Links for 2010-11-22

"But what's this? Kostya's only got 75 "attribute points" (not counting the 10 each for speaking English and having £800), and he needs 80 to qualify as a highly skilled worker. Bad luck, Kostya! Better go do your Nobel-prize-winning research somewhere else!
Yes, as it turns out, "Kostya" isn't entirely hypothetical. In fact, he's based on Konstantin Noveselov, the Russian-born Nobel laureate who moved to the University of Manchester as a postdoc in 2001. The only thing I changed in going from Noveselov circa 2001 to "Kostya" in 2010 was to adjust the salary and give "Kostya" a PhD, which Noveselov didn't get until 2004.
You can try running some other scenarios through the points-based calculator and see what you get. But in my view, there is something wrong with a system that doesn't recognize a future Nobel laureate as a "highly skilled worker"."

"If you drink a little, the popular logic goes, your child might be a little dumber. He won't be damaged per se, but he'll be a little dumber. Behind this calculation is the mystical idea of engineering the perfect child. But perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is, even if we can engineer him, will he grow up to be unbearable?"

"We've always had trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T that rhymes with the first letter of whatever we want to blame for the fact that we don't like our kids very much at the moment.

The problem these articles are identifying is this:  What are our kids doing instead of doing what we want them to be doing at the moment?

The problem with the problem, though, is that what we want them to be doing is preparing to be forty-five years old.

The kids are all right and they're no fools.  They know what we want the be doing and they don't like it much.

The real problem is that there is no alternative for them between preparing to be forty-five and sitting around bored to tears all day."

"A few days ago I contacted 20 TSA Transportation Security Officers (TSO) to ask their opinions of the new "enhanced" pat downs. Of the 20 I reached out to, 17 responded. All 17 who responded are at airports where the new "enhanced" pat down is in place ... and the responses were all the same, that front line TSOs do not like the new pat downs and that they do not want to perform them.  I expected most to not like the pat downs ... but what I didn't expect was that all 17 mentioned their morale being broken down.
Each of the 17 TSA TSOs that responded to me detailed their personal discomfort in conducting the new pat downs, with more than one stating that it is likely they are more uncomfortable performing the pat down than passengers are receiving them."