Understanding the subprime mortgage crisis

Here is a ~45 minute radio show which aired on NPR explaining the road that led us to the subprime mortgage crisis. I found it very informative, check it out.

Listen by clicking here.

Read by clicking here.

An economist's explaination of the current financial crisis

Mike Masnick, a tech blogger/economist who's opinions I (usually) respect, has an posted two informative articles on the current economic crisis. Please go read them:

Take A Deep Breath: Some Perspective On The Financial Crisis

So How Will The Financial Crisis Impact The Wider Economy?

Will Wright on the difference between kids and adults.

Paste Magazine has an interview with Will Wright, the creative mind behind SimCity, the Sims, and Spore.

At one point in the interview they ended up talking about accessibiltiy of a game, and the way that children and adults approach a game. I thought it was really interesting:

Paste Magazine: As an entertainment product, is Spore capable of replicating the processes of science such as experimentation? Do you feel those processes are occurring when people play Spore?

Will Wright: I think they occur in almost any game that's made. If you look at any kid playing a game, what they do is they go up and they grab the controller and they start pushing buttons randomly. They observe the results. They start building a model in their head for how the buttons are mapped. Then they start trying to set high-level goals. They start building a more and more elaborate model in their head of the underlying simulation in our game. And they're doing it purely through the scientific method. They observe data. They craft and experiment and do interactions to test their experiment. They observe their results then they increase the resolution of their model. And that's pretty much exactly what the scientific method is. So I think any kid, almost inherently, knows that and recognizes it as such. If you look at adults, they're really the problem case. Adults generally don't want to touch these things until they know what the rules are. They don't want to fail. Whereas kids are totally comfortable with failure-based learning. And so the kids are the whole time experimenting and actually learning much faster as a result of inherently knowing the scientific method. Whereas adults basically want to know all the rules, they're afraid to press the wrong button, they're afraid to experiment, etc., etc.