CISPA's primary function is to remove legal barriers that might keep Internet companies from giving all your communication and information to the government. It allows "cyber entities" (such as Internet service providers, social networks like Facebook and cell phone companies like AT&T) to circumvent Internet privacy laws when they're pressured by Homeland Security to hand over or shut down -- well, almost anything of yours online that the government wants, no warrant needed....

So, say the government thought you were discussing a cybersecurity threat or [intellectual property] theft -- such as illegal file sharing somehow related to cybersecurity -- on Facebook. The bill would not force Facebook to hand you over to the feds, yet CISPA does make it so that Facebook will be completely unrestricted (say, by your rights) to cooperate with Homeland Security to the fullest extent. 

There are several reasons why wealth does not translate into power so easily.  First, effective philanthropy is extremely difficult to achieve, especially if that philanthropy is trying to counteract prevailing social trends.  Nor should it be assumed that non-profits are always the drivers of change.  Second, the wealthy in groups do not always coordinate very effectively, to say the least.  Each is used to being in charge (remember when the Lakers had Karl Malone and Gary Payton as well as Bryant and O’Neal?)  Third, many of the very wealthy choose to consume ego rents rather than effectiveness.  Fourth, “democracy” and “the market” control large chunks of modern life, and it is hard for outsiders to commandeer those processes.  Most of the major functions of government are there because people want them to be there, for better or worse.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. It's just a celebration of food, sharing, and history. Though there's a nice familial element, there are no gifts involved, and there are no obnoxious religious overtones. I'd rank it as the second greatest federal holiday (not including religious or "unofficial" holidays like Easter or Halloween):

1) Independence Day / Fourth of July -- this has to be undisputed. All about celebrating the birth of this great nation in style: exploding fireworks, grilling burgers and hot dogs, and drinking beers. No obligatory gift-giving or religion.  Minus: jingoism and drunk driving.

2) Thanksgiving -- see above. Minus: turkey is kind of boring. Unfortunate crass commercialism w/ Black Friday. Travel is tough.

3) Memorial Day -- the unofficial beginning of Summer. Great timing for a long weekend. Slightly muddy history; originally a Civil War Memorial, now... I'm not entirely sure what it's about. But I'll take it.

4) New Year's Day -- over-rated. Actually, New Year's Eve is over-rated, New Year's Day is essential to recover from the stupidity and shamefulness of New Year's Eve.

5-7) Presidents Day, Veterans Day, MLK's Birthday -- these are the "actual holidays" where the important historical purpose supersedes any recreational value. Important learning opportunities for our nation's youth.

8) Labor Day -- the unofficial end of summer. Under-utilized. Should be a celebration of American values (hard-work, commitment, dedication). Instead, marks the beginning of school and no one thinks about anything else.

9) Inauguration Day -- depends on who won.

10) Christmas Day -- vastly over-rated. Vastly. Though the possibility of a white Christmas is pretty nice, and it's good to see extended family. However, lots of negatives: simultaneous crass commercialization AND oppressive religious elements. (How is that possible?) Unfortunate emphasis on gift-giving. Terrible music. Cold weather. Egg nog. Impossible travel. Not worth it.

11) Columbus Day -- the Lindsay Lohan of holidays. Maybe at first it seemed like a good idea. But looking back, what the fuck was everyone thinking? Columbus Day is historical revisionism it's worst and brings nothing to the table.

I highly recommend watching the video, below, about the Protect-IP / Stop Online Privacy Act legislation that's pending in the House & Senate. Despite the relatively limited press so far, these two bills are a big fucking deal.

Without mincing words, the proposed law would destroy the basic operating assumptions of the internet. The video below spells out in more detail what the law actually woud do, but the basic point is to take away the ability to create links to various forms of content -- in other words, exactly what the internet is for.

The proposed law does a lot of bad stuff, but here's an example of the worst part: suppose during Thanksgiving you take a cell phone video of your nieces and nephews singing a Justin Bieber song, and post the video on Tumblr. Technically, this is a copyright infringement. As the law currently exists, whoever owns the rights to Justin Bieber's music (probably not JB, btw) can force Tumblr to take the content down. This happens all the time, and isn't really a big deal -- Tumblr just takes down the video, no big deal.

