Sharing news and commentary about education, careers, investing, and life.

Sharing news and commentary about education, careers, investing, and life.

Friday, April 11, 2008

On Hiatus

The blog is on hiatus, as our dear readers have probably figured out from the recent lack of posts. We're using the next few months to continue expanding our business (we're currently in Atlanta, GA; Augusta, GA; Boston, MA) and focusing on delivering further profits. Yeah, it's the typical business jargon but it's difficult maintaining a blog and the business has to come first.

We should be on break for a few months. In the meantime, we'll also be brainstorming ideas for how to improve the blog and streamline our operations. If you have any suggestions or general commentary you can always drop us a line

Thanks for reading so far - since we started about a year ago, we've had well over 3,000 hits as well as countless readers through Facebook Notes.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

EI: Do Not Invest Here

You probably should not invest in this company. Not for a reason like flawed logic (if anything, Sham makes many strong points and I like his overall style) but because a great investment idea isn't shared on a public forum like a blog.

If it were a great idea, Sham would be buying up shares and shares of the company, rather than sharing the idea. Even the great Buffett doesn't disclose the companies he's actively investing in... he only discloses after a certain period because it's required by the SEC. But Buffett gets a delay on required disclosure when he's still buying shares of companies... so what this all tells me is that even if Sham is being nice and sharing a good idea, it's definitely not a great idea. And that means you probably shouldn't invest in Ternium Steel.

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Need other advice and news? Read the full blog!

Monday, March 10, 2008

Are Our Brains Wired For Math?

Strong piece from The New Yorker. A quote and then my quick thoughts below:

"Dehaene has spent most of his career plotting the contours of our number sense and puzzling over which aspects of our mathematical ability are innate and which are learned, and how the two systems overlap and affect each other. He has approached the problem from every imaginable angle... And he has weighed the extent to which some languages make numbers more difficult than others. His work raises crucial issues about the way mathematics is taught. In Dehaene’s view, we are all born with an evolutionarily ancient mathematical instinct. To become numerate, children must capitalize on this instinct, but they must also unlearn certain tendencies that were helpful to our primate ancestors but that clash with skills needed today. And some societies are evidently better than others at getting kids to do this. In both France and the United States, mathematics education is often felt to be in a state of crisis. The math skills of American children fare poorly in comparison with those of their peers in countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. Fixing this state of affairs means grappling with the question that has taken up much of Dehaene’s career: What is it about the brain that makes numbers sometimes so easy and sometimes so hard?"

Great points all around. And the point that children must unlearn certain tendencies that were helpful to our primate ancestors but clash with skills needed today is something that I had personally not thought of until this article. Make sure to click through to get to more of Dehaene's interesting research.

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