Politics
Category archives for Politics
In Which I Am Grumpy About Education
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 9, 2012 In comments to Friday’s snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but…
Shameless Innumeracy
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 6, 2012 On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were…
The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 7, 2011 “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” – Mark Twain In last night’s post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn’t…
Some People Shouldn’t Be Police Officers
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 20, 2011 Including pretty much anybody wearing a helmet in this video from UC-Davis: That’s just disgraceful, all the way around (with the possible exception of the chubby hatless cop in the first part of the video, who appears to be behaving in a more reasonable manner than his armored colleagues). I feel a tiny bit bad…
The Evitability of History
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 2, 2011 As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann’s 1493 (see also this interview at Razib’s place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile…
Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 31, 2011 A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you…
Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 24, 2011 The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of…
Frickin’ Lasers: “Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear”
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 21, 2011 A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it’s with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh. The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that’s been around for a…
It’s a Small World
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 16, 2011 Two “small world” items, involving people I know turning up unexpectedly, doing well for themselves: 1) As mentioned previously, I’ve been thinking a lot about physics education stuff (even though I have other things I ought to be doing), and reading a lot more education-oriented blogs. I was surprised, though, to find a physics-related post…
