Monthly Archives: July 2014

World Cup: American Education 0

I did not watch the World Cup soccer game between Brazil and Germany, but I have been unable to escape the media coverage of the 7-1 “record-setting” football event, including photos on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal of Brazilian flag color decorated fans in various expressions of mourning as if someone, yes, […] … learn more→

The academic cv – it’s forward looking

Most people think about their cv as a retrospective document. The cv has to talk about where you’ve been, what you’ve achieved, where and with whom. However, this is not the way that the academic cv is read. All cv readers have an eye firmly on the future and how what’s on the page tallies […] … learn more→

At sea in a deluge of data

This spring, more college students than ever received baccalaureate degrees, and their career prospects are brighter than they were for last year’s graduates. Employers responding to this year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers’ \”Job Outlook 2014 Survey\” said they planned to increase entry-level hiring by almost 8 percent. But what they may not realize […] … learn more→

The superlaw of potentialism:

Q4P > E+: The overarching dynamic of the Cosmic Order The Quest for Infinite Potential is a ground-breaking, theory of cosmology for the 21st Century. Envisioned by private scholar and metaphysicist David Birnbaum, its principles are laid out in the three part series, Summa Metaphysica I, II and III (Ktav, 1988; New Paradigm Matrix, 2005; […] … learn more→

Lessons learned from the Facebook study

By now, anyone who is remotely interested knows that the Facebook data-science team, in collaboration with some researchers at Cornell University, recently published a paper reporting “experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” If you’ve heard about this study, you probably also know that many people are upset about it. Even the journal […] … learn more→

Even superprofessors deserve academic freedom.

Over on my personal blog, I write a lot about MOOCs. You might say I’m more than a little MOOC-obsessed, but I really am trying to develop other interests. That effort ran aground this week when a Massive Open Online Course at the University of Zurich basically imploded. It’s a confusing story (read about it […] … learn more→

Kids choose their own work in a Montessori classroom

Every day, in classrooms everywhere, teachers grapple with the age-old challenge of how to capture the attention of young people and engage them with the things we think they should know about. In 1907, in the slums of Rome, Dr Maria Montessori designed an experiment to tackle this challenge. In a room housing about 50 […] … learn more→

Facebook is good for science

Over the past two weeks, an important debate has taken place about the ethics of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by researchers at Facebook Data Science and Cornell University. In the study, researchers manipulated some parameters in news feeds to evaluate how the changes influenced readers’ moods as […] … learn more→

The zombie thesis

I have a friend, let’s call him Darryl. Darryl used his skills from a former life as a project manager to bring his PhD in on time and on budget. This involved carefully setting constraints around his project so it was doable and collecting data in a time efficient fashion. When this was done Darryl […] … learn more→

The pen is mightier than the smartphone

Obviously this is a riff on “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and I think even many “lesser-educated” people have heard this saying. But I wonder if the “more-educated” really know where the saying comes from. According to Wikipedia, the go-to source for persons also at the college-level, the line first appeared in Edward […] … learn more→