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Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Sacred Destinations (Saturday, 4/1/06)
The world's cultures have been filled with different religions throughout human history, and there is evidence that people invented a multiplicity of religions during the much longer period of prehistory as well. During the tens of thousands of years that modern humans have been on the planet, religious cultures have existed largely in isolation from one another; but, now, increasingly, geographical distance is becoming irrelevant.
We've remarked previously about how millions of people throughout the world are responding to the fundamentally new conditions of life on Earth as well as to breathtaking changes of many kinds by more vigorously asserting ancient ideas and traditions. We can see examples of this phenomenon in each days news throughout the Muslim world as well as within Christian communities within the United States. This effort to cope may work psychologically for individuals for a while, but it also seems to exacerbate some of the major conflicts of our times, and, sooner or later, people will have to face the new realities, assuming that we don't destroy each other before that happens.
While waiting to see how it all shakes out, you may be interested in examining a few of the thousands of places on Earth which have been regarded as sacred by people within a variety of religious cultures over recent centuries or millennia. Holly Hayes's Sacred Destinations site contains information on about 1,500 of them.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Perfect Disaster (Sunday, 4/2/06)
If you feel that you've been getting too much sleep or doze off too easily, here's something to keep you wide awake. Despite growing concerns about the effects of global warming--more moisture in the atmosphere, warming atmosphere and oceans, greater extremes, greater intensity and frequency of storms, etc.--there have been plenty of disasters during earlier times too. Here's the Discovery Channel's Perfect Disaster site to help you keep those eyes wide open and to keep you alert, maybe increase your anxiety as well.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Fortune 500 for 2006 (Monday, 4/3/06)
Here's the latest edition of the Fortune 500 from Fortune magazine. Among the most notable things worth mentioning is that Exxon has displaced Wal-Mart as the largest corporation in America, and also that General Motors, while still number 3 on the list, is among only three in the top 100 that has reported a recent loss. Another of the three is Delphi, the big automotive parts supplier on which GM depends.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: FAQs on Estimated Taxes (Tuesday, 4/4/06)
Some American taxpayers are required to "pay as they go," not simply wait until they file their tax forms for the previous year. Here are some frequently asked questions on estimated taxes, as well as some answers, from Yahoo's Tax Center.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: An Index of the Wages of Unskilled Labor from 1774 to the Present (Wednesday, 4/5/06)
Emeritus Professor of Economics Samuel Williamson offers some perspective on what unskilled workers have been earning from the late 18th century until modern times. Here's An Index of the Wages of Unskilled Labor from 1774 to the Present.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Electronic Frontier Foundation (Thursday, 4/6/06)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation works to preserve rights and freedoms in the new digital universe.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Making Sense of Clusters (Friday, 4/7/06)
Joseph Cortright of the Brookings Institution has been looking into what makes a region economically successful. Among the factors seem to be clusterings of related companies which can result in development advantages for the region in which they are located. Here's Mr. Cortright's Making Sense of Clusters: Regional Competitiveness and Economic Development.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Executive Paywatch (Saturday, 4/8/06)
The AFL-CIO keeps an eye on what they regard as excessive pay for top executives and reports these pay levels on its Executive Paywatch page.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The American Nurses Association (Sunday, 4/9/06)
The American Nurses Association is a national organization of key professionals in a rapidly changing health care universe. The Association's site offers many features of interest to nonmembers, including an archive extending back to 2000 and a pear-reviewed journal.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: What you may not know about your income tax (Monday, 4/10/06)
David Francis of the Christian Science Monitor lists some things that you may not know about your income tax as April 15 approaches.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Mercer Quality-of-Living Reports (Tuesday, 4/11/06)
Mercer, a human resource consulting firm, has surveyed the world's cities and ranks them according to quality of life. Zurich comes out on top, and, perhaps, not surprisingly, Baghdad comes out on the bottom. Mercer's Quality-of-Living Reports are available from the company.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Badbossology (Wednesday, 4/12/06)
People who believe that they have bosses from hell can share stories and obtain advice, among other things, on Badbossology.com.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: GradGuide (Thursday, 4/13/06)
The Washington Post's GradGuide is intend to help you make the transition from college to the so-called "real world."
