Meme - "Cant even eat a cake without being judged smh..
HA
FAT
I was handed this piece of cake today..."
Meme - "AMERICANS WHEN THEIR FAVORITE COLLEGE TEAM LOSES A MEANINGLESS GAME
Noooo! We lost!
My life is ruined!
AMERICANS WHEN THEIR NATIONAL TEAM LOSES THE MOST POPULAR TOURNAMENT IN THE WORLD
Hey our soccer team lost
lol
lmfao"
Will You Ever Go Back to Your Doctor’s Office? - Freakonomics - "LAWRENCE: The take home finding which we think is really important, and, a little bit antithetical is that clinicians who had a higher telemedicine intensity — so, those clinicians who were spending more proportionate time providing telemedicine care — had more hours of work outside of work, than clinicians who were doing relatively less telemedicine. We found that in both what we called the acute pandemic period — so those first couple of months In New York City when the pandemic hit really hard — we found that that was higher than it was in the pre-pandemic period. But then we also found that in subsequent periods of the pandemic, sort of later in the cycle of the pandemic, that clinicians who were doing telemedicine more intensely were still doing more work outside of work.
LAWRENCE: So, it wasn’t like a learning curve where they figured out how to work the system and then were actually more efficient. Something was happening. There may actually be something more inherent in the telemedicine experience that makes it potentially less efficient than any of the current models of care."
Mexican woman killed for her organs after flying 3,000 miles to Peru to meet a man she met online - "Blanca Arellano, 51, flew 3,000 miles from Mexico City to Lima, Peru, to meet 37-year-old Juan Pablo Jesus Villafuerte Pinto, a human medicine and biotechnology student. The two met on a gaming app and had been in an online relationship for several months, so Blanca Arellano boarded a plane to meet him in search of love... a torso without organs was found at the end of a canal that flows into the sea. Investigators quickly found that the canal passes in front of Jose Faustino Sanchez Carrion National University, where Villafuerte is a student. Forensic experts had also determined that the victim's face had been removed by someone experienced with surgical instruments. Traces of Blanca Arellano's blood had also been discovered throughout Villafuerte's apartment. He had also reportedly posted videos of her organs to TikTok, days after her disappearance."
What Happens When a Hospital Closes? - Freakonomics - "not all rural hospital closures are the same. Some closures could be bad, but others could have unexpected benefits for patients, and might even improve the quality of their care...
JENA: Closure of obstetric units doesn’t seem to be associated with any harm to moms and their infants, and may actually be associated with improvements.
WHITE: Rural obstetric units can provide two types of services: prenatal care services and labor and delivery services. So, when a rural obstetric unit closes, women are losing nearby access to both types of these services. So, when we actually look at gestational length, we do see a slight decline in, how many weeks gestation these mothers had. But what’s interesting is that it turns out that this is really just kind of a shift from gestation at 40, 41, 42 weeks to gestation right around 39 weeks. And what we think is happening, at least, is that providers know that these rural hospitals are closing. They know that these women are having to travel much larger distances in order to give birth in a hospital. And so, they’re scheduling inductions right around 39 weeks. An interesting addition to that is that there’s this recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine that randomized, induction at 39 weeks, rather than expectant management. Just kind of waiting. And what they found is this induction at 39 weeks looks like it actually might be beneficial rather than waiting to 40, 41, 42 weeks. And the reason is, one, there’s about a 16 percent decline in C-sections, if you, have a scheduled induction at 39 weeks. And that study also finds small improvements in infant health"
What Can We Do About the Hardest Patients? - Freakonomics - "In the U.S., just five percent of the population accounts for fifty percent of annual healthcare spending"
Doctors Know They Prescribe Too Many Antibiotics. Why Don’t They Stop? - Freakonomics - "LINDER: People are putting a chemical in their body for something where it has no chance of helping and it can hurt them. You can get adverse reactions like rashes. Women can get yeast infections. People very often get diarrhea. And then you can also get more serious complications. There’s a bacterium in our guts called Clostridioides difficile or C. Diff. Somewhat paradoxically, taking an antibiotic kind of kills off all the good bacteria and the C. Diff overgrows, and that can actually be a life-threatening infection caused by antibiotics...
