regular
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Why Reform Through Institutional Abolition Won’t Work
From Lawyer, Guns, and Money: So to sum up–being right about policy is often irrelevant unless you have a mass movement of people behind you ready to engage in collective action to see those policies enacted. And I don’t think left neo-liberals often understand that. This is why I get so outraged when, for example,… Continue reading
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Zombie Pseudoscience: 8 Glasses a Day
For those wondering, this blog covers two main things — stuff important to instructional design, and stuff important to my statistical literacy class. Here’s something on the latter… Somewhere, somebody, probably employed by a bottled water company, said we should all get eight glasses of water eight times a day. Coffee doesn’t count, the water… Continue reading
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Sustainability and Innovation
Via Doug Belshaw, this excellent quote from an article on sustainability and innovation: Our experience tells us that it is exactly because American companies are so amazingly innovative, entrepreneurial, and intensely competitive that they can’t find ways to deal with the global challenges. Finding sustainable solutions isn’t about discovering new, ever-more disruptive ideas. It requires… Continue reading
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On the Miliband Loop
I’m actually with Ed on this one. Since, like the reporter, the public apparently has no listening skills, most people fail to realize he directly answers each question quite adequately. Q: Labor thinks you’re saying the strikes are wrong, why aren’t you taking their side? A: I *am* saying the strikes are wrong. And the… Continue reading
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“The literacy rate among college graduates is lower today than it was 15 or 20 year [sic] ago.”
John Stossel talks to former Tobacco Junk Science Guy Richard Vedder about education: “Do kids learn anything at Harvard? People at Harvard tell us they do. … They were bright when they entered Harvard, but do … seniors know more than freshman? The literacy rate among college graduates is lower today than it was 15… Continue reading
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The Shock Doctrine Goes Platinum
To clarify my last post — Record companies are evil have made a series of poor decisions will not be around in their current form in a decade or two Whew. Just had to say that for those that had worried I’d gone over to the dark side. The question isn’t really what direction the… Continue reading
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What if broadband DOESN’T eat everything?
From A.V. Club: The sky is still up and water is still wet, but the truism that the music industry is circling the drain appears—at least for now—to be reversing itself ever-so-slightly. Consequence Of Sound gathers the evidence, beginning with a story from Exclaim noting that album sales in North America are up for the… Continue reading
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Great base rate fallacy explanation
From (what else?) a debunking of one of Gladwell’s heroes: In statistics, you can’t judge the predictive oomph of anything without knowing the population prevalence of the event or condition you’re studying. Here’s a simple way to see how easy it is to fall into what they call, in the field, “base-rate neglect”: Suppose you’re… Continue reading
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The Great Threat to Higher Education is Medical Costs, Not Bubbles
To be clear about my last post, there are some catastrophic economics of higher education down the pike; they just aren’t bubbles. The biggest one? Rising health costs for seniors and the disabled. As health care takes bigger and bigger chunks out of the GDP it is going to crowd out spending on a lot… Continue reading
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The “Tuition Bubble” and Degree Oversupply
There’s a lot of neat stuff in Carnevale and Rose’s The Undereducated American (and if you can’t read the whole thing, the first ten or so pages are essentially a Powerpoint of the findings — they will take you all of two minutes to flip through; you have no excuse). One of my favorite pieces… Continue reading
Hapgood 