We've recently discussed the issue of government intervention in the economy in one of my Economics class. Quantity control, also known as quota, is an example government interference. The government controls the amount of goods and services of particular industries and companies and this affects the amount of goods and services supplied in the economy. The New York Times wrote an article called Unfree Enterprise, in which they explained how government intervention is affecting our capitalist economy. The article emphasized how government control is related to a command economy communist Soviet Union and Cuba. Furthermore, the article talks about taxi licenses in New York City. The quotas of licenses have been decreasing ever since 1937.

The New York City license is very small compared to the demand. Taxi medallions are very expensive; this is a technique to keep the medallion price high by limiting quantity. Quota issued by the government is mainly to help keep price high by limiting supply that will increase the demand.

I just read an article about Music, Personality and IQ, and found the reason to justify why we are on turntable every Friday.

Chamorro-Premuzic T. & Furnham, A. (2007). Personality and music: Can traits explain how people use music in everyday life. British Journal of Psychology, 98, 175-185.

Authors believe the way we use music is related to our personality and intelligence. They surveyed 341 British and American university students (aged 17-41).

Some key findings:

Students with a higher IQ, and those more open to new experiences, were more likely to listen to music for the deliberate, intellectual appreciation of it, admiring the musicians' technique or the complexity of the composition.

Who tend to experience regular bouts of negative emotions, and introverts, were more likely to say they listened to music as a way of coping with, or changing their mood.

In accounting, one method that merchandisers use to determine the amount of inventories available and the cost of goods sold is the cost flow assumption method. Under the cost flow assumption method, companies can use the FIFO (First in, first out) method, LIFO (Last in, first out) method, or the Average cost method. However, two of the methods that I want to discuss in today’s blog are FIFO and LIFO. To use LIFO or FIFO, some companies use the periodic inventory system; which states that companies do not keep detailed inventory records of the goods on hand throughout the period.

Under FIFO, companies assume that the earliest goods purchased are the first ones sold. For example, if a company purchase goods on April 15th, August 18th and November 25th, they would assume that the earliest goods purchased were the first to be sold, in this case goods that were purchased in April. Thus to find the company’s ending inventory, the units of the last purchased goods will be multiplied by its unit cost to find ending inventory (400 x 13)=$5200 and (300-250=50 x 12)=$600. We subtracted 250 from 330 to 50, which will give us the units in ending inventory. Then subtracting the cost of units not sold (ending inventory) (5200 + 600)=$5800 from cost of all goods available for sale ($12,000) will give us the cost of goods sold ($6,200).

How can we evaluate the performances of our teachers? While many might blame the public school system as a failure overall, others blame bad teaching and misbehaving students as the problem behind the failure of many schools in the public school system. In addition, grades are the most important standard in evaluating both students and teachers. This forces teachers to teach by the book and follow a curriculum that hardly allows them to incorporate their own ideologies into their teaching. On the contrary, students at private schools are not only evaluated on grades but also on their understanding of the materials.

In a recent article, Bill Gates plans an educational reform that will see $5 billion dollars invested in bringing video cameras that will be available in every classroom. Supporters of cameras in the classroom like the idea because it allows for no excuses from teachers who constantly blame student behavior as the primary reason behind their own shortcomings. Moreover, the cameras will underline and see the performances of both students and teachers in the classroom. The idea presented by Bill Gates is similar to that of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon of the late 18th century. Bentham believed that when those in an institutionalized environment such as schools and prisons are monitored through video cameras throughout the day, they are forced to behave in the best manner possible because no one want others to see them acting up or misbehaving. Although this idea of cameras in the classroom might work, I feel the best way to evaluate teacher performance is through peer review or comparing a teacher with a colleague who is doing very well.

Do you feel that this infographic accurately portrays the "digital divide" in schools? If so, why? If not, why not? Do you think that the team who developed this graphic meant "nerds" in a negative way?

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

I recently came across an awesome tool called Vagrant. It can be used to quickly build and run virtual machines for development and testing purpose . Vagrant is based on Oracle's Virtualbox (similar to VMWare). Here are few quick steps to make your own virtual machine:

What you need:
1. Virtualbox and Vagrant installed on your system.

Running virtual machine using vagrant:

1. Download the vagrant box (which is nothing but the Virtual machine package .box file). You can use this link and download a box of your choice.

2. Import the vagrant box in your local inventory:
"vagrant box add lucid32 your.box/url location"

3. Create new instance via vagrant image from inventor.
"mkdir test"
"cd test"
"vagrant init lucid32"

A sample Vagrantfile is created in this directory. This file serves as the config pointer for vagrant to interface with this VM instance. All vagrant command must be executed within the same directory where the Vagrantfile is located.

#edlabrepresents #edlabdoes #cujgoogle

Yesterday, Manav, Megha, and I went to a packed J-school event with invited guests @ericschmidt, Executive Chairman at Google, @JaredCohen, Director of Google Ideas. They are the co-authors of their book called The New Digital Age, and they answered questions from the audience -- a seemingly even mix of humanities, journalism, and engineering students. The Q&A-style session was moderated by incoming Journalism School Dean, @SteveCollNY.

Manav was in line to ask a question, but time ran out right when it was his turn. #cestlavie. Alas, we didn't get to hear the authors' take on how technology will affect the future of education. However, we did hear their take on other interesting themes... ranging from security vs. privacy, the good and the bad of the world not having a "delete" button, the global (and somewhat also, local) technology gap, and the future of robots even just 5 years from now.

A friend of mine recommended this interesting paper and after reading, I thought I share with you. Since I talked about Predicting Website Aesthetics is Possible, why not talk about other computational aesthetics methods :)

Kao, J.T. & Jurafsky, D. (2012). A computational analysis of style, affect, and imagery in contemporary poetry. NAACL Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature.

What makes a poem beautiful? The authors use computational methods to compare the stylistic and content features employed by award-winning poets and amateur poets. Building upon existing techniques designed to quantitatively analyze style and affect in texts, they examined elements of poetic craft such as diction, sound devices, emotive language, and imagery. They constructed a logistic regression model: poem type (professional or amateur) is significantly predicted by eight different variables: token ratio(the ratio of total word types to total number of words in order to evaluate vocabulary sophistication & diversity), perfect end rhyme frequency, alliteration frequency, positive outlook words, negative emotional words, concrete object words, abstract concept words and generalization words.

In light of today's EdLab Development & Research meeting about NLT promotional ideas and our overall marketing efforts around our various projects, the video below presents research on the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing tool.

Inspired by the New Yorker cartoonist, Carlita Johnson's own blog of rejected cartoons, I'd like to start posting from our collection of rejected Visualized pieces. Perhaps some learning can come of it...

REJECT SELECTION
Pitch date: Apr 1, 2013
Pitch title: Spring breakers today are choosing to learn
*Note the badges that the students are wearing in the bottom half... yeah. That's a group of students choosing to get un-verified credentialing instead of choosing to raise a glass. Pick your poison of regret...

Inspired by the following image, but ultimately FAILING... Oh but there was so much potential to ride on the waves of this awesome meme!