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Rate your relationship with your boss (Friday, 4/14/06)
Career Coach Dale Kurow has developed a questionnaire to enable you to rate your relationship with your boss.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Forms and Instructions (Saturday, 4/15/06)
You can download needed tax forms from the Internal Revenue Service's Forms and Instructions page.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Liber8 (Sunday, 4/16/06)
As anyone knows who hasn't been sleeping under a rock for years, a vast amount of quality information is available on the Internet now, so long as you know its source. In the economic universe, an example is the research library of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Top 10 last-minute tips from the Internal Revenue Service (Monday, 4/17/06)
Here's a top-ten list that doesn't come from Letterman, but, instead, from the Internal Revenue Service, via Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser. It's a top 10 list of last-minute tips.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: How much is that? (Tuesday, 4/18/06)
If the story were true, which it isn't, would George Washington have to throw a whole bale of currency across the Potomac now, rather than a dollar? How much is that? can help you determine how much previous amounts would be in contemporary U.S. dollars.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Special Report on Executive Pay (Wednesday, 4/19/06)
More people seem to be suffering from altitude sickness when they think about the pay of top corporate executives. Here is a Special Report on Executive Pay from the New York Times.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Internet's Growing Role in Life's Major Moments (Thursday, 4/20/06)
Pew Internet and American Life Project has been looking into the ways in which Americans are making use of the Internet in their daily lives and finds that nearly half of Americans who use the Internet are relying on it to assist with major life decisions.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Hispanics and the Future of America (Friday, 4/21/06)
If you're a native English-speaking American, you can hear many languages spoken in the United States now, including in regions you might not expect. For instance, the Minneapolis School District contains students who speak dozens of different languages.
However, if you're looking for one language in addition to English to learn that will be useful in the greatest number of U.S. communities, it is likely to be Spanish. If you're going to be traveling frequently or doing business throughout much of the world, try Arabic or Mandarin.
At any rate, the U.S. is becoming more diverse in many ways, but Hispanics, in addition to being America's largest minority now, even though they come from many regions and have mostly a language in common, are transforming the country all by themselves. Here's a new 490-page book from the National Academies called Hispanics and the Future of America.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Sustainable Development in Coastal Regions and Small Islands (Saturday, 4/22/06)
Small islands and coastal regions throughout the world remain isolated, even during the "information age." UNESCO established a program a decade ago to assist these regions in undergoing sustainable development.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: FDA Centennial (Sunday, 4/23/06)
Prompted, in part, by Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, there was a public outcry for government regulation of medicines and the American food supply. The result was the Food and Drug Administration, founded during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, the FDA is celebrating its centennial this year.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The American Roadside (Monday, 4/24/06)
If the journey is at least as important to you as the destination, you'll probably enjoy The American Roadside, an interesting collection of resources on roadside attractions across America, as well as an opportunity to share impressions and stories with fellow travelers.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Environmental Impacts of Hurricane Katrina (Tuesday, 4/25/06)
There's no doubt that Hurricane Katrina had a huge effect on human communities and structures in the Gulf Coast region, but it also impacted on the natural environment of the region too.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Best of the Humanities on the Web (Wednesday, 4/26/06)
Some goofy things have been going on in American education recently, in part, as a response to its overall condition in relation to 21st century needs. However, some solutions can be worse than original problems, particularly if they come from people who know nothing about education or the development of effective individuals.
There's little doubt that some of U.S. education needs fixing, but we're hoping that efforts to repair what needs repairing will not damage or destroy the best of K-12 education in the United States, or, for that matter, the idea of public schools with their goal of educating everybody. Some school districts are truly lamentable, but others provide excellent service and even are attracting students from affluent families away from high-priced private schools.
