Links ...

1. The Institute, for many years now, is degenerating into a bureaucratic corporate company well past its sell-by date (think General Motors, Air India), focussed on attracting on huge cash infusions, rather than the liberal centre of learning it was meant to be.

   Can you guess which Institute Prithwiraj is talking about, and what might have been behind that assessment?

2. Alison Gopnik: Your Baby is Smarter than You Think:

   In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.

   Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.

3. Anahad O'Connor in NYTimes: Stress Can Make Allergies Worse:

4. The Onion, America's Finest News Source: Film Adaptation Of 'The Brothers Karamazov' Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book

5. Finally, on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Unintended consequences of reading Ayn Rand to a child at bed time.