down time

dogshaming:

I DO NOT like baths.

ianbrooks:

Stop The Cycle of Violence by Jeff Pina

Why must we war upon each other, brothers? Why can we not make love.

(Source: ianbrooks, via massivquiet)

think-progress:

Obamacare turns 2. Here are the facts about what Americans have already gained.

theatlantic:

What’s More Expensive Than College? Not Going to College

College has its skeptics, and the skeptics make good points. Does a four-year university make sense for every student? Probably not. Is the modern on-site college education necessarily the ideal means to deliver training after high school? Maybe not. Vocational training and community colleges deserve a place in this discussion. And we happen to be living through a quiet revolution in higher education.

Here are three quick examples. First, beginning this year, students at MITx can take free online courses offered by MIT and receive a credential for a price far less than tuition if they demonstrate mastery in the subject. Second, the University of Southern California is experimenting with online classrooms that connect students across the country in front of a single professor. Third, there’s Western Governors University, a non-profit, private online university that’s spearheading the movement toward “competency-based degrees” that reward what students can prove they know rather than how many hours or credits they amass. 

Some of these experiments will fail, and some will scale. What’s important is that they offer higher ed and retraining that is cheap, creative, and convenient. If we can win the marketing war in neighborhoods blighted by NEETs and deliver a post-high school education to some of those 7 million young people who have disengaged with education and work, we will be spending money to save money. 

Take out a globe and give it a spin. I challenge you to land on a region where education gains aren’t translating to productivity and income gains. The highest-income countries have the highest rates of enrollment in secondary school and the smallest share of informal employment that is vulnerable to an economic downturn. There is a cost to not educating young people. The evidence is literally all around us.

Read more.

putthison:

The New York Times has a great article about how clothes not only affect the way people perceive us and how we perceive ourselves, but also the way we think:

So scientists report after studying a phenomenon they call enclothed cognition: the effects of clothing on cognitive processes.

[…]

It has long been known that “clothing affects how other people perceive us as well as how we think about ourselves,” Dr. Galinsky said. Other experiments have shown that women who dress in a masculine fashion during a job interview are more likely to be hired, and a teaching assistant who wears formal clothes is perceived as more intelligent than one who dresses more casually.

But the deeper question, the researchers said, is whether the clothing you wear affects your psychological processes. Does your outfit alter how you approach and interact with the world? So Dr. Galinsky and his colleague Hajo Adam conducted three experiments in which the clothes did not vary but their symbolic meaning was manipulated.

Read more here.