Why college?

Yglesias says college lectures started before the printing press, when books were expensive and being lectured at made sense. Why did lectures survive the printing press? Granted, there's often areas where key knowledge is mostly in people's heads, especially in advanced or in hands-on fields. But we use "some guy hired for his research ability drones on" for settled academic fields, too. He notes that learning calculus in school is socially accepted, while teaching it to yourself from a workbook is 'weird.'

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/26/books_and_moocs_lots_of_ways_to_learn.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/27/education_signaling_learning_and_credentials.html

Links

I've been trying to reset my sleep schedule to something more in tune with society. So far I'm just massively jet lagged without the fun of having gone anywhere.

Snooze buttons are bad for you or at least can be, especially if you actually fall asleep you again; sleep has phases, and you can fall into a deeper phase than you were initially. This might also explain something I found during my orals prep: for two weeks my body refused to sleep more than 3 hours a night, and I was tired all the time, but trundled through my studied. The day of my exam I set my alarm, got woken up after three hours, and felt like nauseous crap. There's a difference between three hours because stupid body wakes up and three hours because alarm.

Another column on how teens naturally sleep at 11pm for 9 hours despite US insanity of having high schooler start earlier than elementary school.

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NY Times takes on the Senate, the least democratic legislature in the developed world. 66:1 ratio in power between WY and CA. Why do the 500,000 people of Wyoming deserve more power (and federal money) than the 500,000 people of Fresno?

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Cosmic ray bit flips a growing problem?

Cracked on gun myths or weird facts: gun ads are weird, there's no typical mass shooter, making suicide harder does work to reduce suicides, there's weird gun/god association, violence is down, guns get collected like expensive Barbie dolls, maybe all the gun porn and violent games reduce overall violence while increasing mass shootings. Maybe.

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social mobility of food services, and contribution of liquor to urban vitality
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/27/food_service_sector_should_be_taken_seriously.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2013/03/liquor_license_moratoriums_nimby_idiots_are_strangling_great_neighborhoods.html

Las Vegas female bartenders. Another profession gets sexualized and off-limited for the non-young.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/03/las_vegas_bartender_went_from_a_male_to_a_female_job.html

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Transit has big benefits. Even if a small %age of trips is via transit, those will be disproportionately trips that otherwise would have been on congested roads, so the benefit is larger than one might expect. I always said drivers should welcome transit subsidies as reducing the competition for road and parking...

Productivity minimum wage would be $22/hour. Inflation-linked would be over $10.50

"No wikipedia page? Lawsuit!"

The "Institute for Cultural Diplomacy" threatens WP editors with legal action over the ICD not having a WP page, due to a strong appearance that the deleted page was mostly maintained by the ICD itself, which to my surprise doesn't *quite* violate WP policy but comes close. (Hard to maintain a Neutral Point of View about yourself.)

Edit: some research finds many people saying they're spammers.

http://crookedtimber.org/2013/03/27/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy/ "an organization that I only know of because they relentlessly spam me with unsolicited emails about tedious-sounding events"

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=78735.0 "I keep receiving email invitations to attend "conferences" of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin despite my best efforts to block them, and now students are receiving emails as well. It looks like unpaid interns are harvesting contact information off the web so that academics can be spammed."

http://laboratorium.net/archive/2012/05/13/spam_alert_the_institute_for_cultural_diplomacy " I never received a response from him, just more spam. I called the ICD’s office, in Germany, and asked to be removed from their list. The woman who answered the phone promised I would be. She lied: the email continued." "Hey, I can’t get off their list either!"

With a founder reply: "I have checked with my colleagues as to why they emailed you, and the reason for that is because of our sincere respect for the New York Law School and we felt that since you are a professor of law, you would be very interested to know about our activities and perhaps support us." In other words, "yes we repeatedly sent you unsolicited e-mail, but it was out of respect!"