Who Wants Prosciutto Ice Cream?

“… the three hipster-geeks started squirming and making frat-house jokes. “Dude, you need to eat that!” one said to another, picking a lard caramel off the counter. Godby’s palate favors salt, booze and meat. Each day he scoops 10 to 12 of his hundred-plus ice cream flavors, favorites including Jesus Juice (red wine and Coke) and Boccalone Prosciutto. Godby also produces novelties in the what might be called the nose-to-tail dessert paradigm: duck-fat pecan pies, foie-gras ginger-snap ice cream sandwiches, treats that incorporate odd animal parts. On occasion, next to the register (cash only), he sets out a glass-covered cake stand filled with brownies. Nobody buys them. As Godby, in his uniform of long green shorts, blue apron and white Chuck Taylors, explains, ‘I can’t sell cupcakes to save my life.’”

July 25th, 2010 | Permalink

The Culture of Exposure

“The system is basically set up to maximize kvetching. Government is filled with superconfident, highly competitive people who are grouped into small bands. These bands usually have one queen bee at the center — a president, senator, cabinet secretary or general — and a squad of advisers all around. These bands are perpetually jostling, elbowing and shoving each other to get control over policy. Amid all this friction, the members of each band develop their own private language. These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.”

July 17th, 2010 | Permalink

New York Times + Foursquare

” … Therefore, I propose The Times leverage its upscale brand and borrow a page out of Foursquare’s playbook. The paper should offer rewards, both physical and digital, for user participation allowing users to show off that they read the Times and are thus educated and concerned about worldly affairs.”

July 16th, 2010 | 3 notes | Permalink

The End of the Best Friend

“That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date. While in the past a social slight in backyard games rarely came to teachers’ attention the next day, today an upsetting text message from one middle school student to another is often forwarded to school administrators, who frequently feel compelled to intervene in the relationship. (Ms. Laycob was speaking in an interview after spending much of the previous day dealing with a “really awful” text message one girl had sent another.) Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.”

July 14th, 2010 | Permalink

Smarter Than You Think

“He plays to win,” Boardman said, shaking her head. “He’s really not messing around!” Like most of the contestants, she had started calling Watson “he.”

July 13th, 2010 | Permalink

Steven Strogatz on the Elements of Math

“Steven Strogatz, an award-winning professor, takes readers from the basics to the baffling in a 15-part series on mathematics. Beginning with a column on why numbers are helpful, he goes on to investigate topics including negative numbers, calculus and group theory, finishing with the mysteries of infinity.”

Thoughtful, accessible and interesting. Highly recommended.

July 10th, 2010 | 2 notes | Permalink

Economists Who Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)

“… ‘Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,’ says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. ‘They’re wrong. And we can prove it.’ Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen. Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.”

July 8th, 2010 | 14 notes | Permalink

Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive

“… In the acuity of their visual system, the sensitivity and deftness with which they can manipulate objects, their sociability, chattiness and willingness to deceive, squirrels turn out to be surprisingly similar to primates. They nest communally as multigenerational, matrilineal clans, and at the end of a hard day’s forage, they greet each other with a mutual nuzzling of cheek and lip glands that looks decidedly like a kiss. Dr. Koprowski said that when he was growing up in Cleveland, squirrels were the only wild mammals to which he was exposed. “When I got to college, I thought I’d study polar bears or mountain lions,” he said. “Luckily I ended up doing my master’s and Ph.D. on squirrels instead.””

July 8th, 2010 | Permalink

Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer

“… ‘A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,’ Mr. Furstenberg said. National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones. Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. The stretched-out walk to independence is rooted in social and economic shifts that started in the 1970s, including a change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy that sent many more people to college, and the women’s movement, which opened up educational and professional opportunities. Women account for more than half of college students and nearly half of the work force, which in turn has delayed motherhood and marriage.”

July 8th, 2010 | 3 notes | Permalink

“Mr. Wujec worked on his elaborate visual representation of the conference.”

“Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans. Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.) The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.”

July 5th, 2010 | Permalink

“We still hear all the time that little kids can’t engineer,” said Christine Cunningham, director of Engineering is Elementary, a program developed at the Museum of Science in Boston that offers ready-made lessons, for about $350 each, on 20 topics, and is now used in all 50 states, in more than 3,000 schools. “We say they’re born engineers — they naturally want to solve problems — and we tend to educate it out of them.” (via Many Schools Teach Engineering in Early Grades)

July 3rd, 2010 | 2 notes | Permalink

Top Schools in France Pushed to Open Meritocracy

“Despite the misgivings, in February the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, under considerable pressure, signed on to a “Charter of Equal Opportunity” with the government committing the schools to try to reach the 30 percent goal before 2012 or risk losing some financing. But how to get there remains a point of contention. There is a serious question about how to measure diversity in a country where every citizen is presumed equal and there are no official statistics based on race, religion or ethnicity. A goal cannot be called a “quota,” which has an odor of the United States and affirmative action. Instead, there is the presumption here that poorer citizens will be more diverse, containing a much larger percentage of Muslims, blacks and second-generation immigrants. The minister of higher education, Valérie Pécresse, argued that French who grow up in a poor neighborhood have the same difficulties regardless of ethnicity.”

July 2nd, 2010 | Permalink