Under the new law, here's what would happen: whoever own's Justin Bieber's music can not only force Tumblr to take down the video, but can also put a freeze on Tumblr's finances if Tumblr doesn't act within 5 days. Think about this: Private Company A can claim (without having to prove anything!) that Private Company B is facilitating copyright infringement, and within 5 days essentially shut down Company B's advertising platform, revenue streams, financing, and so forth, all without having to get the government involved. This is fine if you don't care about having Facebook, Youtube, Google, Tumblr, and any of the other websites that let you watch, listen to, or share content.

All of this lunacy is being done at the behest of Hollywood: the industry hasn't adapted to the information age, and is fighting back against Facebook, Google, and so forth by hiring lobbyists to write these ridiculous laws.

This is one of those things where it actually will make a difference to call your Congressman and tell them to ignore Hollywood's lobbyists and vote against Protect-IP (House) and SOPA (Senate). So watch the video below, and email your congressman, and help make sure Congress doesn't fuck up the internet.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/31100268 w=400&h=225]

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Very big news in quantum physics. In case you missed it:

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a pre-print posted online on 14 November reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

I should start by saying I've never had a McRib, and that's okay with me. My understanding of the McRib was that it is probably just a marketing gimmick, and randomly pops up on McD's menus without any discernable rhyme or reason to keep customers on their toes. (Which, in retrospect, is a pretty dumb idea.) So I thought that this idea about when / why McDonald's rolls out the McRib was pretty interesting. The basic thought is that McDonald's introduces the McRib whenever wholesale pork prices drop, allowing them an arbitrage opportunity:

Key: 1. November 2005 Farewell Tour; 2. November 2006 Farewell Tour II; 3. Late October 2007 Farewell Tour III; 4. October 2008 Reintroduction; 5. November 2010 Reintroduction.

"there is literally not enough celery root grown in the world for it to survive on the menu at McDonald's — although the company could change that, since its menu decisions quickly become global agricultural concerns. Not long after he arrived at McDonald's in 2004, Coudreaut added to the menu an Asian salad that included edamame. The Soyfoods Council, a trade group, immediately got calls from consumers across the nation looking to buy edamame at their grocery stores."

Strong endorsement: Yelping With Cormac [McCarthy].

Favorite so far is T.G.I. Fridays:

Fresno, CA

Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Two stars.

Watts strode into the restaurant smelling of horse and woodsmoke and all the patrons turned to watch him as if he had called out to them but he had made no sound save the whispering of his leathers and the jangle of his spurs. He sat at the bar. A bartender in a vaudevillian striped shirt approached smiling like a grifter. Can I help you cowboy, he said.

Double rye.

I’m afraid we dont have rye.

Dont have rye.

Sorry.

Well what do you have?

The bartender slid a glossy menu toward the him. He regarded it with great suspicion. Held it at arms length. He sighed heavily.

I reckon I’ll have a Blue Razzberry Mojito Freezer.

Read this phenomenal article about how Goldman Sachs is reaping immense, tax-payer funded profits by defrauding poor, uninformed consumers.

I've written about the for-profit business model before. Long story short, for-profits use an "asses in classes" business model that's predicated on enrolling increasing numbers of students who are eligible for federal financial aid programs. Here's how it works:

1) Prospective student, often poor and uneducated, is convinced to enroll at a for-profit school. (Read below about the reprehensible recruitment tactics that enable this cycle.)

2) Student borrows the maximum allowable in federal financial aid to pay tuition, which is set to barely exceed the student's financial aid eligibility. (Because of the 90/10 rule.)

3) Student gives financial aid to for-profit school in exchange for a shitty education.

4) Profit! And who cares what happens to the student. The school has their money, and there's zero accountability if the student fails to benefit, because the enforcement mechanisms do not work!



This is how University of Phoenix and Education Management Corp have become so profitable:



 

What's so gut-wrenching is how students end up in for-profit schools in the first place. If students were enrolling in these "universities" in order to receive a truly valuable credential, it would be one thing. But the for-profits primarily and *intentionally* recruit poor, uneducated students looking to catch a break. Their recruitment tactics are reprehensible:

Management handed down revamped telemarketing scripts designed to prey on poor and uneducated consumers, honing in on their past mistakes in life as a ploy to convince them that college would solve all their problems, according to conversations with more than a dozen current and former Education Management Corp. employees over the past two months.

