Links for 2010-07-10

“This is Chu’s second such meaty scientific paper in recent months, both published in the journal Nature.
The first, published in February, was following Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory and better measuring how gravity slows time. Both were published while he has been energy secretary, but started long before he took the job in January 2009. A third study is in the pipeline, Chu said.

None of this is the sort of thing Cabinet secretaries usually read, let alone write. For the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it’s how he takes a break from the problems of a devastating oil spill, global warming and high gas prices.

“I just consider it my equivalent of … vegging out in front of the TV,” he told The Associated Press. “

“In one study, described in last month’s New York Times, researcher Gier Jordet looked at a dataset of important international matches and found that when a team needed an immediate goal to win a shootout (and the game), it succeeded 90 percent of the time. But when a team needed a goal simply to tie the shootout, and a miss would mean an immediate loss, it succeeded only 60 percent of the time. (The overall average on penalties was 79 percent, as Jordet and colleagues reported in this paper.) David A. Savage and Benno Torgler found similar results in their own study. (The Savage-Torgler paper doesn’t seem to give a nontechnical interpretation of the numbers, but if I understand their method properly, their findings seem comparable to Jordet’s.)

Still, despite the two studies reaching such similar conclusions, I’m not convinced that penalty kickers choke under pressure.”

“”The Constitution ‘neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,’ ” Tauro opened, a pointed citation of Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the universally discredited 1896 Supreme Court ruling that upheld segregation. He then decimated the Obama Justice Department’s rationale for DoMA as a legitimate effort to preserve the existing social order to buy time for society to digest the controversial idea of same-sex marriage. The anti-miscegenation laws that spread among the states before the Supreme Court struck them down in 1967, he said, did not cause Congress the concern for social order it invoked in defense of DoMA. […] Tauro concluded that DoMA was driven only by animus against gay people. And animus alone is not a legitimate basis for the government to act. “If the Constitution means anything, it does at the very least mean that the Constitution will not abide a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group,” Tauro wrote.”

“The days when alumni eagerly turned to “class notes” sections of alumni magazines to find out about their old friends seem quaint in the era of Facebook. So the question for alumni magazines becomes: How do they stay relevant?

In an effort to answer that question, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education has conducted the first-ever national survey of alumni magazine readers. The results show plenty of good news for the magazines in terms of loyal readers who read every issue, who in fact care about more than class notes — and who link their readership to their connections to alma mater. But the survey also suggests that alumni magazines, long seen as a key part of the way institutions maintain close ties to graduates, are much less popular with younger alumni than with older alumni.”

“The Delta Cost Project has released a new national trends report and cost-comparison tool that provides significant insight into how thousands of the nation’s colleges and universities are spending their resources. The report – Trends in College Spending 1998-2008: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go? What Does It Buy? – examines national college spending and resource trends in the years leading up to the current recession, with implications for what that means for “the new normal” in college spending.

To make spending data more transparent and accessible, the Delta Project has also unveiled a web-based tool, Trends in College Spending (TCS) Online (www.tcs-online.org) that can be used to examine and compare nearly 2,300 public and private non-profit colleges and universities from 2002 to 2008.”

“Anyone who did time with Foucault will immediately think ‘panopticon’ when reading this piece about the anti-cheating technologies at the University of Central Florida. But I remember vividly the frustration as a teacher when students would cheat, and I remember the palpable sense of relief among the better students when I interrupted a cheat in progress.

At least for me, student cheating was a serious morale issue. It made me feel foolish for having poured so much energy into teaching when the students couldn’t even be bothered to try to learn. And I had good students tell me that faculty indifference to obvious cheating bugged them, because it made them feel like dupes for actually doing the work. When the ones who follow the rules feel like suckers, something is fundamentally wrong.”

“What would happen if the earth’s rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level.”