Denialism of science

• Denialism (WikiPedia) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism
  • In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth. … “[It] is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event”. … group denialism [is defined] as “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”
  • In science, denialism has been defined as the rejection of basic concepts that are undisputed and well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a topic in favor of ideas that are both radical and controversial. … It has been proposed that the various forms of denialism have the common feature of the rejection of overwhelming evidence and the generation of a controversy through attempts to deny that a consensus exists. … A common example is Young Earth creationism and its dispute with the evolutionary theory.

2014

• “How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real” by Chris Mooney (Mother Jones; 2014.05.02) – http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/inquiring-minds-katharine-hayhoe-faith-climate
  • Millions of Americans are evangelical Christians. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe is persuading them that our planet is in peril.
  • “Years of Living Dangerously Premiere Full Episode” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brvhCnYvxQQ
• “Most Americans doubt Big Bang, not too sure about evolution, climate change – survey” By Rik Myslewski (The Register; 2014.04.21) – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/21/most_americans_doubt_big_bang_not_too_sure_about_evolution_climate_change_survey/
  • Science no match for religion, politics, business interests

  

• “AP-GfK Poll: Big Bang a big question for most Americans” (AP-Gfk; 2014.04.21) – http://ap-gfkpoll.com/featured/findings-from-our-latest-poll-2
  • Few Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But they express bigger doubts as concepts that scientists consider to be truths get further from our own experiences and the present time … Americans have more skepticism than confidence in global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and have the most trouble believing a Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago….
  • Just 4 percent doubt that smoking causes cancer, 6 percent question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain and 8 percent are skeptical there’s a genetic code inside our cells. More – 15 percent – have doubts about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines …
  • About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority – 51 percent – questions the Big Bang theory …
  • “Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,”…
  • The poll highlights “the iron triangle of science, religion and politics,” … And scientists know they’ve got the shakiest leg in the triangle….
  • To the public “most often values and beliefs trump science” when they conflict, … … Political values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change….
  • Religious values are similarly important… Confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the poll. Likewise, those who regularly attend religious services or are evangelical Christians express much greater doubts about scientific concepts they may see as contradictory to their faith … “When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can’t argue against faith,” … “It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable.” …
  • Beyond religious belief, views on science may be tied to what we see with our own eyes. The closer an issue is to our bodies and the less complicated, the easier it is for people to believe, …
  • Marsha Brooks, a 59-year-old nanny who lives in Washington, D.C., said she’s certain smoking causes cancer because she saw her mother, aunts and uncles, all smokers, die of cancer … But when it comes to the universe beginning with a Big Bang or the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old, she has doubts. …
  • Jorge Delarosa, a 39-year-old architect from Bridgewater, N.J., pointed to a warm 2012 without a winter and said, “I feel the change. There must be a reason.” But when it came to Earth’s beginnings 4.5 billion years ago, he has doubts simply because “I wasn’t there.”…
  • Experience and faith aren’t the only things affecting people’s views on science. … “the force of concerted campaigns to discredit scientific fact” as a more striking factor, citing significant interest groups – political, business and religious – campaigning against scientific truths on vaccines, climate change and evolution….
  • … sometimes science wins out even against well-financed and loud opposition, as with smoking. Widespread belief that smoking causes cancer “has come about because of very public, very focused public health campaigns,” … [also, what is very encouraging is] the public’s acceptance that mental illness is a brain disease, something few believed 25 years ago, before just such a campaign.
• “Why climate deniers are winning: The twisted psychology that overwhelms scientific consensus” by Paul Rosenberg (The Salon; 2014.04.19) – http://www.salon.com/2014/04/19/why_climate_deniers_are_winning_the_twisted_psychology_that_overwhelms_scientific_consensus/
  • There’s a reason why overwhelming evidence hasn’t spurred public action against global warming
  • “The reason ‘consensus’ has not appeared to work in society at large to date isn’t because it’s ineffective – it’s because there is a well-funded counter-movement out there that takes every opportunity to mislead the public into thinking that there isn’t a consensus,”
• “How politics makes us stupid” by Ezra Klein (Vox; 2014.04.06) – http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid

