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But in the 1980s and 1990s, the market changed drastically with the expansion of used book recyclers. They set up shop at the bookstore door near the end of the semester and bought students’ new copies for pennies on the dollar. They would show up in my office uninvited and ask if I want to sell any of the free adopter’s copies that I get from publishers trying to entice me. If you walk through any campus bookstore, nearly all the new copies have been replaced by used copies, usually very tattered and with broken spines. The students naturally gravitate to the cheaper used books (and some prefer them because they like it if a previous owner has highlighted the important stuff). In many bookstores, there are no new copies at all, or just a few that go unsold.
What these bargain hunters don’t realize is that every used copy purchased means a new copy unsold. Used copies pay nothing to the publisher (or the author, either), so to recoup their costs, publishers must price their new copies to offset the loss of sales by used copies. And so the vicious circle begins—publisher raises the price on the book again, more students buy used copies, so a new copy keeps climbing in price.
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In some cases, the costs are driven up because the market has gotten highly competitive with more and expensive features, like pricey full color throughout, and lots of ancillaries (website for the book, CD-ROM of Powerpoints or images, study guide for students, instructor’s guide, test banks, and many other extras). In the high-volume markets, like the introductory courses taken by hundreds of non-majors, these silly extras seem to make a big difference in enticing faculty to change their preferences and adopt a different book, so publishers must pull out all the stops on these expensive frills or lose in a highly competitive market. And, like any other market, the cost per unit is a function of how many you sell. In the huge introductory markets, there are tens of thousands of copies sold, and they can afford to keep their prices competitive but still must add every possible bell and whistle to lure instructors to adopt them. But in the upper-level undergraduate or the graduate courses, where there may only be a few hundred or a few thousand copies sold each year, they cannot afford expensive color, and each copy must be priced to match the anticipated sales. Low volume = higher individual cost per unit. It’s simple economics.
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the real culprit is something most students don’t suspect: used book recyclers, and students’ own preferences for used books that are cheaper and already marked with someone else’s highlighter marker!
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Since childhood this generation has had it drilled into their heads that college is the answer to everything. It isn’t. In reality, college is the answer to nothing. Whatever you do after you finish, if you do it for money, or to make your folks happy, or because you think you have to, and not because you love it, you’re going to be miserable.
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“I can’t leave my job because of my mortgage.”
“I can’t find a new job because of my car payment.”
“I can’t quit because I have kids.”This is the Greek Chorus of any office, and you will hear a few people say this every day for years. Older people. People who have been working for about as long as you and I have been alive. They aren’t bad people. They have just been working at a job they didn’t like for so long, that they forgot that life shouldn’t suck. They are miserable, they complain about everything — and worst of all — they are hopeless. None of them looked forward to anything more than a long weekend, or a week at the beach, and retirement/death.
Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he teaches a wildly popular course on ignorance, inviting scientists in as guest speakers to tell students not what they know but what they don’t know, and even what they don’t know that they don’t know. (Would you rather earn an A or an F in a class called “Ignorance”?, he muses.)
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Firestein captures the essence of the problem by contrasting the public’s understanding of science as a step-wise systematic algorithm of grinding through experiments that churn out data sets to be analyzed statistically and published in peer-reviewed journals after a process of observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation, and new hypothesis testing, with the Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles’ description of science as “groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, ‘Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,’ and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline” (p. 2), in reference to the old proverb: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.”
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It has been estimated that from the beginning of civilization around 5,000 years ago to the year 2003, all of humanity created a grand total of five exabytes of digital information. From 2003 through 2010 we created five exabytes of digital information every two days. By 2013 we will be producing five exabytes every ten minutes. The 2010 total of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. It isn’t knowledge that we need more of; it is how to think about what we know and what we don’t know that is becoming ever more critical in science, through a process Feinstein calls “controlled neglect.” Scientists “don’t stop at the facts,” he explains, “they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out” (p. 12). It must be this way, he argues, because “the vast archives of knowledge seem impregnable, a mountain of facts that I could never hope to learn, let alone remember” (p. 14). Doctors and lawyers and engineers need many facts at their ready, as do scientists, but for the latter “the facts serve mainly to access the ignorance” because this is where the action is. “Want to be on the cutting edge? Well, it’s all, or mostly, ignorance out there. Forget the answers, work on the questions” (pp. 15–16).
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. Your training in financial theory, economics, mathematics, and statistics will serve you well. But your lessons in history, philosophy, and literature will be just as important, because it is vital not only that you have the right tools, but also that you never lose sight of the purposes and overriding social goals of finance.
