Inside Higher Ed also features an opinion piece about Princteon’s tuition freeze, following my alma mater’s lead from 2000. While Princeton is larger and may carry more punch in the world of higher education than Williams, I will be very surprised if this decision triggers an onslaught of emulation. Only a tiny number of extraordinarily… Continue reading The Cockeyed Economics of Higher Education
Month: January 2007
Student Evaluations Don’t Mean Much
This is kind of sticking with the “Journal of Unsurprising Results” theme, but Inside Higher Ed today reports on a new study of student evaluations finding, well, more or less what you would expect: One explanation could be that good students are earning good grades, and crediting their good professors for their learning. The Ohio… Continue reading Student Evaluations Don’t Mean Much
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Travis at Arcane Gazebo suggests a game: Six Degrees of Wikipedia Go to Wikipedia. Click the random article link in the sidebar. Open a second random article in another tab. Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second. Lacking other bloggy inspiration,… Continue reading Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Christopher Moore, You Suck [Library of Babel]
Christopher Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is probably my favorite of his books. It is a silly book, about the romance between Tommy Flood, a naive would-be writer from Nebraska, and Jody Stroud, a young woman in San Francisco who finds herself turned into a vampire. It’s an extremely funny book, with adventures involving… Continue reading Christopher Moore, You Suck [Library of Babel]
Bunnies Made of Cheese
The dog is standing at the window, wagging her tail excitedly. I look outside, and the back yard is empty. “What are you looking at?” I ask. “Bunnies made of cheese!,” she says. I look again, and the yard is still empty. “There are no bunnies out there,” I say, “and there are certainly not… Continue reading Bunnies Made of Cheese
Cover Songs That Shouldn’t Be
As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits’s Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his “lounge singer from another planet” treatment. Most notable among these is probably “Sea of Love,” which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by… Continue reading Cover Songs That Shouldn’t Be
Searching for the Higgs Boson
Cosmic Variance finally got themselves an experimentalist, John Conway of CDF, and he hits the ground running with a nice post about the search for the Higgs boson: I’ve been looking for the Higgs boson for almost 20 years. So there I was, on a Saturday morning in December, at CERN as it so happened,… Continue reading Searching for the Higgs Boson
Advanced Concepts: Decoherence
Matt Leifer doesn’t blog all that often, but what he posts is very good. It tends to be extremely high-level stuff about foundational problems in quantum theory, mind, so it’s not for the faint of heart, but if you get into that sort of thing, it’s fascinating. Wednesday’s post on dechoerence is no exception: [L]et… Continue reading Advanced Concepts: Decoherence
Unsurprising Results in Pedagogy
Via Eurekalert, a Florida State press release touting a paper in Science studying techniques used to teach reading. The conclusion won’t surprise anyone who has worked in education: The researchers found that “the efficacy of any particular instructional practice may depend on the skill level of the student. Instructional strategies that help one student may… Continue reading Unsurprising Results in Pedagogy
Physics News Round-Up
I’ve been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I’m going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep,… Continue reading Physics News Round-Up