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Brief thought exercise: why do we keep applying business and market principles to the idea of education?

This will be a pretty short post, because if I wrote everything I wanted to write about it, I’d be here for hours and probably get off into a series of meandering sub-points that wouldn’t ultimately benefit anyone. Lest you… Continue Reading

Delaware tips the least (14 percent). Alaska tips the most (over 17 percent). And for cities, Denver tips the most. Fun with studies!

Check out the map above. It’s based on data from Square — more on that in a second — summarized here and here. The data looks at tipping across America, and on the second link, you can see every state… Continue Reading

Timothy Jay Vafeades, the “Vampire Trucker,” apparently kept women as sex slaves in his truck.

This is a fairly f’ed-up story. Here’s a snapshot of what happened: An arrest warrant filed Tuesday in Salt Lake City claims Vafeades kidnapped a 19-year-old female relative who had come from Florida in May 2013 to work with him on… Continue Reading

Here’s the broader lesson in Mercer beating Duke in the first major upset of the 2014 NCAA Tournament

The Mercer team had seven seniors. The four guys with the most points for Mercer — Gollon, Coursey, Hall, and White Jr. — are all seniors. They’ve quite possibly played about 100 games together, and had countless more practices. Duke’s five starters contained one senior… Continue Reading

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Good managers are super rare. 82 percent of manager hires end up being the wrong one. (Whoa.) Here’s why (kinda).

People are staggeringly bad at managing others. Can we fix that? Continue Reading

Starbucks will eventually sell alcohol in about 1,000 stores. And so it begins.

Here’s the corporate version: “Anything that you see happening here is driven by the question: what is the customer looking for?” Starbucks spokesperson Alisha Damodaran told Quartz.“When we think about new product offerings in the stores, we always think about what… Continue Reading

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On Larry Page, dreaming big, and anonymous health care “big data”

Larry Page appeared at the TED 30th Anniversary conference in Vancouver, speaking on stage with Charlie Rose (part of the interview is above, and you can find a deeper transcript here). There are about 127 different headlines you could go… Continue Reading

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Where do low-income residents tend to live together the most? (As well as high-income residents.) Er, San Antonio and Memphis.

Cities have become increasingly economically segregated in the last decade or so, according to various studies (for example, this one). There’s been some pretty substantial discussions about this and what it all means across the Internet by people far more… Continue Reading