Social-Science
Category archives for Social-Science
Nobel Prize Betting Pool
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 27, 2010 It’s that time of year again– the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who’s getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest: Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year’s Nobel Prizes. Anyone who…
Suburban Poll: Real Estate Fliers
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 21, 2010 On my walk with Emmy this morning, I noticed that a house a couple streets over has just gone on the market, and they had one of those “Please take one” boxes on the yard sign, with a bunch of one-page fliers about the house. Even though we have no intention of moving any time…
Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 1, 2010 There’s been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times’s investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using “Value Added Modeling,” which basically looks at how much a student’s scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and…
Grenade Tossing About Grade Inflation
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 27, 2010 Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that’s pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion: We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective…
Science v. Religion: Time to Try (Social) Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 17, 2010 There are lots of reasons why Josh Rosenau is one of the few writers blogging about science-and-religion issues that I still read. This morning’s post on what you ought to do to determine effective approaches is an outstanding example: Rather than looking at national polls, which are crude instruments and can miss shifts within small…
I Write Like a Random Selection of Famous People
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 14, 2010 Via Crooked Timber, there’s a silly web site that lets you put in a chunk of text, and does some sort of statistical analysis of it to determine what famous writer’s prose it most closely resembles. It turns out, I’m kind of hard to categorize. For instance, when I’m writing about Holy Grails, I apparently…
Faculty Evaluation Is Really Complicated
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 17, 2010 There’s a paper in the Journal of Political Economy that has sparked a bunch of discussion. The article, bearing the snappy title “Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors,” looks at the scores of over 10,000 students at the US Air Force Academy over a period of several years, and…
Academic Poll: Talk or Poster?
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 7, 2010 The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday’s silly poll about fears (I love the fact that “Wavefunction Collapse” leads “Monsters from the Id” by one vote at the time of this writing– my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and…
Non-Dorky Poll: Vote Reporting
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 4, 2010 As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here’s a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results: Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey If you’d like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that…
Infuriating Polls
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 26, 2010 I’m currently enjoying the high, thin whistle of an impending deadline, so here are a couple of poll questions about infuriating behaviors to pass the time. The first is about people: Which of these is more infuriating to read/watch/hear?online surveys The second about presentations: Which of these talks is more infuriating to listen to?Market Research…
