Overheard Around the Web

Quick links, cheap shots, bon mots:

• More congressional insanity over H-1B visas. These America-first protectionist congressmen make me sick.


• Seth Roberts on how to reform higher education: "My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?"


• Researches map the sexual network of a high school and find that it's actually not a hub-driven system, after all. In other words, sex partners are distributed across the high school fairly equally.


• What facial emotions we study depends on the culture. Fascinating. Telling example: "In the United States the emoticons : ) and : - ) denote a happy face, whereas the emoticons :( or : - ( denote a sad face. However, Japanese tend to use the symbol (^_^) to indicate a happy face, and (;_;) to indicate a sad face."


• Seth Godin takes a whack at trying to sum up college admissions today: "I happen to think that almost all of it is money-driven, insecurity-fueled foolishness, a bogus nexus of lies, fears and greed."


• How to turn a feature of your product into a benefit: keep adding "which means that" after each description of your feature until you arrive at a benefit.