Freakonomics Blog » The False Altruism of Alumni Giving

Mellisa Lafsky in her posting The False Altruism of Alumni Giving on the Freakonomics blog mentions an interesting study about how the alumni donation are correlated with the child's age and likelihood of applying to the school. My take on this:

there could be another reason for the increase in alumni contribution which is that as the child's age increase so does the alumnus' too and so does his/her income. Which can directly result in higher disposable incomes which in turn would lead to higher contributions to any charity including donations to college.

My personal thinking in this matter is that I would not donate to my college if I think that could have an impact on my kid's chances of getting an admission. It would be unfair on my part to think so and it would be even more unfair on the part of the college to consider the amount of my donations as helping the cause of my kid. I would like my college to take the best students no matter what their pedigree is and no matter what their parent's contributed to the college.

From Freakonomics Blog

Recently read this post on Freakonomics blog No Price Discrimination at Northwest Airlines.
My own experiences about the service provided by the airlines are similar. The crew at most times gets confused about how to react when they are faced with a situation that is probably not mentioned in their handbook.

So is the quality of air crew going down or is that the passengers are getting more demanding these days?

What happens when a maestro plays the subway?

Recently read this interesting article in the Washington Post. Its about what happened when Washington Post arranged for Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, to bring his $3.5 million violin to a subway stop, open up his case for donations, and see how people respond. The story even shows you hidden video. Before you read the article, take a guess at what you think happened.

One particular piece of the article which caught my attention about why babies love music:

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Which makes me think about my daughter Nandini, she is only a year old and the way she has taken to dancing is really interesting. Niether of her parents are into dancing, her mother does have an ear for the music. Since she learned to walk Nandini has been dancing and has improved on her steps without any external help or teaching. Seems like she is a born dancer. And the moment music starts playing on our radio, she drops what ever she is doing and starts dancing. It is really fun to watch her dance. Its so natural and straight from the heart.

We always used to wonder how she has learned to dance, now we know!!