Once is an accident, twice is coincidence... Jeff Weiner. Jeremy Zawodny. JR Conlin.. All apparently headed to startups or funders thereof. (Update: Usama Fayyad as well.) Come on, purple and yellow, don't just lie there, do something! Even other people's startups have figured out how to leverage your under-worked community assets.
Forex for Dummies as well as the rest of us. Here's a well-done tutorial on the ups and downs of the dollar, from a group of Bay Area money managers.
This is your brain on credit. A fascinating study suggests that paying with credit rather than cash partially disengages the cost function. (HT: Maggie's Farm.) So there's a scientific basis for the recommendation of some of my favorite personal finance books to dump the credit cards. I'd also say, from personal experience, that running a rigorous household budget may have the same effect, assuming you pay off your cards each month - and you do, right? Whether it's cash, debit or credit, it all gets marked off against a balance, the only thing that varies is when. Most people can figure out that pain delayed is still pain, but...
This is your brain on cigs. The latest American Scientist brings a piece on another study, a combined behavioral and MRI look at differences between nicotine addicts and others in a stock market simulation. Seems the addicts lose the ability to process what the experimenters call 'fictive signals' - what those of us with an economic bent would call opportunity costs. Do you suppose these two groups of researchers should be comparing notes?
In the belly of the beast. Adjunct 'Professor X' at Unknown College pens an Atlantic piece on the woes of teaching English lit and comp to those of marginal academic abilities. This all sounds very familiar. About 25 years ago I spent some time as an adjunct, in computer science, at a community college in Flint, Michigan, motivated by a need to keep the wolf away from the door as well as sampling the teaching option before plunging into the commercial world. Two weeks into the first term I was bemoaning the fact that I could see myself easily flunking half the students, based on their complete inability to handle systematic problem solving, let alone actual programming. My fellow slave laborers opined that it was normal, and the best thing I could do is persuade them to drop the course while they could still get a refund. Yeah, I been there.
Glenn Reynolds has talked about a current bubble in higher education, and if you count back the years, my experience was at the height of the fad for retraining autoworkers. There is one other factor in common: Some of my students were driven into the classroom to escape the consequences of a local economy wrecked by a combination of auto company management incompetence and auto union arrogance. And a lot of today's lower echelon students are driven there because their high school diplomas mean little as a credential, due to...