Quick links, cheap shots, bon mots:
- More congressional insanity over H-1B visas. These America-first protectionist congressmen make me sick.
- Seth Roberts on how to reform higher education: "My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?"
- Researches map the sexual network of a high school and find that it’s actually not a hub-driven system, after all. In other words, sex partners are distributed across the high school fairly equally.
- What facial emotions we study depends on the culture. Fascinating. Telling example: "In the United States the emoticons : ) and : – ) denote a happy face, whereas the emoticons 🙁 or : – ( denote a sad face. However, Japanese tend to use the symbol (^_^) to indicate a happy face, and (;_;) to indicate a sad face."
- Seth Godin takes a whack at trying to sum up college admissions today: "I happen to think that almost all of it is money-driven, insecurity-fueled foolishness, a bogus nexus of lies, fears and greed."
- How to turn a feature of your product into a benefit: keep adding "which means that" after each description of your feature until you arrive at a benefit.
Regarding the visa limitations on international technology workers: if I am still alive when you are in your mid-40s, Ben, look me up and tell me THEN if you feel the same way.
I have been treated to essays about the lack of Americans to fill jobs in technology and engineering for years — and I have been denied literally dozens of those same jobs. The fact is that if employers are patient, they will find *exactly* the person they want to do *exactly* the job they want for *exactly* what they want to pay and with *exactly* the benefits they want to give. Some of us, especially as we grow older, are ignored because we don’t allow for enough exactlys.