JPMorgan wants to give people with criminal records a second chance at a good job. The United States is boasting its lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years, but that doesn’t hold true for people with prior convictions. The largest bank in the country said on Monday it wants tolevel the playing field.

“When someone cannot get their foot in the door to compete for a job, it is bad for business and bad for communities that need access to economic opportunity,” said JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon in a press release. The bank said it wants to broaden its pool of potential employees after already hiring some people with a conviction on their record for entry-level jobs, like transaction processing and account servicing.

The United States loses between $78 billion and $87 billion in annual GDP by excluding people who have a criminal record from the workforce, according to the bank. Studies also show that providing education and opportunities also reduces recidivism. “We believe as a firm, that business has an important role to play in building a more inclusive economy,” Heather Higginbottom, president of the newly launched JPMorgan Chase PolicyCenter, told CNN Business.

Financial institutions are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as far as hiring goes. The agency began relaxing the rules last year. JPMorgan has now “banned the box” that asks prospective employees whether they have a criminal record. But there are still plenty of employers requiring the disclosure of prior convictions, and that poses a barrier to entry to the job market for people with a criminal background.

Because of that, the unemployment rate is much higher for Americans with records than for those without. In fact, it’s an estimated 27％ for the roughly five million formerly incarcerated people in the country, according to JPMorgan. That is compared with 3.5％ for the United States as a whole.

A record that is eligible for pardon or to get expunged shouldn’t matter for a job applicant, Higginbottom said. But if you robbed a bank, chances are you’re still not getting hired by JPMorgan. “We’re not lowering our hiring standards,” Higginbottom said.

Last year, 10％ of its hires—2,100 people—had some sort of criminal record, she added. Crimes ranged from disorderly conduct to personal drug possessions and DUI charges. The bank said it will invest some $7 billion in community organizations in cities including Chicago, Detroit and Nashville to support people with a criminal past.

What sort of glass you drink from predicts how fast you drink. “Would you like that in a straight or a jug, sir?” was once a common response to Britishers’ request for a pint in a pub. Like the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels, who argued whether a boiled egg should be opened at the pointed or the rounded end, beer drinkers were adamant that only from their preferred shape of glass did their drinks taste best.

Straight-sided glasses—sometimes with a bulge a little below the lip—have largely won the day. Jugs equipped with handles are now rare. But that is probably because straight glasses are easier for bar staff to collect andstack. The shape of a beer glass does, nevertheless, matter. For a group of researchers at the University of Bristol have shown that it can regulate how quickly someone drinks.

Angela Attwood and her colleagues asked 160 undergraduates—80 women and 80 men—to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out of a flute—a tall narrow wineglass; or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass. To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others were half-full. What Dr. Attwood and her team were really interested in was how quickly the various drinks would be drunk.

The answer was that a full straight glass of beer was polished off in 11 minutes, on average. A full flute, by contrast, was finished off in seven, which was also the amount of time it took to drink a full glass of lemonade, regardless of the type of vessel. If a glass started half-full, however, neither its shape nor its contents mattered. It was drunk in an average of five minutes.

Though beer flutes are not common in British pubs, her observation that the shape of a glass can affect how fast it is drunk from bears investigation. Both health campaigners and breweries would be interested in the results, though they would probably draw opposite conclusions about what is the best-shaped glass in which to serve a bevvy.

Aside from being one of the greatest works of American literature, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick spawned the term “Moby-Dickering”, describing the activity of spending too much time hunting for the meaning in the book’s pursuit of a giant white sperm whale. However, marine biologist Richard J. King has approached the classic very differently in his own book.

King has been rigorous. He studied Melville’s original sources to work out what he probably knew rather than what he wrote, delved into specimen tanks below the Natural History Museum in London, interviewed scientists and took to the seas himself.

Take right whales. How these mammals got their name is clear. “Since it was slow, coastal, and plump with oil, hunters called it the ’right whale’, as it was the best one to chase,” writes King. Today, we know these whales use the baleen plates in their mouths to filter plankton and krill out of the water. But Moby-Dick was published in 1851 and the word “krill” didn’t come into regular usage until the 20th century. In the novel, narrator Ishmael says right whales feed on “brit”. There are clues to suggest he meant krill, but we can’t be sure.

