links for 2009-04-21

  • "[S]trange to say, in 2007 the median family income in New York City was $52,871. Maybe New York takes in floods of new residents every year, and so many of them die of starvation that the median income is actually below the level needed to survive. Maybe over half of the families in New York are zombies. Or maybe -- just maybe -- over half the families in New York live well below the [$75,000] this "Goldman vet" thinks you just can't live on."
  • "Managing light is the most important aspect of photographic composition. Entire books (as well as some fantastic blogs) have been written on the subject. I can't compete with that level of detail in a short blog post, so let me instead distill the topic down to this:

    To take better photographs, a good start is to think about light."

  • "Lots of new professors harbor anxiety about lecturing, understandable given that it show ups of most top 10 lists of American phobias. The ability to give an engaging lecture doesnât come shrink-wrapped with your graduate diploma. Nor does it necessarily come with experience; some of the smartest and most seasoned professors Iâve ever encountered are horrible lecturers. That said, lecturing is so integral to successful college teaching that itâs a form of masochism and sadism to not become good at it."
  • "In a paper released Friday, four scholars at Duke University (three in economics and one in sociology) propose a new way to test for mismatch. They say that much more information is needed than has typically been available in the past. But because they were able to obtain this information for Duke, they argue that a mismatch test is possible. They propose a test in which applicants admitted to an elite university are asked to predict their first-year grades and are then told the average grades earned by members of similar ethnic and racial groups admitted under similar circumstances. In this situation, they argue, students admitted under affirmative action could make an informed judgment on whether they were being mismatched."
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