Community Colleges On NBC

Here is a new show from NBC. Some community college folks find this show offensive, but I find it very funny. What thinks you?

The Death of Yearbook

Here is an interesting article on the economist. The article discusses how yearbooks are disappearing at various colleges around the country.

"ONE fixture of college life is rapidly disappearing. Yearbooks, those
beloved annual publications recording the events and people of the academic
year, are suffering from plummeting print-runs, or are even being dropped
altogether, in colleges across the country."

The problem sited in the article are cost of publication and shrinking disposable funds students have left after paying tuition and paying for books. However, the story has one more explanation for the disappearance of the yearbook.

"But the main cause is not the cost so much as the replacement of print
with electronic media by and for the Facebook and MySpace generation. With
social networks linking hundreds of friends and offering digital photographs and
videos the traditional yearbook looks like a bit of a dinosaur. "

They don't know our stories

We are on money and banking now. I was doing my Jimmy Stewart impression from It's a wonderful life to explain that banks take a liquid assets (your deposits) to finance illiquid assets. This is the scene where Jimmy Stewart is explaining to his depositors that their savings are loaned out to their neighbors. "John your deposit is in Joe's barn... Jack your deposits are..."
I quickly realized that nobody knew the story. Nobody in the class had seen this movie. Nobody knew Jimmy Stewart! They did not recognize his pattern of speech. God I feel old!

Media and Economics

I found the following video at
http://voxbaby.blogspot.com/2006/10/beyond-headlines-media-coverage-of_22.html