Posts

May 22, 2013

+

Former Washington, DC schools superintendent Michelle Rhee is a controversial figure. Originally touted (on both the left and right) as the figure who could save the capital’s schools, her standardized test-based decision making, and her apparent eagerness to fire educators, quickly earned the ire of the teachers unions. This fight with the Washington Teachers Union probably cost former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty his reelection, and it certainly cost Rhee her job. Since then she’s […]

May 21, 2013

+

9:33 PM | Godolphin doping scandal continues…

Following on from the initial scandalous revelations from the Godolphin stable (see post here), the fallout has continued. Here’s a brief update with results of further tests revealed yesterday. The original story had...

+

7:00 PM | Type 2 Diabetes Treatments and Potential Effects on Bone

No summary available for this post.

+

3:00 PM | The Future of Water

Freshwater expert Sandra Postel reveals how water is destined to become our most precious resource— and the impact of your personal water footprint.

May 20, 2013

+

7:25 PM | Fashion College, for Fun and Profit (and Just for Fun and Profit)

Among the more controversial aspects of young adult training, two things stick out as particularly offensive, and perhaps mutually reinforcing: overpriced schools and the scarcity of good jobs. And now, at long last, we’ve got an institution of higher learning that seems to combine both of these things, pretty overtly. From the New York Times comes news of a school, of sorts, that offers really high-priced training that doesn’t seem to train one for anything: [Zuzanna] […]

+

6:59 PM | College Enrollment Declines, and That's a Good Thing

Fewer people are attending college. From the Huffington Post comes news that college enrollment has declined, dramatically, from last year. According to the article: A report released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center Thursday revealed a 2.3 percent dip in students choosing to attend college during the spring of 2013. This year’s numbers represent a big leap from last spring, when enrollment only declined 0.3 percent from the previous year. But this does not mean […]

+

6:09 PM | The bravery of librarians

Two things caught my attentions over the past few days. The first was the text of a Graduation Address from Dorothea Salo to the graduating students of the Library and Information Sciences Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The second was a keynote from Chris Bourg, whose blog is entitled “Feral Librarian”, gave at The Acquisitions Institute. Both focus on how the value of libraries and the value of those who defend the needs of all to access information are impossible […]

+

3:43 PM | Saved From Living Death: How Genetically Modifying Chestnuts Could Bring Them Back

The American chestnut was the king of the trees in forests in the eastern U.S. until a fungus from Asia brought them down. We are getting very close to making a resistant American chestnut. Now the question is whether or not we should plant it out in the wild.

May 19, 2013

+

9:01 PM | Open thread, 5/19/2013

A lot’s been happening. The human phylogenetic graph is looking curiouser and curiouser.

May 18, 2013

+

3:56 PM | DSM-5 Released: The Big Changes

The DSM-5 was officially released today. We will be covering it in the weeks to come here on the blog and over at Psych Central Professional in a series of upcoming articles detailing the major changes. In the meantime, here is an overview of the big changes. We sat in on a conference call that [...]

May 17, 2013

+

7:42 PM | The Importance of What You Measure

Check out this piece today by Robert Reischauer and Michael McPherson. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, and McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, argued that one of the major problems for education reform is the way we collect data. It's important to measure outcomes, they write-- If you don’t track your performance, you can’t tell whether you’re improving, and you have no reliable way to know if your improvement strategies are […]

+

5:51 PM | You Want to Know What Competition in Education Will Do? Look at Chile.

One of the major themes in American education reform of the last 20 years is the idea of improving education quality by introducing more competition. Business-style freemarketism will force schools to improve, because, if people have more options they’ll demand better performance. This is the theory behind primary and secondary reform initiatives like vouchers and charter schools, and also higher education ideas like for-profit colleges and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). As […]

+

1:07 AM | Introducing Mind Matters

Who are we? Where does our consciousness begin and end? How are the lives of the individual and the collective connected? These are questions that an increasing number of scientists and thinkers around the world are exploring. More and more attention is dedicated to how neuroscience, biology, psychology and ancient philosophical and spiritual questions can [...]

May 16, 2013

+

8:44 PM | Small words – Town Hall talk for Ignite Seattle

Some people in science like to use big words. You know what I’m talking about. Climatology, prehistoric, proteomics. Or phrases that tie us up in knots. I’m a fan of small ordinary words. Words that all of [More...]

