These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt. Can you guess any of them? I only guessed one, Devry University, and I've never even heard of the top school on the list.
I'd be curious what degrees students would pursue if they were given a report their first week in school showing the job prospects of graduates: employment rates, mean and median salaries, years to pay off school debt, etc.
(h/t @kenwuesq)
This study also confirms our earlier finding that trade statistics can mislead as much as inform. Earlier we found that for every $299 iPod sold in the U.S., the U.S. trade deficit with China increased by about $150. For the iPhone and the iPad, the increase is about $229 and $275 respectively. Yet the value captured from these products through assembly in China is around $10. Statistical agencies are developing tools to gain a more accurate breakdown of the origins of traded goods by value added, which will be attributed based on the location of processing, not on the location of ownership. This will eventually provide a clearer picture of who our trading partners really are, but, while this lengthy process unfolds, countries will still be arguing based on misleading data.
Those who decry the decline of U.S. manufacturing too often point at the offshoring of assembly for electronics goods like the iPhone. Our analysis here and elsewhere makes clear that there is simply little value in electronics assembly. The gradual concentration of electronics manufacturing in Asia over the past 30 years cannot be reversed in the short- to medium-term without undermining the relatively free flow of goods, capital, and people that provides the basis for the global economy. And even if high-volume assembly expands in North America, this will likely take place in Mexico where there is already a relatively low-cost electronics assembly infrastructure.
An interesting piece in AEI about how shifting assembly jobs back to the U.S. might not be the economic boost it's often made out to be.
It’s an important distinction that Apple products (and other electronic goods) are really only “Assembled in China,” and not actually “Made in China.” The value of the final assembly in China is pretty small compared to the value added in the U.S., and yet China gets credit for the majority of the value according to the way trade statistics are calculated.
The Tour de France made a great addition to its coverage this year. Velon, a joint venture of 11 of the world's top cycling teams, partnered with GoPro to mount GoPro cameras on some of the cyclists and crew in this year's race.
The footage has been spectacular. You can find it on Velon's Tour de France homepage, on GoPro's site, and of course on YouTube. If you want a quick 2 minute sampler, edited with music, here are highlights from Stages 1-7.
I'm partial to the footage that's edited but not scored with music. It has the feel of found footage, and the lens distortions of the extreme wide-angle GoPro lenses and the ambient soundtrack brings to mind one of my favorite documentaries of recent years, Leviathan.
This is one good example, highlights from Stage 4, the cobblestone stage, a recent addition to the Tour. You see cyclists pulling over to pee on the side of the road, spectators gawking as one cyclist stops to check his tire pressure, a crash in one wet righthand turn, and other moments that occur in most stages but may be skipped by regular television coverage. All of the footage is from a unique first person (first bicycle?) perspective. If you've ever wondered how computers see, for now the answer is probably through a stationary fisheye lens.
In Stage 3, a huge crash caused chaos in the peloton. This footage from a GoPro mounted on the chest of a team ORICA GreenEDGE mechanic gives a wholly original sense of the carnage. One can feel the occasional adrenaline rush of being a pro cycling mechanic in a stage race. It's thrilling ambient journalism.
I often cringe at the found footage Hollywood conceit because it depends on believing that someone would be holding a camcorder and filming every moment, even when being chased by giant lizards or witches. But the rise of the GoPro and other sports cams now gives a more believable scenario for such movies. We're not too far off from the first Hollywood movie shot (ostensibly) on a GoPro or other such action camera (that is, it could be shot on a higher end cinema camera but pose as a GoPro), or pieced together from snippets of iPhone videos. It's a whole new aesthetic, but one that's familiar to this generation raised on Snaps and Snapchat Stories.
More major sports should consider integrating such cameras into their broadcasts, or, as the Tour de France did, as supplemental footage on the internet. I'm not holding my breath, but it's not surprising that more peripheral sports have led the way here. Incumbents tend to be reliably sluggish.
I've never heard of this typography concept: asym spacing.
But one tech company believes something as simple as increasing the size of spacing between certain words could improve people’s reading comprehension. Research going back decades has found that “chunking,” a technique that separates text into meaningful units, provides visual cues that help readers better process information.
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The image below shows the before and after of Asym’s spacing on a paragraph of text. Quartz is also experimenting by manually adding Asym’s spaces to this article. The effect is subtle, but likely will irk keen-eyed copy editors (sorry!), especially those from the print world who are accustomed to deleting extraneous spaces.
No idea if the science behind this is solid, but I have heard of chunking. When I took a speed-reading class in grade school, they taught us two key principles. One was not to read aloud “inside your head,” and the other was not to read linearly, one word at a time, but to look at chunks of words (which also makes it hard to read linearly).
Maybe because I already chunk groups of words in regularly spaced text, or maybe because the asym spacing bunched odd groups of words together, I found the regularly spaced text (on the left) easier to read.
Kashmir Hill worked as an invisible boyfriend/girlfriend for a month. We are already living with one foot in the near future.
With each job, I would see the person’s first name, last initial and hometown; “how we met;” and my own assigned name, age, and which of six personality types they’d given their Invisible. Now I’m adventurous and fun. Now I’m cheerful and outgoing.
There were 3 major rules:
1. I was always supposed to be upbeat in my messages.
2. I’m not supposed to break character.
3. No sexting. (Photos are blocked on the service.)
I’d get the story of how we met and the last 10 messages we’d exchanged. This setup is designed to create the illusion of continuity; ideally, an Invisible Boyfriend would seem like a steady, stable presence in a user’s life, instead of what it really is: a rotating cast of men and women. And it is both: a woman who works for the service previously told me she prefers playing the role of boyfriend because she knows what a woman wants to hear.
Hill probably got paid more for this article than she did for her work as invisible companion.
It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.
If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. “Contributors have a tremendous amount of control over their decisions—for example, when to perform a task, when to complete it, and even if they want to complete it at all,” said Jeffrey H. Newhouse, an employment lawyer at Hirschler Fleischer, by email. “That means the contributor isn’t an employee and, as a result, employee protections like the minimum wage don’t apply.”
Not surprising considering the required skill set is the ability to write with decent grammar, that's reasonably commodified.
As with Uber, the laborers already fear displacement by technology like self-driving cars.
I assumed that, when artificial intelligence is good enough, Invisible would just cut the crowdsourced humans out of the equation and use chat bots, which you don’t have to pay per message, instead.
No, he said. “Having humans in the flow is the key to the service,” said Tabor. “There are things that only humans can respond to and understand, like inside jokes.”
Loneliness continues to be one of the great problems being tackled by technologists. See also: Her, The Diamond Age.