You Name It, and Exercise Helps It
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/health/29brod.html
By JANE E. BRODY
Randi considers the Y.M.C.A. her lifeline, especially the pool.
Randi weighs more than 300 pounds and has borderline diabetes, but
she controls her blood sugar and keeps her bright outlook on life by
swimming every day for about 45 minutes.
Nicholas A. Christakis: Social Networks Are Like the Eye
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/christakis08/christakis08_index.htmlChristakis, along with his colleague James Fowler, "have started
with several projects that seek to understand the processes of
contagion, and we have also begun a body of work looking at the
processes of network formation -- how structure starts and why it
changes. We have made some empirical discoveries about the nature of
contagion within networks. And also, in the latter case, with
respect to how networks arise, we imagine that the formation of
networks obeys certain fundamental biological, genetic,
physiological, sociological, and technological rules. "
"So we have been investigating both what causes networks to form and
how networks operate."
Aging Makes Us More Liberal, Not More Conservative
http://www.newswise.com/p/articles/view/538333/Research published in the American Sociological Review debunks the myth that people grow more conservative, in their attitudes and their political beliefs, as they age. The research is the first to show that people 60 and over become more liberal faster as they age than does a younger cohort.
Business of the Bomb: The Modern Nuclear Marketplace
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/nukes/index.html
In January 2000, a German engineer living in South Africa met with a
friend and business partner to hatch a deal. Gerald Wisser, a
61-year-old broker, visited his friend's pipe factory outside
Johannesburg to see if his friend wanted to make a bid on a
manufacturing project. According to what Wisser later told
investigators, his friend, Johan Meyer, pointed to a foot-and-a-half
tall stack of documents and said, "That is the beast. I will make an
offer."
"The beast" was machinery to assist with the enrichment of uranium.
It was just one part of a much larger operation. Its goal: to
provide the fuel enabling Libya to produce its own nuclear bombs.
To men like Wisser and Meyer, it was just another business project.
What's Online: Just a Business
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/technology/03online.html
May 3, 2008
By DAN MITCHELL
Increasingly, the business of illicitly selling the
materials and technologies for making nuclear bombs looks like just
that: a business.
"Business of the Bomb: The Modern Nuclear Marketplace," an hourlong
public radio documentary by the Center for Investigative Reporting
and American RadioWorks, describes the "increasingly white-collar
nature of the nuclear bomb business."
A study in the banality of evil, the documentary, available at
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org, takes listeners through
industrial parks and offices where deals have been struck and
bomb-making equipment has been assembled.
Centering on the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, now under
house arrest in Pakistan, the program makes clear that the most
dangerous players in the underground nuclear trade are often not
"desperate terrorists smuggling enriched uranium across borders,"
but rather "successful businessmen" who "may live in suburbs and
belong to country clubs."
Education and Economic Growth
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/16110377.html
Education Next, Spring 2008, (vol. 8, no. 2)
It's not just going to school but learning that matters
Even before and certainly ever since the 1983 release of A Nation at
Risk by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, national
economic competitiveness has been offered as a primary reason for
pushing school reform. The commission warned, "If only to keep and
improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world
markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational
system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and
poor, majority and minority." Responding to these urgent words, the
National Governors Association, in 1989, pledged that U.S. students
would lead the world in math and science achievement by 2000.
According to the latest international math and science assessment
conducted by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and
Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA) (see Figure 1), the United States remains a long distance
from that target. Rather than worrying about the consequences, some
have begun to question what all the fuss was about. Education
researcher Gerald Bracey, for example, has argued that no one has
"provided any data on the relationship between the economy's health
and the performance of schools. Our long economic boom suggests
there isn't one--or that our schools are better than the critics
claim."
They're Global Citizens. They're Hugely Rich. And They Pull the Strings.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203311_pf.html
By David Rothkopf
We didn't elect them. We can't throw them out. And they're getting
more powerful every day.
Call them the superclass.
At the moment, Americans are fixated on the political campaign. In
the meantime, many are missing a reality of the global era that may
matter much more than their presidential choice: On an ever-growing
list of issues, the big decisions are being made or profoundly
influenced by a little-understood international network of business,
financial, government, cultural and military leaders who are beyond
the reach of American voters.
In addition to top officials, these people include corporate
executives, leading investors, top bankers, media moguls, heads of
state, generals, religious leaders, heads of terrorist and criminal
organizations and a handful of important cultural and scientific
figures. Each of these roughly 6,000 individuals is set apart by
their power and ability to regularly influence millions of lives
across international borders. The group is not monolithic, but none
is more globalized or has more influence over the direction in which
the global era is heading.
Doubt it? Just look at the current financial crisis. As government
regulators have sought to head off further market losses, they've
found that perhaps the most effective tool at their disposal is what
the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank described to me
as their "convening power" -- their ability to get the big boys of
Wall Street and world financial capitals into a room or on a
conference call to collaborate on solving a problem. This has, in
fact, become a central part of crisis management, both because
national governments have limited regulatory authority over global
markets and because financial flows have become so large that the
real power lies with the biggest players -- such as the top 50
financial institutions that control almost $50 trillion in assets,
by one measure nearly a third of all assets worldwide.
$81 Million for Reserve of Teachers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/nyregion/29teachers.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
By JENNIFER MEDINA
New York City is paying $81 million over two years in salaries and
benefits for teachers without permanent teaching jobs, according to
a report being released on Tuesday.
The teachers are part of the so-called reserve pool, which holds
teachers whose positions have been eliminated, but who have yet to
secure a new permanent teaching position at another school.
The reserve is an outgrowth of the city's contract with the
teachers' union, which ended seniority rights in staffing decisions
as well as the automatic transfer of teachers who had been cut
because of shrinking enrollment, the closing of large schools or the
elimination of particular programs. At the time, Chancellor Joel I.
Klein said he would rather absorb the cost of the teachers in the
reserve pool than saddle principals with teachers they did not want.
Under the contract, teachers whose positions have been eliminated
from one school and cannot find another to hire them, or who simply
do not look for a new job, are assigned to schools to fill in as
substitute teachers or temporary replacements. They collect full
teacher salary and benefits.
Teachers at those schools are required to show up every day at
regular school hours and are available for principals to use as
substitutes, but the principals are not required to do so. Officials
at the Education Department said they did not track how often the
principals used the assigned substitutes, or whether they did at
all.
Jack Lynch: Guide to Grammar and Style
The English Language: A User's Guide
A much-revised and expanded version of this on-line guide, with hundreds of added examples.
Guide to Grammar and Style
New Study Debunks Myth That Most Tech Entrepreneurs Are College Kids
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2958/new-study-debunks-myth-that-most-tech-entrepreneurs-are-college-kids?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
8.5.1
A new study from researchers at Duke University and Harvard University challenges the popular assumption that most technology entrepreneurs are twee college kids launching businesses from their dorm rooms.
Joshua Kurlantzick: State Inc.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/16/state_inc?mode=PF
The most important new forces in global business are aggressive, wealthy,
and entrepreneurial. But they aren't corporations: they're authoritarian
governments.
March 16, 2008
IT WAS THE biggest corporate deal in the history of sub-Saharan
Africa: Last October, a foreign firm spent nearly $6 billion for a
chunk of Standard Bank, the South African company that has long
dominated finance on the continent.