Links for 2012-04-30

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we’ve tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle class is not a […]

Links for 2012-04-28

Learning about science education from the experts: Kids « Boundary Vision By far the best panel on science education I’ve seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.

The Writing Process

9:30am Thursday, Starbucks Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits. 11:15am Thursday, Starbucks Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection. 11:30am Thursday, Union College Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh. 1:30pm […]

Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing

Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that’s where it gets weird: As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According […]

Links for 2012-04-27

Animals Disappointed in your College Performance This ostrich begs to differ with you. Grammar does matter. Boston Review — Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans’ isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic; […]

Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics

I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant, […]

Links for 2012-04-26

What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine I am not a particle! I am a HUMAN BEING!! Studies in Everyday Life: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: My Comments on the Limits to Growth This is my response to the recent post by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy, in which he questions an economist […]