Jonathan Wai on Muck Rack

Jonathan Wai

Durham
As seen in: CNN, MSN, Business Insider, Color Research & Application, Forbes, HuffPost, The Washington Post, TIME, Yahoo News, Cambridge University Press & Assessment and
Associate Professor of Education Policy and Psychology and 21st Century Chair @UArkansas. scholar.google.com/citations?user=7AA4QGEAAAAJ&hl=en
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There's no getting around facetime with your kids

There's no getting around facetime with your kids

msn.com — Quartz 08/10/2014 Jonathan Wai Soon we will celebrate my son's first birthday. It has been a year of sleepless nights and frustrations, but also a year of many special moments, including a smile meant for me that I will never forget. I had no idea how much time, literally face-to-face, I would end up spending with my son, and how that would change me, psychologically and physically. When he was born, Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect , sent me an excerpt from her book that she hoped would motivate me as a new father.
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Chess Concepts Peter Thiel Used To Become A Billionaire

Chess Concepts Peter Thiel Used To Become A Billionaire

Inc. — Check out how Peter Thiel used classic chess strategy to make money. Advertisement Through notes from Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup class at Stanford University, we have a unique window into the mind of the venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. He's fascinated with human nature, and integrates what he learned from his former career as a chess master into his lectures. Chess is a contained universe: there are only 32 pieces on the board and 64 squares those pieces can occupy. But starting up a company takes much more than raw intellectual ability; it requires what Thiel calls "The Mechanics of Mafia," or the understanding of complex human dynamics.
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Want to Get Smarter? Read Something on This List

Want to Get Smarter? Read Something on This List

www.psychologytoday.com — There's a lot of hope today that playing mindless brain training games will make you smarter. But instead of trying a quick fix, why not read something that will really work out your brain? It may not be easy, but perhaps you'll actually learn something by wrestling with difficult material. Dominic Cummings, at the time special adviser on policy to the education secretary of Britain Michael Gove, argued in Some Thoughts On Education and Political Priorities that "we need an 'Odyssean' education so that a substantial fraction of teenagers, students and adults might understand something of our biggest intellectual and practical problems, and be trained to take effective action."
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8 Simple Strategies to Improve Your Innovation

8 Simple Strategies to Improve Your Innovation

www.psychologytoday.com — Richard Hamming, mathematician at Bell Labs for thirty years, gave a talk before he passed away on the factors that determine why a scientist does or does not make significant contributions. Although his focus was on ideas in science, the wisdom he shared really can be applied to any area where original thought is necessary. Here are the core insights from his talk. 1. Don't Think Your Success Is A Matter of Luck Hamming argues a major roadblock is thinking your success will be mainly about luck. To do first rate work, you have to drop any modesty and say to yourself: "Yes, I would like to do something significant."
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Nine Ways To Become Smarter Than You Think

Nine Ways To Become Smarter Than You Think

www.psychologytoday.com — I recently had the opportunity to talk with the technology journalist Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think . You can read the full conversation here. From that chat, I distilled nine lessons from Clive on how we can improve our thinking, with and without technology. 1. Spend Significant Chunks of Time Offline "I think it's good to spend significant chunks offline. For example, I don't check my email on weekends. This means I'm usually off social media...I'll text a bunch because that's social for me and how I organize social behavior.
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Why We Need The Math Police

Why We Need The Math Police

blogs.edweek.org — By Jonathan Wai and Lou DiGioia Compare these two scenarios. Scenario 1: You've just logged into Facebook and read a post by one of your "friends" that contains the sentence "Your right, I was wrong." Moments later, there are several replies to the post that point out the grammatical error. Your "friend" quickly acknowledges the error, corrects the sentence, and jokingly comments, "You're right to correct me!" Scenario 2: You go out to lunch with a group of friends and when the bill comes, the person to whom the check was handed stares at it blankly.
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Decades of Facebook likes will explain how you became yourself

Decades of Facebook likes will explain how you became yourself

Quartz — The Facebook like button was first released in 2009. As of September of 2013, a total of 1.13 trillion likes had been registered across the earth, according to OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder in his new book Much has been written about how "likes" limit our social interaction or increase our engagement with brands. But these likes have another function, they're becoming a source of data that will eventually tell social scientists more about who we are than what we share.
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The case for starting statistics education in kindergarten

The case for starting statistics education in kindergarten

Quartz — The US appears focused on math education, especially when it comes to curing American innumeracy. Yet we are in an age when enormous new data sources are now available in academia, business, and government. Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications at Facebook, argued that our kids should study "statistics, because the ability to understand data [will] be the most powerful skill in the twenty-first century." Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, noted "I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I'm not kidding."
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If you want to be rich and powerful, majoring in STEM is a good place to start

If you want to be rich and powerful, majoring in STEM is a good place to start

Quartz — The standard narrative today is that science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) education is important because we need more data scientists, engineers, and STEM professionals. But promoting STEM education is critical for another reason: it teaches creative problem solving, which is widely applicable and more necessary than ever today. STEM education is linked to success not only in STEM fields, but in many other disciplines and even among many of the world's most wealthy and powerful people. At the heart of mathematics is pattern recognition and the joy of numerical play.
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One Size Does Not Fit All: The Need for Variety in Learning

One Size Does Not Fit All: The Need for Variety in Learning

KQED — When you want to improve your physical health, you don't have to eat one specific type of food or exercise in a specific way. Rather, you need an appropriate mix of healthy foods and exercise - no one thing is required. Different types of exercise and foods are in some sense interchangeable. What matters is that you get the appropriate dose. Could this common idea from health translate into the world of education? Consider the cases of two hypothetical students, Suzie and Greg. Suzie goes to a summer science camp every year, she gets lost in Wikipedia for hours after school, competes in chess tournaments, and overall is engaged at school.
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Even as a child, Jeff Bezos was a data-obsessed, workaholic genius

Even as a child, Jeff Bezos was a data-obsessed, workaholic genius

Quartz — Brad Stone's The Everything Store tells the story of Jeff Bezos and the rise of Amazon. It also illuminates how childhood personality and ambitions would drive his adult accomplishments, giving us a window into what might be our future. The following string of anecdotes connect the life stories of the boy who would become the man: a spatially-talented inventor, an ambitious space explorer with dreams of saving humanity, and a focused and disciplined workaholic who always believed his work was central to his life. The tinkerer. A three-year-old Bezos would dismantle his crib in a bid for sleeping in a real bed.
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Why We Need To Value Students' Spatial Creativity

Why We Need To Value Students' Spatial Creativity

KQED — At 16, Albert Einstein wrote his first scientific paper titled "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields." This was the result of his famous gedanken experiment in which he visually imagined chasing after a light beam. The insights he gained from this thought experiment led to the development of his theory of special relativity. At 5, Nikola Tesla informed his father that he would harness the power of water. What resulted was his creation of a water-powered egg beater. Tesla, who invented the basis of alternating current (AC) power systems, had the unusual talent to imagine his inventions entirely in his mind before building them.
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