Shack Attack

Incestuous Dexter (He's Married to Deb!)

2010-07-28T21:56:16-07:00

Today I learned that the actors playing Dexter Morgan and his sister Debra are real-life hubbie and wife. On that subject, if you're not watching Dexter, you should be. You can stream the first two seasons from Netflix, and get the others on DVD. I'm in the middle of the third, and it's great.

That is, when I have time to watch it. If I'm lucky, I'll get a couple free nights before school starts to catch up.

The Impact of Kindergarten Teachers on Students' Future Earnings

2010-07-28T21:41:57-07:00

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

via www.nytimes.com

Instapaper Makes Reading Online Content Fun and Easy

2010-07-28T11:54:45-07:00

A clever young man named Marco wrote an awesome little web service called Instapaper. If you ever find an online article you'd like to read, but are annoyed by the text size, the ads, clicking to change pages (each one with more ads), or your inability to pick up the article and go somewhere else, you need this.

Instapaper is really simple:

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Read Later
Whenever you're on an article you want to read later, online or offline, at your leisure, click "read later."
That's it. You can access all of your content at Instapaper.com.

Instapaper syncs between the web and your phone, which is sweet. If I'm reading something on the computer and need to go somewhere, I can keep reading it wherever I am. It uses crazy-ass technology magic to remove all the ads, pictures, and weird formatting from articles, so all you have is beautiful, distraction-free text.

I haven't touched another iPhone app in a while.