society
pontiff | August 9, 2008Say it ain't so Hasbro, say it aint so. From an NPR story on a makeover of the game "Clue":
The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he's a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer -- a dot-com billionaire.
Take that you stuffy academic professors, with your padded elbows and your pipes and your uncombed Einstein hair: you're no longer the smartest person in the room (unless you've made a video game,…
clock | August 7, 2008Jeff Jarvis - The myth of the creative class:
Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don't lament that, not for a moment.
The…
clock | August 5, 2008Last week, most of the attention of the media, Old and New, revolved around the question if it is McCain supporters or Obama supporters who are more likely to think that Britney Spears is teh hawt (dunno what the answer is, but I recall seeing some statistics about the overwhelming lead by the Red States in porn consumption, TV watching, numbers of adult establishments and number of visits to such establishments per capita, and this may or may not correlate with the perception of Britney Spears as attractive to certain subsets of the male population).
But her name has also been mentioned a…
clock | August 4, 2008Thomas Frank, the author of the popular book What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, has a new book out - The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule - which sounds even better. He was the guest on NPR's Fresh Air tonight (listen to the podcast - it's worth your time) and I have to say I agree with him 100%.
Heck, I wrote about this many times before, and especially focused in this post and this one - conservatism is antithetical to Free Market.
As conservatives tend to do, they say one thing and think the opposite (you know, black is white, up is down,…
clock | August 4, 2008Michael Shermer - Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism - read only this sentence:
Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion.
I'm not sure if this is an editorial mandate, but if it is, this week's feature article takes it to the logical conclusion of just profiling people who are irredeemably awful, and unapologetic about it. This week, they take a look at the culture of Internet trolls:
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing…
clock | August 2, 2008White denial: Obama, race and America's selective memory by Hal Crowther:
A lot of Americans are like German tourists, who never harmed or perhaps even met a Jew, and are amazed to find a chilly reception in Tel Aviv. Though Jim Crow was considerably more recent than Adolf Hitler, lapel-pin patriots and insulated media hypocrites experience acute shock--or feign it--when they hear the heated rhetoric of black pride and empowerment from people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I'm still shaking my head over a Wright-bashing column by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, invoking "liberal masochism" and…
drorzel | August 1, 2008You know, my opinion of "No Child Left Behind" style attempts to measure "failing" schools is as low as anybody's, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous:
Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if evaluated using a less biased measure, a new study suggests.
Ohio State University researchers developed a new method of measuring school quality based on schools' actual impact on learning - how much faster students learned during the academic year than during summer vacation when they weren't in class…
clock | July 31, 2008Apparently, even journalists reporting on it learned the details (and how to properly frame it) from this episode of This American Life. Worth listening to (or reading the transcript).
drorzel | July 31, 2008The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology:
Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don't really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they'll do that with cc's all the way up the chain, as a way of spreading the manure over the most ground with the least effort. Yet, when confronted, they're surprised that anybody would take offense, and they revert to their perfectly civil selves.
It is, indeed, mystifying, and seems to be more common in…
clock | July 29, 2008We knew the web was big...
The Blogosphere Needs to Mature - But How?
Tracking Facebook's 2008 International Growth By Country
The Web's Dirty Little Secret
The Future of the Desktop
drorzel | July 29, 2008Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was actually anticipated by this post at "It's The Thought That Counts,", which was pointed out to me in comments.
Janet had the first direct response, with a later follow-up speculating about the reasons for the divide. As I said in one of my own comment threads, I think a lot of it has to do with…
clock | July 28, 2008Lee Siegel was on NPR's On The Media the other day, defending his sockpuppetry and painting all bloggers as unwashed hordes of fascists. Boo hoo.
I listened to the podcast and it was too short to be of much substance. The interviewer has no idea how big of an offense sockpuppetry is, and Siegel demonstrated that, apart from comments on his own blog, he has never really taken a look at the blogosphere as a whole. If the comments on his posts are all he knows, he really knows nothing about blogs. The quip about editors who wink about nobody reading comments is just another proof how…
drorzel | July 28, 2008The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers' scores on…
drorzel | July 27, 2008A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science and engineering professors.
This is obviously not a question I can answer, but I agree that it would be good to know. So, how about it?
drorzel | July 26, 2008I know nothing about art or music.
OK, that's not entirely true-- I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don't know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I'm not even sure those are both art terms.
Despite the sterling reputation of the department, I never took an Art History class when I was at Williams, nor did I take any music classes. They weren't specifically required, and I was a physics major-- my schedule was full of math and science classes, and between that and the boozing,…
drorzel | July 22, 2008I've been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I've been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It's also been a useful mental health break, though, as I'm a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago.
Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle, which is the new "framing" fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming…
clock | July 20, 2008Titles of blog posts have to be short, but I could expand it to something like this:
"Depending on the medium and the context, many scientists can be and often are excellent communicators"
That is what I understood to be the main take-home message of "Sizzle". If you check out all the other blog reviews, even those that are the harshest do not state the opposite, i.e., that the movie pushes the stereotype of scientists as dull, stuffy communicators. Though, some of the commenters on those blog posts - people who could not have seen the movie themselves yet - imply that this was the case.
So…
clock | July 18, 2008Scientific Collectivism 1: (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved Dissent):
I want to bring up a discussion about what I perceive is a dangerous trend in neuroscience (this may be applicable to other areas of science as well), and that is what I will term "scientific collectivism." I am going to split this into two separate posts because it is so long. This first post is the weaker arguments, and what I see are the less interesting aspects of scientific collectivism-however, they deserve a discussion.
What will you be? and the related Friday Poll: Tinker, Tailor, Biologist, Researcher. So, how…