The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of […]
Month: August 2011
Links for 2011-08-24
To my ultra-rich readers (in the unlikely event I have any) | slacktivist "Those seem to be the options. You can either risk losing a big pile of money for the slim chance of a decent return or you can give up on the idea of a decent return just to avoid losing a big […]
Do You Really Need a Graph for That?
As long as I’m picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with– they found that […]
The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement”
A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau’s Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn’t Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can’t link to, basically taking the view that people are […]
Links for 2011-08-23
‘Infinite Jest’ Imbues Decemberists Video by Michael Schur – NYTimes.com "It is a project that so fully combines Mr. Schur’s favorite book — the first he ever read that he felt was written the way he thought and spoke — and favorite band, he says he would have been crushed if anyone else had gotten […]
On Nymity
The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I’ve been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I’ve never tried to maintain a separate Internet […]
Take A Moment to Remember
A few people last week were linking to this press release from Fermilab, which probably says more about the state of American particle physics than anything else: it’s about an experiment that they expect to be approved in 2012, to break ground in 2013, and start running in 2016. I guess with the Tevatron shutting […]
Links for 2011-08-22
hwrnmnbsol: Michele Bachmann: EXPLAINED "[I]t seems that a great many statements made by Michele Bachmann have the effect of generating bewilderment among a certain class of the population, a class that for brevity’s sake I shall label ‘people who know things’. I have a new theory to help explain some of Michele Bachmann’s statements in […]
Frickin’ Lasers: “Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear”
A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it’s with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh. The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that’s been around for a […]
2011 Hugo Awards: Predictably Meh
As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn’t all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would’ve been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout/ All Clear, a pair of […]