College basketball is over, college and pro football are long gone. And while I have watched more NBA basketball this year than in prior years, falling asleep through one quarter doesn’t quite count. I don’t watch hockey and I hate baseball. So I thought the offseason would be boring. That is until news broke that [...]

Dr Murphy; I just finished reading your post on your dinner with an unnamed accomplished economist. One must admire your success in getting an economist to talk in circles. But it isn’t really all that difficult as you’re applying legitimate scientific thinking to a subject that is in fact not a science. Economists try to [...]

Somehow, our elected officials in Washington have managed to agree on the issue of student loan interest rates. It’s a cause for celebration. Federal student loan rates are set to double soon if new legislation doesn’t get signed. Everyone agrees, and yet they’ve still made it political. In Washington the only currency is political capital. [...]

According to research at the University of Akron, machines can now grade school essays better than people. Faster too. As in thousands in seconds compared to a few dozen per hour with people. These tests are meant to gauge how well a student can put together sentence structure. For example, a good sentence from a [...]

Congratulations, you have a degree. Now, how to do you show it off? You don’t. The exception. If your salutation begins with Dr then you can clarify what kind of Doctorate you have at the end of your name. Especially if your particular doctorate shows an extra emphasis on your specialty. For example, a physician [...]

When you find something you’re really passionate about it’s easy to lose sight of a greater goal and take a short cut. Perhaps you want to get into Harvard and cheat on your SATs to get in. Or something less serious like taking out store credit to buy that new iPad you wanted to pay [...]

Law school used to be considered a ticket to the good life. Getting into law school was hard and graduates would go on to have lucrative careers and be well-respected members of society. I’m not sure if that fantasy was ever a reality, but it certainly helped increase demand for law schools over the last [...]

A peaceful resolution to the Euro crisis: As of right now this is the biggest issue facing the developed world.  As scary as this crisis might be, we’ve come a long way since WWII. Enough turnover in Congress to make them more able to enable legislation: At this point I don’t really care which party [...]