July 2009
25 posts
"Teaching naked"
The Chronicle has an interesting article about the efforts of Dean Jose Bowen at SMU to get his professors to “teach naked”: mostly, he has removed computers from all the classrooms to discourage the use of PowerPoint. He argues that traditional lectures should be prerecorded and placed online as podcasts, and classes should be reserved for discussion, demonstrations, and other neat...
Are Kindles worth it?
I’ve written about Kindles here before in part because I’ve been seriously considering getting one. You can imagine I was dissapointed, then, when I read a pretty devastating review of the Amazon product in the New Yorker. Part of the review seemed unnecessarily picky - images don’t show up as clearly, lots of books don’t yet have Kindle versions, and newspaper articles...
Slipping labor regulations in trade agreements
One popular way for politicians to ally themselves with pop humanitarians and fuzzy feel-gooders is to push for progressive labor regulations in trade agreements with developing countries. The idea is that it’s important Americans can be sure they’re not importing goods that were made under poor labor conditions or for too low wages. The intentions of these Bono-wannabes are mostly...
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Revisiting PTED
Slate has a column expressing concern about the DSM-V; in particular the author, Christopher Lane, is concerned with the inclusion of “overuse of the Internet, “excessive” sexual activity, apathy, and even prolonged bitterness.” In Bitter? Get Better! I argued that the disorder-treatment paradigm was ill-suited to a modern understanding of the brain and a modern ethics.
I...
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Embrace the singular they!
Occasionally it strikes me how often ordinary sentences indicate the gender of people we discuss. It’s nearly impossible to avoid it even in cases where the person is an abstract idea rather than an actual person with a gender as in “An astronaut depends on his spacesuit.”
English’s lack of un-gendered pronouns has caused plenty of stress for people who want to be...
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The McSweeney's of math
McSweeney’s originally published works rejected by other magazines. Rejecta Mathematica hopes to do the same for math journals.
The volume starts with a letter from the editors that answers important questions like “Is it a joke?” (No.) and “Why are you doing it?” (Several paragraphs of reasons.)
They intend to publish minor results, results based on questionable...
Some optimism about immigrant detention
I just read a surprisingly upbeat article about juvenile immigration detention facilities. For a long time, non-citizen children often slipped between the cracks when their families were detained, often being placed in dangerous adult facilities. The article, though, suggests that children are treated much better than non-citizen adults.
That doesn’t actually say much though - there are...
The perks of day dreaming
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article about how the brain stumbles upon creative ideas. What’s cool is that scientists can see a spike in brain activity before the person actually knows the insight is coming. I’m hoping this kind of research will allow us to cultivate and improve our own creativity.
It’s also this kind of creativity that I’m worried we might...
2 economic post-mortems
The first is a recent Malcom Gladwell piece, arguing that overconfidence lies at the root of the crisis. In typical Gladwell fashion, it has some pretty good, interesting anecdotes, but overall I don’t think he showed a very good understanding of what’s unique about this crisis. You can use the “twas hubris’ explanation for any failure that comes from a bad decision that...
Thomas Jefferson - 'where the magic happens'
Wired has a neat article on Thomas Jefferson’s house. Calling Jefferson an original do-it-yourself-er, the author covers Jefferson’s 18th century life hacks: his bed positioning, revolving book stand, note-taking etc. I thought the reasons for how he arranged his house were particularly interesting. Overall, it’s a good, light read.
CSI and the state of US forensic science
Miller-McCune has a scary article about the level of influence police departments have over forensic scientists. While ideally forensic scientists would be impartially concerned with the truth, it seems like in many places they’ve transformed into advocates for the prosecution (One note from a forensic scientist to a prosecutor literally read, “I want to help you all I can”). As...
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We're surprisingly peaceful
Looking at the wikipedia article on the subject it would seem like the 21st century has been fairly conflict-ridden. The war in Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, Gaza, Zimbabwe and Pakistan all come quickly to mind. So if that’s all true, why is Steven Pinker so surprised by the amount of peace we’ve experienced in modern times?
In short, if you think we’re bad now, you’d have...
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How hard is your government working?
A recent piece in the Washington Post by Steven Pearlstein argues that the Obama administration has done an effective job tearing out overly bureaucratic processes and galvanizing the civil service into faster action.
