Is Going to an Elite School Worth It?

It appears that it may well be:

Among the most cited research on the subject — a paper by economists from the RAND Corporation and Brigham Young and Cornell Universities — found that “strong evidence emerges of a significant economic return to attending an elite private institution, and some evidence suggests this premium has increased over time.” Grouping colleges by the same tiers of selectivity used in a popular college guidebook, Barron’s, the researchers found that alumni of the most selective colleges earned, on average, 40 percent more a year than those who graduated from the least selective public universities, as calculated 10 years after they graduated from high school. Those same researchers found in a separate paper that “attendance at an elite private college significantly increases the probability of attending graduate school, and more specifically graduate school at a major research university.

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The Size of the U.S. Military Footprint

While this map is a few years old (from the Bush Administration), it does show the reach of the U.S. military and its global bases. According to the 

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Department of Defense, there are 46 countries with no U.S. military presence and 156 with American troops.

Click on the image for more detail.

Other quick facts:

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American Prison State

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

 

There are roughly 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in America, more than any country in the world. 
 
The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).
 
Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males.  African-Americans–males and females–make up .6 percent of the entire world’s population, but African-American males–alone–make up 8 percent of the entire world’s prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners
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The Trolley Problem

The philosophical dilemma of the “trolley problem”:

Moral philosophers have long debated under what circumstances it is acceptable to kill and why, for example, we object to killing a patient for their organs, but not to a distribution of resources that funds some drugs rather than others. To understand the debate you need to understand the trolley problem. It was conceived decades ago by two grande dames of philosophy: Philippa Foot of Oxford University (click here to read more about Foot) and Judith Jarvis Thomson of MIT. The core problem involves two thought experiments—call the first “Spur” and the second “Fat Man.”

Read more here.

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Just How Big is Africa?

While the traditional Mercator projection used in maps can provide a distorted sense of Africa’s size, it’s worth noting that the continent is HUGE, equaling the size of the United States, Europe, China, India and Japan combined.

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