Older articles

• “How Do You Get People to Give a Damn About Climate Change?” by Chris Mooney (Mother Jones; 2013.10.18) – http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/10/inquiring-minds-kahan-lewandowsky-communicate-climate
  • Experts have come a long way in figuring out which messages can successfully open minds and move public opinion. There’s just one problem: They disagree about whether the message everyone’s using actually works.
• “Scientific uncertainty and climate change: Part I. Uncertainty and unabated emissions” by Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey, Michael Smithson, Ben R. Newell, John Hunter (Springer) – http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1082-7
  • Uncertainty forms an integral part of climate science, and it is often used to argue against mitigative action. This article presents an analysis of uncertainty in climate sensitivity that is robust to a range of assumptions. We show that increasing uncertainty is necessarily associated with greater expected damages from warming, provided the function relating warming to damages is convex. This constraint is unaffected by subjective or cultural risk-perception factors, it is unlikely to be overcome by the discount rate, and it is independent of the presumed magnitude of climate sensitivity. The analysis also extends to “second-order” uncertainty; that is, situations in which experts disagree. Greater disagreement among experts increases the likelihood that the risk of exceeding a global temperature threshold is greater. Likewise, increasing uncertainty requires increasingly greater protective measures against sea level rise. This constraint derives directly from the statistical properties of extreme values. We conclude that any appeal to uncertainty compels a stronger, rather than weaker, concern about unabated warming than in the absence of uncertainty.
• “Scientific uncertainty and climate change: Part II. Uncertainty and mitigation” by Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey, Michael Smithson, Ben R. Newell (Springer) – http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1083-6
  • In public debate surrounding climate change, scientific uncertainty is often cited in connection with arguments against mitigative action. This article examines the role of uncertainty about future climate change in determining the likely success or failure of mitigative action. We show by Monte Carlo simulation that greater uncertainty translates into a greater likelihood that mitigation efforts will fail to limit global warming to a target (e.g., 2 °C). The effect of uncertainty can be reduced by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Taken together with the fact that greater uncertainty also increases the potential damages arising from unabated emissions (Lewandowsky et al. 2014), any appeal to uncertainty implies a stronger, rather than weaker, need to cut greenhouse gas emissions than in the absence of uncertainty.
• “The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science” by Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles E. Gignac, Samuel Vaughan (Nature Climate Change 3, 399-404 (2013); doi:10.1038/nclimate1720; 2012.10.28) – http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n4/full/nclimate1720.html
  • Although most experts agree that CO2 emissions are causing anthropogenic global warming (AGW), public concern has been declining. One reason for this decline is the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by political and vested interests, which often challenge the existence of the scientific consensus. The role of perceived consensus in shaping public opinion is therefore of considerable interest: in particular, it is unknown whether consensus determines people’s beliefs causally. It is also unclear whether perception of consensus can override people’s ‘worldviews’, which are known to foster rejection of AGW. Study 1 shows that acceptance of several scientific propositions-from HIV/AIDS to AGW-is captured by a common factor that is correlated with another factor that captures perceived scientific consensus. Study 2 reveals a causal role of perceived consensus by showing that acceptance of AGW increases when consensus is highlighted. Consensus information also neutralizes the effect of worldview.