One common worry about institutions is that they are more afraid of doing things wrong than about not doing things better. That is, we expect them to be inefficiently risk averse....
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Stats on unwed mothers/rebooting marriage
I learned from a recent post by Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias that births to unmarried women have reached about 40%. Interestingly, the US isn’t even at the top of the list; Frace is at 50% and Iceland is at 66%. Japan has a shockingly low share of unwed mothers at a mere 2%.
Hanson suggests that if women have shorter term goals for a mate (i.e. they don’t want to find a mate as a...
Two profiles on two very different women
The first is a great article in Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin. Worth the read because she’s truly a bizarre person, and because the author uses the awkward phrase “indisputably fertile female” to describe her.
The second is a Financial Times article on Marilyn vos Savant, the women with the world’s highest IQ. The look into her life is pretty interesting, but the article was...
Colapinto: Franken and John/Joan
John Colapinto has a piece in the New Yorker on Al Franken’s dramatic and bumpy road to the US Senate. It’s definitely worth a read.
In case you haven’t read this before, you should definitely check out Colapinto’s 1997 Rolling Stone article The Case of John/Joan. The article (and later the book) tells the story of a baby, born a male, who was medically turned into a...
America's rich
Daniel Gross has an article in the New York Times about Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 “Theory of the Leisure Class”. What’s most interesting is the observation that America’s super-wealthy tend to adopt the activities and mindsets of the old European aristocracy. Gross writes, “Once, as I entered the office of one magnate, a generation removed from the shtetl, my eyes...
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Baby talk and Google
Plenty of people roll their eyes at the odd way parents speak to their children: higher pitch, longer duration and greater variation in pitch. But research suggests that we all do it; not just all Americans, but all humans.
Aside from this just being a sort of novel and cute fact, it illustrates one of the most important points made by modern psychology: humans are not blank slates when they...
Choosing to forget
We’ve known for a while now about some drugs that seem to dampen the intensity of traumatic memories like propranolol. There has been talk recently of more targeted memory erasure. Direct conscious control of memory would be an interesting ability, but what would you choose to forget?
One hope for those who advocate the development of memory erasure techniques is that soldiers or victims...
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Minilateralism and international cooperation
There are any number of difficult challenges and exciting opportunities facing our globe that seem to require coordinated action: climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, pandemics, financial stability and free trade. But getting every major country to agree to a single proposal is a herculean task at best. The doctrine of minilateralism hopes to avoid letting over-inclusiveness impede...
Matt Taibbi on Goldman...
Rolling Stone has an article on Goldman Sachs’s involvement in past financial bubbles. It’s well written but more inflammatory than honest - while it certainly is a little creepy that Goldman is so ubiquitous in the news, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they are more culpable than anyone else for the financial crisis. I worry some that this kind of anti-finance...
Frat dudes...
Nicholas Syrett has an article in AlterNet entitled, Why is the Frat Boy Culture So Sleazy and Sex-Crazed? Among other examples, the article includes several mentions of Dartmouth’s Zeta Psi - I don’t know whether he knew how timely this article is, given that Zeta Psi is slated to return campus after a lengthy double secret probation.
The crux of Syrett’s argument is that...
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The Flynn effect
IQ scores increased steadily from the ’30s through the ’90s. Evidence on increases from the ’90s through today is controversial. This increase was termed the Flynn effect after the researcher who first popularized the trend and has done the most work trying to understand it.
There’s fairly wide agreement that the increase in IQ happened, but not much agreement about the...
It's snowing on mars
I’ve tweeted before about how much I’m in love with outer space. I’m not sure why I find it so exciting, but I do. Given that, I am compelled to share this news: there are snowstorms on Mars.
Why should we explore space? It inspires the young to study technical fields, it produces widely applicable technological innovations, it gives us a deeper understanding of our place in...
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The theory of rational addiction
Here’s a fantastic interview with awesome economist Kevin Murphy on his research and various topical economic issues. The whole thing is worth a read, but I wanted to highlight one section in particular: Murphy’s research with Gary Becker on the theory of rational addiction. I generally wish to assume people are rational about things, but what could be less rational than the behavior...