+

7:32 PM | The Government's Student Loan "Profit"

Is the federal government making a huge profit on student loans? Are students going broke sending hard-earned cash to the Department of Education? That’s the allegation made by many pundits in reaction to Congressional Budget Office report. As Mandi Woodruff over at Business Insider puts it: Student loan debt is now one of the Obama Administration's biggest cash cows. The government is poised to pocket a record $51 billion profit from federal student loan borrowers this year…. […]

+

6:56 PM | The Sexual Harassment Police

In an effort to curtail sexual abuse on campus the Obama administration is working on a new policy on harassment. This comes after widespread revelations of colleges (e.g. the University of Montana and Yale) failing to address or report sexual crimes. The new policy, according to a piece at The Atlantic by Wendy Kaminer (right), looks like this: In a joint letter to the University of Montana, (intended as "a blueprint" for campus administrators nationwide) the Justice Department (DOJ) and […]

+

3:39 PM | Understanding Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a history professor who also gives paid lectures, including a notorious recent event where he made an offhand commend dissing John Maynard Keynes for being gay, marrying a ballerina, and talking about poetry. Ferguson later characterized his own remarks as “stupid.”I blogged a bit about this already, but I just wanted to repeat one point, after reading a couple of comments by some observers who, I think, misunderstood his remarks, taking them more seriously than […]

+

3:00 PM | Thinking Like a Pirate – or a Scientist

New understandings about how scientists think have inspired changes in school science standards.

+

12:56 AM | Guest Post: Spreading Awareness About Cochlear Implants

The third in our series of guest posts to celebrate Better Hearing and Speech Month, is a post from Rachel Chaikof, founder of Cochlear Implant Online. Cochlear Implant Online is using Better Hearing and Speech Month to launch their new campaign to raise awareness of cochlear implants. Be sure to watch …

May 15, 2013

+

7:15 PM | Blaming the Coach for Everything

An Oregon bill scheduled for public hearing today would hold coaches at state universities financially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. According to an article in The Oregonian : House Bill 3524 provides that coach at public university who intentionally or recklessly commits or causes to be committed major violation of rules of National Collegiate Athletic Association is liable for university's actual damages […]

+

4:13 PM | Instead of Asking for Education Transparency, Maybe We’ll Just Ask for Another Study About It

For years politicians and education pundits have called for more “transparency” in higher education. What programs graduate their students on time? What colleges produce graduates with the highest salaries? How are students paying back their education loans? Despite years of this stuff, it turns out Congress is still not going to demand that colleges provide this information. Instead, according to Amy Laitinen at the New America Foundation, there’s another call to […]

+

1:50 PM | Star Trek's Lesson for Students: Your Dissertation Topic Doesn't Matter

I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them. The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS […]

May 14, 2013

+

7:05 PM | Community Colleges Focus on Jobs

Back in 2010, Jamie Merisotis and Stan Jones wrote for this publication about the potential benefits of using community colleges, and federal money, to help get the unemployed back to work. The administration appeared to have listened and the next year the Department of Labor provided money to community colleges for skills development. It seems to have worked pretty well. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed: The colleges have also used the money to sharpen their focus on career services. […]

+

6:11 PM | The Daily Show Does “Scared Straight” on Student Loans

This is hilarious: This might be rather personal. I'm pretty sure most of the Daily Show writers have degrees from liberal arts schools.

+

3:00 PM | Are Doughnuts Destroying Forests?

A conversation with a forestry expert reveals doughnuts as unlikely contributors to global deforestation.

+

1:00 PM | Free Expression vs. Not Wanting to Make Anyone Personally Uncomfortable

From a video conversation between UC Berkeley’s next chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, and Dan Mogulof of Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs: I don’t support divestment with respect to Israel. At the same time, many of my colleagues felt very strongly about this and many of them signed a petition, and it circulated widely at the time, which was 2002. There were, after that, all sorts of other controversies that developed about the climate for Jewish students on Columbia’s […]

+

2:54 AM | The Mandarin — Whoop De Doo

I was Twittering away the time between playing ball with the boy and supper when I ran across this piece http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/science/iron-man-3-d-printing/ which reminded me of a BBC interview I heard in the car last week where the reporter had the techno anarchist guy who printed the plastic gun on the line and wanted him to [...]

May 13, 2013

+

6:26 PM | Social Class: The Next Affirmative Action?

The Supreme Court is set to decide soon on Fischer v University of Texas. The court will likely focus on whether the university has reached a “critical mass” of minority students (enough that minority students no longer feel isolated), the test put forward in the seminal affirmative action case, Grutter v Bollinger. Many observers believe it appears likely the court will ultimately bar public universities from using race in their admissions policies. It will therefore be all the […]

+

3:08 PM | How to Tell if College Presidents Are Overpaid

The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. Perhaps, most relevant for this community, it also surpassed the compensation growth for university professors. Moreover, the median statistic masks that several presidents earned more than double that amount. Pennsylvania […]

+

12:59 PM | Diabetes and the Skeleton: A Sweeter Look to the Future