"Home schooling" might be a viable alternative to the worst of American schools, if nothing else, simply in order to protect children from toxic influences. But, unless parents are professional educators, there's little chance that simply keeping kids at home for instruction will result in their being better prepared than sending them to the best of American public schools. Parents who have convinced themselves that they are better at teaching than top professional educators may think they can conduct family surgery themselves too. Also, kids learn a great deal at school that is not included in their classes--like how to interact with people outside their families, for instance.
The "No Child Left Behind" program has resulted in a tremendous emphasis on testing, which means that somebody with political power either has a lot of confidence in standardized tests, or, more likely, knows nothing whatever about the underlying statistical issues. In addition, the testing has narrowed the focus of educators, not only to reading and math, for the most part, but also to the task of preparing students to do well on the tests, rather than creating competent, educated persons who are well-prepared for life and work in the new world of knowledge, technology, and economics.
A major neuroscience expert on the Charlie Rose TV program the other night said that recent data suggest that, in addition to the role of the arts in humanizing society, de-emphasizing them in favor of so-called "core curricula" may be counterproductive, because excellence in the arts does seem to depend on some of the same aptitudes as excellence in science and math. It's not uncommon to find musicians who have a very strong technical streak, in large part, because music theory is a subset of physics theory, and knowing what you're doing and why in music requires an understanding of mathematical relationships. All of the arts have strong technical components. It shouldn't be a surprise, for instance, that Albert Einstein was a fairly competent cellist, or that he was interested in the first place.
We even worry a bit about the influence of three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's influence, now that 2 million copies of his hugely successful and increasingly influential book, The World is Flat, are in print.
He's right in asserting that "outsourcing" is not simply a matter of a "race to the bottom." In fact, the shipping of low skill jobs overseas has become very old news, and, for the most part, already has happened. Nearly everybody is aware that China and India, with their exploding economies, want a hegemonic relationship to the high-value jobs too, and they're already producing far more engineers and other technical people than the United States.
We worry because, even though we believe that the brilliant Mr. Friedman is correct in calling for a dramatic increase in technical interest and technical preparation for American young people, if the U.S. is to retain its creative edge, we're afraid that, if he is successful in influencing public attitudes and policy, it might result in our emphasizing education for work even more at the expense of education for living and education for citizenship.
This is important in a society in which large numbers of people already believe that education is "practical," only if it provides preparation for one's first job, or, at most, for a career and earnings, not if it provides preparation for an entire life.
It's also important because most of the beliefs that most Americans have about themselves and their world are simply unsupported by the the sum of current knowledge. That is, many Americans and their leaders have a mostly goofy and distorted view of reality, and, according to Emeritus Professor Carl Frost of Michigan State University, effectiveness depends on the 1) quality of our contact with reality as well as 2) appropriate responses to that reality. Individually and collectively, it will be very difficult to respond appropriately to a reality that we misperceive or misinterpret in the first place.
"Education" is something very different from "training." The latter prepares people for specific kinds of work tasks, and it's certainly true that there has been a tremendous escalation of the kinds of skill sets required by good jobs in the new global economy.
However, modern societies need highly-developed persons as well as quality personnel. The current age has been defined largely in terms of science and technology, but the humanities also play a critically important role in determining the quality of individual, family, and societal life. As John Kennedy once remarked, the humanities seem to have more to do with our ends than our means. Here is the Best of the Humanities on the Web.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: EconLog: Issues and Insights in Economics (Thursday, 4/27/06)
EconLog is a "blog" written from a libertarian point of view by Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Laws and Regulations Governing Immigration (Friday, 4/28/06)
This summary of Laws and Regulations Governing Immigration comes from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is what the old INS is called now that it is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: The Best Undergraduate B-Schools (Saturday, 4/29/06)
Here's a list of the best undergraduate business schools, in the judgment of editors at Business Week magazine.
Today's NewWork News Web Tip: Center for Global Development (Sunday, 4/30/06)
The Center for Global Development is one among a number of think-tanks concerned with key issues having to do with the economics of developing countries.
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