Patients expect them. This is not a knowledge problem. And so, I was not having success in discouraging doctors from using inappropriate antibiotics until I started actually working with behavioral economists and social psychologists, recognizing the contextual and psychological and social and emotional aspects of antibiotic prescribing that lead doctors to inappropriately prescribe antibiotics. All of the reasons to prescribe an antibiotic are right there in the room and emotionally salient and all the reasons to not prescribe an antibiotic, so things like guidelines, an adverse event later — resistance — happen after the visit and often we don’t find out about it. We very much remember the rare patient who gets really angry with us when we didn’t prescribe them antibiotic, and that is an uncomfortable situation for us."
EU throws 'party' in the metaverse - but just six people turn up - "A European Union plan to throw a virtual "party" in the metaverse to engage young people in its policies flopped spectacularly after only six people turned up. The EU Commission’s foreign aid department splashed £332,000 to create the metaverse on which people could log in to a virtual concert to meet people and learn about the bloc. The event, with its own virtual DJs playing music on repeat, was supposed to be so digitally enticing to young people that once they were there the EU would be able to educate them about its development policy... The event’s target audience, according to the European Commission, was 18-35 year olds “who identify as neutral about the EU and are not particularly engaged in political issues”. Brussels unveiled the metaverse back in mid-October but it struggled to gain support from even those working in the EU department which created it. Devex reports that one source from within the European Commission called the special metaverse, “digital garbage.” And the fiasco has drawn scorn from a number of EU watchers. “It’s a travesty that an EU institution feels the need to throw hundreds of thousands of euros behind this nonsense,” Jacob Kirkegaard of the German Marshall Fund told The Telegraph. “Anyone with a brain knows the metaverse is a dud.”"
How Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives - "In May 1963, Rachel Carson appeared before the Department of Commerce and asked for a “Pesticide Commission” to regulate the untethered use of DDT. Ten years later, Carson’s “Pesticide Commission” became the Environmental Protection Agency, which immediately banned DDT. Following America’s lead, support for international use of DDT quickly dried up. Although DDT soon became synonymous with poison, the pesticide was an effective weapon in the fight against an infection that has killed—and continues to kill—more people than any other: malaria. By 1960, due largely to DDT, malaria had been eliminated from eleven countries, including the United States. As malaria rates went down, life expectancies went up; as did crop production, land values, and relative wealth. Probably no country benefited from DDT more than Nepal, where spraying began in 1960. At the time, more than two million Nepalese, mostly children, suffered from malaria. By 1968, the number was reduced to 2,500; and life expectancy increased from 28 to 42 years. After DDT was banned, malaria reemerged across the globe... studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States have since shown that DDT didn’t cause the human diseases Carson had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably one of the safer insect repellents ever invented—far safer than many of the pesticides that have taken its place... In 2006, the World Health Organization reinstated DDT as part of its effort to eradicate malaria. But not before millions of people had died needlessly from the disease."
How the Asian face got its unique characteristics | South China Morning Post - "We decided to take a look at how the skull’s overall bone and flesh structure has shaped characteristics unique to the Asian face"
Can fine-dining Cantonese cuisine survive as old chefs retire, when young ones don’t want to put in the hours? | South China Morning Post - "Eight treasure duck is a labour-intensive dish served in traditional Cantonese restaurants that’s ordered days in advance. First, the duck is marinated overnight in dark soy sauce, spices and Shaoxing wine. The following day, hot oil is ladled over the duck to tighten the skin. Once the bird has cooled, it is stuffed with eight stir-fried ingredients, which can include glutinous rice, diced mushrooms and water chestnuts, lotus seeds, Chinese sausage, chestnuts, dried shrimps, bamboo shoots and dates. Then, the cavity is sealed with a metal skewer. Finally, the duck is cooked in soy-flavoured chicken stock for more than an hour. When sliced open, the aroma of the stuffing mixes with that of the succulent, tender duck. In Hong Kong, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find such labour-intensive Cantonese dishes – others include pork tripe stuffed with chicken and bird’s nest , deep-fried taro cake with smoked duck, and deep-fried whole boneless chicken stuffed with glutinous rice – on restaurant menus. This is partly because of higher labour costs, but also because fewer youngsters are showing an interest in the trade. Veteran chefs well into their sixties are starting to retire or have already hung up their aprons, and with them goes decades of knowledge and experience of cooking traditional dishes that were once hugely popular... Instead of serving complex dishes that take time, many restaurants today prefer to dish up food that can be made as quickly as possible to boost customer turnover. The bottom line makes it hard to justify dishes such as pork lung in almond soup, which needs lungs that have been thoroughly cleaned, and stone-ground almonds... he is enjoying his job, and now knows how to make classic dishes including deboned and stuffed chicken wings and steamed flower crab in Shaoxing wine. “I am very interested in Chinese culinary culture,” Yuen says. “When chefs cook a dish, they use very few ingredients, and add maybe chicken stock or vinegar, whereas in Western cuisine they use lots of herbs and spices to achieve flavour.”... The 32-year-old originally studied architecture before switching to cooking, and even went to Guangzhou, over the border in southern China, to learn vegetable and fruit carving – an art form lost in Hong Kong... Some dishes, he says, including gold coin chicken, have been taken off menus in recent years not because they are time-consuming, but because they are unhealthy. The dish is made using char siu, pork belly fat and chicken liver oil. It has made a nostalgic reappearance in some restaurants"
Meme - "Pastor John Hagee @PastorJohnHagee: "If you are not an eyewitness, you are a false witness (Exodus 20:16). If you didn't see it, you shouldn't be gossipping about it."