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Finance, at its best, does not merely manage risk, but also acts as the steward of society’s assets and an advocate of its deepest goals. Beyond compensation, the next generation of finance professionals will be paid its truest rewards in the satisfaction that comes with the gains made in democratizing finance – extending its benefits into corners of society where they are most needed. This is a new challenge for a new generation, and will require all of the imagination and skill that you can bring to bear.
An economics book used in some high schools holds that the Antichrist — a world ruler predicted in the New Testament — will one day control what is bought and sold.
These unemployed graduates have the knowledge and free time to plan revolutions. They would hang around in coffee shops and talk politics, and soon a revolution brews.
Recently, an Education Ministry official was reported to have told a US diplomat (source: Wikileaks) that Singapore did not plan to encourage more students to study in university, and the campus enrolment rate would stay at 20%-25%.
I wonder, if this is true, is it connected to concerns about the possibility of unmanageable unemployment among graduates here?
The Ten Commandments of Teaching
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
- Bertrand Russel
Coding is as hot as it’s ever been and yet we graduated more students with CSci degrees in The Year of Our Orwell as we do today? What’s going on here exactly? A little more from the same blog post:
In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.
We are raising a generation of American Idols and So You Think You Can Dancers when what we really need is a generation of Gateses and Zuckerbergs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF download) computer and mathematical occupations are expected to add 785,700 new jobs from 2008 to 2018. It doesn’t take a math major to see that we’re graduating students at a far lower rate than required to meet demand.
But what’s important is not just what is happening but also why it’s happening. If there’s both security on the downside (computer science majors experience rock-bottom unemployment rates) and untold riches on the upside, it seems the rational economic choice for people to flock to majoring in computer science and engineering. And yet, that’s not what’s taking place.
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People don’t get excited by technology. The glamour and glitz of Hollywood that attracts thousands of Midwestern prom queens every year is undeniable. And the stereotype of the lone coder sitting alone in a cube somewhere can’t quite match up to the thrill, however unlikely, of one day performing in front of Steven, Randy and Jennifer.
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Technology is hard. OK, now perhaps we’re getting a little closer to the truth. It’s not that learning how to program has gotten noticeably more difficult over the years. If anything, frameworks like Rails for Ruby make it easier. But there is a basic level of understanding that, if you don’t have it, drastically reduces the likelihood that you’ll become an engineer.
Indeed, at each level of our education there’s a chance to miss out on fundamental knowledge that, if not acquired at that point, becomes progressively more difficult to pick up later in life. Salman Khan said it best in his TED talk that should be mandatory viewing:
“…you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it’s usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation.”
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But suppose integration doesn't change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck's Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White,Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.
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even if school desegregation hadn't shuttered many promising black schools, the rest of the civil rights revolution would still have undermined them. In the segregated job markets, many of the most talented blacks became school teachers and principals in black schools; after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, they moved into more lucrative jobs in racially integrated firms and businesses. The costs of school desegregation that Buck identifies—the disruption of nurturing all-black institutions and communities, racial antagonism, mutual distrust, and black alienation in white dominated settings—are among the unintended consequences of desegregation generally. If many children growing up in these neighborhoods think of education as the exclusive domain of whites, that's because they think of almost every mainstream aspiration as the exclusive domain of whites.
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Buck describes the legacy of desegregation as ironic, but there's an unintended irony in the book's focus on school desegregation itself. Despite its status as the defining achievement of the civil rights movement, public-school desegregation is, for most practical purposes, dead. Since the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, the federal courts have rushed to lift desegregation orders and many once-integrated schools are now steadily resegregating. America's public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1988, and they are becoming ever more segregated with each passing year. In Parents Involved in Public Schools v. Seattle School District(2004), the Supreme Court invalidated the modest and voluntarily adopted public-school desegregation plans of two formerly segregated districts, a decision that will accelerate resegregation nationwide.
But suppose integration doesn't change the culture of underperformance? What if integration inadvertently created that culture in the first place? This is the startling hypothesis of Stuart Buck's Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation. Buck argues that the culture of academic underachievement among black students was unknown before the late 1960s. It was desegregation that destroyed thriving black schools where black faculty were role models and nurtured excellence among black students. In the most compelling chapter of Acting White,Buck describes that process and the anguished reactions of the black students, teachers, and communities that had come to depend on the rich educational and social resource in their midst.
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Buck draws on empirical studies that suggest a correlation between integrated schools and social disapproval of academic success among black students. He also cites the history of desegregation's effect on black communities and interviews with black students to back up a largely compelling—and thoroughly disturbing—story.
