October 2011
1 post
The Value of College Is: (a) Growing (b) Flat (c)... →
Millions of people applying to college this fall are grappling with how to write the first sentence of their essay and where to send the first application. Behind these worries, however, is a broader anxiety about not which college to attend, whether to attend at all. Is college worth it, any more?
July 2011
2 posts
Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in... →
“Although is it a man-made domain, cyberspace is now as relevant a domain for DoD activities as the naturally occurring domains of land, sea, air, and space.” - 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review
March 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting...”
– NYT Opinion - Degrees and Dollars
WatchSalman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education
January 2011
1 post
2 tags
What Are You Going to Do With That? →
We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By “What are you going to do,” I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by “that,” I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be...
December 2010
1 post
1 tag
Antakolouthia - Virtual entailment
“There is always an optimal value,” explained the philosopher Gregory Bateson, “beyond which anything is toxic, no matter what: oxygen, sleep, psychotherapy, philosophy.”
The same is true of personality traits. The Stoic philosophers referred to this paradox as “antakolouthia,” or the mutual entailment of the virtues. By this view, no virtue is a virtue by...
November 2010
1 post
1 tag
October 2010
2 posts
1 tag
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Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in... →
Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emergesfrom the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 individuals, working in...
September 2010
2 posts
1 tag
“It takes two to three years to put a new approach into place, and then it’s at...”
– Bill Gates on U.S. education reform
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Welcome to The Layland Notes
One of my lifelong ambitions is to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to pursue happiness. I aspire a world where people lead healthy and productive lives by reaching their highest ambition and fullest potential.
The Layland Notes is where I share my thoughts on some of the issues I’m focused on: education, tobacco-use control, effective economical policy, family homelessness, urban...