"You'd probe to find a weakness," said Brian Klein, a former admissions employee who worked for three years at Argosy University Online, one of four major colleges operated by EDMC. "You basically take all that failure and all those bad decisions, and you spin it around and put it right back in their face as guilt, to go to this shitty university and run up all of this debt."

Former employees described the pressure ramping up on the sales floor after Goldman and its partners entered the business, leading to an atmosphere where "no" was not an acceptable answer.

"When I first started working there, people legitimately felt like it was about the student," said Flynn, the recruiter at South University who arrived in fall 2006, just a few months after the company went private and a few months before Nelson took over as chief executive. "If you had an explanation of why a student wouldn't enroll right away, it was listened to. But then it became more about, 'you need to get that person to enroll, and you need to overcome their objections.'"

An internal instructional brochure for admissions officers, obtained by The Huffington Post, described typical excuses cited by admissions employees for failing to enroll a potential students and forbade them from accepting any of them.

"My student's dog died, her cousin is graduating and she just got pregnant," began a hypothetical excuse from one recruiter.

The instructional brochure instructed that director not to accept those reasons. "You are missing something!" the brochure declared, urging recruiters to press harder. "Build rapport, trust, and relationships with your student that they feel comfortable telling you concerns and why they are scared."

A sales call handout obtained by The Huffington Post describes the first three steps when talking to a new sales lead: "1. Build em up! ... 2. Break Em Down! Find the PAIN! ... 3. Build em Up!"

Suzanne Lawrence, who worked in admissions at Argosy University online in 2009 and 2010, remembered recruiting a woman for online classes who had never used the Internet and had no email address. She thought the student wasn't a good match, but she was instead instructed to help the woman set up a Gmail account and get enrolled.

In case you need a reality-check:



A couple more salient points:

•  Almost 10% of the borrowers represented above will default on their debt within two years of finishing school. This percentage vastly understates the real default rates on student loans, because it is extremely difficult to default that quickly, given 1) that repayments typically aren't required for 6 months after finishing school, 2)  there are deferral and forbearance options available, and 3) it takes a series of missed payments to default.  The real default rates are likely much, much higher.

• Unlike virtually every other type of debt, student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So, if a student borrows too much for a degree that turns out to have no value in the labor market, they are pretty much screwed.

• The majority of "gift aid" (primarily merit-based scholarships, which is emphatically *not* student loan debt) is not given to the students who need it the most.

• If you're wondering how this happened, this would be a good place to start:

Matt Yglesias, comparing universities to newspapers, makes a very simple but very important point:

A college, or a law school, is basically supposed to be conveying information to people. This is an activity that’s become radically cheaper and easier over the past twenty years... Learning is cheaper and easier than ever. And yet getting a degree is more expensive. How’s that? Something’s off, in a big way.

Unfortunately, I doubt it, but if nothing else it's good news that the "Party Ends at For-Profit Schools." (At least, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

At first, I had the same reaction as Tyler Cowen, which was: Hey, it's nice to see the market actually working!

But then I thought more about it. It's hard to parse out the effects of regulation, but I'm skeptical that this correction would have taken place without the scrutiny that various states and the Dept of Education have brought on for-profit colleges -- including the revelation that for-profit schools were recruiting students at homeless shelters and halfway houses, and that for-profit recruiters regularly and brazenly lied to prospective students. This would be evidence to the fact that regulation often improves the efficiency of the marketplace.

I'm no expert on how these institutions finance themselves (besides the fact that they're hugely dependent on federal financial aid programs), but the increased regulatory risk has pretty clearly become a serious issue. Combined with the fact that these same institutions are writing off half of the institutional loans they make to their students, I imagine the investors who own these companies are getting a little nervous.

Another way of looking at this is that the existence of the for-profit higher education stems from a series of flaws in the way the federal government subsidizes higher education. So perhaps this is just a little bit of good regulation on top of a great deal of very poorly considered subsidization. Which, I suppose, is pretty common and pretty depressing. Identifying and fixing the basic structural flaws that led to the creation of an enormous, highly destructive, and now thoroughly established sector of higher education would be a pretty serious challenge.

In any event, for-profit colleges have long been some of the most profitable companies on Wall Street -- as Steve Eisman noted in his awesome takedown, ESI (which runs the ITT Tech chain) is more profitable than Apple, which is insane. So, in other words, there's still a long way to go before Wall Street (or the government) fully addresses this enormous market failure.

