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 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).
→ Read more Control freaks
I keep wondering how can there be such a mixture of (not always) good (sometimes excellent!) economic policies (far better than most ‘opposition’ in the USA advocate- and that’s one problem there: the alternative might be worse, in overall terms), but absolutely insane ‘political’ ones (eventually leading to bad economic outcomes as well…), interfering with private life/ choice and meant to control, there is this obsession with controlling each and everybody’s activities, thoughts etc.,
→ Read more Nude inspiration (with an application to Romania)
Since our Romanian mass-media (well, the ‘education’ department from Gandul) are launching a great moral offensive against nudity (public or academic nudity, to be exact), here’s some interesting material on nudity and (great) inspiration.
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