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Link Biscuits: 1.11.09

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 01/11/2010 - 21:04
  • NYTimes, Boulez's Gentler Roar: “I don’t apologize for being on the barricades,” [Boulez] said, recollecting his early days during the late 1940s and early ’50s, when he wrote a notoriously pitiless obituary of Schoenberg, conspicuously booed Stravinsky’s music in Paris in 1945 and declared that any musician who had not experienced, as he infamously put it, “the necessity of dodecaphonic music” was “useless” because he is “irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.” “Like a lion that had been flayed alive,” was Messiaen’s description of the young Mr. Boulez. “You never get results if you aren’t fighting,” Mr. Boulez now says. “I understand better other points of view, although I still may fight against them.” Mr. Barenboim phrased it another way when we talked one recent afternoon: “What makes Pierre a towering modernistic figure is that he has managed in his life to move between revolutionary moments and evolutionary moments. When revolution was necessary, he was there, courageously, to lead it.""
  • NY Times, Multicultural Critical Theory. At B School?: ""A decade ago, Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had an epiphany. The leadership at his son’s elementary school had asked him to meet with its retiring principal to figure out how it could replicate her success. He discovered that the principal thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy — the same approach taken by the managing partner of a successful international law firm in town. “The ‘Eureka’ moment was when I could draw a data point between a hotshot, investment bank-oriented star lawyer and an elementary school principal,” Mr. Martin recalls. “I thought: ‘Holy smokes. In completely different situations, these people are thinking in very similar ways, and there may be something special about this pattern of thinking.’” That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.""
  • MDRC, Testing Transitional Jobs and Pre-Employment Services in Philadelphia: "The evaluation uses a rigorous design in which nearly 2,000 long-term and potential long-term welfare (TANF) recipients were assigned at random to TWC [transitional jobs] or STEP [pre-employment services], or to a control group that did not participate in either program. The research team is following all three groups over time using surveys and administrative data. Results for the first 18 months show that: The TWC program group members had significantly higher employment rates and earnings than the control group members, but the difference faded after the first year of follow-up. When earnings from transitional jobs and unsubsidized jobs are combined, the TWC group earned about $1,000 (26 percent) more than the control group, on average, and received significantly less welfare assistance. The earnings gains and welfare reductions largely offset one another, however, leaving the two groups with about the same total income. Recipients who were assigned to the STEP program did not work or earn more, or receive less welfare, than the control group. The results may have been affected by the fact that many people who were assigned to STEP did not participate in the program for long periods."