Sadly true.

Bottom Line: The sorry truth is that “colleges remain indifferent to how well they help students learn, graduate, and succeed in the workplace.” And “like the church…they see themselves as occupying an exalted place in human society, for which they are owed deference and gratitude.” We should demand that all data around the effectiveness of colleges at teaching students be made public and easily searchable so that consumers of higher education can make more informed choices.

via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Colleges Work to Maintain an Information Deficit About Their Effectiveness.

This reminds me of the experiment they did on how you create solidarity. The answer being find a common enemy. The long form of the quote below is also nice to read. Read it at the linked site.

The role of the blogosphere

New research supports the notion that we fixate on enemies, and inflate their power, as a defense mechanism against generalized anxiety.

The longer article is  here.

….

Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 10, 2010 at 06:45 AM in Science, Weblogs | Permalink

via Marginal Revolution: The role of the blogosphere.

See I see myself do this a lot. I read something that appeals to who I believe I am and I grab it like a Recovering Alcoholic grabbing his Johnny Walker. I believe I do this, and am probably not alone in doing this because in some ways we have a yearning to validate who we are at least or even only to ourselves. It is that we sometimes grab these things just to say to ourselves we were not wrong. I know this is not a rational way of living. I hope to change this.

If this were the only case where I had this dispiriting result … perhaps I could treat it as an exception. But what I’ve found is every time I did a study like this … there was nobody home in terms of really wanting to know the result.

via Edward Tufte, Ron Howard, and government consulting

People shuld remind themselves of this easy seldom means worth something valueable.

If you answer a classified about making money from home stuffing envelopes, is it any wonder you’re not going to get paid much? If it’s really easy to get a job, the job probably isn’t worth much.

via Seth’s Blog: Open buying and open selling.

I actually do this a lot.  I try to minimize the pain I have with any task I have to do. This means  exchanging merienda/lunch so that I don’t have to go through the trudgery of testing some bits of code that I find extremely boring.  This is what we should do. Find the happy bits in our life and maximize the fun. Sometimes this means finding a new job, sometimes this means letting go of some of the comforts we enjoy, sometimes this means having to take less money (ehem), sometimes this means taking on bigger more challenging projects (ehem), and it obviously means knowing yourself and being flexiblre about yourself enough to be able to change and to be able to be inflexible.

Most everything about happiness in this life is about knowing oneself, controlling for the fear and want for comfort we have that is preventing us from doing what would make us happy. This blindness is the blindness of fear and the least action. If we can get through this hump, this fear I believe this is the easy 80% of happiness we get if happiness obey’s the Pareto Principle.

Ah, we all think we get paid to be brilliant, funny thing is that we usually enjoy the stuff we are brilliant at.

It’s the drudgery that exacts its price on our souls.

Wouldn’t we all take a pay cut if it allowed us to only do the bits of our job that we enjoyed? I would.

-Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid.com

Pointer from chris blattman. Nice “rules” for writing fiction.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

via Ten rules for writing fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Step one would probably be. Do not treat people as replaceable cogs. People are people. People are not gears in a machine.

Intellectual property lawyer Brent Britton spoke on how the most successful companies now focus on making their employees and customers delightfully happy, as a business model.

via Wikipedia creator had lots of earlier failures.

Wow we are being penalized for our reliability.  I have a strange feeling that data analyst / programmer / consultant would be closer to doctors/lawyers than engineers.

The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members’ mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur’s reach. Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. “A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught,” a sociologist named Randall Collins wrote in a history of educational credentials. “the skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.” Indeed, when historians try to explain why engineers have never become as pretigious and independent as doctors or lawyers, one of their answers is that the engineer’s competence is too clearly on display. (When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is.)

via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.

I think people around me find this hard to believe but for introverts like me social interactions are welcome but are extremely taxing on our strengths and psyches. It really takes great effort to interact. I hope not a lot of people think that I’m some kind of snob.

The Introvert’s Corner blog: “We Gotta Fight for our Right Not to Party”

By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:21 PM February 17, 2010

As a semi-introvert, I was happy to discover Sophia Dembling’s Introvert’s Corner blog.

A woman who read one of my essays on introversion said that when she explained her introversion to her family, her brother said, “We didn’t know you were an introvert. We thought you were just a bitch.”The Introvert’s Corner: How to live a quiet life in a noisy world

via The Introvert’s Corner blog: “We Gotta Fight for our Right Not to Party” Boing Boing.

see the pic at the linked site!

Love this quote!!!

Of course, once people saw this cartoon, I got a lot of people saying, “Hugh, you should make that into a t-shirt. I’d wear one!”

Eh. I don’t do t-shirts. Too much hassle. Learned that a long time ago…

Still, it’s a nice idea. One thing I know about me and my audience, is that we’re not interested in doing stuff just for the paycheck. We’re trying to do stuff that matters, even if it kills us…

via the ‘die trying’ print | gapingvoid.