Excellent post of Steven Levitt on whether giving tenure in the academic environment (in Economics, in particular) makes any sense. Of course- and Levitt should know that, but maybe he doesn’t, since he does not say anything about it- both Richard Posner and Gary Becker extensively talked about this (and about tenure in general, though they did focus on the academic and judicial settings) on their common blog, more than a year ago (they also came back on the topic with answers to comments received on the initial posts, see Posner’s reply to comments and Becker’s reply to comments, respectively).
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Mankiw’s advice for new junior faculty
Plenty of good advice from Greg Mankiw for new junior faculty. Though I might have a problem with his one-before-the-last piece: “Avoid activities that will distract you from research.
→ Read more Scientific publishing lags: Maths vs. Economics
I’ve received today this email (I receive quite often such emails since I am also interested- rather actively, I’d like to think- in Applied Mathematics). I put in bold what is the most interesting thing for my purpose here (I won’t search for the rank or reputation of this journal below etc.
→ Read more How to (and how not to) praise (your) kids
I certainly agree with the conclusions of this interesting article in the New York Magazine (overviewing a few dozen recent studies on the topic): praising the effort rather than the intelligence or, even better formulated, praise needs to be specific.
→ Read more On Larry Page’s address at the AAAS Annual Meeting 2007 and more from that event
Excerpts from Larry Page’s address at the AAAS Annual Meeting of this year are in the third part of this recent Science podcast (in .mp3 format) from the 17th of February (his talk starts from around min 14 in the podcast).
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