Category Archives: business

Evidence that you can’t lure entrepreneurs with tax cuts

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Mission: Graduate, ABC Community School Partnership, and Early Childhood Accountability Partnership (ECAP) are putting us on the right track to growth, both short- and long-term.

150 executives surveyed by Endeavor Insight, a research firm that examines how entrepreneurs contribute to job creation and long-term economic growth, said a skilled workforce and high quality of life were the main reasons why they founded their companies where they did; taxes weren’t a significant factor.  This suggests that states that cut taxes and then address the revenue loss by letting their schools, parks, roads, and public safety deteriorate will become less attractive to the kinds of people who found high-growth companies.  (Hat tip to urbanologist Richard Florida for calling attention to the study.)

Rock on Mission: Graduate, ABC Community School Partnership, and Early Childhood Accountability Partnership (ECAP)!

You can read the entire article here.

Edward Snowden: Here’s how we take back the Internet – 2014 TED Talk

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So, if you are looking about for an interesting and timely topic for a social studies, civics, or government class, or just a dinner party, you owe it to yourself to spend 35 minutes watching this TED talk.

Whether you believe Snowden is a traitor, scoundrel, or hero, he speaks about what is perhaps the greatest change agent Spaceship Earth has witnessed in the past 20 years.

He relates the internet’s relationships and impacts – past, present, and future – with the fundamental themes and concepts of: human rights, economic – military – national security, journalism, the Bill of Rights, governance, politics, as well as the necessities for and challenges of the black-budget intel world.

I urge you to take 35 the minutes to watch it and then just imagine the discussions and experiences you may have in your classroom of kids that have only grown up knowing, and will continue growing up with and using, this amazing creation: The Internet – 2014 and beyond.

Watch the talk by clicking here.

Your Job Taught to Machines Puts Half U.S. Work at Risk

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This from recent Bloomberg News

Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?

When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.

“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street LLP.

Full Coverage: Technology and the Economy

Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.

The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

“These transitions have happened before,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. “What’s different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs.”

To read the full article and see the neat graphic, click here.

Civic Hacking: Re-energizing citizenship and Restoring Trust in Government

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Here is a quick summary of Catherine Bracy’s September 2013 TED Talk entitled Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens.

I believe you will want to watch it a couple of times and share it with lots of others.

  • “Hacking”  is collaborative, innovative problem solving
  • Civic Hacking brings 21st a Century tool set to bear on the problems  government and society are facing
  • It encourages and empowers effective citizen participation
  • It re-energizes citizenship and restores trust in government
  • It is a way to create functional apps that serve real people in a user-friendly way

One example towards the end is just sobering.

The Mexico House of Representatives let a 2-year $9.3 million (USD) contract to build a bill-tracking system. Out of frustration and irritation, Mexico City tech-geeks created a contest to create a system in 10 days for a “prize” of $9,300 (USD) (!). They received 173 apps; 5 were presented to the legislature and are still being used; the $9.3 million contract was vacated.

Click here to watch.

 

LEADERSHIP – What Does It Take [TED Talk]

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“Leadership” is the Shyamalan Foundation’s #2 practice, and I’ve blogged and emailed the summary details in the recent past. Here is a TED talk on the subject that both sounds supportive and extends some important examples.

There are many leadership programs available today, from 1-day workshops to corporate training programs. But chances are, these won’t really help. In this clear, candid talk, Roselinde Torres describes 25 years observing truly great leaders at work, and shares the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future.

Roselinde Torres: What it takes to be a great leader –   October 2013, San Francisco

The Heckman Equation – economic development and education

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This article in Businessweek January 20-26, 2013 is a wider public distribution of the concept, problem, and solution early child education speaks to that Governor Martinez spoke of in her State of the State address today. Heckman’s Equation brings hard, observable data into the realms of making public policy.

James Heckman, is a PhD economist at the University of Chicago and views education for 3- and 4-year olds as fix to a current serious market failure.  In terms of economic development, early child education is a hard-nosed investment that pays off in lower social welfare costs, lower teen pregnancy rates, decreased crime rates, and increased tax revenue, as opposed to  spending on prisons, health and adolescent special education remediation.

Through the Heckman Equation, he found that an initial investment in free instruction of $17,758 per child per year in 2006 dollars, yielded between $60 and $300  return on investment (ROI) in state and federal welfare monies, increased tax revenues, and, most significantly, savings in police and court costs. As an economist, he finds this is  a 7% to 10% annual ROI.

So, not only did this turn out to not be a cost, it more than paid for itself in annual ROI in improved human capital to business and society, he also found it consistently beat historical ROI on equity (the stock markets) of around 5.8%.

The data further show that the earlier a child gets help, the better the results continue to be through each stage of education. Literally, the greatest ROI or ‘bang for the buck’ exists in early intervention – early child education, and this effective ROI reduces throughout adolescence.

A big problem arises when kids ought to be in early education programs which most young parents can’t afford. Heckman says, “The accident of birth is a huge, huge imperfection in the (economic) market.”

The good news is, and data show, this is overcome-able through targeted early child education and it appears to be scalable.

As an aside, in a 2011 Heckman lecture, he points out that cognitive testing stressed by NCLB and Race to the Top, only speaks to one dimension of a multidimensional system that includes, at least: integrity, socio-emotional skills, character, collaboration, grit. Yet data strongly indicates these untested characteristics may account for the largest share of human development, effectiveness in life, and contribution to the economy and society. These are the “soft” skills that are so widely reported today to be both in short supply and increasing demand.

Beyond interesting, the data also show these “soft” skills even affect scores on cognitive tests!

Bring 21st Century Into High Schools

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Here’s a quick summary of, and link to, a June USNews article about bringing the 21st Century into the High School classroom.

A recent Gallup research program interviewed 1,014 people ages 18-35 with varying levels of education, asking them to recall their last year of school.

They found that about 1 out of 2  or  2 out of 3 individuals were NOT presented with collaboration, real-world problem solving and critical thinking opportunities in their high school experience.

While students were techno-savvy, only 3 percent had used discussion boards, video conferencing, Skype or other collaborative tools in the classroom.

Students tasked with regularly using these 21st century tools were more likely to say they excelled at their jobs, and that these tools were crucial in today’s workplace.

The Common Core State Standards adopted by most states require teachers to incorporate collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking into their lessons.

Cull current events: Look at what is dominating the news cycle and think about how it can apply to lessons. Use severe weather outbreaks and environmental disasters to illustrate everything from climate patterns to the logistics of coordinating relief efforts. Use the never-ending campaign season to teach students about statistics, social studies, finance and big data.

Tap industry experts: Getting a CEO into a classroom can be a logistical nightmare. Getting them on a Skype call – now that’s another story.

Free online tools can open up a wellspring of opportunity for getting experts in front of students. Educators can set up a call or join one hosted by someone else, using resources such as Skype in the Classroom. Teachers can also turn the tables and have students present a project or pitch an idea to industry leaders,

Read the complete article    here.