The Free Thought Prophet: "That eliminates the Gospels themselves! Thanks!""
Facebook - "The Singaporean vs Malaysian civil service is not just limited to the rate of pothole repair which is visible, but also the speed at which their online services are kept running which is less observed. Singapore corporate registry services are from my experience functional 100%. Even if there were any breakdowns, the duration and frequency is not observable to me. Malaysian corporate registry however... it's been down for 5 days in a row. Inconceivable by Singaporean standards. Pictured is the High Court Building in Kuala Lumpur. You can see the lack of maintenance to the exterior facade, which has drips of stain from rain and mould in all pictures provided by Google. A microcosm of Malaysian inefficiency."
The Professor Who Said “No” to Tenure - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: When I first got to the U. of C., I was struck by how mathematically demanding the requirements were in economics major, and then, to my shock and dismay a couple years after I got there, there was a proposal on the table to even up these mathematical requirements further. And I actually went around and I informally surveyed my colleagues and I asked them how much math they had taken. And roughly half of my colleagues would have taken less math than we were requiring of our undergraduates. So, at the faculty meeting where we were going to vote on adding these extra math classes, I asked why people thought this would be a good idea. And the answer I was given was, “Well, the economics major is too popular at the University of Chicago and it’s too much work for the department administrators and our faculty is too small to cover the classes.” So, the idea was we have to add more essentially useless, but very painful math classes, and that will reduce the attractiveness of the major. Somewhat incredulous, I reminded my colleagues that we were indeed the University of Chicago economics department, and we believed in markets and why not, for instance, deliver an amazing major and charge higher tuitions to the students who wanted to major in economics, and by picking the right price, we could equilibrate supply and demand. And there was a lot of silence in the room. So, I said, “Well, okay, forget about that. If that’s impossible. What about just using a lottery to allocate spots? It wouldn’t be efficient, but it’s still so much better than intentionally make the econ. major bad.” And so, immediately after I made this impassioned speech, we had a faculty vote and I was the only person in the room to vote against adding extra math classes as a requirement. And we indeed created this major that was just a monstrosity designed to drive people away. And that, to me, captures in some very fundamental way what’s one of the things that’s wrong with the modern academic institutions...
[You were] part of a much more radical experiment at Quest University Canada...
