1. The Atlantic says Just 27% of BA's Have Jobs Related to Their Major? Don't Believe the Fed's New Stat
2. 100 fastest growing inner city businesses
From a pet relocation service, a wine lifestyle marketer, to a scrap metal regenerator, America's urban core is home to a variety of fast-growing companies. Here's the top 100, as ranked by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
3. Factory safety: Battle of the brands
... This approach has been criticised by the Workers Rights Consortium because, unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe. Yet it is debatable whether wealthy factory owners really lack funds to make factories safe, as opposed to the lack of incentive due to the Bangladesh government's failure to enforce its own building code. WalMart points out that the government has now started to close unsafe fatories, 19 so far (presumably because of the constant protests by locals since the collapse of Rana Plaza). It says its new approach will detect unsafe factories significantly faster than the Workers Rights Consortium's plan.
Perhaps it would be better if everyone agreed on a common approach. But if there must be competition, it is surely better that it is over how to make factories safer than the alternative.
4. Economist Timothy Taylor with some interesting thoughts on Spending on America's Pets
5. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
While psychologists can't know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.
6. Why You Feel Smart Around Some People But Dumb Around Others
... Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.
It's just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. Research in this area should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a "lump of something that's in our heads," as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as "a transaction among people."...
... This research has important implications for the way we educate children and the way we manage employees. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and managers a more accurate sense of people's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate in schools and workplaces is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion.
Professor Aronson calls the doltishness induced by an uncomfortable social situation "conditional stupidity." We should use that insight to create the conditions for brilliance. ...
7. Do those who doubt climate catastrophism lack scientific credibility?
8. Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image (INFOGRAPHIC) The article is a bit over the top, but this graphic was interesting:
9. America's Declining Teen Birth Rate, Explained in 3 Charts
10. Suburbia Needs Jesus, Too Interesting piece that has caused some buzz in social media. Her point about the centrality of everyday life is something I resonate with.
12. Methodists May Discourage Those Over 45 from Becoming Pastors
13. How does copyright work in space?
CHRIS HADFIELD has captured the world's heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut's clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth orbit. But when the man fell to Earth in a neat and safe descent a few days ago, after a five-month stay in orbit, should he have been greeted by copyright police? Commander Hadfield was only 250 miles (400 km) up, so he was still subject to terrestrial intellectual-property regimes, which would have applied even if he had flown the "100,000 miles" mentioned in the song's lyrics or millions of kilometres to Mars. His five-minute video had the potential to create a tangled web of intellectual-property issues. How does copyright work in space? ...
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