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Related:

• “Climate change – or not” – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/climate-change-or-not/
• “Antivaccination movement” – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/antivaccination-movement-and-other-lunacies/
• “We don’t need stinking renewable energy …” – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/we-dont-need-stinking-renewable-energy/

Poverty

• Poverty @WikiPedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
  • Poverty is general scarcity or dearth, or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money.
• “Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions (And why their “bad” decisions might be more rational than you’d think.)” by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic; 2013.11.22) – http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on-poverty-why-poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/
• “This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense” by Linda Tirado (The Huffington Post; 2013.11.22) – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/why-poor-peoples-bad-decisions-make-perfect-sense_b_4326233.html
• “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts” by Killermar (2013.11.22) – http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558
• “The High Cost of Not Having Enough” by Emily Badger (The Atlantic > Cities; 2013.09.04) – http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/high-cost-not-having-enough/6759/
• “How Poverty Taxes the Brain” by Emily Badger (The Atlantic > Cities; 2013.08.29) – http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/
• “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function” by Anandi Mani1, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao (Science; 2013.08.30; Vol. 341 no. 6149 pp. 976-980) – http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract
  • Burden of Poverty: Lacking money or time can lead one to make poorer decisions, possibly because poverty imposes a cognitive load that saps attention and reduces effort. Mani et al. (p. 976; see the Perspective by Vohs) gathered evidence from shoppers in a New Jersey mall and from farmers in Tamil Nadu, India. They found that considering a projected financial decision, such as how to pay for a car repair, affects people’s performance on unrelated spatial and reasoning tasks. Lower-income individuals performed poorly if the repairs were expensive but did fine if the cost was low, whereas higher-income individuals performed well in both conditions, as if the projected financial burden imposed no cognitive pressure. Similarly, the sugarcane farmers from Tamil Nadu performed these tasks better after harvest than before.
  • Abstract: The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.

Quacks everywhere

Bruce Lipton

• “Bruce Lipton, quack” at Atheist in a (Metaphorical) Foxhole blog – http://inafoxhole.livejournal.com/83321.html

Dr. Joseph Mercola

• “FDA Orders Dr. Joseph Mercola to Stop Illegal Claims” by Stephen Barrett, M.D. (at QuackWatch; 2012.02.01) – http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/mercola.html
• “9 Reasons to Completely Ignore Joseph Mercola” by Joseph Albietz (Science-Based Medicine) – http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/9-reasons-to-completely-ignore-joseph-mercola-and-natural-news/
• Postings on Dr Mercola at Science Blogs
• “Dr. Oz defiantly embraces The Dark Side” – http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/dr_oz_finally_unequivocally_embraces_the.php
  As 2011 dawns, there is no doubt in my mind that Dr. Oz has now inevitably crossed the Woo-bicon, gone over to the Dark Side, betrayed the cause, gone woo, or whatever you want to call it. I say again: Stick a fork in him. He’s done, as far as science-based medicine goes. That’s because he featured one of the biggest promoters of quackery on the Internet on his show in one fawning segment after another. I’m referring, of course, to Dr. Joe Mercola, who was the main guest on The Dr. Oz Show yesterday in segments entitled The Alternative Health Controversy (part 1, part 2, part 3), coupled with another segment entitled The Surprising Supplement You Need. Let’s just say that Dr. Oz’s journey to the Dark Side is now complete. He has controlled his fear but released his woo, and it is strong woo indeed.
  
  To give you an idea of just how bad this is, take a look at the introduction to the show before the credits. Dr. Mercola is described as a “pioneer in alternative medicine” and “a man your doctor doesn’t want you to know.” I don’t know about you, but hearing that made me think instantly of Kevin Trudeau and his now-infamous book of quackery Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You To Know About.

On importance of practice

• “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” by Amy Chua (Wall Street Journal; 2011.01.08) – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html –
  Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
  … What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. …

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Related: Skills acquisition – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/skills-acquisition/

Wasted generations

• “The disposable academic” – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (The Economist; 2010.12.16) – http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

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See also: Education – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/education/

Education

• “Is a Postdoc Worth it?” (SlashDot; 2013.11.25) – http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/1929203/is-a-postdoc-worth-it
  “In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that ‘The term “postdoc” refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it’s much like the term “bar mitzvah.”) So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc.'”
• “The Postdoc: A Special Kind of Hell” by Adam Ruben (Science; 2013.11.21) – http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_11_21/caredit.a1300256
  • Postdoc positions were established to prolong the awesomeness of graduate school, which everyone loves, while simultaneously postponing the ability to make money, which everyone hates.
  • Many postdocs are foreigners who come to the United States to enjoy the abundant opportunities this country offers for scientific advancement. We reward their enthusiasm with postdoc positions. We hope they forgive us.
  • Postdocs are very small and hard to see. If you encounter a postdoc in the wild, approach with extreme caution! You can frighten away a postdoc by asking, “Shouldn’t you be in the lab?”
  • Despite its masculine undertones, the term “postdoctoral fellow” is actually gender-neutral. This has led to much confusion when female doctoral students have told their friends or family, “I’m planning to become a fellow.”
  • Because tuition is not a factor, a postdoc actually impacts the annual lab budget less than a graduate student. Then again, a postdoc impacts the annual lab budget less than an order of Pad Thai (if Pad Thai were an allowable expense on National Institutes of Health grants).
  • Postdocs have many natural predators, including vapid undergraduate trainees, negligent advisers, erratic funding sources, unsympathetic significant others, and the predator from Predator.
  • The earliest postdoctoral appointment was in 1931. That postdoc hopes to go on the faculty job market sometime in the next couple of years.
• “How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang” by Alexandre Afonso (at his blog: http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/; 2013.11.21) – http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/
  • The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics. Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation”[3]. Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment. Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail[4].
• “What You (Really) Need to Know” by Lawrence H Summers (NY Times; 2012.01.20) – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html
• “Live and Learn – Why we have college” by Louis Menand (The New Yorker; 2001.06.06) – http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand
• College physics: two-way engagement vs. one-way lectures (Physics Today; 2011.05.12) – http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics/2011/05/science-and-the-media-14—20.html#twoway
  • “A Better Way to Teach?” by Jeffrey Mervis (Science; 2011.05.12) – http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html
  • “Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning” by Benedict Carey – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/science/13teach.html
• “Survey: College Is Unaffordable, and a Poor Value. But It’s Still a Good Investment?” by Brad Tuttle (Time; 2011.05.17) – http://money.blogs.time.com/2011/05/17/survey-college-is-unaffordable-and-a-poor-value-but-its-still-a-good-investment
• “Good Reads: Fancy (but Worthless) Kitchens and College Degrees, and More” by Brad Tuttle (Time; 2011.05.06) – http://money.blogs.time.com/2011/05/06/good-reads-fancy-but-worthless-kitchens-and-college-degrees-and-more/
• “Education: The magic of hard work” by Jim Newton (LA Times; 2011.04.25) – http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-0425-newton-20110425,0,2244970.column
• “Education: The PhD factory” by David Cyranoski , Natasha Gilbert , Heidi Ledford , Anjali Nayar & Mohammed Yahia (Nature; 2011.04.20) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html – The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?
• “Column: World View – Reform the PhD system or close it down” by Mark Taylor (Nature 472, 261; 2011.04.20) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html – There are too many doctoral programmes, producing too many PhDs for the job market. Shut some and change the rest, says Mark C. Taylor.
  … Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them. …
• “Developing world: Educating India” by Anjali Nayar (Nature 472, 24-26; 2011.04.06) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110406/full/472024a.html – The country’s vast, education-hungry population could supply the next generation of the world’s scientists — but only if it can teach them.
• “Why College Is Not A Bubble (Except For The University Of Phoenix)” by Anya Kamenetz (FastCompany; 2011.05.02) – http://www.fastcompany.com/1751087/why-college-is-not-a-bubble-except-for-the-university-of-phoenix
