Items to Share: 9 June

Education Focus

• The way of truth | websofsubstance 'A social science such as education research [...] is frustrated by many confounding factors that are absent in the physical and biological sciences. However, even when high quality research is able to be performed, or when techniques are used to draw truth out from large numbers of studies, we still only have little snapshots and samples. The vast bulk of what passes in classrooms is left unanalysed...' 

Other Business

• More Money makes you Bad at Work: The Myth of Performance-Related Pay. | Doctor Stu's Blog  So why does this not apply to bankers?

• Tatsuo Horiuchi: the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist | Spoon & Tamago  Extraordinary! Original files available to work out how he does it.

• Medical school dark side: The third year makes students less empathetic. - Slate Magazine : comment in preparation.

• Brazilians, ctd: More perplexing Portuguese | The Economist  What Brazilians say; what foreigners hear; what Brazilians mean. I wonder what this says about Freire? 

• David Ogilvy 10 Tips on Writing 'In 1982, the original “Mad Man” David Ogilvy, sent the following internal memo to all employees of his advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, titled “How to Write.”...'  

• On Being an Octopus | Boston Review  'In a famous 1974 paper, the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked: What is it like to be a bat? [...] If we want to think about something more truly alien, the octopus is ideal. Octopuses are distant from us in evolutionary terms, have a nervous system of very different design, and bodies with no bones and little fixed shape at all. What is it like to be an octopus?'