9 Things We Regret Not Doing in Our 20s Life is filled with regrets. Ask anyone around you what their regrets are and they usually have no difficulty coming up with many items on their “regret list.” And for some reason our twenties are ripe for a field of regrets. Perhaps it’s because as we get older we look back on that period of adulthood as the height of freedom and autonomy. As move into middle age, we look back and wish that we had made better choices and taken more opportunities. Traveling more – I regret not travelling more, and so does nearly everyone that I have asked. Investing early – How many times have we kicked ourselves for not starting our 401Ks in our twenties, for not putting our excess cash in long term investments, for not investing in our future early. Being more responsible with spending – In order to invest in our retirement or save for that down payment, we would have needed to make wiser financial spending choices. Life is good; don’t misunderstand.
Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of 'Expert' - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology The expert is dead! Long live the expert! Wikimedia Commons How do we judge whether a person knows what he or she is talking about? At least in part, we rely on a set of cues -- titles, university degrees, papers published, lectures given -- that have long been bound up in the concept of "expertise". Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is the hope that through its openness and its anonymity it could democratize the process of how knowledge gets built and organized. But, of course, this kind of collaboration doesn't itself imply the absence of expertise. So "experts" in the traditional sense (e.g. academic pedigrees) do still matter in this collaborative environment. They write (pdf): "We define an editor e's interest in a Wikipedia article a as the mean similarity between e's search queries and a ... This may be "intuitive" to those immersed in Wikipedia's pages, structure, and data, but it's a new and radically distilled understanding of expertise: An expert is someone who knows something.
For those who were wondering...the academic side of things: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education Exhortation - Summer 2008 Print Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers By William Deresiewicz June 1, 2008 It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. But it isn’t just a matter of class. I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge.
Meltdown This next week and a half promises to be electrifying. We’re on the brink of an epic hurricane, a Presidential election, and either the most disappointing or the spookiest Halloween ever. But right now I’m going to talk about me, about MIT, and about why I haven’t talked to you in a month. Toward the end of September I became noticeably stressed out. “Cory,” I said to my boyfriend, “nobody loves me.” “Nonsense,” he replied, “I love you.” “I want to go home,” I said. Then I watched an episode of America’s Next Top Model and felt better. “Have I always been this crazy?” “Well,” he said, “you’ve always been a little crazy. That afternoon I went to S^3. I have a fantastic dean at S^3. The next week was my primary hell week of the term. After my final all-nighter I woke up to someone waddling down the alley below my window and swearing angrily. Friday evening I went to visit my high school friend Eric at Tufts. The people I met were beautiful. “Why don’t you transfer out?” And we didn’t.
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. “Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. What happened? Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. Thomas E.
India's elites have a ferocious sense of entitlement My office is located in an urban village in the heart of Delhi. Originally surrounded by fields where people grew crops, these areas now house apartment blocks and shopping malls. All that’s left of the old village is the cluster of houses in which many of the erstwhile residents live, and where a few small traders have set up offices and shops. Privilege looms large in the southern Indian city of Chennai. It was around 6 o’clock on a late summer day, not yet dusk. Then along came a large SUV, driven by a young and obviously wealthy man. This isn’t an unusual scene in India and it’s not about road rage. Let me tell you another story: my neighbour in the upper-middle-class area where I live is a man who owns luxury hotels. Who could study the rich? Where does this kind of behaviour come from? Who in India would have the temerity to study the rich? There haven’t, to my knowledge, been any such studies in our region of the world. The culture of taking Eating the children’s sweets
Faux Friendship - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education By William Deresiewicz William Deresiewicz discusses the shaky future of friendship on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth Wednesday, December 16 at 12:40 p.m. Listen to the episode here. "…[a] numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant. …"—War and Peace "Families are gone, and friends are going the same way." We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? How did we come to this pass? The rise of Christianity put the classical ideal in eclipse. The classical notion of friendship was revived, along with other ancient modes of feeling, by the Renaissance. Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau. Add to this the growth of democracy, an ideology of universal equality and inter-involvement.
21 Ways You Should Take Advantage Of Your 20s 1. Don’t feel the need to respond to every text message, phone call, and email the second it reaches you. Once upon a time, it took longer than a minute to reach someone. People used stamps and envelopes; they had answering machines they didn’t check for hours, sometimes days. No one will die if you don’t immediately respond to every message you receive. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. All information provided in this article is for reference purposes only. Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!" Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. John P. The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. 1.