Very well done brief explanation of how people generate good ideas, according to Steven Johnson:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU]

I highly recommend the book that this is plugging, which is unsurprisingly called Where Good Ideas Come From.

So my last post was about all the different ways the Dept. of Education screwed up the Investing in Innovation program. (Actually, I didn't list all the ways -- only the two big ones. There were others.) Fortunately, there are plenty of ways the Dept. of Education can redeem themselves. In fact, they already are!

I'm all about deep, far-off, cutting-edge, so-cool-it's-almost-fictional science, and I'm fascinated by organizations like the Advanced Research Projects Administration. (These are the folks who invented the internet, and related to the folks who just tested a hypersonic plane that could theoretically fly from London to Sydney in 12 minutes. It crashed.) They're also the folks behind the prediction project I wrote about a few weeks ago. This is why I was excited to see that the Dept. of Education just announced that they're launching "ARPA-ED," which is supposed to do for public education what DARPA did for defense and the rest of the world (think GPS, the internet, robots, etc). According to the press release, examples of projects they'll pursue include:

• Digital tutors that are as effective as people


• Classes that improve as more students take them -- like how NetFlix's recommendations improve over time


• Educational software as compelling as the next videogame.

This is Part I of II: What Innovation Really Means, a.k.a. How the Department of Education F*cked Up the $650MM Investing in Innovation Program.

I really liked this good.is article about "How Obama's Education Grants Hinder True Innovation." The article focuses on the i3 grant program, which stands for "Investing in Innovation." It was a $650MM program last year, and I spent a bucketload of time working on College Forward's competitive but ultimately unsuccessful application.

As the article explains:

[A] funny thing happened on the way to innovation. When the first multimillion-dollar grants were awarded last year, they went to some of the country’s most established education nonprofits—to allow them to keep doing pretty much what they had been doing. For example, the two largest prizes, $50 million each, went to the KIPP Foundation (one of the most established charter school networks) and Teach for America to expand their famously well-oiled human capital machines. Smaller “development” grants of $3 million to $5 million each helped school districts bulk up their arts programming or data analysis.

What wasn’t funded? Many programs that were truly innovative, according to a report released last month by Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit group that pushes for school improvements to aid low-income students.

Despite their early successes, innovation prizes were firmly supplanted by direct grants. Grants, unlike prizes, are a powerful tool of patronage. Prizes, in contrast, are open to anyone who produces results. That makes them intrinsically threatening to the establishment.

This is a very cool science project that intends to learn more about individual and group forecasting -- think Intrade's Prediction Market, or "the wisdom of the crowd."

It's called the Good Judgment Project, and they're looking for college-educated participants to, basically, make a series of predictions over the next several years. They'll then take your predictions, and 1) provide feedback about your individual prediction skills, and 2) aggregate everyone's predictions, and mine the data to learn more about how individuals and groups make predictions about national security, economic affairs, and so forth.

You can sign up here. (I did.) In addition to contributing to this cool project, they're offering $150 annual honorariums to folks who fulfill all the requirements.

The Good Judgment Project is one of five teams working on behalf of IARPA, a deep-science government agency that does very futuristic and very cool work on behalf of the NSA, CIA, and so forth. Which is another way of saying that this is some cool shit.  The purpose of this particular project is "the development of advanced techniques that elicit, weight, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts" and "to dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision, and timeliness of forecasts for a broad range of event types".

Here are some details about the Good Judgment Project, with more posted below the fold:

Despite its importance in modern life, forecasting remains (ironically) unpredictable. Who is a good forecaster? How do you make people better forecasters? Are there processes or technologies that can improve the ability of governments, companies, and other institutions to perceive and act on trends and threats? Nobody really knows.

The goal of the Good Judgment Project is to answer these questions. We will systematically compare the effectiveness of different training methods (general education, probabilistic-reasoning training, divergent-thinking training) and forecasting tools (low- and high-information opinion-polls, prediction market, and process-focused tools) in accurately forecasting future events. We also will investigate how different combinations of training and forecasting work together. Finally, we will explore how to more effectively communicate forecasts in ways that avoid overwhelming audiences with technical detail or oversimplifying difficult decisions.