• “Lost in the Meritocracy” by Caleb Crain (NYTimes; 2011.04.29) – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower-by-professor-x.html
• “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries” by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari (The New York times; 2011.04.30) – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
• “Why Science Is a Lousy Career Choice” (SlashDot; 2011.04.25) – http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/25/164228/Why-Science-Is-a-Lousy-Career-Choice
  “President Obama had a town hall meeting at Facebook’s headquarters last week and said that he wanted to encourage females and minorities to pursue STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). However, Pastabagel writes that the need for American students to study STEM is one of the tired refrains in modern American politics and that plenty of people already study science, but they don’t work in science. ‘MIT grads are more likely to end up in the financial industry, where quants and traders are very well compensated, than in the semiconductor industry where the spectre of outsourcing to India and Asia will hang over their heads for their entire career.’ Philip Greenspun adds that science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. ‘The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children,’ writes Greenspun. ‘Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it.'”
  … It isn’t just that the science grads aren’t good enough, its that the science itself it harder than it’s ever been before. All the low hanging fruit that could be figured out by an individual or small team as already been done: “It was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.” — P.A.M Dirac, DIRECTIONS IN PHYSICS, 1978, P. 7
• “If you want kids to learn science, you need a better sales pitch.” (Partial Object blog; 2011.04.21) – http://partialobjects.com/2011/04/405/
• “Higher Education Linked to Lower Blood Pressure” (Discovery News; 2011.02.28) – http://news.discovery.com/human/blood-pressure-education-health-110228.html – The finding could help explain the often observed association among people in developed countries.
• “U.S. Risks Creating Uneducated ‘Underclass'” (Discovery News; 2011.04.20) – http://news.discovery.com/human/us-risk-undereducated-underclass-110420.html
• “Outsourcing in Higher Education” by Kirsten Winkler (BigThink; 2011.04.12) – http://bigthink.com/ideas/37851
• “The Real Science Gap” by Beryl Lieff Benderly (Miller-McCune; 2010.06.14) – http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/
  It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.
• “Finland’s Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach” by Joshua Levine (Time; 2011.04.11) – http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062419,00.html
• TechCrunch:
  • “Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist’s Response” by Dale J. Stephens (TechCrunch; 2011.04.12) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/13/living-the-knowledge-life-a-thiel-fellowship-finalists-response/
  • “Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel” by Vivek Wadhwa (TechCrunch; 2011.04.12) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-friends-take-education-advice-from-peter-thiel/
    • Academic Research/Published Papers (by Vivek Wadhwa) – http://wadhwa.com/research/
  • “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education” by Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch; 2011.04.10) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/
  • “Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To “Stop Out Of School”” by MG Siegler (TechCrunch; 2010.09.27) – http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of-school/
  • “Why Our Schools Suck, The Movie” by Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch; 2010.09.20) – http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/why-our-schools-suck-the-movie/
  • “Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big” by Vivek Wadhwa (TechCrunch; 2009.10.24) – http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/got-degree-envy-no-worries-you-can-still-make-it-big/
• “The disposable academic” – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (The Economist; 2010.12.16) – http://www.economist.com/node/17723223
• “Is A College Education Worth The Debt?” (NPR; 2009.09.010 – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112432364
• The Chronicle of Higher Education – http://chronicle.com/
  • “Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs” by Ben Gose (2010.07.25) – http://chronicle.com/article/Goodbye-to-Those-Overpaid-P/123633
  • “Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices?” by Lawrence Biemiller (2010.07.30) – http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25897
  • “Why Do They Hate Us?” by Thomas H. Benton (2010.09.26) – http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-/124608
  • “Why Do They Hate Us? part 2” by Thomas H. Benton (2010.10.24) – http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-Part-2/125066/
• “The Ph.D. Problem (On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal)” by Louis Menand – http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy
• “Women in Science” by Philip Greenspun (2006.02) – http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

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See also: Wasted Generations – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/wasted-generations/

Online free lectures

GOTO: “Expand your mind” – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/expand-your-mind/.