links for 2009-02-14

"Sometimes, a day of interacting with the rest of the human race on the roads and streets leaves you convinced that the world would be a much nicer place if most newborn humans were tossed in a burlap sack with some stones and then deposited in the nearest pond.

But here’s the funny thing – there’s the rest, which we tend not to notice. "

"That Johnny Cash thing is the one that’s going to keep the developers of Songsmith awake at night, staring at the ceiling and hoping there’s no afterlife in which they’ll have to answer for what they’ve created."

"Although he isn’t a fraternity brother, Nicholas L. Syrett has immersed himself in the world of Greek history. Syrett, an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado, is interested in much more than pledging and bonding. His new book is The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (University of North Carolina Press). Through fraternities, he writes about definitions of masculinity, evolving ideas about gender, and changes in the way college men identified themselves. Using fraternity records (campus and national), diaries, interviews, and a variety of other sources, Syrett offers a history that is at times sympathetic and at other times critical."

"It’s only when you ask why faculty in many fields don’t just do without textbooks that you realize a bit of what that price is standing in for. (I’ve never used a conventional textbook, and I’d say that’s generally true in a lot of humanities courses.) Compiling a series of reliable and clear readings on the full range of topics covered in a survey course is hard. If you had to write them all yourself, that would be an enormous undertaking. If you’re also putting together problem sets which you intend to use for grading purposes, that’s harder still, because not only do you have to compose those problem sets, you have to change them, or have a very large group of them from which to draw every year. Making up your own textbook, if your pedagogy needs to be based around one, would be a tremendous amount of labor well above and beyond your ordinary responsibilities as a teacher or researcher."

"The truth is that while lots of people in the building “know” who the good teachers are, very few people in the building actually know much about what is going on in anyone’s classroom. If that’s not true in your building, then you already have a pretty good school, and while you should try to improve you should also understand that you can’t get much better than pretty good. If it is true, then the way to improve is to find out what is going on in the classrooms so you can improve it. The teachers who are successful should be observed by those who are less so, and should mentor them; the teachers who are especially successful with particular sub-populations should be assigned to them more often than they currently are."

"Previously, I talked about science fairs. One of the problems is that students don’t really have a good understanding of data analysis. For me, statistical analysis is just something to do with data. It isn’t absolutely true. So, it doesn’t really matter that students use sophisticated tests on their data. The important point is they use some type of test to compare data.

"I just made up some arbitrary data analysis rules. Maybe if students and judges accept something like this, it could really improve science fair projects and judging."

"I thought that it might be fun to have a discussion about "rules to live by" in experimental physics. Here are a few that I think may qualify, and of course I’d appreciate your suggestions for others…."