Over the course of each year, forecasters will have an opportunity to respond to 100 questions, each requiring a separate prediction, such as “How many countries in the Euro zone will default on bonds in 2011?” or “Will Southern Sudan become an independent country in 2011?” Researchers from the Good Judgment Project will look for the best ways to combine these individual forecasts to yield the most accurate “collective wisdom” results.  Participants also will receive feedback on their individual results.

All training and forecasting will be done online. Forecasters’ identities will not be made public; however, successful forecasters will have the option to publicize their own track records.

The internet has been churning out some gems lately:

First, this awesome video of the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, crushing a Mercedes with a tank because it was parked in a bike lane. I could see Rick Perry doing something like this, except he'd probably crush a tree, immigrant, or branch of Planned Parenthood.

Second, this video of Kevin Durant going crazy at Rucker Park. I love that NBA stars go play in rec leagues over the summer, though apparently he's not getting much in the way of competition. Must be fun, though.

Finally, these two excellent stories about the "University of Northern Virginia." The first, which is pretty boring and technical, describes how the "university" was recently raided by Homeland Security officials as they're basically unaccredited and pretty clearly exploiting technical loopholes to enroll thousands of foreign students from South Asia. But somehow the first story neglected to mention that the Chancellor of UNV's runs a sex-dungeon out of his basement in suburban Northern Virginia. Thank you, Gawker, for getting to the heart of the story here. In case you've never been to a sex dungeon, there are some pretty creepy photos if you click through the link.

I saw Limitless on DVD last night, and it was a terrible movie. Dumb plot, not well acted, annoying CGI animations... not good. Which was unfortunate because the concept Limitless addresses -- using drugs/technology to supplement human ability -- is an interesting, important, and relevant idea that deserves much better treatment.

Just a few days ago, I read Rahul Parik's Salon article about the movie, and about how we are likely moving towards a broader embrace of brain-enhancing drugs:

[W]hat if, for example, your child needs a lifesaving but risky and complex 15-hour surgery? Wouldn't you want that doctor to be as alert as possible throughout the procedure, even if that meant using Provigil or another cognitive-enhancer? Or what if your son is on the ground in Afghanistan? Wouldn't you want him to be able to take a dose of Ritalin before going on patrol, so he’s sharp and ready to defend himself?

But regardless of your personal feelings on that matter, our ability to innovate will continue to challenge our sense of morality. We can't simply pretend that these drugs don't exist.

Technically, you're already a cyborg. If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don't protest that your cellphone isn't part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don't give me that "It's not attached to me" argument. You're already a cyborg. Deal with it.

My third favorite member of the Wu Tang Clan, RZA (aka Bobby Digital, The Scientist, The Rzarector, Prince Hakeem, and so forth) just unveiled a new Wu Tang-branded set of headphones that are called "Chambers" and have flashing LED lights that are timed to whatever you're listening to.

Apparently this will be at least the fourth entry into an increasingly crowded market for rapper-endorsed headphones (think Dr. Dre). But it's a good reminder that Wu Tang invented, and perfected, the now-common "kitchen sink" business model that accounts for much of the fortunes of Dr. Dre (headphones, Dr. Pepper, etc), 50 Cent (VitaminWater... wtf?), and plenty of others.

The foundation of Wu Tang's business model, if you want to call it that, was their unique contract structure: the Wu Tang Clan had a single contract with a record label as a conglomeration of rappers, but that contract specifically allowed each of the nine Wu Tang members to have solo contracts with different labels; in some respect, the whole point of the Wu Tang conglomeration was to elevate the solo careers of each member. And the plan totally worked: RZA, GZA, Method Man, ODB, Ghostface Killa, and Raekwon went on to successful solo careers. And some of their solo albums were just as critically acclaimed (if not more so) than the original Wu Tang albums.

But what's so fun about Wu Tang is the extent to which they embraced the diversity of their approach to commercializing the Wu Tang brand:

• Before there was Rocawear or Sean John there was Wu Wear


• Wu Tang: Shaolin Style, a video game


• A documentary


• A "manual"


• A $500 Ghostface Killa doll that has an actual 14K chain, Swarovski crystal, and a 1-in-500 chance to hang out with Ghost


• These sweet shades


• Coffee mugs... even though RZA told Bill Murray that "caffeine can cause serious delirium"

Well, this doesn't sound good:

One of the biggest obstacles facing a startup whiskey distiller is time. No matter how quickly you can turn yeast, water, and grains into alcohol, you still need to mature the product in oak barrels to get something you can legally call "whiskey." ...

