second floor

this is powerful journalism

interesting post

The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.

The joke about economists is that they are always using the phrase “On the other hand.” Economists are trained to recognize all sides of an argument. That seems like an easy and obvious skill, but in my experience, the general population lacks that skill. Once people take a side, they interpret any argument on the other side as absurd. In other words, they are relatively susceptible to cognitive dissonance.

found on amazon

can someone please explain how “free speech” and “trespassing on someone else’s property” are the same thing?

from the daily cal. i like how in the last paragraph his initials become “AJ”.

Five Minutes With… Ajay Krishnamurthy
Student Advocate Hopes for Visibility
BY JULIA SZINAI
Daily Cal Staff Writer
Saturday, September 1, 2007

The Daily Californian sat down with the ASUC Student Advocate Ajay Krishnamurthy, who said he hopes to improve the visibility of his office and make it more progressive.

Daily Californian: Can you describe your position and why did you choose to run for student advocate?

Ajay Krishnamurthy: The student advocate’s office is billed as … the student’s public defender, which means that we represent and advise students having disputes with the university. That can range from anything from ‘I was accused of plagiarism,’ to ‘I was accused of assault,’ to grade appeals, financial aid and residency issues. … UC Berkeley is not an easy place to get through, even in the best of circumstances. But when students are facing problems … they really do need some kind of institutional shoulder support. I don’t think that really exists outside of our office that much.

DC: What kind of issues are facing students today?

AK: I don’t think there is a single issue that is most prevalent. … We are set up in a way that we deal with conduct issues, academic issues, residency, as well as grievances, which is any time a student is bringing a complaint to the university. … An overriding theme is that sometimes there is a lack of transparency about how things are processed in the university, where students are not really sure where they should go to resolve certain issues. … That’s really where our role comes in.

DC: What kind of tools do you have to increase the transparency of those issues?

AK: This office has built up a lot of good will with the administration in the last five or six years. … Even though we may be seen as an adversary, we are not really. Ostensibly the administration and our office are working for the same thing, which is to try to help resolve those issues. … We have built up a lot of capital with them and so we can start being a little bit more progressive in the work that we do.

DC: Are you working to make the office more visible to students?

AJ: That is our biggest issue we are facing this year. I think we do a great job with the cases we handle and we do handle a good number of cases, a little bit under 400 per year. But most students don’t know we exist. … What we really need to do is try to create a kind of formalized referral process so that … administrators can refer them to us. … Right now any time a student is accused of a conduct violation they get a letter from our office in the same file. Hopefully we can get a similar system with the financial office … as well as advising office.

Teens skip menial summer jobs but miss some valuabe lessons:

There’s little question that the demise of the summer job is due in part to globalization. For one thing, with millions of low-skilled immigrants around, service industries don’t need to rely on kid labor the way they used to. Lawn-care companies and fast-food restaurants can now employ a more permanent adult staff. And, according to Neil Howe, an expert on age cohorts, kids are so used to seeing immigrants doing that sort of work that they assume “I don’t have to mess with food or cleaning stuff up.” Ironically, the same kids whose parents are paying $4,000 for them to go to Oaxaca to build houses for the poor can’t imagine working for money next to Mexican immigrants at the local Dunkin’ Donuts.

while i  found this paragraph interesting, the rest of the article is basically just a rant about how great things were in the good ol’ days. you know, when time was we could send our younguns off to war to fix ‘em up straight.

this is not us. nor is this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people died of starvation every day in 2003, and as of 2001 to 2003, about 800 million people were chronically undernourished. On average, a child dies every five seconds from starvation.

but i’ll bet wikipedia  looks nice on a new iphone.