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So the relevant qualifier to my statement above is top 50 institutions in the country. Florida isn't among them. To make the qualifier more precise, I was thinking of institutions that are members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE, http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/) which is a group of private universities that behave similarly.

One thing that gets lost in most of these debates is the fact that many students don't pay the sticker price that universities advertise. At most of the top 50 universities in the US, something like 50% of students receive some sort of financial aid/subsidy. These discounts are often substantial.

The $50k sticker price is a tool universities use to price discriminate based on a family's ability to pay and how much a university wants a student. Thus, it's not crazy to see a talented student from a low-income background paying something like $2k a year to attend a top-tier university. Of course, this doesn't really answer your question. This phenomenon still leaves the 50% of students paying full freight, and only applies to wealthy universities that can afford such financial aid programs.

Not familiar with the programs at either university, but consider that Stanford is one of the wealthiest private institutions in the world against the budget crisis that the state of California is currently facing. Financial security goes a long way in ensuring that you're in an environment conducive to working on your startup.

Just curious, where did you acquire this knowledge? Is there somewhere that I can read up on the industry, or did you learn all this from experience?

Michael Lewis gets amazing access for the pieces he writes about finance. Not too technical, but he really gets into the characters that are involved with different parts of the industry. He's also one of the lucky writers who can write about anything that piques his interest at a given time (Moneyball, Blind Side, and essays in the same vein), so those are worth checking out as well.

Atul Gawande is a great medicine writer. He was at Slate for a while, but he's been writing for the New Yorker for the last few years.

Why can't I rent ebooks? All I want is to pay $X to take out Y books at a time like I do with Netflix for movies. Who do I need to talk to get this done?

I'd love to do it myself, but the Kindle is proprietary device.

An interesting related piece about Nokia's strategy: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/obituar...

This is the Ruef paper if anyone is interested. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766

The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over the last 30 days.

That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."

There is absolutely nothing about methodology on the ASCI site. Here is their official commentary on the results: http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task... The MSNBC pretty much lifts sentences from there.

This is a bigger picture summary of how other industries fare to give some perspective: http://www.theacsi.org/images/stories/ACSI_TREE_07_10.pdf

It's hard to tell if these findings really mean anything, since this is social media's first year on the survey. And without more information, it's hard to say if a direct comparison across industries even makes sense.

you know, it's funny. most people would put the start of economic thought ~1776 when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. That means it's been around less than 250 years. Sure it may not describe physical processes, but economics does try to model the real world. SCIENCE wasn't too far along 250 years after inception. I mean, we still believed that the world was flat not too long ago. give it time, the data will come. mistakes will be made.

The original article. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/exploitation_elle_mag_h...

Well first off, everyone should read the New Yorker article referenced. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...

The issue at hand is not teacher compensation, but the fact that no mechanism exists to weed out ineffective teachers from the pack. I don't think $100,000 a year (after 20 years of service) is too high a price to pay for a competent professional who can have a positive impact on hundreds of lives over the course of his/her career.

In fact, the argument could be made that it is not enough, and that is why traditionally those working in education are not as talented those in other, more well funded fields like finance and medicine.

The scariest part of Steven Brill's article is many teachers' aversion to quality metrics that could actually measure performance and hold them accountable for their work.

Two quotes: 1. Our schools are indifferent to instructional effectiveness,"the study declared. Under the subhead “All teachers are rated good or great," it examined teacher rating processes, and found that in districts that have a binary, satisfactory-unsatisfactory system, ninety-nine per cent of teachers receive a satisfactory rating, and that even in the few school districts that attempt a broader range of rating options ninety-four per cent get one of the top two ratings.

2. I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: "If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences."

"That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,"she responded. "We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children." After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, "Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.

I think I'll be there. I just joined up a few days ago, but this could be fun.

When does the author talk about double sided coins? The example is based on the premise that the coin is fair and each toss is independent of the others.

Wired had a writeup of this guy last year. Pretty interesting: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2008/02/blind_hacker?...

Fun fact about that picture (if I've identified it correctly): It was taken for Warren Buffett's annual Christmas card. After the photo was taken, the Hooters girls all fawned over Bill Gates, leaving Buffett behind.