Archive for December, 2009
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Merry Christmas!
We spent 6 years in Texas, and it remains a fascinating place to me. I only got to see Robert Earl Keen play once, but he remains one of my favorite singer/songwriters. So it’s nice to see this on YouTube. Merry Christmas, everyone!
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I think I need to learn Ruby
Perhaps this will help. After I’m done with grading and letters of recommendation…
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Something interesting I would never had read if I weren’t on the UM University Senate
A 1915 AAUP statement on Academic Freedom. John Dewey was President of the group then. I don’t know what role, if any, he played in the statement, but it’s thoughtful and very well-written.
Not an issue I’d ever thought much about before.
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Best thing I’ve read today
Different disciplines have their own ways of being stupid. I’ve been intrigued by the ways that economists have of being dumb. I thought that this piece by Andrew Gelman was a very cogent discussion of a prototypical case:
Here’s what he’s responding to:
Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not
all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could
have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging
life.Dubner describes this as making “perfect sense” and as being “so unusual and so valuable.”
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Found in translation
Last summer we saw a very good Japanese movie (“Departures“) about a young man who falls into a job where he prepares dead bodies for funerals. At one point his mentor cooks some food and says something like, “it tastes so good, I hate myself.” The line is later repeated in the movie, and people laugh when he says it.
A Chinese undergraduate working with me saw the movie and really liked it. We were discussing it and I asked about the line (there were Chinese subtitles in her version). She remembered the scene but said the line was, “This food is so good, I can’t resist it.”
I really wonder what the original line was. Did the Chinese translator fix it to make it more normal, or did the English translator have a mordant and morbid sense of humor?
Here are some links that cite what we saw (in the English version):
http://yasminthefilmmaker.blogspot.com/2009/03/achingly-beautiful-film.html
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2009/06/11/f-departures-review.html
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Best take on “21st century skills” I’ve seen
By Craig Jerald in a report by the Center for Public Education:
The need for traditional knowledge and skills in school subjects like
see also a discussion by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post.
math, language arts, and science is not being “displaced” by a new set
of skills; in fact, students who take more advanced math courses and
master higher math skills, for example, will have a distinct advantage
over their peers.
courtesy of Joanne Jacobs.
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Very thoughtful article from Don Norman…
...discussing why ethnographic and design research don’t and won’t produce “breakthrough products.”
Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.
I thought there was one obvious reason that he did not highlight, though, which is that people often don’t know what they want, and so however you ask them, they can’t tell you.
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The university and economic growth
Courtesy of Seth Roberts, this interesting article by Philip Greenspun on the future of universities.
I think the next few years (after the initial stages of grief) will be a very interesting time for big state universities. My current employer, the University of Michigan, has respond in some pretty creative ways to the long downslide in financial support from the state. I think that what we teach students and (particularly) how we teach them will undergo some real changes, and I hope that that ferment will lead to improvements.