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After picking my daughter Katie up at the airport in Chicago and preparing to drive to Michigan for the holidays, I must admit that I first checked the web to see what the Occupy protestors are doing for the Thanksgiving holidays. Since so many protestors are college students, I wondered if they were headed home and dropping the protests for the weekend? It doesn't look like it! On the Occupy Chicago site I found that they are planning a People’s Parade tomorrow — “as an alternative to the corporate-sponsored event taking place on State Street.”

In the last ten months, I started a long process of getting used to the idea that my Ph.D. work is over. I am (finally) done and I can do nothing more – except to start another Ph.D. on a different topic, maybe. There is no sadness, no regrets, not even the feeling of fighting an addiction; but there is one question repeated over and over again: “Now, that your Ph.D. is done, what will you do next?”

Our family recently attended a symphony concert. It was a matinee performance geared for families, and the sold-out concert hall was packed with moms, dads, grandparents, and squirrelly, dressed-up youngsters all eager to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons on a big screen with live orchestral accompaniment. A large, blank screen hung above the stage where the musicians warmed up and ran through tricky bits.

One of the big trends for 2012 is sure to be educational data and analytics. As the year draws to a close, Knewton, Pearson, Grockit and now EverFi are all making their moves to build learning algorithms and student data models.

In the New York Times this past Sunday, there was a front page article on the inadequacy of law schools in preparing lawyers for the work they will do. The culprit? The faculty write too many law review articles, according to the reporter. If they were teaching (or even practicing law) instead of writing arcane articles they wouldn’t be so out of touch. The journalist cited a law review article on how few law review articles get cited.

Why do are students willingly miss classes, celebrating the canceled class?

I was never much of a batter. I wouldn’t make contact terribly often, and when I did, I only ever hit down the third base line. If you’re a right-handed batter like me, that’s a sign of swinging too early.

Two book recommendations for Thanksgiving 2011 are Robert Frank's The High-Beta Rich and Michael Lewis' Boomerang. These books go nicely as a pair, as the first seeks to explain the consequences of the financialization of wealth and the second follows this trend to its ultimate conclusion (world economic crisis and default). If you were planning on going crazy on Black Friday at Best Buy with your credit card, you might be wiser to download (buy?) these books and stay home reading.