Germy currencies from around the world…

“Fun” Fact: Australia had the cleanest currency in the study, and the U.S. dollar had the highest concentration of E. coli – the bacteria that causes food poisoning.

(Don’t be offended by the giant “FOR KIDS” headline at the top of the article. Money is gross no matter how old you are.)

Ouch. According to a new study, college students are spending four (or more) years and thousands of dollars on higher education, but they’re not actually learning anything.

(photo credit: peanutian)

Here’s the short story:

Students are slacking off, colleges are more focused on enrolling and keeping new students than they are on making sure each student gets a quality education, and professors are having trouble keeping up with their increasingly large class sizes as more and more people attend college.

Here are the fun facts:

• 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college.
• 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” over four years of college.
• Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge — while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
• Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
• Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.

Read the whole story here.

Even if the graphs are, oh, maybe just a little misleading. Take this one, for example. It appears to say that the reason certain European countries are in worse financial shape than others is because more of their men want to stay at home playing videogames.

See? Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal are over there on the right, with more of their menfolk living with the parents. And, conveniently, those same countries rank high on the riskiness (a.k.a. sovereign risk) of their government bonds (a.k.a. sovereign debt).

If he lives with his parents, you might want to think twice. About buying his government’s debt. (via The Economist)

But in case your statistics teacher hasn’t drilled this into your heads yet, correlation is not causation. This is a real-world example of that. Just because you can make a chart with a nice line on it doesn’t necessarily mean that one factor causes the other. Think about this:

• The % of men living with their parents may be another way of describing the % of men who are unemployed (or underemployed). That would certainly be a factor in a country’s financial health.
• Adult kids living with their folks might be due to a really expensive housing market, which is another factor in a country’s financial situation.
• The countries with the highest % of men living with their parents all have cultural traditions that encourage kids to stay with their parents until they marry, or sometimes even after.
• Ireland doesn’t have this culture of stay-at-home-til-you’re-40, but their bonds are still considered risky investments. If you just focus on the red line, you might miss this important point.

In conclusion:

1. Correlation is not causation
2. Think before you reblog
3. If you can’t do either of those things, at least read the comments

You may have an opinion about the compensation practices of Wall Street firms, but what would Aristotle do?

We had to look across the pond to get an answer, but the BBC has done a pretty bang-up job of using classic philosophy to talk about modern issues. And the comments below the story are just fantastic.

Aristotle aside, what do you think about the big bonuses? Does your opinion change after reading the article?

Depending on who you ask, it could mean very different things.

(A little grandfatherly wisdom from your friends at TILE.)

Spend/ Grow/ Give your money, and eat it too!

moneyisnotimportant:

Yes, this is a cake.

Here’s a fun fact: by forbidding their drivers to make left turns, delivery service UPS saved us all about 20,000 metric tons of carbon emissions. But there’s more!