Quote of the Day

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he That every man in arms should wish to be ... Who, with a natural instinct to discern What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn .. . More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure, As tempted more: more able to endure, As more exposed to suffering and distress.

- William Wordsworth, "Character of the Happy Warrior"

Professors - The Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Bad Student Debt

College debt is not spread out equally among all students. It is concentrated in certain colleges, such as the for-profit schools. It is also concentrated in certain populations. Kids without top SAT scores, which open doors to well funded colleges, those without financial resources from home, or those who families lack higher education experience are particularly vulnerable. These students are in dire need of advice.

Jordan Weissmann recently showed how the biggest student loan default rate came from the for-profit sector. He said that we need alternatives for the type of student who attends the University of Phoenix, including low-tuition community colleges or true vocational training programs in high schools.

I also believe that untraditional students need more guidance about making higher education decisions. Faculty advisors and administrators do provide some guidance to kids like Lisa about finances -- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. A few schools have genuinely innovative reforms that should be replicated. However, students need more help than individual faculty can provide.

Students need administrators, high school counselors, or outside groups to provide them with a cocktail of career, education, and finance advice. They need to understand the penalties that are involved with transferring schools and changing majors. They should meet with the financial aid office, understand the totality of their loans, and know whether or not interest is accruing. Decisions about majors, careers, and universities should be undertaken with care.

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When Johnny Comes Home - Nancy Sherman

It is easy to see Stoicism's appeal within the military. To be in the military is by definition to give up a certain amount of agency. To reclaim it back by narrowing the perimeter of what is within one's own dominion is, in a way, liberating. Hence the Army's tendency to focus on the individual in its recruitment campaigns from ''Be All that You Can Be" to today's ''An Army of One." These slogans soften the notion of a modern military as a monolithic corps and emphasize instead individual courage and heroism. They neglect to mention, however, their corollaries -- personal sacrifice and psychological trauma.

Those who come back from war bear personal scars. Inside the corridors of hospitals like Walter Reed are men and women who have lost limbs in mortar attacks; others have lost their eyes to shrapnel from car bombs in Baghdad. But for every soldier who comes back physically injured there is one who has returned emotionally shattered. Some walk the perimeter of the hospital grounds, as if still on watch; others relive their injuries in recurring nightmares. Each has learned that a warrior's mind and body are not bulletproof.

As an enlightened public, we need to work hard to remove the stigma that many in the military still harbor about seeking psychological help for war trauma. And we need to ensure not only that the Veterans Administration, but the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Reserves have adequate resources to treat those who suffer from war trauma. Current studies from Walter Reed Army Institute of Research indicate that 17 percent of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Experts predict that the numbers will swell three and four years after deployments end. It is likely to be worse for those engaged in fighting up close with insurgents. With base and hospital closures, will the Department of Defense have the resources for treatment?
 
On the battlefield itself, military leaders must find collective time to grieve and teach their men and women that proper grieving can strengthen, not weaken moral fiber and troop solidarity. Shakespeare's archetypal Stoic warrior, Coriolanus, got it right, when he described the challenge, ''It is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion." This is a lesson doctors and therapists at military hospitals know well. It is a lesson all military leaders need to take to heart.

- Nancy Sherman is the author of Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind

Quote of the Day

In other words, we shouldn’t jump at a new technology simply because it has advantages; only time and study will reveal its disadvantages and show the value of what we’ve left behind.

Which brings us back to paper. With strength and durability that could last thousands of years, paper can preserve information without the troubles we find when our most cherished knowledge is stuck on an unreadable floppy disk or lost deep in the “cloud.”

- Long Live Paper

Do Animals Ever Forget?

A pigeon might learn to associate your face with food, but it probably can't remember your last meeting in the way you might be able to recall details of your last trip to the park. It is an important distinction, because episodic memory is thought to allow us to imagine and plan for the future. This skill, known as mental time travel, was long thought to be unique to humans, but there are now some signs that a handful of other species might also be able to escape the present.

Some of the most convincing evidence comes from Nicola Clayton and Sergio Correia at the University of Cambridge, who have shown that western scrub jays can learn from their experiences to anticipate the actions of other birds. If one bird knows that another is watching it bury its food, for instance, it will later move the stash, presumably to prevent it from being stolen. But they will only do this if they have previously stolen food themselves - suggesting that they were drawing on their memories while forming the plan. Similar studies have suggested that bonobos and orang-utans are also capable of mental time travel..

Initially, the work attracted a lot of scepticism from researchers like Michael Corballis at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who believed that the results could be explained by a complex kind of classical conditioning, for instance. But some recent work has begun to change his mind. He points to a study of activity in the hippocampuses of rats, which suggests that they replay their movements through a maze, and may even imagine future paths that they could take. He is also impressed by Santino, a chimp at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden that collects and hides rocks to throw at visitors, using premeditation that would rely on episodic memory..
 
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Quote of the Day

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

- Teller

What I've Been Reading

Information Whats to Be Shared by Joshua Gans. Book makes a sound case for embracing a sharing model to break the logjam the old publishing model has stuck in for more than a decade now. Of-course, Joshua makes no qualms in stating that sharing is just one of many alternatives.
  
Much creation is collaborative and usually takes place between people who know each other well. The Internet adds a new dimension to creation: collaboration can take place on a larger scale between people who do not and may never know one another. Such shared creation adds a new dimension to the notion that information wants to be shared. When information is used to create new information, knowledge, or content, the dividing line between creation and use becomes blurred. Moreover, impediments to information sharing become more critical.

Bottom line:
Can you envisage a business model for your information based on sharing that provides adequate returns for the cost of creating that information?

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion

Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

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Quote of the Day

"How can you excuse the man who buys bookcases of expensive wood, and piling into them the works of unknown, worthless authors, goes yawning amongst his thousands of volumes? He knows their titles, their bindings, but nothing else. It is in the homes of the idlest men that you find the biggest libraries—range upon range of books, ceiling high. For nowadays a library is one of the essential fittings of a home, like a bathroom. You could forgive this if it were all due to a zeal for learning. But these libraries of the works of piety and genius are collected for mere show, to ornament the walls of the house."

- Seneca

Whatever Happened to Movies for Grownups?

The big picture (allowing for some exceptions) is this: The six major studios want to make three kinds of movies. They want to make blockbusters costing a hundred and fifty million dollars and up (with another fifty to a hundred million dollars spent on promotion)—that is, films that are based on comic books, video games, and young-adult novels. These movies mostly feature angry pixels contending in the dead air—action sequences of total physical abandonment and virtually total meaninglessness, in which nothing imprints itself on your memory except the experience of being excited. They want to make animated features for families, some of which—especially the ones from Pixar—are very good. And they want to make genre movies—thrillers, chick flicks, romantic comedies, weekend-debauch movies (female as well as male), horror movies. Movies that have a mostly assured audience.

The range of films made by the studios has shrunk—serious drama is virtually out of the question. A good, solid movie like Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007), with George Clooney, wouldn’t have a shot at being made now. I suspect “The Social Network” got made only because Aaron Sorkin wrote the script. “Lawrence of Arabia,” from 1962, which is playing all over the county October 4th for one day on big screens, wouldn’t even be considered now.

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