Social-Science
drorzel | October 19, 2010There have been a bunch of interesting things written about education recently that I've been too busy teaching to comment on. I was pulling them together this morning to do a sort of themed links dump, when the plot at the right, from Kevin Drum's post about school testing jumped out at me. This shows test scores for black students in various age groups over time, but more importantly, it demonstrates one of my pet peeves about Excel.
If you look at the horizontal axis of this plot, it shows regularly spaced intervals. If you actually read the labels, though, you'll see that they're anything…
drorzel | September 27, 2010It'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 correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
drorzel | September 21, 2010On 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 soon (and, in fact, are planning to have the basement redone), I took one because, well, I want to know what our neighbors' houses are like, and what they're selling for.
Which brings us to the silly poll topic:
The fraction of real-estate fliers picked up by people who live in the neighborhood and just want to know the…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There'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 Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
drorzel | August 27, 2010Via 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 grading scale, one that is independent of grading curves, we find that 29% of intro astronomy students fail to meet minimal standards for college level work. Of the remaining students, 41% achieve satisfactory work, 30% achieve mastery of the…
drorzel | July 17, 2010There 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 subpopulations, I'd think that it would be more useful to do lab work, and to look at the broader literature on communications. Daniel Loxton did a nice roundup of a few useful studies in this realm, and Mike McRae looked at a wider sampling in the context of…
drorzel | July 14, 2010Via 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 sound like Dan Brown. When the subject turns to the size of the proton, though, I sound like Douglas Adams.
Maybe it's just that the random variety of topics on the blog throws it off, though. I have, after all, written an entire book explaining quantum mechanics through conversations with…
drorzel | June 17, 2010There'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 finds a small negative correlation between the faculty effect on performance in an introductory course and performance in a follow-on course. In other words, as they explain in the Introduction,
[O]ur results indicate that professors who excel at promoting…
drorzel | May 7, 2010The 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 this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll:
You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…
drorzel | May 4, 2010As 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 could be fun to see.
drorzel | April 26, 2010I'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
My answers to these are probably a big part of why I sometimes have trouble with the Internet and the people on it. I'm interested to know what other people think, though. And while the polls themselves are binary choices, feel free to leave…
drorzel | January 18, 2010The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall's essay about why he didn't attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for "screening interviews," used to cut a long list of applicants down to the three or so who will be invited to campus.
This is almost a two cultures moment, because this isn't the situation in my part of academia. It's not that the job market is any better, but there isn't the same automatic…
drorzel | January 10, 2010There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant.
This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…
drorzel | December 9, 2009Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to "beat the odds", getting good results with populations that don't typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are "beating the odds," let alone what methods are best to use for this. It turns out to be a lot harder to measure than most people think-- I was particularly struck by this bit:
It gets worse, thanks to my colleague Doug Harris, in his paper, “High flying schools, student disadvantage, and the logic of…
drorzel | December 3, 2009I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading an economics paper, specifically the one about academic salaries and reputations mentioned on the Freakonomics blog. There's a pdf available from that post, if you'd like to read it for yourself.
The basic idea is that they looked at the publication records of several hundred full professors of economics, and publicly available salary data for many of the same faculty, and tried to correlate those with the "reputation" of the professors in question. They used a couple of indirect means to assign each faculty member a "reputation," mostly…
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | October 19, 2009Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's…
drorzel | October 19, 2009It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…
drorzel | October 12, 2009Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
We had pretty decent weather-- cool but seasonal, sunny in the morning, clouding over in the afternoon-- for today's Open House. Last year, we had dreary rain at least one of the Open House days. I'd like to think that something as random and trivial as the weather wouldn't really influence a high school student's college decision, but then, I've heard stupider things...
drorzel | September 28, 2009It's that time of year again, when the Nobel Prizes are announced-- the official announcements will be made starting next Monday. And, as usual, people are speculating about who will win, on both an amateur and professional basis.
Meanwhile, as we've done in the past, I will offer a valuable prize to anyone who predicts the winners of any of this year's Nobel prizes:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
Rules and conditions are the same as…