HELFAND: A very small group of people were given a blank piece of paper and said, “Let’s design a university from scratch for the 21st century, rather than the 19th-century universities we all live in.” And that was just too tempting to be passed up. So, how did it look different than a normal university? Well, the first problem in my view in universities is departments. So, we have no departments. And we built that into the concrete by making a circular academic building and assigning the offices to faculty by lottery. So, a music professor would sit next to a math professor, would sit next to a poet, would sit next to an economist. And most academics like to learn new things, and so, it ended up with the innumerate music professor and the tone-deaf math professor teaching a course of the mathematics of music together. And modeling learning in the classroom because they were actually learning from each other as they were doing this course. The next thing, of course, is tenure. So, we did not have tenure. We had fixed-term contracts that were renewable and we had a peer-review system. It wasn’t an administrative-review system. And we renewed a lot of contracts, and we didn’t renew some contracts... we were going to do this block system — this one course at a time. So, you take four courses in a term, but you take them in sequence instead of in parallel. It’s transformationally successful in terms of student engagement and what you can get done in a month. So, if I was teaching an astronomy class, well, it’s dark at night, not in the daytime. So, you just have class at night instead of in the daytime and keep them up all night, because they have nothing — no English paper due the next day and no economics problem set to do. They’re just doing one thing at a time. The volcanology class — first day they come to class they don’t get a fat textbook with boldface words they have to memorize. They get a list of equipment they have to bring the next day for winter camping. They go up for two days to the volcano behind the campus and collect samples. They spend the next three days in the high-pressure, high-temperature lab analyzing the samples. And then on Sunday, they fly to Volcano National Park in Hawaii and work with the volcanologists there. And they don’t know all the boldface word definitions, but they know a lot about volcanology. And even a religion class — the Buddhist retreat was open Thursday evenings and the Jewish services were on Saturday mornings, and so they’d just have class when it was relevant to have class. And then we didn’t have departments so the first two years was a core curriculum where everyone took an equal amount of math, science, social science, humanities, arts, and language. And then in the next two years, they defined their own question. They would define a set of more advanced courses they’d need to get the background to answer the question. They had a mandatory two-month or more fieldwork out away from the university doing something in a government office in a N.G.O. in Africa, or a local lab, or something like that. And then they would, in their final year, do this final project. And on the last week of their last year, have to present it to the entire university. Most of them I would say were better than the master’s theses I’ve seen at Columbia. They were just extraordinary because they focused on them for two years, and they were questions that the students themselves were passionate about."
Meme - "Hell is other people"
"I'm other people's hell"
Meme - "*Arya and Gendry* When winter came but you didn't"
Christian Actor Neal McDonough Became Typecast as a Villain To Avoid Doing Kissing or Sex Scenes - "McDonough, who has appeared in the movies “Minority Report” and “Band of Brothers,” refuses to do kissing or sex scenes out of respect for his wife... he refuses to take parts where he would be required to take God’s name in vain"
Government Remains Americans' Top Problem in 2022 - "For the seventh year in the past decade, Americans name dissatisfaction with the government as the nation’s top problem in 2022. An average of 19% of U.S. adults have mentioned some aspect of the government as the most important problem facing the country in Gallup’s 11 measures this year. The government edges out the high cost of living or inflation (16%) and outpaces the economy in general (12%). Further down the list, immigration, unifying the country, COVID-19, race relations and crime each average 4% to 6% of mentions in 2022... After Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Americans’ mentions of Russia as the top U.S. problem jumped from 2% to 9% in March. Although the war continues, mentions of it as the most important problem dropped to 5% in April, and it has not been named by more than 1% of Americans in the latter half of 2022... In the wake of two mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, Americans’ mentions of guns as the most important problem in the country rose to 8% in June. Yet, between August and December, no more than 2% of U.S. adults named it.
The government category has only been unseated from the top spot in Gallup’s list once in the past five years -- in 2020, when COVID-19 surpassed it."
Hating the government is a national religion in the US
Americans Revert to Favoring Reduced Government Role - "Americans have shifted back to favoring a more hands-off approach for government in addressing the nation's problems after a rare endorsement of a more active role last year. Currently, 52% say the government is doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses, while 43% want the government to do more to solve the country's problems... All party groups are less likely now than a year ago to favor a more active government role, but independents' opinions have changed the most"
From 2021
Support for Third U.S. Political Party at High Point - "Sixty-two percent of U.S. adults say the "parties do such a poor job representing the American people that a third party is needed""
Giving It Away - Freakonomics - "ARNOLD: There’s this common discussion amongst traders about what’s your number? What number of wealth do you have to reach in order to retire from the job? Because, again, at some point when you get into it, it’s this amazing rush, and you hang out at night with other traders from the industry. You think about it when you’re by yourself at home, when you’re in the shower, you dream about it. And that’s for a stage. And then I think you start to mature as a trader, and you start to get other interests in life and it becomes more of a job. And so, you start thinking about, “Okay, what am I going to do next? I’m not going to do this until I’m 65 years old. So, what’s my number?” And what I’ve always found was that both for me personally, as well as for everybody I’d ever had this discussion with, was that number changes, right? When you reach that number, it bumps up, and it bumps up again. I think part of this is psychological. Part of this is, people just to increase their desires and their wants, their material wants. And so when you have X, you start thinking about, “Oh, this other guy has Y and that must be so much better.” And then if you get to Y then, “Oh, that guy has Z and look what he’s able to do.” And I think that treadmill of always trying to top that other guy or girl and it ends up leading to unhappiness. It ends up leading to being stuck in a job because of the compensation. And not because you love going into work anymore. But it’s about making money. Now, of course, like, for most people work is about making money, but the people I’m talking about and then in this example, it’s people who have enough money to live the rest of their life. But they’re on that treadmill because something psychological is, “I need more. I need more.” And I had gotten to that point where I had so much that it was ridiculous to say, “I need more.” I had this ability to step back and say, “That’s a stupid fight. It’s a stupid way to live my life. I need to be happy and maximize happiness.”"
