The Problem with American Politicians Being Lawyers

The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or naA tional level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to thrive within it. One problem we have today, though, is that so many American pobliticians don't seem to have a clue about the flat world. As venture capitalist John Doerr once remarked to me, "You talk to the leadership in China, andid they are all the engineers, and they g...

 Pattern-Building When Learning a New Word

Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends beyond their defi nition to relating words to the pattern of categorization where they fi t. Students attend to how words relate to other words through a number of types of cat...

 The Collector’s Fallacy and Tsundoku

One of my favorite Japanese words is tsundoku (積ん読). Aside from being a fantastic pun, I think it’s captures our shared problem pretty well: “Tsundoku” is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. Buying books does not equal reading books. We all know that. Yet, so many end up victims of tsundoku anyway. Why? One problem, I think, is that collecting feels like learning. Each time we discover a new productivi...

 Chinese Books Lack an Index

Yet even if some technological fix were to be devised to solve the problem of character entry, the non-alphabetic nature of the writing system still results in other serious and long-standing “invisible” problems. For example, the inclusion of a standard index to books, manuals and reference materials is made orders of magnitude more difficult by the Chinese writing system. The result is that to this day, the vast majority of non-fiction books published in China do not have an index, or a...