Here are some articles from the week that I think you should know about:
University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler wrote this column for The New York Times and in it discusses ways in which lotteries can improve civic life. He discusses how musical stairs increased their use by 60% and how a program in New Taipei City gave dog owners the chance to win gold if nuggets if they deposited their pets poop in a special containers, literally turning poop into gold.
Want Your Data to go Viral? Make it Visual
Over on the Duarte blog this week, they discuss a project they did with the Rauch Foundation to increase awareness about their Long Island Index Report They talk about ways to take data and visualize it. Data visualization is an increasingly important field and one that helps filter the tsunami of data that is available.
The “Mathlash” To Silicon Valley’s Move into Education
This article from Fast Company talks about how math teachers are reacting to new channels of education delivery like Khan Academy. Many see this as actually hurting education because it teaches a paint by numbers mentality rather than true knowledge and insight.
Twitter Breaks News of Whitney Houston’s Death 27 Minutes Before Press
This post from Mashable just looks at the viral nature of news today. I’m sure that most of us learned of Whitney Houston’s death from social media, not traditional news sources, and probably within a relatively short time frame of one another. In our digital, viral world news can travel at impressively fast speeds.
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