseans. If you’re just starting your homeschooling journey, just need the non-lawyer version of our laws or looking for support groups, our e-lists, umbrella or covers schools, (known as church-related schools here, or other resources, you’re sure to find what you need here. We’ve got a great Search feature and a good FAQ. If you still have questions, feel free to e-mail for a prompt response. Thanks for visiting…
Kay Brooks, Founder, TnHomeEd.com.
What Finland can teach America about true luxury
Some people would rather not achieve on their own. They want it done for them.
The expat quoted doesn’t have a problem with paying for the quality healthcare or education. The issue, I think, is taking the responsibility for his own welfare and being self-reliant. Whatever happenened to working in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest? The desire to have someone take care of everything for you is foreign to me. I’d rather take care of myself and succeed or fail on the merits of my actions.
What’s wrong with paying for you education,or paying for your own healthcare? What’s wrong with being rich?
FTA: Americans in Finland shared similar sentiments. But they weren’t naive about the place, and there was a reason they weren’t buying the latest toys. “I’ll never become rich in Finland,” one explained, “the taxes are just too high.” But for him it was a trade-off worth making. “Great healthcare, basically free. My kids get one of the best educations in the world, free.” By the way, that includes college, free. He had no plans to move back to the States.
FTA: Finland doesn’t pay lip service to providing a level playing field for all its citizens. It really does give the vast majority of its citizens a fair and equal chance in life, in a way that the US just doesn’t, no matter how much Americans like to think it does.
The True Cause of College-Tuition Inflation? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate?
While none of those reasons are necessarily off the table, consider this article by Tamar Lewin in today’s Times:
Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.
During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.
Support staff! And what kind of work are they doing?
The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors, and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations and reporting requirements colleges face.
via The True Cause of College-Tuition Inflation? – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.
People don’t stop killers. People with guns do
People don’t stop killers. People with guns do
via People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.
On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn’t allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. “Why couldn’t we meet off campus today?” she asked.
Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus.
In The Roanoke Times last year – after another campus incident, when a dangerous escaped inmate was roaming the campus – Wiles wrote that, when his class was evacuated, “Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness. That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.”
Guns make colleges safer
Mass public shootings are a horrific feature of modern life. Many of the bloodiest examples of this scourge have occurred on college campuses. As professors, we are particularly sensitive to this danger.
Despite this – no, because of this – we support a bill currently pending in the Texas Legislature that would permit the concealed carrying of firearms on college and university campuses in the state by holders of concealed-handgun permits.
Any public policy involving matters of life and death should be decided only after weighing carefully the competing risks. Examining the relevant facts and data indicates that permitting Texas permit holders to carry weapons on college campuses would improve safety because:
•The best available empirical evidence shows that concealed-carry laws reduce the incidence of mass public shootings.
•Mass public shootings occur almost exclusively in places – like universities – where concealed carry is proscribed.
•There are numerous examples of firearms owners acting to disarm would-be mass murderers, thereby saving lives.
•Concealed-handgun-permit holders are overwhelmingly law-abiding individuals.
If gun bans truly reduced the risk of mass public shootings, then gun-free zones would be refuges from such havoc. Sadly, the exact opposite is true. All multiple-victim public shootings in the United States with more than three fatalities have occurred where concealed handguns are prohibited. Moreover, the worst primary and secondary school shootings have occurred in Europe, despite its draconian gun laws.
Pirate Bay Lawyer to Demand a Retrial – WSJ.com
STOCKHOLM — A defense lawyer in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case said Thursday he will demand a retrial after the judge admitted he was a member of copyright-protection organizations.