"In our system, I think it's better to be an affluent person suspected of trying to blow up a police station than it is to be a poor person who's suspected of much, much less than this." Those are the words of Salil Dudani, a John Gardner Public Service fellow, who has worked on civil rights cases … Continue reading Debtor’s Prisons Still Exist in the U.S.?!
I've heard of ghost writers; is there such a thing as a ghost reader*? Last May I wrote a post titled "What Morley Safer and I Had in Common". The post was written as a tribute to Safer shortly after his death, and focused on one of his more well-known stories that dealt with modern … Continue reading Do People Actually Read My Blog?
Since the 1970s, the Villanova Singers, an all male chorus group, has been offering Singing Valentines to that special someone. A lovestruck student can buy a singing Valentine for his or her "special friend", and the Villanova Singers would come to your classroom unannounced and ask if it was OK if they delivered a singing … Continue reading Singing Valentines – A Villanova Tradition
I started teaching right around the time tools like PowerPoint first came on the scene. Since I've always liked to try out new technologies, I would give these tools a shot if I thought they would enhance my teaching. The first presentation software I worked with was a great program called Compel, which I thought … Continue reading Is This What Teaching Used to be Like?
This is the eighth in a series of blogs in which I go through and “musically annotate” Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, “Born to Run”. This involves going through the book page by page and listing the artists, and when possible, providing a YouTube video of the artists and songs that Bruce mentions as among his favorites. Here … Continue reading A Musical Annotation of Bruce Springsteen’s Autobiography – Born to Run, Part 8
Did you know that there is an optimal dating strategy for finding your ideal mate? Well apparently there is. The solution uses probability calculus to figure out how to maximize the odds of choosing the best option from a series of dates. First published in 1960 by Scientific American, it has become known as the secretary … Continue reading Love and Math
The tension is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. Today was test day, and students are feverishly working away, oblivious of how much time they have spent working on this 55-minute ordeal. Suddenly, a voice shatters the deafening silence, "There's 10 minutes left." Thirty pairs of eyes stare at me incredulously, as … Continue reading “There’s 10 Minutes Left”- It’s Funny Every Time (to me at least)
I hope that you did not read the title of this blog and say, "Wow, that's pretty deep," or "I've often thought the same thing." If you did, then you are, to put it bluntly, not too intelligent. That's the conclusion of a recent article that appeared in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. Titled … Continue reading To Wander the Story Is to Become One with It
At the Digital Life Design conference in 2015, Henry Blodget, editor and CEO of Business Insider, opened his talk with some interesting data. Blodget noted that over the past 150 years, humanity has collectively saved ourselves about 30 hours of work per week through our increased productivity. Here is the chart he used to support … Continue reading Congratulations, You’ve Freed Up 30 Hours per Week! Now What Do You Do?
Despite how great the game itself was (although I'm not a fan at all of the overtime rules), there didn't seem to be any particular Super Bowl TV commercial that stood out from the rest. Nonetheless, I thought I would share my three favorite ads, in no particular order. I'll start with the one that … Continue reading My Three Favorite Super Bowl Commercials of 2017
Borden's Blather 