Category Archives: Education

Education, Philosophy, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Rewiring Our Brains?

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Is the Internet changing the way we think?

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going–so far as I can tell–but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

It’s anecdotal, but I’ve noticed the same thing. I used to read many more books (and magazines, such as The Economist) than I do now. Almost all of my reading occurs on line, and I am much less able to focus than I used to be. But it’s not clear whether this is an effect of aging, or new habits. More the latter, I suspect.

Education, Media Criticism

Why I Like Reading Blogs

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I hadn’t thought about it before until I saw this post by Kate Woodbury, but it’s because blog posts contain a lot of the words “I” and “me.”

Since “no first-person” inevitably results in bad writing (an overabundance of passive voice; the use of “one” or “student” instead of “I”), I always tell my students, “You may use first-person in my class. In other classes, check with the instructor.”

I never thought much about WHY teachers were telling students this. I vaguely remember someone telling me not to use first-person, and I vaguely remember ignoring that someone; other than that, it didn’t seem like an important issue.

However, I recently discovered at least one reason teachers ban first-person: prevented from using first-person, students will set aside me-centered thinking and use credible evidence; that is, rather than saying, “I think this, thus it is true,” students will write, “According to expert X . . .”

I don’t buy this argument; in fact, I think banning first-person usage ends up doing more damage than good. If the problem is the lack of expert/credible sources in students’ writing, not using first-person doesn’t solve the problem; it just covers it up. After all, a first-person’s account could be more credible than an “expert’s” account. I’d much rather read a student’s personal/eyewitness account of 9/11 than a thousand third-person conspiracy theories.

The key is in the first sentence. Being forced to write in third person often results in stilted, boring prose. Unfortunately, the modern journalistic ethos, probably hammered into them in J-School, is that “objective” news stories must be written third person. This is why good bloggers (even taking away the bias) write far better and more readable pieces, than most conventional journalists. They don’t have to do it with one “I” tied behind their back.

[Via her post on liberal fascism and Calvinism]

Education, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Irony At Epcot

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A travelogue by Lileks:

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything’s hakuna Montana.

Follow the link for the rest of the story.

Education, Space

Encouraging Words

In his Senate testimony, Frederick Tarantino, head of USRA, made the following interesting recommendation:

I also want to bring to the subcommittee’s attention an exciting new way in which university-led experiments with hands-on training could be boosted by NASA involvement. Within the next few years, suborbital commercial vehicles being developed by such companies as Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, and Blue Origin, will provide a unique way to engage scientists and researchers. NASA has already taken the first step by issuing a request for information to help in the formulation of a Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program.

By providing the opportunity for researchers and even undergraduate students to fly into space along with their experiments, not only can new experiments be conducted, but the opportunity can inspire students to engage in the math, science, and engineering. The participatory approach of the personal spaceflight industry means each suborbital launch can be experienced by thousands of people, with young people able to tune in and watch live video from space as their professors and fellow students conduct experiments in real time and experience weightlessness and the life-changing view of the earth from space. The hands-on experience will create a new generation of Principal Investigators who will be prepared to lead the flagship science and human exploration missions, later in their careers.

These new vehicles will provide low-cost access to the space environment for scientific experiments and research. The market rate for these services has already been set by the space tourist market at $100,000-$200,000 per seat, a much lower cost than existing sounding rockets.

We believe the commercial potential here could be energized by the participation of our space agency. USRA requests the subcommittee authorize NASA to follow through on the request for information by establishing the Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program and issuing a NASA Research Announcement soliciting investigations. This will create a university research payloads market for these emerging commercial operations, provide a new way for university researchers to conduct experiments with student involvement and hands-on-training, and bring the involvement of NASA, and its imprimatur, to an exciting new U.S. industry.

Let’s hope that the staffers were paying attention.

Education, Political Commentary

Campus Idiocy

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There were some shots fired at Florida Atlantic University (two or three miles from my house) at a party last night. In what’s obviously a ridiculous and gross overreaction to the Virginia Tech massacre, classes have been cancelled, the entire campus has been locked down, and twenty-five hundred students are now essentially prisoners in their dorms.

How long will this go on? Who knows? It could be days before they find the perp (no one was killed, and one person was wounded, and it’s not even clear that the wound was from the gun), and they may never do so.