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Black students bused into predominantly white schools faced hostility and contempt from white students. They encountered the soft prejudice of low expectations from racist teachers who assumed blacks weren't capable and from liberals who coddled them.
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The most significant driving force of any city is its people. It is crucial to have a livable environment for increasingly mobile populations, and to attract a significant workforce. More than one-third of the people in New York and London are foreign-born. Despite their astonishing growth, Asian economic powerhouses fail to reach that level of cosmopolitan culture. New York or London will continue to top the indices, but only if they ensure their strong cultural offers are unmatched and maintain open immigration policies.
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as soon as a centa-millionaire in Moscow, Beijing or São Paolo makes their fortune, the first thing they do is figure out how they can ferret away large chunks of that wealth to countries that guarantee political and personal freedoms, have sound legal systems, a favorable tax environment, good security and good schools for their kids.
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It is not within any university’s ability in any country to reform a society. Educators are not imperialists, but they should be personifications of civic conscience, pushing student after student to question the rules of the world in which they live.
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The good news for educators is that students experiencing a free exchange of ideas for the first time are aware of the importance of the act, which Americans might take for granted. In a rule-bound society, the relentless questioning of the status quo in the classroom can be shocking, sometimes painful, but it is the university’s place to guarantee that this continue, no matter what the geographical location.
The debate on this Yale-NUS venture certainly runs deeper and wider than this – and there are many more concerns at an institutional level that I, as a mere student, would not be able to appreciate as keenly as employees of both institutions. The only problem that bewilders me is the kind of careless, generalized stereotypes being traded not only by students, but also by Yale faculty members – which seems to betray the very ethos of good scholarship.
If Yale is asking herself if she should partner NUS/Singapore in this YNC venture, should we (NUS/Singapore) not be asking the same about Yale too, considering the quality of arguments proffered by some of her tenured best?
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Don’t get me wrong – the Yale-NUS joint venture can be critiqued in so many other ways (Potential elitism? Accessibility to those who cannot afford the fees? Institutional incoherence vis a vis YNC’s relationship with the mothership of NUS? Indeed, KRC has critiqued this venture before.), but I would have expected more sophisticated arguments from these Yale professors, not arguments that sound so typically Orientalist and which have already been used by so many (MO, YDN) before them.
These scholars and students, whether or not they have been to Singapore, appear to see the world only through the blinkers of their prejudices. Just like the Portugese explorer, Vasco da Gama, who landed in Calicut, India in 1498. Where there were Hindus, da Gama saw only Christians of a “tawny complexion”.
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This point may resonate especially with Walker Vincoli, who spent two full semesters here without sensing any form of “everyday resistance” à la James Scott (who, incidentally, is at Yale, so he should be able to educate his colleagues about the multiple manifestations of resistances existing in other cultures), or even overt subversion or opposition at all (contrary to popular belief, the Illegal Assembly Laws are rarely enforced.) It is hard to believe that tenured Yale professors would accept such superficial analyses of a whole political system, nation.
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the kids in the neighborhood schools are often rebels, especially those relegated to the Normal streams. They have been condemned by society, and yet, they still hold in them the potential to shine. These kids go against status quo. Instead of continuing to relegate them through elitist programs that ignores them, the government should instead refocus its efforts on promoting entrepreneurship to those kids, inspire them to follow a calling larger than themselves, and give them a useful avenue to vent their rebellious streak, harnessing their creativity away from destructive acts like vandalism to creating value for society.
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the port for the Samsung Galaxy S was done by a Normal Tech student. This boy, has done what most of our computing uni undergrads are unable to do. There is alot of potential there. Those kids have what it takes to succeed. All that needs to happen in that their energy is refocused elsewhere. Someone needs to start believing in them. They need to have hope. The government needs to re-look at its policy of meritocracy and education, before more potential is lost.
Despite all our achievements in education we have produced NO Nobel Prize winners. There is no such thing as a globally renown artist who was educated in the Singapore system. It's not just the multinationals that are run by foreigners. To get ahead in government service, you need to spend a stint of your education elsewhere. All three of our Prime Ministers have had to study elsewhere for a period of time. When Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's closest thing to an intellectual, encouraged Singaporeans to send their kids to our wonderfully good local universities, someone asked him where his daughters were studying. Mr Mahbubani suddenly became very silent on the topic.
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In the last decade of living in Singapore, it remains rare to find a Singaporean running the Singapore operations of a multinational. David Tang of DDB remains the only Singaporean running the Singapore office of a multinational. Ed Ng, formerly regional CEO of GE Commercial Finance South East Asia was a unique species who had an American reporting to him. Outside these two, the Singaporean bosses have all been entrepreneurs - Palani Pillai and Lim Sau Hong come to mind.
