Every four years, we experience the summer Olympics.  They formally open today in Beijing, although women’s soccer has already kicked off.  The Olympics are a major media event, one that NBC paid $1 billion for the rights to televise. While the athletes are there to perform at their best and many great athletes will be participating, the side shows are almost as interesting.

Illegal substances or “doping” may appear to be a recent issue, but have actually been around since the 1960 Olympics in Rome when Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen died during his event after injecting a doping agent.  At the same Olympics, American and Soviet weightlifters acknowledged taking anabolic steroids.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson team up on this recently published book.  In Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, Christensen and his co-authors apply sound theory, research, and practicality to a subject that no one wants to tackle: reforming K-12 education in America.

Some of the prescient points that the authors make in the book are:  increasing spending on the wrong items (like more computers) won’t necessarily help improve K-12, blaming the problems solely on the teachers’ unions won’t improve K-12, and unless students and teachers are motivated, problems won’t necessarily get solved.

Read the rest of this entry »

On August 4, 1790, Congress authorized the construction of ten vessels to “enforce tariff and trade laws and to prevent smuggling.”  Organized as the Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard is the oldest continuous seagoing service in the United States.  In 1915, the Revenue Cutter Service was merged with the U.S. Life-Saving Service to become the modern Coast Guard.  In 1939, the Lighthouse Service was transferred to the Coast Guard and in 1946, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation was transferred to the Coast Guard.  In 2003, the U.S.C.G. was made a division of the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Read the rest of this entry »