Random links
- That Good Deed Might Cost You $300 in Miami
- "The Miami City Commission is considering a proposal that would prohibit "unauthorized" people and groups from sharing food with homeless people in the downtown area." ... got to love how the government works to help the homeless. I suspect that you'd probably be better off handing out food than money. Actually, for about a year I tried a policy of offering to buy folks a meal at a nearby restaurant when approached by beggers. Never did get any takers on that.
- The Creativity Crisis
- "Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. ... Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward." The article gets into what can be done about it.
- Share of College Spending for Recreation Is Rising
- The article notes a professor at Ohio University who calls this the "country-clubization of the American university." I feel somewhat included to agree. The article notes that while spending increased pretty rapidly on both instruction and other things at university, the rate of increase in spending on student services and the like was about 50% higher than on instructional-related expenses.
- "There's no escaping doctrine, but handle it with care"
- "If we maintain this balance, we will get criticism. In another sermon, Lloyd-Jones makes a rare observation about his own reputation. He was considered by the mainstream British listener to be highly doctrinal and orthodox, but many in more conservative churches felt he put too much emphasis on human experience. He responded: 'It seems to me that we have a right to be fairly happy about ourselves as long as we have criticism from both sides... For myself, as long as I am charged by certain people with being nothing but a Pentecostalist and on the other hand charged by others with being an intellectual, a man who is always preaching doctrine, as long as the two criticisms come, I am very happy. But if one or the other of the two criticisms should ever cease, then, I say, is the time to be careful and to begin to examine the very foundations.'"