Nickel and Dimed

This is somewhat belated, as it’s no longer active, but I had a bunch of other things to do last week, and never got around to posting about Blog My Wage: HOPE asked Houston City Council member Peter Brown to spend a week living on the wage of a city worker. Council Member Brown took… Continue reading Nickel and Dimed

Physics for Everyone (for Some Value of “Everyone”)

In today’s New York Times Natalie Angier has a nice story about increased interest in physics: Many people wring their hands over the state of science education and point to the appalling performance of America’s students in international science and math competitions. Yet some of the direst noises about our nation’s scientific prospects may be… Continue reading Physics for Everyone (for Some Value of “Everyone”)

Announcing the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program

In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any… Continue reading Announcing the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program

More on Class and Networking

Yesterday’s Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess. There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this morning, though, with Travis Hime… Continue reading More on Class and Networking

Class and Networking

Via Bora, a very interesting essay by Danah Boyd about class divisions in social networking sites: Over the last six months, i’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift… Continue reading Class and Networking

A Modest Proposal

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian: The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the relatively low percentage of Americans pursuing postsecondary education… Continue reading A Modest Proposal

Helping Others Help Themselves

I don’t normally do blog carnival announcements. I’m not really organized enough to remember the deadlines, and most of the carnivals out there don’t interest me all that much. The first edition of a new one has just been posted, though, and it’s definitely worth publicizing: “Help Us Help Ourselves” (or “HUHO,” if you like… Continue reading Helping Others Help Themselves

The Education Gap

The Times last weekend had a big article on the “achievement gap” in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a… Continue reading The Education Gap

Advantage: Blogosphere!

Today’s New York Times has an article on the loss of the middle class in major cities: The Brookings study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the median for each area, found that the percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas had dropped to… Continue reading Advantage: Blogosphere!