Common core is rolling out

In this month and the next, Common Core is rolled out in every public school in the 41 states. Every student from Mississippi to Maine will take classes with more rigorous academic standards and take the nationwide standardized test to evaluate both the students' and teachers' performances. All the students are supposed to be endowed with the capability of critical thinking before going to colleges. If successful, US will still be a hard act to follow in the next few decades. If failed, it may drag further down the confidence of underachieved students.
http://time.com/author/haley-sweetland-edwards-2/

$10M for posting one word "yo"

An app that does nothing but post the word "yo" to a phone is worth $10M. I guess I am a fuddy-duddy but is it really an innovative app or just over-rewarding the inanities on smartphones?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

92% failure rate of new drug development

The recent flap of the plummeting stock price of 基亞生技 raised my attention to the success rate of new drug development. From a report by Bain Consulting in 2003, it showed, in 2000-2002, the failure rate of new drug development was as high as 92% with a whopping $1.7B total cost and only 5% ROI if approved by FDA. The lucrative profit of new blockbuster drug dreamed by any upstart bio-tech company starts to become holy grail nowadays.
http://www.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/cms/Public/rebuilding_big_pharma.pdf

Student Goal Objectives

The students learning in one year can lag behind for as long as 11 months if they are unlucky to stumble across ineffective teachers. Realizing the importance of the teachers' effectiveness, NJ government has introduced SGOs (student goal objectives) for teacher evaluation. Of course, lots of backlash from incumbent teachers, citing the murky evaluations of teachers on subjective goals in SGOs. That being said, does it mean every teacher can run their own course without being evaluated by some criteria? (and leave students to their own devices?)
http://www.nj.gov/education/AchieveNJ/intro/OverviewPPT.pdf

鋪路種豆

After reading an article in Economist, I feel compelled to search an interesting news of "鋪路種豆" in 江蘇泗洪縣. 泗洪縣 bureaucrats had illegally converted farmland into highways. Last month, they all panicked after having heard the upcoming visit of inspectors from central government. Under this antsy situation, they figured out an ingenious remedy: Dumping multitudinous truckloads of soil on the highway and soybeans were planted on it.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/photo/2014-07/27/c_126801918.htm

author of best-selling books in three centuries

Spent almost 4 hours transfixed in front of TV in the last two weeks to watch "Mark Twain", author of best-selling books in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries including his autobiography a few years ago as #1 among Amazon's best-selling books. Still amazed by the appealing writing styles in his best-known books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Never did I realize that Mark Twain is a pen name of Samuel Clemens until watching this TV program.
http://video.pbs.org/program/mark-twain/

Banks are more important than schools

Larry Summers, former secretary of treasury, Harvard President, director of national economic council and nephew of two Nobel Prize laureates, has recently raised public attention of "secular stagnation" in modern economy. However, one comment in the following article from a little girl to Summers probably tugs at readers' heartstrings more than his "secular stagnation". When Summers extolled how important education in government's policy during a school visit, one little girl asked him "Why should any of the students believe you when there is paint chipping off the walls of their classroom and when the first lunch period has to begin at 9:45 a.m. because this school is so overcrowded? There is no chipping paint at any bank. Maybe we think bank is the most important thing.”
http://larrysummers.com/2014/04/11/idle-workerslow-interest-rates-time-to-rebuild-infrastructure/