Education of a senator
While top colleges have been known to buck their admissions criteria for the wrong reasons, they do on average admit smarter students, and the academic training they provide is easily above average. So it may be instructive to know what percentage of Senators, the most elite of the political brass, have graced the hallowed corridors of top academic institutions, and if at all the proportion attending top colleges varies by party.
Whereas 5 of the 42 Republican senators have attended top colleges (in the top 20), 22 of the 57 Democratic Senators have done the same. The skew in numbers may be due to the fact that New England is home to both top schools and a good many Democratic Senators. But privilege accorded by accident of geography is no less consequential than one afforded by some more equitable regime. As in if people of fundamentally similar caliber are there in Senate in either party, a belief cursory viewing of CSPAN would absolve one off, some due to happenstance of geography have been trained better than others.
Discounting elite education, one may simply want to look at extent to education. There one finds that whereas 73% of the Democratic Senators have an advanced degree, only 64% of Republican Senators have the same. While again it is likely that going to top schools increases admission to good advanced degree programs, thereby making advanced education more attractive perhaps, there again one can conjecture that whatever the reason – some groups of people, due to mere privilege perhaps, have better skills than others.
Why do telephones have numbers?
Unique alphabetical addresses could always be uniquely coded using numbers or translated as signals. However technological limitations meant that such coding wasn’t widely practiced. This meant people were forced to memorize multiple long strings of numbers, a skill most people never prided themselves with, and when forced to learn it, they took to it like fish to land. Freedom from such bondage would surely be welcome by many. And now, unsparing hands of technological change which have made such coding ubiquitous hope to deliver comeuppance to telephone numbers. Providing each phone with an alphabetical ID that maps to its IP address would be one smart way of implementing this change.
Misinformation and Agenda Setting
People actively learn from the environment, though they do so inexpertly. Given an average American consumes over 60 hrs of media each week, one prominent place from they learn is the media. Say if one were to watch a great many crime shows – merely as a result of the great many crime shows on television – one may impute wrongly that crime rate has been increasing. A similar, though more potent, example of the this may be the 70% of Americans who believe breast cancer is the number one reason for female mortality.