Other details are clearer. Ishmael refers to whales as fish, not mammals, even though he knows they have lungs and warm blood. This is deliberate, says King, because Ishmael “positions the practical hunter’s knowledge of the whalemen above that of the ’ learned naturalists ashore’”.

King updates other aspects too, revealing the surprising intellect of sperm whales, with some learning to dive down to “floss the fish off the long lines” when they hear the sound of commercial boats hauling back the catch.

While King judges Moby-Dick’s scientific accuracy, he also reveals how the book helped raise the profile of sperm whales, opening the door to better protection for them. Yet King also writes that “Melville fed the period fear and contempt for sharks, writing of these fish as a ghastly, fierce and cannibalistic metaphor”. So the novel may also be partly responsible for the widespread, irrational fear of sharks and the deaths of so many of these beautiful predators.

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C-plus in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma. We’re moving to a more competency-based world, where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.

Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery—the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor.

There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of MIT’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the MIT lectures and do the exercises at home. Then in class, the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem-solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent.

We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach.No more. The world of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.

Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on what works, but standing still is not an option.

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” Rick Scott, the Florida governor, once asked. A leader of a prominent Internet company once told me that the firm regards admission to Harvard as a useful proof of talent, but a college education itself as useless. Parents and students themselves are acting on these principles, retreating from the humanities.

I’ve been thinking about this after reading Fareed Zakaria’s smart new book, In Defense of a Liberal Education. Like Mr. Zakaria, I think that the liberal arts teach critical thinking. So, to answer the skeptics, here are my three reasons the humanities enrich our souls and sometimes even our pocketbooks as well.

First, liberal arts equip students with communications and interpersonal skills that are valuable and genuinely rewarded in the labour force, especially when accompanied by technical abilities. “A broad liberal arts education is a key pathway to success in the 21st-century economy,” says Lawrence Katz, a labour economist at Harvard. Professor Katz says that the economic return to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills—excellence at communicating and working with people—with technical skills.

My second reason: We need people conversant with the humanities to help reach wise public policy decisions, even about the sciences. Technology companies must constantly weigh ethical decisions. To weigh these issues, regulators should be informed by first-rate science, but also by first-rate humanism. When the President’s Council on Bioethics issued its report in 2002, “Human Cloning and Human Dignity,” it depends upon the humanities to shape judgments about ethics, limits and values.

Third, wherever our careers lie, much of our happiness depends upon our interactions with those around us, and there’s some evidence that literature nurtures a richer emotional intelligence. Science magazine published five studies indicating that research subjects who read literary fiction did better at assessing the feelings of a person in a photo than those who read nonfiction or popular fiction. Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends. Literature also builds bridges of understanding.

In short, it makes eminent sense to study coding and statistics today, but also history and literature.

“It’s such a simple thing,” said John Spitzer, managing director of equipment standards for the United States Golf Association. “I’m amazed that so many people spend so much time and energy on trying to change it.” The simple thing to which he refers is the humble golf tee, a peg made of wood thatmost of us grab by the handful or buy for a few pennies each, stick in our pockets, and don’t give a second thought to.

The road to the tee began with a Boston-area dentist named George F. Grant, who received a patent in 1899 for “an Improvement in Golf-Tees.” Grant’s tees consisted of a small piece of rubber tubing attached to a tapered wooden peg to be pushed into the ground. The rubber held the ball, and yielded when the club contacted it. He had them produced by a nearby manufacturing concern and gave them out to his friends but never tried to sell or market them.

That fell to William Lowell—another tooth doctor, coincidentally—who created the Reddy Tee in 1921. It was a one-piece implement of solid wood, painted red at the top so it could be easily found and cleverly named. He paid Walter Hagen and trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood to endorse and use the device, and it was a commercial success, with more than $100,000 in sales by the time it was patented in 1925.

The introduction of the oversize metal driver in the 1980s led most golfers to adopt longer tees to go along with the larger and higher sweet spot of those clubs. The USGA has banned tees longer than 4 inches, a height that is well past the point of diminishing returns. Even back in the 1960s, Jack Nicklaus understood the value of teeing the ball high, which he explained by saying, “Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.”

Golfers who have fairly steep swings (like me) break a lot of tees. We can only envy the legendary Canadian pro Moe Norman, who could play for weeks with a single tee. When his playing partners asked him how he managed to stripe his drives without dislodging the peg, he answered, “I’m trying to hit the ball, not the tee.” So are we all, Moe. So are we all.