Last night I read an article from the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly that is getting a TON of mentions in the print and on-line news and opinion communities. It is entitled The Quiet Coup and is written by Simon Johnson. One reason that the article is getting so much attention is that Johnson was once the chief economist for the International Monetary Fund and in the article he makes a case for a populist approach to our current economic situation. Because of how traditionally harsh restrictions required to receive IMF support have negatively affected the poor in those countries receiving IMF support, one usually does not say “IMF” and “populist” in the same breath. But Johnson makes the argument that if the US were an annonymous case for insolvency presented to the IMF for their assistance the IMF would not hesitate to urge that banks be nationalized and a taxpayer-centric approach for restructuring the banks be taken.
David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer seems to have just discovered what librarians and archivists have known for a long time. In a recent interview with Dag Spicer, the Curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, he finds out that digital storage devices have a remarkably short lifetime and that data can be lost if simply dumped on to a magnetic or optical digital storage medium. He should have talked to an archivist. Data Rot, as he terms it, is why we still put essential information on microfilm and store it in salt mines or why we print things off on to acid free paper and store the paper in environmentally sound conditions … and on and on. Or, it is why we spend a lot of time migrating digital data from one storage medium to another with multiple back-ups. Still … he did serve to popularize the problem.
A recent essay by noted environmentalist Bill McKibben
points out that global warming is such a serious and immediate problem that we have to stop quibbling about whether any single alternative energy project is perfect or perfectly ready for implementation and start to implement as many as we can now. Even if you don’t fully believe in global climate change … consider what might happen to the lives of your grandchildren if you are wrong and the problem is immediate. Seems like the smart thing to do is act like it is real, act now, and then figure out the fine points from a safer perspective.
Two recent articles about student expectations in higher education seem to fit together and are highly recommended.
The first appeared in the NY Times on February 17, 2009 and was entitled: “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes.” In essence, it reports that over the course of their pre-higher education lives, students have been led to believe that hard work is the goal and that actual learning is not as important. Whether students actually have a good idea of what hard work IS relative to learning is another issue. The article seems to draw the point that to many students, not “easy” defines “hard work” and should equate to a good grade.
Related to this article is a piece in the Christian Science Monitor on Grade Inflation ( “Grade Inflation Gone Wild“, March 24, 2009). It points out that without a very strong and conscious effort to keep them from inflating, grades in higher education have significantly inflated. The author attributes easy high grades to a lack of effort on the part of students and, by extension to an abundance of free time contributing to the alcohol problem on campuses.