Links for 2010-05-19

“If you’ve spent significant time on the Davidson College campus the past four years, chances are you’ve at least heard of “the Name Tag Guy.”

Or, less likely, Stephen Pierce.

They are one. Both were among 427 seniors who graduated during the college’s 173rd commencement Sunday – Pierce pinning to his gown the same paper name tag he was given on his first day of freshman orientation in 2006.”

“Now, XENON100 has responded with yet another preprint defending its analysis and claiming that it has “properly taken into account the uncertainty” in the low-energy response.

I can’t wait for the next preprint in this dark-matter “he said, she said”!”

“Now, as to my actual data management plan, here is how I plan to deal with research data in the future.

I will store all data on at least one, and possibly up to 50, hard drives in my lab. The directory structure will be custom, not self-explanatory, and in no way documented or described. Students working with the data will be encouraged to make their own copies and modify them as they please, in order to ensure that no one can ever figure out what the actual real raw data is.

Backups will rarely, if ever, be done.”

“Grading certainly has its problems, and I’ve never met a teacher who enjoyed it. But just as Winston Churchill described democracy as “the worst form of government” except for all the others, so too with grading.

Let me put it more directly. I think avoiding grading (or some comparable form of rigorous evaluation by the instructor) shirks necessary responsibility, avoids necessary comparison, and puts the humanities at even greater risk of bring branded “soft” than they already face.”

“This summer, the university’s College of Letters and Science — home to three quarters of Berkeley’s 25,000 undergraduates — will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.

Like so many other institutions, the college usually asks students to read a specific book or watch an assigned movie in the weeks before classes start, to inform discussion during orientation and throughout the fall. But a reading assignment didn’t make sense for something as cutting-edge and personalized as genetic analysis.”

“At the behest of his good friend Shel Silverstein, Coe decided to record two albums of X-rated joke songs (1978’s Nothing Sacred and 1982’s Underground Album) awash in racial epithets, profanity, and lyrics designed to offend just about everyone. It’s strange to think of Silverstein, a prolific country songwriter, poet, and famed children’s book author, perhaps best known for writing The Giving Tree, as the demon on Coe’s shoulder whispering sinister advice into his ear.”