Timely Snow

Apropos the winter weather, and thanks to George Rosenwald:

“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks [...]

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 [...]

This was a somewhat odd article contra “interdisciplinarity” by a sociologist at Penn, and this was a more interesting takedown of the original piece. I, particularly from my status as a professor at one of the places cited as drinking deeply from the interdisciplinary Kool-aid, fall somewhere in between.

Before commenting on the article, let me [...]