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2014 Elections Trend: Anti-incumbent attitudes are near a record high, but there’s very few toss-up races. Why?

Check out the chart above and some of the charts herein, and you could argue that the 2014 midterms have the highest anti-incumbent polling stance in about 22-24 years — seems like 68 percent of those polled are saying they want to… Continue Reading

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Brief thought exercise: what percentage of conversation in a given day is transactional/small talk?

Last night I was in this class, and there were eight full-time faculty members in the class to evaluate some presentations we had done, and prior to the class actually commencing there was pizza and much merriment (and some nerves… Continue Reading

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Ultimate life hacks: flow and making tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge

I had an interview with 3M last year — if you’re not familiar, they invented the Post-It Note — and the interviewer says to me right off the bat, “Well, why do you want to work at 3M?” I wasn’t… Continue Reading

Fun with labor, maps, and statistics: if you want to find a job, move to North Dakota, Nebraska, or Dallas

I love data on jobs and job searching, probably because my own life is a wreck with that stuff right now. I started out looking at unemployment rate by state — to a coastal-bias person, it would seem crazy that the… Continue Reading

If you interview inmates about their decision-making when they were younger, what can you learn?

That’s the idea behind a photo exhibit from Trent Bell (there’s an accompanying video embedded above). Only 12 men volunteered for Bell’s project, which came about when one of his good friends was sentenced to 36 years in jail — and… Continue Reading

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IBM has a food truck debuting March 7 that’s going to reinvent your favorite foods (like burritos) off of cognitive computing

Came across the IBM Tumblr the other day and it’s fairly cool; one thing they’re focusing on now is called “cognitive cooking,” and it’s described in the video above — and also in this video. Essentially, the idea is this:… Continue Reading

14.7 million tweets were sent during the 2014 Oscars, mostly related to Gravity, Jennifer Lawrence, and Ellen’s best selfie of all-time

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap — Ellen DeGeneres (@EllenDeGeneres) March 3, 2014 That shot above — which is pretty cool — did become the most-retweeted photo of all-time eventually: https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/440340258140323842 Overall, during the time… Continue Reading

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Did David Cicarella and John DeStefano mark the future of teachers’ union compromises in New Haven?

I was a teacher for a couple of years, and I’ve stayed close to the education movement ever since — as a volunteer, an observer, and in other capacities. Some of my friends from teaching are now principals or district… Continue Reading