Part of the reason is cultural. To climb in a multinational, you need to have overseas experience. A good deal of Singaporeans don't like to travel simply because you never know when you get to see family. Both Eddie Khoo, now head of consumer banking for United Overseas Bank and Edmund Koh, President of UBS Singapore, were ex-Citibankers who moved to smaller banks (admittedly in higher positions) for the very simple reason - they climbed as high as they could in Citi Singapore and any higher would have meant relocating elsewhere. -
Westerners and now the Indian Expatriates don't have such qualms about moving around. As such, these groups find it easier to move up the international corporate ladder. UL's head in Asia-Pacific is from Kerela and there's Deepak Sharma, Chairman of Citi Private Bank who was an Indian Citizen who now happily resides in Singapore.
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Supposedly students in Singapore are assessed with national tests every two years. Concurrently a teacher is assigned a class every two years. While some students will always come and go there will be a cohort of students who do not change over the two years. The normed average grades of those two years can then be measured and the percentage improvement (or decline) noted. Working on the famous Greek principle that victory has many generals but defeat is an orphan, the relative movement in the class average is deemed to be reflective of the quality of teaching the students have received. Not only that but the relative improvement can then be assessed against similar results for all the peers of the teacher for that year. Supposedly the top ten per cent of the Singaporean teachers are given substantial performance bonuses and earmarked for future promotion while the bottom ten percent are counselled and effectively told that if similar results occur again that they should look to another career besides teaching.
The silence of the Australians was by now deafening.
The Singaporeans then went on to point that before this system was introduced the best teachers would always try and get the best students because they could then brag about how many students they had in top 1000 performers etc. Now the best teachers would try and get the worst performing classes so they could get the greatest improvement. Thus the worst classes would get the best teachers and in that way the whole country's education system was lifted.
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a major key to his success was to ensure that everyone in his organisation was measured on some objective performance indicator and each year replace the bottom ten per cent.
Just because it can’t be tabulated in financial terms does not negate our value at home. Being a SAHM is not for those who can’t make it in the “real” world. I will tell you that it takes grit, determination and lots of dying to self to make it as a fulltime SAHM. And who says you don’t need to be an educated mom to handle the demands of SAHM-dom?
The working world is alluring and glamourous and usually financially rewarding. More power to those who are able to juggle work and motherhood and enjoy both. But for the rest of us who are unable or choose not to, think of this season at home as that – a season. When our children are no longer so dependent on us, we can venture out to the workplace once again. Sure, some of us can return to the workforce earlier than others and our season at home varies. But we are most certainly not wasting the country’s or our parent’s money and recourses by being educated to the best of our abilities and then choosing to stay home for our family’s well being.
A few years ago, the critic and essayist William Deresiewicz, who went to Columbia and taught at Yale, wrote that his Ivy education taught him to believe that those who didn’t attend “an Ivy League or equivalent school” were “beneath” him. The writer Walter Kirn recalled that at Princeton he learned to “rise to almost every challenge ... except, perhaps, the challenge of real self-knowledge.” In my experience, a great many students at top colleges are wonderful young people whose idealism matches their intelligence. Yet the charge that elite college culture encourages smugness and self-satisfaction contains, like Mr. Santorum’s outburst, a germ of truth.
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Our oldest and most prestigious colleges are losing touch with the spirit in which they were founded. To the stringent Protestants who founded Harvard, Yale and Princeton, the mark of salvation was not high self-esteem but humbling awareness of one’s lowliness in the eyes of God. With such awareness came the recognition that those whom God favors are granted grace not for any worthiness of their own, but by God’s unmerited mercy — as a gift to be converted into working and living on behalf of others. That lesson should always be part of the curriculum.
What is happening inside the classroom for those who do get in? Who is teaching the students? Less and less often it is a member of an institution’s permanent faculty, and rarer still one of its distinguished professors. More and more of the teaching has been parceled out to part-time instructors who have no hope of landing a full-time position. Because of this, their loyalty to the school that hired them, and to the students they will probably meet in just one course and never again, has diminished.
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when the public is asked about colleges and universities, the response is increasingly negative with each passing year. According to the Pew Research Center, most American citizens (57 percent) say that higher education “fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend.” Within the innermost sanctum of the academy the view is almost the same: “About four-in-ten college presidents say the system is headed in the wrong direction,” according to Pew. If university presidents, who by profession and temperament routinely find every glass more than half-full, are so disconsolate, the public can’t be expected to be optimistic.
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