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Economic Astronomy II: Gender Shares of Jobs
The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields: This comes from an...
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The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to...
A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau’s Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn’t Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well,...
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Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs
The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or...
View Article1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
Back when I reviewed Mann’s pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I’d held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a “Cortez the Killer” kind of way....
View ArticleThe Evitability of History
As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann’s 1493 (see also this interview at Razib’s place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such...
View ArticleLanguage and Statistics Poll: Define “Vast”
Prompted by a number of people using the phrase “vast majority” recently, I wonder where the line between “majority” and “vast majority” is. Thus, a poll: What is the minimum level of support that...
View ArticleBaffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing
Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior,...
View ArticleCongratulations to Roth and Shapley and John Novak
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has just been announced, and goes to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice...
View ArticleWhat’s FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash
Now that we’ve apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he’s been overhyped. If you’ve somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer...
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The Visual Presentation of Misleading Information, Anti-Asian Bias Edition
In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz’s epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed. ———— Steve Hsu has a...
View ArticleDeficit Models, Bureaucratic Empathy, and Work-Life Juggling
Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post...
View ArticleOn Kids and Conferences
Kate had to leave at 7am this morning to go to a “retreat” for her office, so I took the kids to Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast. That got us all out the door at the same time, avoiding the freakout from...
View ArticleScience Is Hard?: “A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for...
There was a brief flurry of discussion yesterday kicked off by Matt Yglesias posting People Don’t Major in Science—Because It’s Hard, which more or less says what the title would lead you to believe...
View ArticleDorky Poll: Rorschach Numbers
It’s been a really long time since I’ve done a Dorky Poll here, but I’m pretty fried at the moment, so here’s a kind of mathematical personality test: two numbers that do not uniquely define a...
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Baseball and Gender Bias: “Number of Women in Physics Departments: A...
I’ve spent a bunch of time recently blogging about baseball statistics, which you might be inclined to write off as some quirk of a sports-obsessed scientist. I was very amused, therefore, to see...
View ArticlePhysics Research Survey and Contest
One of my colleagues at Union is doing a physics education research project with a summer student, and is using an online survey to collect data. Obviously, the more people respond to the survey, the...
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White People Only Have 2.8 Friends
There was some buzz Thursday about a poll showing that 40% of white people don’t have any friends of a different race. Ipsos/Reuters include a spiffy “data explorer” where you can make graphs like the...
View ArticleGender Gap Update
The JCC day care is closed today for one of the fall cluster of Jewish holidays, which means I’m spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift so I can teach my...
View ArticleCongratulations to Fama, Hanson, Schiller, and DougT
It was looking like we were going to slip through the entire Nobel season without a winner in the Uncertain Principles Betting Pool, but at the eleventh hour, we got one: DougT correctly predicted that...
View ArticleThe Evergreen Topic of Grade Inflation
There was a flurry of re-shares last week for this article about Yale shutting down a site that aggregated student course evaluations, which is fine as far as it goes, but repeats a stat that really...
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