Florida is a shall-issue state, but I suspect that the school (like most) foolishly bans guns on campus (which obviously worked so well last night). Unfortunately, despite the fact that all the students are adults, and there’s no reason to think that the shooter has any intention to shoot people on campus, they are being treated like children, deprived of the means to defend themselves, and locked away in their rooms. It’s a continuation of the infantilization of society, and the growth of the nanny state. Obviously, the authorities are worried about being accused of not being sufficiently solicitous of the safety of the students, but apparently they don’t believe that their liberty has any value. They need to understand that they have to have some balance. If I were one of those students, I’d bring suit for false imprisonment.

[Update an hour or so later]

I just heard that the police are “searching Boca Raton” for the gunman. So they’re not restricting their search to campus? I’m only three miles or so from campus. Why haven’t they come down my street and locked us in our houses? He could be anywhere. Why restrict it to campus?

Education, General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Darwin And Hitler

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Derb has some thoughts:

As so often with creationist material, I’m not sure what the point is. Darwin’s great contribution to human knowledge, his theory of the origin of species, is either true, or it’s not. Is David saying: “When taken up by evil people, the theory had evil consequences. Therefore the theory must be false”? Is he asserting, in other words, that a true theory about the world could not possibly have evil consequence, no matter who picked it up and played with it, with no matter how little real understanding? Does David think that true facts cannot possibly be used for malign purposes? If that is what David is asserting, it seems to me an awfully hard proposition to defend. It is a true fact that E = mc2, and the Iranians are right at this moment using that true fact to construct nuclear weapons. If they succeed, and use their weapons for horrible purposes, will that invalidate the Special Theory of Relativity?

If David does not think that Darwin’s explanation for the origin of species is correct, let him give us his reasons; or better yet, an alternative explanation that we can test by observation. That a wicked man invoked Darwin’s name as an excuse to do wicked things tells us nothing, nada, zero, zippo, zilch about the truth content of Darwin’s ideas.

I always have to scratch my head at conservatives who are perfectly comfortable with Adam Smith’s invisible hand when it comes to markets, but can’t get their heads around the concept of emergent properties in the development of life. And of course, the opposite is true for liberalsfascists.

[Evening update]

Jonah Goldberg has more defense of Darwin (and Einstein). Bottom line, with which I agree:

Nazism was reactionary in that it sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. So was Communism. So are all the statist and collectivism isms. The only truly new and radical political revolution is the Lockean one. But, hey, I’ve got a book on all this stuff.

He does indeed.

Education, Political Commentary

Sweeping It Under The Carpet

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I’ve been very disappointed in my alma mater, in its continuing racist efforts to give preferences to students not on the content of their character or quality of their academics, but purely on the color of their skin, not to mention its defiance of the law and Supreme Court rulings against this egregious behavior. It now turns out that, in an ongoing effort to continue to illegally discriminate, it has been withholding data and lying to the courts:

Before the UM clamped down on CIR’s request for data, Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.

According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% — higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM’s heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.

While Judge Lawson now has dismissed the case, the reason probably has less to do with the law and more to do with the what the evidence was starting to show about the real harms of the preferential admissions policies followed for years by the UM and other schools. For the time being, Judge Lawson has sidelined the effort to get a full decade’s worth of data as part of this litigation. But given what even three years worth of data seems to show, schools like Michigan will find it increasingly difficult to keep this data secret. If even the “holistic” use of race makes it difficult for minority students to compete academically, the moral and legal imperative to publicize and analyze this information becomes great.

This has done a real, damaging disservice to the minorities in whose supposed interest these misguided programs were designed. Instead of going to a school better suited to their abilities and succeeding, many of them flunk out in the face of the stiff competition in Ann Arbor or, if they make it through, fail the bar, when they may have been successful lawyers going to a second-tier law school. Of course, I suspect that the response of the geniuses who came up with this scheme would be to insist that they be given additional bar scores for their skin color to level the field…

In any event…

All of this is a far cry from last January when Mary Sue Coleman, Governor Granholm and the rest of the political establishment said they would keep Prop. 2 tied up in legal knots for years. While BAMN’s decision to sue seemed like a good idea last year, it’s a good idea that turned into their worst nightmare. Too bad for them.

Don’t look for any boo hoos from me. This seems like poetic justice.