Links for 2011-02-23

"I can't say no. People ask me to be a science fair judge. If they have good food, I am there. Of course there are problems with the science fair.

Students tend to focus on non-important things like the materials they used.
There is often a lack of error analysis on any level. Students will take 1 data point and draw conclusions based on this.
Don't get me started on "and so in the end my hypothesis was correct".
But we all want science fairs to work. We want them to be awesome. Change is difficult. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to instead share a science fair project idea with you. I was actually going to do this project myself - but you know ...time...it keeps on ticking. There is only one of me (for now).

How Reliable are Science Fair Judges?
That is the title of my proposed science fair project. If you really insist on have a hypothesis, I guess it would be the sam as the title. Sort of a meta-science fair project, no?"

"This is a pretty classic example of the use of historical analogy as sleight-of-hand, rather than as an investigative tool. Turow, Aiken and Shapiro mean us to understand that copyright was a necessary cause of the possibility of profit that they suggest fueled the work of Shakespeare, and therefore that copyright as we have it today is an equally necessary condition of the continued creation of cultural work. They're undone by their fatal attraction to the iconic name of Shakespeare, however. If that's where they want to start the story, the analogy actually undercuts their case.

The dramatic explosion of entrepreneurial cultural creation that they associate with copyright began two hundred years before the first copyright law. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, made their living without copyright. What came before copyright was the printing press, a new technology that permitted dissemination of printed texts and images on an unprecedented scale, at unprecedented prices."