December 2009
19 posts
Goldstone Report Largely Bogus, so says New... →
Since the early 1990s, the nature of the military conflict facing Israel has been dramatically shifting. What was mainly a clash between states and armies has turned into a clash between a state and paramilitary terror organizations, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north. This new form of struggle is now called “asymmetrical war.” It is defined by an attempt on the part of those groups to...
The Atlantic - Why our Healt Care System is FUBAR →
Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure—all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast.
By what mechanism does society determine that an extra, say, $100 billion for health care will make us healthier than even $10 billion for cleaner air or water, or $25 billion for better nutrition, or $5 billion for parks, or $10 billion for recreation, or $50...
Large Hadron Collider article →
The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.
inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s
If this new collider doesn’t produce groundbreaking discoveries, particle physics will have reached...
Learning Style Be Damned →
According to Harold Pashler, teachers should disregard learning style. It is true, students of a certain learning style will enjoy a lesson taught in their way more than students of a different learning style. Yet Pashler’s findings show ways of teaching certain things have uniformly better testing results.
“In almost every actual well-designed study, Mr. Pashler and his colleagues...
New Republic - American business schools prepare... →
Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.
After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned...
Protocol Economy by Brooks →
“In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions.”
http://www.amazon.com/Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American-Century/dp/B002IKLO8W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261069542&sr=1-1
Books I may want to read by this Toulmin guy…
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
The Architecture of Matter
“It took telephones seventy-one years to penetrate 50 percent of American homes,...”
– Ken Auletta, as quoted in LA Times story
