I’m currently enjoying the high, thin whistle of an impending deadline, so here are a couple of poll questions about infuriating behaviors to pass the time. The first is about people: Which of these is more infuriating to read/watch/hear?online surveys The second about presentations: Which of these talks is more infuriating to listen to?Market Research… Continue reading Infuriating Polls
Category: Social-Science
Academic Poll: How Do You Like Your Interviews?
The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall’s essay about why he didn’t attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for “screening… Continue reading Academic Poll: How Do You Like Your Interviews?
Climate, Weather, and Public Opinion
There’s a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of “If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?” It’s a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that’s making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant. This reminded me of something I’ve wondered… Continue reading Climate, Weather, and Public Opinion
Even in Education, The House Always Wins
Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to “beat the odds”, getting good results with populations that don’t typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are “beating the odds,” let… Continue reading Even in Education, The House Always Wins
Correlation, Causation, and Reputation
I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading an economics paper, specifically the one about academic salaries and reputations mentioned on the Freakonomics blog. There’s a pdf available from that post, if you’d like to read it for yourself. The basic idea is that they looked at the publication records of several hundred full… Continue reading Correlation, Causation, and Reputation
Creepiness Is Contagious
It’s always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn’t make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views. So, for instance, there’s this broadside against ineffective math… Continue reading Creepiness Is Contagious
Can Kids These Days Write?
Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past. This is a little… Continue reading Can Kids These Days Write?
With Polymaths Like These…
It’s hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr’s article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit: The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks–policy or science–the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists… Continue reading With Polymaths Like These…
Notes Toward a Master’s Thesis in Sociology of Higher Education
Somebody should look to see if there’s a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
Nobel Prize Betting Pool
It’s that time of year again, when the Nobel Prizes are announced– the official announcements will be made starting next Monday. And, as usual, people are speculating about who will win, on both an amateur and professional basis. Meanwhile, as we’ve done in the past, I will offer a valuable prize to anyone who predicts… Continue reading Nobel Prize Betting Pool