"TED is not simply “engaging” & “entertaining” but a specific type of entertainment that is increasingly out of touch & exclusionary.

…appears that whole TED brand induces laughter from many of those skeptical of corporate speak & techno-jargon. At first, I thought I was laughing alone; however, it turns out that lots of other people are equally unimpressed by the current state of TED…I’m not the only one who does not take TED very seriously or worse, views the whole project as suspect…

Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism…

So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery…

As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”"

"Lumping various studies, some of dubious quality, under the umbrella of meta-analysis, and then applying a further manipulation to amplify already questionable methods leads to the graph above.<br />
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And now teachers around the country are getting the graph above shoved under our puppy-dog noses like a soiled newspaper, while some high paid folks intone "Do this and our state scores will rise 45 percentile points."<br />
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Marzano is either stupid or disingenuous, and I doubt he's stupid. Making a case that a particular strategy will raise student scores 45 percentile points is like saying that a particular diet will add 45 years to your life. A lot of people will try the diet, and most will even be better for it. But very few are going to add many years to their lives.<br />
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So, yeah, "identifying differences and similarities" can improve student learning outcomes. But anyone who teaches kids already knows this. Really."

"MacGillis quotes Florida: “We can confer subsidies on places to improve their infrastructure, universities, and core institutions, or quality of life, [but] at the end of the day, people—not industries or even places—should be our biggest concern. We can best help those who are hardest-hit by the crisis, by providing a generous social safety [net], investing in their skills, and when necessary helping them become more mobile and move to where the opportunities are.”<br />
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"What it reminded me of most, sadly, was the episode of The Simpsons, in which Springfield gets a monorail." [Explained.]<br />
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"Though he spends the rest of the book waxing philosophical on motorcycle repair, Crawford does touch on economics from time to time, and he raises some damning points. In essence, he points out that in the race to make our workforce more and more skilled in the “knowledge economy” we have forgotten entirely about the value, both economic and cognitive, of the skilled trades."