Ever hear of a little app called Instagram? How about a website called Hunch? Well apparently they were both created by real people, and in this video those real people are in the same room.
Chris Dixon talks about the long, weird journey from college to Instagram fame, and the terrible moments after the app launched for the first time. He’s interviewed by Kevin Systrom, the creator of Hunch and current darling of the tech start-up world.
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:
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:
In conclusion:
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.)
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!
(photo by Thomas Euler)
Did you see this? NYTimes foodman Mark Bittman is the kind of guy you want thinking about the food supply.
Says Mark:
“For decades, Americans believed that we had the world’s healthiest and safest diet. We worried little about this diet’s effect on the environment or on the lives of the animals (or even the workers) it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure — that is, its sustainability.
That didn’t mean all was well. And we’ve come to recognize that our diet is unhealthful and unsafe. Many food production workers labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions, and animals are produced as if they were widgets. It would be hard to devise a more wasteful, damaging, unsustainable system.”
Everyone needs food, so it’s funny (and okay, scary) that we have so little control over how our food gets to our plates. And like everything, food production has an economic story behind it.
Read Mark’s suggestions for shaking up the system, reclaiming our diets, and ensuring clean, nutritious food that’s good for us and the planet.
