Chicago Booth Blog: Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan - Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan CHICAGO – To understand how to achieve a sustained recovery from the Great Recession, we need to understand its causes. And identifying causes means starting with the evidence. Two facts stand out. First, overall demand for goods and services is much weaker, both in Europe and the United States, than it was in the go-go years before the recession. Persuasive explanations of the crisis point to linkages between today’s tepid demand and rising income inequality. Rising house prices gave people the illusion that increasing wealth backed their borrowing. This emphasis on anti-worker, pro-rich policies as the recession’s primary cause fits less well with events in Europe. So consider an alternative explanation: Starting in the early 1970’s, advanced economies found it increasingly difficult to grow. Greater competition and the adoption of new technologies increased the demand for, and incomes of, highly skilled, talented, and educated workers doing non-routine jobs like consulting.
100 Amazing How-To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything | Rated Colleges Posted by Site Administrator in Online Learning May 7th, 2009 Learning new skills and expanding your knowledge doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. There are loads of free resources on the Web that can help you find instructional videos, tutorials and classes to learn a wide variety of skills from fixing basic car problems to speaking another language. With 100 sites to choose from, you’re bound to find something here that will help you learn just about anything you could want. General Tutorials These sites offer a wide range of tutorials and videos. Around the House Want to know how to fix that broken cabinet or hang up some great wallpaper? Business and Management If you feel like you’re seriously lacking on business and management skills at work, no need to worry. KnowThis? Language and Writing Those who want to learn a new language, improve their writing skills or just learn more about literature will be well-served by these instructional sites. Technology Math S.O.S. Science Creativity
Soutien scolaire cours particulier anglais, donner cours maths Soutien scolaire, cours de musique, cours de langue, sports...retrouvez directement les meilleurs professeurs particuliers près de chez vous. Désolé, nous n'avons trouvé aucun résultat à proximité de ! Nous recrutons pour le moment des professeurs particuliers. Ou publiez un cours dans votre région et gagnez de l’argent avec Apprentus. Merci! Nous vous contacterons dès que nous aurons trouvé un professeur! Les cours suivants sont donné dans une langue différente: Nous n'avons pas trouvé de résultats correspondant à votre recherche. Joy L Français , anglais , néerlandais , histoire Bruxelles, Belgique Julien Kbidi Mieux comprendre les matières scientifiques Saint-Benoît, France Rebecca Schneider Aide aux devoirs, Mathématiques, Allemand, Français, Anglais Genève, Suisse Alex Ferrario "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano" London, Royaume-Uni Frère Noumark Kamenan Français, Anglais, espagnole Madrid, Espagne Tatiana Schmid Cours particulier d'anglais Chêne-Bougeries, Suisse Jennifer Byers Montreal, Canada Virginie Blazin
"Fast Food’s “Ethnic Insights”" by Andrew Billo Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – There is no denying the fast-food industry’s contribution to America’s obesity epidemic. Now, Asians and Asian-Americans could follow on this path, as major fast-food chains like McDonald’s target them disproportionately. Although Asian-Americans amount to only 6% of the United States’ population, the marketing magazine Advertising Age reports that for every nine focus groups that McDonald’s organizes, two (22%) are Asian-focused, while another four center on other minorities. At the Asia Society’s Diversity Leadership Forum earlier this month in New York, McDonald’s Director of Ethnic Marketing Vivien Chen described how the company has focused its marketing on the ethnic consumer. Chen claims that its strategy – called “Leading with ethnic insights” – shows the company’s commitment to the Asian-American consumer. In fact, this link represents the scope of Asia’s incipient obesity problem.
Dumb Little Man - Tips for Life "Rio’s Unsustainable Nonsense" by Jagdish Bhagwati Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – If George Orwell were alive today, he would be irritated, and then shocked, by the cynical way in which every lobby with an axe to grind and money to burn has hitched its wagon to the alluring phrase “sustainable development.” Thus, the International Labor Organization and trade-union lobbies have managed to insert “Decent Jobs” into the seven priority areas at the Rio conference. No one should pretend that we can magically offer decent jobs to the huge numbers of impoverished but aspiring workers in the informal sector. The flavor of the week in Rio is “sustainability indexing” for corporations, by way of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Corporations can, of course, be asked to conform to a “don’t” list – don’t dump mercury into rivers, don’t employ children for hazardous tasks, etc. Even when the Rio+20 agenda includes something more properly “environmental” – say, the supply of water – platitudes predominate.
