Links for 2010-01-25

"Seven years after Osama bin Laden's last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis's presence among us than for his. Hence there is reason to ask whether the paradigm of Osama bin Laden as terrorism's deus ex machina and of al Qaeda as the prototype of terrorism may be an artifact of our Best and Brightest's imagination, and whether investment in this paradigm has kept our national security establishment from thinking seriously about our troubles' sources. So let us take a fresh look at the fundamentals. "

"In 1999, few others in the business-school world shared Mr. Martin's view. But a decade and a seismic economic downturn later, things have changed. "I think there's a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it's questioning assumptions, or looking at problems from multiple points of view," says David A. Garvin, a Harvard Business School professor who is co-author with Srikant M. Datar and Patrick G. Cullen of an upcoming book, "Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads."

Learning how to think critically -- how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives -- has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders. Mr. Martin even describes his goal as a kind of "liberal arts M.B.A." "

"We're so used to the sun that we often forget what a fascinating object it really is. Far from being the dull blob that it appears from far away, it's 1030 kg of nuclear matter with temperatures ranging from 5,000 K at the surface to 107 K at the core. Some months ago, during Nordita's program on "Solar and stellar dynamos and cycles" in a talk on Helioseismology, I saw this video showing a solar quake, waves propagating on the sun's surface:"

"A terrible confession: although the majority of the math sections taught at most cc's fall into the developmental or intermediate categories, full-time faculty frequently aren't hired with an eye to that. Generally -- with noble exceptions -- you'll find higher concentrations of adjuncts at the lower end of the curriculum, even though that's where the students need the most (and best) instruction. Depending on where you are, it may be typical to require a master's degree in math to teach any level of math at all.

For the record, I consider this insane."

"Arthur Goldhammer's excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité - a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight), as this chart shows."

"Pictured below is what's known as a skimmer, or a device made to be affixed to the mouth of an ATM and secretly swipe credit and debit card information when bank customers slip their cards into the machines to pull out money. Skimmers have been around for years, of course, but thieves are constantly improving them, and the device pictured below is a perfect example of that evolution.

This particular skimmer was found Dec. 6, 2009, attached to the front of a Citibank ATM in Woodland Hills, Calif. Would you have been able to spot this?"

"Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally.

Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you're so very angry.

You should be angry. You're getting screwed.

I think you know that. But you don't seem to know that it doesn't have to be that way. You can stop it. You can stop it easily because the system that's screwing you over can only keep screwing you over if you keep demanding that it do so.

So stop demanding that. Stop helping the system screw you over."

"In 1964, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published "The Raw and the Cooked" ("Le Cru et le Cruit"), in which he argued that turning raw food into cooked food traced a symbolic passage from nature to culture. Cooking, in other words, was a kind of bildungsroman for civilization itself. Lévi-Strauss' essay theorized what Julia Child's popular television series, The French Chef, had begun to demonstrate a year earlier with respect to American society; for we were evolving, under her tutelage, from the "raw" to the "cooked"-- from meat loaf and mashed potatoes to coq au vin and pommes de terres lyonnaises. The recent film, Julie and Julia, is an index to how far we have come, not only in our culinary evolution but in our cinematic one."