Why Bother Searching for Aliens? - Freakonomics - "LEVITT on solar geoengineering: It turns out that whenever these big volcanoes have erupted, the sunsets have been extremely vivid, more vivid than we’re used to. The painting, The Scream, if you’ve ever seen that — in the background has his red sky. It turns out that red sky wasn’t just his imagination. That’s what sunsets looked like at the time because of an enormous volcanic eruption that had happened the previous year. So, I said to David Keith, “Oh, that’s great. Sunsets will be better.” And he actually got prickly and he said, “No, I’m an environmentalist. The best sunset is the one that existed before humankind started messing with it.” So, you can take your choice: Are vivid sunsets better or worse? But they would be more vivid...
TARTER: How do you get to be an older technological civilization? I think that after biological evolution, you get the onset of cultural evolution. And if you’re going to be old and technological and stable, you have to lose the aggressive tendencies that probably helped you get intelligent. And in my mind, there is a possibility that an old technological civilization will, in fact, not be aggressive. The cultural evolution will have changed that tide of biological evolution. And they will be, as Steven Pinker says kinder and gentler than we are now, than we’ve ever been before. And I think, technology well in advance of ours and much older than ours will also be kinder and gentler. But that’s a think. I don’t know that, and neither does Stephen. It’s simply another possibility."
Edward Miguel on Collecting Economic Data by Canoe and Correlating Conflict with Rainfall - Freakonomics - "MIGUEL: First of all, in terms of schooling, there was a sharp reduction in school absenteeism in the schools that received deworming... The second thing that we found, and this is where the externalities come in, is we were able to estimate the effects of the treatment on the health outcomes, even of kids who were not living in or attending these treatment schools. We found that providing deworming drugs in a particular elementary school actually reduced infection levels of kids that lived up to four kilometers away... the kids who received deworming when they’re in elementary school are more likely to go on to secondary school. And actually, those effects are larger for females. The girls who got deworming ended up getting more schooling. When we track them even farther — 10, 15, and 20 years down the line, we see large benefits in terms of labor market earnings. So they earn on average something like 10 to 14 percent more per year, even 20 years later.
LEVITT: Woah. Wow. Okay. So that way, let me stop you there because that’s huge. So you only dewormed these kids two or three times, right?
MIGUEL: For two or three additional years in childhood.
LEVITT: Okay. So that temporary treatment, which you said costs — what did you say? Thirty cents per kid?
MIGUEL: Yes. Per year.
LEVITT: Okay. For a dollar per kid, you did an intervention that led to a 10-percent increase in lifetime income. That sounds crazy, right?...
MIGUEL: So unfortunately, child survival is a big issue in Subsaharan Africa, including in Kenya. And at the start of our study period about 80 kids out of 1,000 would die before age five. Eight percent is really high — an order of magnitude above what we would have in the U.S. Now over time, it’s fallen. Kenya has developed and there’s been improvements in health. What we find is in our sample, there’s a reduction of a quarter in under-five mortality for the kids of people in the treatment group...
In any given year, 20 percent of African countries can be in some form of armed conflict... there’s no clear evidence that more diversity leads to more conflict. Certain studies say if there’s certain alignments of ethnic groups, there could be more, but as a first order, kind of fact, no. It’s not the case that more linguistically, ethnically diverse countries have more conflict. That’s very surprising to people, I think.
LEVITT: It is surprising. How about democracy? Every American is raised to believe that democracy is good and dictatorship is bad. Does this hold true when it comes to armed conflict in Africa?
