Idle Question of the Day "Exactly what bad consequences would follow if laws were passed by the relevant countries rendering credit default swap contracts void henceforth? (That is, canceling all the outstanding wagers because the bookies went bust.) " (tags: blogs politics economics social-science business) Basketball news: No, I don’t think that it’s better to… Continue reading links for 2009-03-19
Month: March 2009
Teams Who Are Ahead Win More Frequently
Over at the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph: Explained by Wolfers thusly: The first… Continue reading Teams Who Are Ahead Win More Frequently
Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too… 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that… Continue reading Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
Yesterday’s bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the “Why Does Excel Suck So Much?” post I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we’re more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the… Continue reading Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
(Wis)Con or Bust
In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They’re auctioning off a lot of interesting… Continue reading (Wis)Con or Bust
links for 2009-03-18
bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home – Inside Higher Ed "[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of âEmpty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Compositionâs Self-Representation in National Arenas.â In the discussion, participants differed on how much of a… Continue reading links for 2009-03-18
Class and College
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education: Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn’t really sleep on the plane, so it’s still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one reason why we try to get everyone to go… Continue reading Class and College
The Higgs Boson: Still Not Here
I was busy with other stuff when this hit the blogs, but I did want to at least comment in passing on Fermilab’s announcement that it still hasn’t found the Higgs Boson. Detailed commentary is available from Tommaso Dorigo and John Conway. If you’re not a physicist, or even just not a particle physicist, it… Continue reading The Higgs Boson: Still Not Here
The Confusing Display of Quantitative Information
Nobody is ever going to mistake me for Edward Tufte, but whenever I run across a chart like this one: (from Matt Yglesias, who got it from Justin Fox where it was merely one of many equally horrible plots), I find myself distracted from the actual point of the graph by the awfulness of the… Continue reading The Confusing Display of Quantitative Information
links for 2009-03-17
The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room  "Back when I was in college, there wasn’t a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I… Continue reading links for 2009-03-17