Issue 34, Spring 2008

William A. McEachern, Editor

Odds and Ends

"The hordes of English majors who fill our classes might think twice if they knew that economics and mathematics -- with their emphasis on problem-solving -- are the best preparation for a career in law. Flowery prose is seldom valued by an overburdened judiciary." —Cameron Stracher, publisher of the New York Law School Law Review and co-director of the Program in Law & Journalism

Quotes from Alan Greenspan's Memoir, The Age of Turbulence

"Economics appealed to me right from the start: I was enthralled by supply and demand curves, the idea of market equilibrium, and the evolution of international trade." (p. 29)

"For one thing, he [a writer for Fortune magazine] knew how to write clearly in short, declarative sentences. He tried to teach me to do the same and almost succeeded; it was a skill I had to unlearn as chairman of the Fed." (p. 43)

"Business economists are not exactly party animals." (p. 81)

"Ending the course of monetary antibiotics too soon risks the reemergence of the infection of inflation." (p. 156)

"To be involved in the analysis of the world's most vibrant economy, then be able to apply that analysis to decisions and have feedback from the real world—I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than serve as Fed chairman." (pp. 202-203)

"I identified early in my professional career competition as the primary driver of economic growth and standards of living in the United States. In moving to a global context decades later, I was required to alter my perspective very little." (p. 249)

"Teaching, Thinking, and Learning" References
Bartsch, Robert A. and Cobern, Kristi M. (2003). Effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations in lectures. Computers & Education, 41, 77-86.
Bligh, Donald A. (2000). What's the use of lectures? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Cull, W. (2000). Untangling the benefits of multiple study opportunities and repeated testing for cued recall. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 215-235.
Glover, J. A. (1989). The "testing" phenomenon: Not gone but nearly forgotten. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81, 392-399.
Jamet, Eric, and Le Bohec, Olivier. (2007). The effect of redundant text in multimedia instruction. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32, 588-598.
Mannes, S.M., and Kintsch, W. (1987). Knowledge organization and text organization. Cognition and Instruction, 4, 91-115.
Mayer, Richard E., and Roxana Moreno. (2003). Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.
Rea, C.P., & Modigliani, V. (1985). The effect of expanded versus massed practice on the retention of multiplication facts and spelling lists. Human Learning, 4, 11-18.
Simon, Herbert. (1980). Cognitive science: the newest science of the artificial. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 4, 33-46.
Sosin, Kim et al. (2004). Efficiency in the use of technology in economic education: Some preliminary results. American Economic Review, 94, 253-258.
Stern, Elsbeth et al. (2003). Improving cross-content transfer in text processing by means of active graphical representation, Learning and Instruction, 13, 191-203.

For helpful comments on a draft of this issue, I thank Sarah Greber, Dennis Heffley, Charles Martie, Stephen Miller, and Dave Shaut.

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