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
The NCAA Physics Tournament
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people “predicting” the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question. This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the… Continue reading The NCAA Physics Tournament
Non-Locality Is Created Locally
Scientific American has an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen with the New Scientist-ish headline Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity and the sub-head “Entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. It may also undermine Einstein’s special theory of relativity.” An alternate title for… Continue reading Non-Locality Is Created Locally
What’s Your Name Again?
The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest: How do other teachers remember their students’ names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we’ve been… Continue reading What’s Your Name Again?
Not Your Normal Press Release
EurekAlert offered a press release from the American Physical Society over the weekend that may indicate that someone in the press office has won a round of drinks: The American Physical Society (APS) is elated that the Senate has approved the FYO9 Omnibus Bill, which will allow scientists to continue cutting-edge research that will lead… Continue reading Not Your Normal Press Release
links for 2009-03-16
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder (tags: comics movies literature books avclub) First Lensman (1950), by E.E. âDocâ Smith | Books | A.V. Club "First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come to drive me nuts:… Continue reading links for 2009-03-16