Timely Snow

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!

Perhaps this will help. After I’m done with grading and letters of recommendation…

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

By Craig Jerald in a report by the Center for Public Education:

The need for traditional knowledge and skills in school subjects like
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 [...]

...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 [...]

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 [...]