Top 10 Free Ways To Discover New Music Online – Eternal Code [via makeuseof.com] Bored with your music and want to discover some new bands or singers? There are two main ways you can do that online. You can use services which create music maps, allowing you to explore artists similar in genre to the artists you already listen to. Some of these websites have a community built around them, which gives fans the opportunity to interact directly with these new talents. Here is a list of 10 free sites to discover new music. TuneGlue TuneGlue is straightforward and easy to use. Using TuneGlue, you start out with 6 similar artists, and can continue to explore and expand on them. Music-Map A less flashy alternative to TuneGlue is Music-Map. Music Roamer Music Roamer adds another dimension to music map sites, by not only providing suggestions of similar artists, but also allowing you to listen to music directly on their site. Bloson The simplest alternative to these first three websites is Bloson. Zune One Track Mind The Hype Machine TheSixtyOne OurStage PureVolume
"Labor’s Paradise Lost" by Robert Skidelsky LONDON – As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the Great Recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called “technological unemployment” – that is, “unemployment due to the discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. Machines were rapidly replacing human labor, holding out the prospect of vastly increased production at a fraction of the existing human effort.
11 Points - A Blog of Lists by Sam Greenspan. Funny lists, movie lists, sports lists, top lists. So, basically, lists. Dancing on the Sand - By Bruce Jones At 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, 1,000 or so advanced delegates at Rio+20 (formally, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) laid down their pens and shut off their laptops. At noon, Brazil's worldly foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, gaveled through the Outcome Document from the chair. And by mid-afternoon, Rio was full of a sound to which that joyous city is unaccustomed: the collective moan of 40,000 environmentalists disappointed about the results. (Yes, you read that right: 40,000. Alongside 10,000 official government participants.) That the Rio outcome fell short of the highest expectations was not only predictable, it was predicted -- by everybody. There were some avoidable mistakes. In practice, though, the best-organized process in the world wasn't going to produce serious outcomes on environment issues, either in Rio or Mexico City. What's more, the outcomes from Rio aren't all bad. The U.N. is not alone in having had a tough week.
Tracks on a Map In Praise of Leisure - The Chronicle Review By Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." Given when it was written, it is not surprising that Keynes's futuristic essay was ignored. He asked something hardly discussed today: What is wealth for? We in the West are once more in the midst of a Great Contraction, the worst since the Great Depression. The first defect is moral. Second, the crisis has exposed capitalism's palpable economic problems. So let us imagine that everyone has enough to lead a good life. Let's begin by pondering the reasons for the failure of Keynes's prophecy. It was not ever thus.
Musical scale The frequencies 440Hz and 880Hz both correspond to the musical note A, but one octave apart. The next higher A in the musical scale would have the frequency 1760Hz, twice 880Hz. In the western musical scale, there are 12 notes in every octave. These notes are evenly distributed (geometrically), so the next note above A, which is B flat, has frequency 440 × β where β is the twelfth root of two, or approximately 1.0595. Left is a table of the complete musical scale between middle A and A-880. The psychoacoustic properties of the musical scale are fascinating. Frequencies that are harmonically related tend to sound good together. The blue waveform is the sound you hear, which is a combination of the other (pure tone) waveforms. What about 440 × 3 = 1320? For somewhat more arcane reasons, the interval between A and E, which is a frequency rise of 3/2, is called a fifth. Where does the C sharp come from in the major triad? A major triad can be written as a sum of sinusoids
Don't Sweat the Bond Markets The ongoing eurozone debacle has driven home certain straightforward lessons: the fiscal rules enshrined in the EU's 1997 Stability and Growth Pact had almost no teeth, government bonds of EU nations are not a risk-free asset, and voters do not readily tolerate economic austerity. Beyond these, however, the last few years have also contained subtle lessons about the relationship between governments and capital markets. More specifically, they have shown that our understanding of the pressures that private capital markets place on governments is incomplete. Although holders of government debt certainly would react markedly to a change in the membership of the eurozone, they would not likely react strongly, or over the longer term, to many other government policy decisions and political outcomes. And these reactions have varying consequences for governments, depending on how governments have managed their debt profiles. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register