Links for 2010-05-16

"China has its Four Great Classical Novels: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. My impression, gained from minutes and minutes of research, is these are influential and the sort of thing any given Chinese person would be aware of and somewhat familiar with.

I was thinking about what the analogous stories would be for the West and abandoned that as too broad a category. For Britain and Britain-derived nations, though, I think there are at least two stories that almost everyone knows: King Arthur and Robin Hood. Am I overlooking anything obvious?"

"I was going to just leave the oil spill in the gulf topic alone. Not because it isn't important, obviously it is. Rather, I wasn't going to do anything because I didn't really have anything to add to the topic. After a couple of readers requested it, I think I do have something to add. How exactly do you estimate the amount of oil flowing into the gulf?

What do I have to start with? A video"

"Whether a doomsday scenario is possible in the Universe of Futurama is of great interest to David X. Cohen, the show's Executive Producer and head writer, and a former writer and producer for The Simpsons. Cohen has a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard and a master's degree in computer science from UC Berkeley, and is not afraid to use them.

With an omnipresent devotion to physics, and many writing colleagues on the show with backgrounds in applied math, electrical engineering, computer science, and chemistry themselves, Cohen is always looking for places in stories where he can insert "an in-joke" relating to science and technology. He is extremely proud of the fact that Futurama is one of the "few shows that can put in a joke for a physics graduate student," he says. "And with an animated show, you have much more opportunity to do those kinds of things. In a live action show, it's kind of hard to put in a floating holographic equation." "

"I studied all of the published tenure denial decisions involving private colleges and universities in the federal courts for the period 1972-2000. I chose 1972 as my starting point because that was the year that Title VII -- originally enacted in 1964 -- was extended to higher education institutions. (For the purposes of this article, I performed a quick review of decisions published since 2000 -- I discovered nothing that contradicted my findings.)

In all, I reviewed 70 judicial opinions. The themes and trends that emerged are summarized below, along with brief commentary on two cases that I found particularly interesting. Both administrators and faculty should benefit from this article, as it will give them a glimpse into the experiences of their peers. "

"Real world economics should acknowledge that many of the Sound Financial Principles we've been taught are either outmoded or irrelevant, but the new rules are hard to pin down.

If you had a chance to teach a financial literacy course to youngish college students, what would you focus on?"