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By Thoreau (Post title is a joke, since “beta” means something different in finance than in physics.) Kevin Drum wonders, mostly jokingly, if somebody has set up a neutrino communications network to do arbitrage on Wall Street. While one should always be careful about blogging seriously in response to a light musing, and while one […] By Thoreau At dinner yesterday a very privileged college student explained that, while MOOCs are an inferior product that he would never want for himself, we do need something affordable and suitable for less-prepared and less-affluent people. He said this while sitting across the table from a distant relation who’s a community college professor. So […] By Thoreau Iranian physicists suddenly find themselves in a job market that no longer needs them. By Thoreau I love this article: “Would you like to teach? There are a lot of jobs with less security and pay than the tenure-track faculty, and you could totally get one!” But, honestly, that isn’t the biggest flaw in this article. The biggest flaw is that they focus on people with jobs that aren’t […] By Thoreau You know how Very Serious People are always telling academics that we need to buy into whatever the MBAs are selling? I think that the scholars at the Heritage Foundation have just joined the ranks of academic traditionalists who hate Very Serious Think Tanks hucksters. If the Heritage scholars actually do join our […] By Thoreau A very progressive-minded person was telling me excitedly about a “new” approach to teaching a subject. And I thought about it and said “Oh, that was in the Feynman lectures.” His response was that Feynman might have done it 50 years ago, but education reformers only got into it recently. So then I […] By Thoreau I know that zero accountability is a bad idea (indeed, its flaws are illustrated every time I compare salaries on my hallway…) but I still like this article calling for no reforms, no New Initiatives, etc. It is a very necessary corrective to the pressures we face. Besides, it could save us money. […] By Thoreau To me, this deal seems, at least on the surface, reasonable. More importantly, the very fact that US and Iranian officials are openly sitting at the same table means that further progress is possible on peace between the US and Iran. 1979 was a long, long time ago. Yes, some bad things happened […] By Thoreau I find it rather strange that I am protective of Senate filibusters. When I first got into election systems geekery, I quickly realized that (1) there are far more effective ways to defend minority interests than filibusters in our malapportioned Senate, and (2) plenty of wealthy, liberal, and democratic countries have constitutions with […] By Thoreau I am not sufficiently “in the know” to judge the significance of this, but Dean Dad is convinced that it is big. He’s more tuned into edu-fads than I am, and more willing to give them a shot, so if he sees the party ending it probably means something. It might not be […] |
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