Dude, where’s my psychohistory?
In a feature story for Nature at the beginning of the month, Laura Spinney writes about the latest generation of academics hoping to quantify historical patterns and make universal claims about “cliodynamics,” as U Conn’s Peter Turchin hopes to call his work. We’ve seen this movie before as quantitative social science history in the 1960s, cliometrics in the […]
Faculty ROI: recalibrating your time before the semester begins
If you’re a faculty member on a standard U.S. academic calendar and anything like me, this week you are thinking at least a little about the new semester. (If you finished all your semester planning and are enjoying the day at the beach, why are you reading my blog right now??) Before the summer and […]
Gerard Robinson leaves the rodeo
Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson has submitted his resignation effective the end of August. The past year would have been hard on anyone in that position, appointed by the state board of education in large part because of pressure by Florida’s bull-in-a-china-shop governor Rick Scott, the same governor who pushed out Eric Smith in spring […]
Methinks he doth contrary too much
Andrew Hacker is back, now flacking the idea that algebra should not be required of high school graduates. ((He is better known as the coauthor of a book critical of the value of college. On to algebra.)) I wrote about general algebra-requirement criticisms in 2006. But to Hacker’s argument: he proposes “citizen statistics,” to which […]
Saving Private @rupertmurdoch
In light of recent scandals, it’s hard not to see this [Amplify announcement] as a bit of image rehabilitation, but we’ll do our best to take it at face value. — Engadget Engadget has the announcement about Amplify all wrong, I think. The press releases about the new News Corp division Amplify (and Wireless Generation) […]