Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Case For Preschool

The Friday Podcast: The Case For Preschool : Planet Money : NPR
(audio, 21 min, with the relevant part starting from 3:30 min)
In this great podcast, James Heckman, a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel Prize winner, tells about randomized controlled studies on the benefits of investing in free preschool for kids. For every $1 we spend for high quality preschool for a disadvantaged kid, we get back 7-10% average annual return, equivalent to $30-$300 over the kid's lifetime.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes

Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes | Video on TED.com (video, 3 min)
If you think that you know how to tie your shoe laces, you may be in for a big surprise!
Find out a better way to tie your shoes in this short video.
Here is the strong knot Terry Moore refers to in the video (picture of the reef knot from Ian's Shoelace Site):

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Esther Duflo: Social experiments to fight poverty

Esther Duflo: Social experiments to fight poverty | Video on TED.com (video, 17 min)
Esther Duflo, professor at MIT and the co-author of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, argues powerfully for using scientific methods in public policy, an idea long overdue. Decision making in medicine changed from mostly guesswork in the past centuries, when the doctors used leeches to "cure" diseases, to more data driven methods, often based on randomized controlled trials, today. Amazingly, decision making in public policy is still stuck in pre-scientific stage full of opinions and angry rhetoric - in other words, in the "leeches" stage. Duflo suggests to add more science to decision making in public policy. She illustrates this on three examples from the poverty prevention in the developing world.

Please continue helping Ukraine and Israel: contact your elected officials

Those of us who live outside of Ukraine can help Ukraine by writing, calling or emailing our elected officials, urging them to continue help...