MIGUEL: There’s a very weak relationship and a lot of democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa revert to autocracy quite quickly. So it’s a kind of unstable situation, in terms of which countries are democratic and there’s no strong smoking gun correlation with conflict.
LEVITT: Okay. How about a country’s colonial history? There’s been tons of research in economics suggesting that the more extractive and ruthless the colonial times, the worse things are today. Is that predictive of more armed conflict?
MIGUEL: No, no strong relationship. These are all the things like everybody looked at, including myself. And we were like, wait, where are the relationships we thought were there?...
In the year after a major drop in rainfall, which is associated with a drought, you could see an increase in conflict risk of something like 50 percent. So going from say, a 20-percent baseline risk of armed conflict up to 30-percent risk."
Clearly the best thing the government can do is get out of the way
So much for blaming colonial borders for African conflict
Why Can’t Baby Boomers and Millennials Just Get Along? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Well, let’s reflect on this from all the perspectives that we can. I love that Jenny ends this question with the musing about her 81-year-old mother, because there’s the recognition there that she may be just as loud, and annoying, and unwise relative to her 81-year-old mother as 20-something-year-olds are to her. What this question also gets at is this ongoing debate, Stephen, between the idea of there being generational differences in personality, and character, and narcissism, and so forth. And the famous finding is that young people are more and more narcissistic —this kind of egocentric, like “I’m the center of the universe, also I know better than you.” That was one of the first high-profile findings that came out. And the reason why we might even speculate about this is that there are questionnaires on narcissism that have been given out and completed from the seventies all the way up to now. And I will say that psychologists have disagreed about how to analyze the data — about which comparisons really are more fairly considered apples to apples. The psychologists on the other side of the debate are like, “No, no, no, no. What is masquerading as these generational differences in narcissism is really a developmental trend.” And, in general, young adults can be a little less wise, a little less able to see the big picture, etc.
DUBNER: Meaning, if we were to consider this question not in 2021, but in 1921, or 1821, or even 821, that theoretically, we may find the same sentiment, because it’s not so much about generational shift as it is about your actual age and stage of development.
DUCKWORTH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, those are the two sides of the debate. And I would say for myself — as a psychologist who’s not directly engaged on either side — I would say that, in general, developmental differences tend to be much larger than generational differences...
The delayed-gratification tasks that Walter Mischel invented where little kids, usually around age four, have a choice between one treat now — say, one marshmallow now — versus a larger amount of the treat later — say, two marshmallows later. That task has been given now for decades. And when you ask people, “Do you think our kids today are better, the same, or worse at delaying gratification compared to kids who grew up decades ago?” Most people put their money on the kids from decades before... people say, when you survey adults, “Oh, people are definitely getting less good at delaying gratification.” And the data are literally exactly the opposite. In other words, little kids today wait longer in the marshmallow task than their counterparts did decades before...
DUBNER: We did this episode a while back on Freakonomics Radio to try to look at the impact of taking notes by longhand — pen and paper, or whatnot — versus by laptop. And this was researched by Pam Mueller and Dan Oppenheimer... for factual questions, there was no difference between the laptop and the longhand note-taking, but for conceptual questions, do you remember the result?
DUCKWORTH: It had this great title. It’s like, “The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” So, yes, longhand in that study was better for the important, key ideas of lecture... When you are in class with a keyboard, you’re a stenographer. You’re just taking down everything in a kind of mindless, you know — And that’s preventing you from doing what you really need to do, which is to sit there and just really think, and synthesize, and draw the connections. And I do think there’s something about having the keyboard in front of you and the fact that we can, frankly, type faster than we can write, that actually leads us down that slippery slope of just, you know, you spend the whole time typing everything the professor says. That article though, by the way, has been since questioned...
There is research suggesting that if you have your laptop in class, which you are likely not using it to take notes, but, in fact, watching a full-length feature film, then you are going to distract your classmate who’s actually trying to pay attention to the extremely boring professor. So, I don’t let my students have laptops in class, not because I worry about their own cognitive retention as much as I really do think it’s distracting. When my husband showed me the photograph of my own students, in my own class, watching YouTube videos and not taking notes — even though it looked, to me, like they were from the other side of the laptop — I just knew right then that there would be this enormous externality problem, because you’re trying to pay attention to Dr. Duckworth and the person next to you is watching Gossip Girl."