Items to Share (10 December)

• The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters: by Benjamin Ginsberg, reviewed by Alan Ryan in THE. Wonderful sub-title: "A dean is nothing without a deanlet".

•  Monday’s medical myth: you can’t mix antibiotics with alcohol --just in case you get an infection over the festive season.

• The snowclone silly season opens: Geoffrey Pullum makes another attempt to kill the "Eskimo words for snow" cliche.

• How Universal Is The Mind? Excellent blog post on a fascinating subject; sails a little close to the Sapir/Whorf notion of language as a determinant of perception, but worth reading alongside Deutscher's take from a linguist's perspective on some parallel issues of perception.

• The Evolved Self-Management System: Nicholas Humphrey in the Edge musing on what the placebo effect suggests about releasing human capacities in other directions. 

• Race And Intelligence: A Wrap from Andrew Sullivan; I don't claim to have read it all, but this is the kind of conversation which only a popular, moderated blog can deliver.

• Inland Revenue has a sense of humour? This has been going around via email for quite a long time, but it was new to me: the link is to the original source.

• More on the Khan Academy; getting behind the scenes and reporting on how analysts are drawing on their finance backgrounds to evaluate the effectiveness of the programmes. 

• A secular Sunday School for grown-ups: videos from Alain de Botton's School of Life.

• Interesting introduction to the work of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who studies morality, as much as possible without preconceptions. I haven't read his latest, The Righteous Mind; why good people are divided by politics and religion, but I did enjoy his 2006 offering The Happiness Hypothesis; putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science (Arrow Books).

• Correlation and causation; great graphics.

•  What's a crash blossom?