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Testing Schools
Parents want to be able to tell which elementary and high schools will be better for their children. Society wants to be able to reward good teachers and move bad ones into different roles. I don’t know how we should do that effectively, but I do know that what we’re doing now is a bad…
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Big Bail Out
How is the big bail out supposed to work? The basic idea seems to be that the U.S. government will pay bad financial assets. Once these have been purchased, financial companies will know how much money they have. Right now, nobody will lend money, because they don’t know how much they should keep in reserve.…
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Imperfect Storm
I’m sure I am not the only person annoyed by the overuse of the phrase “perfect storm”. The phrase first appeared with the book and movie of that name, referring to a real storm in 1991. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and it was indeed a notable storm for me, as a very…
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Anathem
I just finished Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book is based on a lot of the Western philosophical tradition, albeit under different names. He provides an SF explanation for Plato’s Theory of Forms, which I think anybody has to appreciate, loosely (very loosely) based on some of Gödel’s…
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A.I.G.
The U.S. government has just now moved to bail out A.I.G. In this case it may not be a pure bailout: the government issued an $85 billion loan in return for warrants for 80% of the company. To put $85 billion in perspective, it’s the cost of the was in Iraq for eight months. So…