All this waiting takes money—a lot of it, and all before you've sold your first bottle.... But the allure of producing brown liquor is a strong one, so for the last few years entrepreneurial types have been looking for ways around the time conundrum. Some have used "tea bags" of wood chips to increase the surface area of wood in contact with the liquid. Others use barrels with honeycomb patterns cut along their insides, to increase the surface area. Tuthilltown, in upstate New York, has even experimented with vibrations from bass-heavy music to agitate the aging whiskey, thus increasing the movement of the liquid against the wood. ...

[I]f even a sizable minority of distillers accept shortcuts like this as part of being "craft," then American whiskey as a whole will see its reputation threatened. It's happened before, after all: The sector is only now climbing out of its decades-long purgatory as the bottom-shelf bastard son of Scotch. It was there largely because, after a wave of consolidation, too many owners decided to focus on profits over quality. They had forgotten the maxim of Julian "Pappy" Van Winkle: "We make Fine Bourbon. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always Fine Bourbon." It would be a shame if many craft distillers, in a rush to compete with the big guys, made the same mistake.

Well, this doesn't sound good:

One of the biggest obstacles facing a startup whiskey distiller is time. No matter how quickly you can turn yeast, water, and grains into alcohol, you still need to mature the product in oak barrels to get something you can legally call "whiskey." ...

All this waiting takes money—a lot of it, and all before you've sold your first bottle.... But the allure of producing brown liquor is a strong one, so for the last few years entrepreneurial types have been looking for ways around the time conundrum. Some have used "tea bags" of wood chips to increase the surface area of wood in contact with the liquid. Others use barrels with honeycomb patterns cut along their insides, to increase the surface area. Tuthilltown, in upstate New York, has even experimented with vibrations from bass-heavy music to agitate the aging whiskey, thus increasing the movement of the liquid against the wood. ...

[I]f even a sizable minority of distillers accept shortcuts like this as part of being "craft," then American whiskey as a whole will see its reputation threatened. It's happened before, after all: The sector is only now climbing out of its decades-long purgatory as the bottom-shelf bastard son of Scotch. It was there largely because, after a wave of consolidation, too many owners decided to focus on profits over quality. They had forgotten the maxim of Julian "Pappy" Van Winkle: "We make Fine Bourbon. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always Fine Bourbon." It would be a shame if many craft distillers, in a rush to compete with the big guys, made the same mistake.

I have a relationship with Chipotle that borders on insane. While I eat there infrequently these days, I used to be a regular. (My friend TSchu once at a Chipotle burrito for, I believe, 42 consecutive days.) When I finished high school, my parents gave me one share of Chipotle stock as a graduation present, which I still own. So as a co-owner, I feel obligated to defend Chipotle when people lob idiotic attacks at the company on highly influential blogs:

Glad to see the Dish [a.k.a. Andrew Sullivan] has caught on the burrito scam.  I happen to like Chipotle a lot and I can't understand why they don't offer a healty wrap.  Corn tortillas are much lower calories.  There are even whole wheat tortillas at the grocery store that taste good and are 80 calories.

The shame of this is that we know a double cheese burger is bad, but people don't realize it when these healthy-sounding dishes have so many calories.  And chain restaurants are the worst violators because they know sugar, butter, and lard sell.  Outback Steakhouse, PF Changs, Chipotle can offer unbelievably caloric foods. Check out this list of America's twenty worst foods.  Lots of things with chicken, turkey burgers, fish.  If someone is trying to order healthy in a place like that you really have to make every order a special order, ie hold the mayo, server on wheat toast, no wrap, etc.

Google+: Yes / No / Maybe?

Here's my relatively pathetic profile. My initial feedback is that the "+" at the end is pretty awkward, and makes punctuation difficult.

 

So I had missed this video of an "educated" woman going around the internet until I read the estimable James Fallows' take on it. I agree with everything Fallows writes: gross class-warfare, reflective of higher ed's role in reinforcing privilege, and so forth. But I want to address something different: why NYU is perceived as prestigious.