It’s a sign of how good computers have gotten that I’m faintly offended whenever Google Translate fails to come up with something even halfway sensible. I mean, translating a blog post from one language to another is a ridiculously difficult problem, and yet they usually do a passable job. It’s only when the vanity search… Continue reading Machine Translation Lets Me Down
Author: Chad Orzel
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 02
I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we’ve had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I’ll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments: I’d like to hear more about your class on… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 02
Links for 2012-01-13
In Praise of Footnotes (Polar Bear Cub/Anything But The Republicans Dept.) « The Inverse Square Blog Exit, pursued by a [actual, live, polar] bear. OCD, Vampires, and Rants, oh my! – Men’s Versus Women’s Poses As mentioned yesterday, I took some inspiration from Jim C Hines’s Striking A Pose blog entry and figured I’d do… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-13
Concussions, Back Problems, and Odd Statistics
Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture: The sickness will be rooted in football’s tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players… Continue reading Concussions, Back Problems, and Odd Statistics
Ask Me Stuff
I’m running a little short on blogging inspiration lately. This is partly just a function of being busy– most of my time is spent frantically working on class prep or child maintenance, and another piece is the result of an inconvenient policy change. But I do feel like I’ve gotten into a bit of a… Continue reading Ask Me Stuff
Links for 2012-01-11
Confessions of a Community College Dean: What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads? The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads? How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? – NYTimes.com he new Colbert… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-11
How to Read a Scientific Paper
My course this term is on time and timekeeping, but is also intended as a general “research methods” class. This was conceived by people in the humanities, where the idea of generic research methods makes a lot more sense than in the sciences (where there’s a lot more specialization by subfield), but I’m going to… Continue reading How to Read a Scientific Paper
Links for 2012-01-10
The Active Class » Blog Archive » Do they do the reading? Helping students prepa… It’s a common complaint: Students don’t read the book before class. It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences. Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real… Continue reading Links for 2012-01-10
In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
In comments to Friday’s snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but… Continue reading In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
Weekend Family Blogging
Lots of people ask how SteelyKid is taking to having a younger sibling. Well, judge for yourself: This is during the Giants-Falcons playoff game this afternoon, but it’s pretty typical. When both SteelyKid and The Pip are home, she’s always running over to give him kisses and hugs and chatter at him. She’s super excited… Continue reading Weekend Family Blogging