Society
Category archives for Society
Is College Worth It?
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 17, 2011 As I noted the other day, we’re entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being “back to school” time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college…
Problematic Tigers
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 14, 2011 SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate’s), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing.…
Education Reform Is Slow
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 3, 2011 Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in…
On Multitasking
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 21, 2011 After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of “multitasking”, specifically about whether it’s merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing…
My Feelings on Fracking
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 19, 2011 The New York Times had another article on the environmental impacts of shale gas drilling, which reminded me that I had intended to write something else on the subject after February’s post on the fracking panel at AAAS, but never got around to it. The hook for the article is yet another study showing that…
Wind Power Economics and the Ability to Focus
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 22, 2011 Kevin Drum re-posts a chart on wind power made by Stuart Staniford showing that the number of new wind power plants installed in 2010 was way lower than in 2009 or 2008: This is meant as a starting point for discussion about the big economic issues that might’ve caused this. One of the many, many…
Advertising Reveals Our Culture
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 21, 2011 I’ve been watching a lot of basketball lately, and between the channel-flipping and occasional single-game windows, it has not been possible to use the DVR to avoid seeing commercials. Which means I’ve seen a lot of the current paradigm of advertising in America, which seems to consist of two main modes: Smug and “dickish”: The…
Annual Mis-Reporting on Graduation Rates
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 15, 2011 It’s NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they’ve been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities…
Science Stereotypes and Threats
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 11, 2011 One thing that I thought of while writing yesterday’s mammoth post about scientific thinking and stereotypes was the notion of stereotype threat, the psychological phenomenon where students who are reminded of negative stereotypes right before a test tend to score worse than they do when taking the test without the negative reminder. This is a…
Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 10, 2011 A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it’s generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let’s take another crack at it. While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I’m not really trying…
