The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” — Mark Twain In last night’s post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn’t… Continue reading The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right

The Evitability of History

As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann’s 1493 (see also this interview at Razib’s place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile… Continue reading The Evitability of History

Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you… Continue reading Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs

The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of… Continue reading Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs

Frickin’ Lasers: “Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear”

A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it’s with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh. The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that’s been around for a… Continue reading Frickin’ Lasers: “Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear”

It’s a Small World

Two “small world” items, involving people I know turning up unexpectedly, doing well for themselves: 1) As mentioned previously, I’ve been thinking a lot about physics education stuff (even though I have other things I ought to be doing), and reading a lot more education-oriented blogs. I was surprised, though, to find a physics-related post… Continue reading It’s a Small World

The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC: It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society. It’s a nice line, but it doesn’t entirely make sense. When I hear the term “grass-roots movement,” I think of something that… Continue reading The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves