Links Dump

What the research says | National Numeracy The Skills for Life survey (2011) measured the numeracy levels of 16 to 65 year-olds in England, finding that: 22% of the population (7.5 million adults) are working at Level 2 or above - roughly equivalent to A*-C at GCSE - compared with 26% (8.1million adults) in 2003. The comparable figures for literacy are 57% of the population (19.3 million adults) in 2011 and 44% (14 million adults) in 2003. What's the matter with white people? - 2012 Elections - Salon.com Both the right and left suddenly have a lot of complaints about white people,…
When There's More To Winning Than Winning : NPR When last we left the NCAA, it was February madness, colleges were jumping conferences, suing each other, coaches were claiming rivals had cheated in recruiting -- the usual nobility of college sports. And then, in the midst of all this, the men's basketball team at Washington College of Chestertown, Md., journeyed to Pennsylvania to play Gettysburg College in a Division III Centennial Conference game. It was senior night, and the loudest cheers went to Cory Weissman, No. 3, 5 feet 11 inches, a team captain -- especially when he walked out onto…
Making Light: Whisperado: Video! Release party! Free association! Now available on YouTube: the video for Whisperado's "Teenage Popstar Girl." Song written by Sobel / Nielsen Hayden / Mills. Video concept and direction by Dan Azarian. Whisperado does not normally perform in black suits and ties. Contents may settle during shipping. Contains nuts. On Making Yourself Right - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic What you are left with is the obvious fact of a human being: confronted with his participation in an immoral act, doubling down on immorality. Accused of deception, he elects to…
UPDATED X 6: YOU'RE RUINING NATHAN FILLION FOR ME, NATHAN FILLION. Alternate title: But I forgive you. -- TheBloggess.com Conversation with my friend, Maile... me: Sooo...Nathan Fillion is making me doubt my own existence. Maile: Um...what? me: I've been asking him for a picture of himself holding twine for almost a year now, and he refuses to acknowledge me or the thousands of other people asking for twine pictures. Maile: Why exactly are thousands of people asking him for twine pictures? me: It's sort of a long story. Patriarchy, modesty and training up children: Who are the babies? Â…
scott_lynch: Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you'd expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had witnessed the the passage of a soul to the ancient Egyptian afterlife, complete with the weighing of the human heart against a feather. I shit you not. "What is unacceptable…
Religion News Service | Blogs | Mark Silk - Spiritual Politics | Santorum v. JFK But if, as Santorum suggests, you do go on and read the speech, you will discover that Kennedy never said that people of faith have no role in the public square or that faith is not allowed there. He did, however, articulate a number of positions that Santorum should be asked if he agrees with. Here's the questionnaire: From Rapunzel to The Little Red Riding Hood, Beloved Children's Classics as Minimalist Posters | Brain Pickings As a lover of children's books, especially classic ones with timeless wisdom for…
In the genes, but which ones? | Harvard Gazette "It is only in the past 10 or 15 years that we have had the technology for people to do studies that involved picking a particular genetic variant and investigating whether people who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have that genetic variant," said [Union College Psychology Professor] Chabris. "In all of our tests we only found one gene that appeared to be associated with intelligence, and it was a very small effect. This does not mean intelligence does not have a genetic component, it means it's a lot harder to find the particular…
Experimental Theology: The Bureaucrat The second most common question I get is this, "Do you like being a Department Chair?" My answer is complicated, a yes and a no. On the one hand I don't like managing the administrivia of a bureaucracy. I struggle with this part of the job. Plus, I keep waking up expecting to find that I have dead, soulless eyes. But on the other hand, as a bureaucrat I have a certain range of powers within the system. And my goal, in light of those powers, is this: humanize the system. This is the part of the job I like. I've written about this before, about how…
On How Not to be Foxhog College | Easily Distracted Excessive hedgehoggery makes it impossible to talk of change except as loss and violation, makes all planning into trauma. But a blithe fox, in love with his or her own humbuggery, tramples on the passions that sustain scholarly research and focused teaching, and doesn't seem to understand the fineness of the line between a cosmopolitan jack-of-all-trades and a dispossessed vagabond. So how do we all stay open to the future in planning, stay provisional about our practices, without risking that dispossession? How to institutionalize…
Astro-Physical Calculator A JavaScript calculator with all manner of physical constants already programmed in, in different systems of units. College Misery: I'm Baffled At My Students And Their Inability to Conquer "Some" Technology. My students are whiz bang on all their electronic gear, flashing their digits and emails wirelessly from phone to phone, downloading first run feature films on Bit Torrent, running blogs, tweeting their whereabouts, bowel movement times, and of course the Facebook, oh my God, the Facebook. Video, photos, uploading, resized, printed out on t-shirts, etc. But…
The Bouletcorp » Darkness I think my roommate is DARK... Ingenious Infographic: U.S. Highways, Mapped Like A Subway System | Co.Design: business + innovation + design Chucking geographic accuracy for a Tube-style schematic makes much more sense for plotting routes on the U.S. interstate system. Like the London Underground, the interstate highways are all about connecting nodes and skipping the stuff in between. On the Tube, there's no scenery between stations; as far as a rider is concerned, it's like riding an elevator. So who cares if the clean, orthogonal lines connecting stations don't…
Online Python Tutor Gives a nice visual representation of what's going on in a Python code snippet. If only it handled VPython... Chip MacGregor .com: Does the publisher lose money if my book doesn't earn out? Remember, every business can lose money. Retail shops, service business, even publishers. I mean, if you own a shoe store, you order in shoes that don't sell, and you have to drastically reduce prices, you can lose money on each pair of shoes sold. Publishing is no different. The publishing house pays out advances, they pay an editor, hire a cover designer, buy ink and paper, then pay…
Xpress Reviews: Nonfiction | First Look at New Books, February 17, 2012 -- Library Journal Reviews Playing Gracie Allen to Orzel's George Burns is the endearing Emmy, the canine star of his previous book. No matter whether Emmy thinks she will be younger by pulling fast on her leash or that she will suddenly fit through a hole in the fence by running as fast as she can toward it, Orzel talks her (and readers) through the principles of relativity, including time dilation and length contraction. No prior mathematical knowledge is required for this book, but some basic knowledge in physics might…
Problem solving like a physicist | Science Edventures Another way, which looks the same on the surface, is to break the nasty problem into a sequence of steps. "First, find the relationship between A and B. Then, calculate B for the given value of A. Next, substitute A and B into C and solve for C in terms of A..." That's a sequence of smaller problems that will lead to a solution of the nasty problem. But it's not scaffolding: it's spoon-feeding and it teaches none of the problem-solving skills we want the students to practice. I've heard from number of upper-level instructors declare they…
Proton Collisions Vs. Quark/Gluon/Antiquark Mini-Collisions | Of Particular Significance Keep in mind that the total number of 7 TeV = 7000 GeV proton-proton collisions that took place in ATLAS while they were accumulating the data for the plot above was about 100,000,000,000,000. [The total 2011 data set was 5 times larger, but the corresponding plot won't appear for a few months.] Of all these collisions, just two had mini-collisions that passed above 3500 GeV -- half the collision energy of the protons. In principle the energy of the mini-collisions can go up all the way to 7000 GeV,…
The Virtuosi: Time Keeps On Slippin' Alright, so how do we go about quantifying how "good" a watch is? Well, there seem to be two main things we can test. The first of these is accuracy. That is, how close does this watch come to the actual time (according to some time system)? If the official time is 3:00 pm and my watch claims it is 5:00 am, then it is not very accurate. The second measure of "good-ness" is precision or, in watch parlance, stability. This is essentially a measure of the consistency of the watch. If I have a watch that is consistently off by 5 minutes from the…
Jeremy Lin, Landry Fields unveil nerdiest handshake in NBA history - San Jose Mercury News Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields of the New York Knicks may comprise the most intelligent starting backcourt in NBA history. It's certainly hard to top a duo that boasts college degrees from Harvard (Lin) and Stanford (Fields). So it's not surprising when Lin and Fields unveiled what has to be the nerdiest pre-game handshake in league history. The choreographed skit features the two skimming through an imaginary book, taking off their glasses and then placing them inside pocket protectors. Confessions of a…
Why the Proponents of a Gay Marriage Ban Will Soon Be Speechless - Slate Magazine So there you have it: That's the best case that can be made against gay marriage. An appeals court dissent that rests on the premise that states needn't act rationally, or offer evidence of rationality, or even be rational in creating classifications, so long as someone publishes a study and someone else believes it. That's the best they've got, it seems. That is not legal argument or empirical evidence. It is the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence. Pants are Overrated…
Why The Planet Doesn't Care About Your Eco-Friendly Lifestyle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation Co.Exist:What does the average environmentalist get wrong? Wagner: Environmentalists, all too often, think that the best way to go about solving the problem is to get everyone to do as they--we, I included--do. I don't eat meat. I don't drive. But individual do-gooderism won't solve global warming. And it may actually be counter-productive, for two reasons. First, there's a well-documented psychological phenomenon called "single-action bias." You do one thing, and you move on. You…
NPR hack apologizes for Wall Street « LBO News from Doug Henwood For a while, I've been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its "liberal" reputation makes palatable a deeply orthodox message for a demographic that could be open to a more critical message. The full critique will take some time. But a nice warm-up opportunity has just presented itself: a truly wretched piece of apologetic hackery by Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR's Planet Money economics…