There is some irony to be found in the title of Tamar Levin’s excellent article in Friday’s edition of The New York Times , “Report Urges Changes in Teaching Math.” To do anything other than what the report recommends would hardly qualify as teaching math. Here’s the crux of the matter: Closely tracking an influential 2006 report by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the panel recommended that math curriculum should include fewer topics, spending enough time to make sure each is learned in enough depth that it need not be revisited in later grades. That is the approach used in most top-performing nations, and since the 2006 report, many states have been revising their standards to cover fewer topics in greater depth.
Video game maker Electronic Arts has launched a hostile $2 billion tender offer for rival Take-Two Interactive Software, reports The Associated Press. Also, Time Warner-owned AOL is acquiring popular UK networking site Bebo for $850 million in cash, reports The Financial Times. Meanwhile, Pacific Gas & Electric reopened a December offering of 10-year notes to sell $2 hundred million more of the paper and at the same time has issued $4 hundred million in new 30-year notes to repay commercial …
When I suggested the need for a capital budget, these were the sort of problems I wanted to avoid (this one in my own backyard): CONCORD, N.H.—Northern New England is turning to the sun, wind and waste wood for clean, renewable power, but there’s a serious problem: the threat of gridlock on electricity “highways.” A prime example is New Hampshire’s northern Coos County, where there are proposals to build renewable energy plants with roughly 460 megawatts of capacity — two-thirds of the proposed renewable projects in the state — to run over a transmission line that can only handle 100 megawatts. The bottleneck is in Whitefield, the end of a transmission loop that runs through Berlin and Lost Nation
In his Economic Scene column in today’s New York Times , David Leonhardt discusses the challenges of measuring unemployment and using the unemployment rate to assess the state of the labor market. In a nutshell, we have a fairly low official unemployment rate and yet many people not working. In this excerpt, he focuses on a distinction that his colleague Paul Krugman once glossed over (to much fanfare in my first month of blogging): There are only two possible explanations for this bizarre combination of a falling employment rate and a falling unemployment rate.
Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith of Chapman University and George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in his new book, Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms. They discuss the social and human sides of exchange, the robust nature of equilibrium in experiments and the real world, the seeming contradiction between Adam Smith’s two great works, the unpredictability of how innovation emerges and its rationality, what neuroscience might tell us about economic decision-making, and the challenges of small-group intimate exchange and our interactions with strangers in the extended order of the marketplace.
The Los Angeles Times has a story this morning about the revenue loss to the Treasury from overvalued donations of works of art: An alleged tax-fraud scheme involving donations of overvalued art to four local museums is part of a larger, unchecked problem with inflated art appraisals that has cost the federal government untold millions, a Times analysis has found. Each year, the Internal Revenue Service audits donations claimed on only a handful of the 100,000 or more tax returns that allow art donors to reap nearly $1 billion in tax write-offs. Half of the donations checked over the last 20 years had been appraised at nearly double their actual value.
3/1 CNN Your Money: Talks of Great Depression Coming
mainstream! John Williams discusses a coming financial depression. Many financial experts outside of mainstream has spoken about an economic collapse for years; such as Bob Chapman from theinternationalforecaster.com DISCLAIMER: RedPill4u does not own this video footage, it belongs to their respective owners under the Fair Use policy and terms. The percentage of elected officials saying their community has experienced the following over the past year: Increase in foreclosures: 62% Increase …
