It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch.
David W. Wills, a professor of religious history at Amherst, on MOOCs.
Wills started out being open to MOOCs, he said. But the more he heard the more his concerns grew, and none of edX’s representatives seemed able to address them.
[…]
The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors.
From Laptop U - Has the future of college moved online? [New Yorker]
DNA: The Book of You
Oh hey, some guy with the same name as me and who sounds exactly like me wrote and narrated this video for TED-Ed all about the scale, structure and organization of the human genome.
Oh wait… it IS me! Enjoy the sciencey sounds of my voice telling you all about how big the human genome is.
Although 20,000 genes sounds like a lot, it’s far less than the number scientists initially predicted. We end up getting lots of variants out of fewer genes thanks to something called alternative splicing. Although none of it is “junk”, about 8% of our genome is inactive virus DNA (which we stole genes from in order to be born), and more than half is other kinds of insertions from ancient, jumping “selfish genes” called retrotransposons.
Enjoy!
(A note: Most of the numbers in this lesson are for one copy of the human genome. Remember that you actually have two copies of the human genome in every cell, so the length of DNA and number of bases, etc. it actually DOUBLE that! If you want to know more details about any of the facts and figures in the video, leave me a note in the YouTube comments or send me a message here or on Twitter.)
Great job Joe.
This is why I teach: Getting Facebook messages from other Tumblr users about the fact that my students are reblogging his blog posts and adding ancient philosophy to them … on a Saturday evening.
We should all band together and stop Ari before he ruins the Internet the tumblr I have learned to love and cherish. Also I may be wrong but Justin Lincoln has and/or continues to utilize Tumblr for academic purposes. This is madness.
Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize
Psychology
“Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,” Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.
The Ig Nobel Prizes always give me hope that I will continue to get published. And this one was in Psychological Science.
Bless the Ig Nobel Prizes, these are prizes that “first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
Here’s a few more winners,
NEUROSCIENCE PRIZE: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
PHYSICS PRIZE: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
LITERATURE PRIZE: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
REFERENCE: “Actions Needed to Evaluate the Impact of Efforts to Estimate Costs of Reports and Studies,” US Government General Accountability Office report GAO-12-480R, May 10, 2012.
Always aim for the stars kids.
UC struggles with bias claims raised by Jews, Muslims: Some Muslim students feel their rights are being suppressed and some Jewish students think anti-Israel protests on campus have become anti-Semitic.
UC students and others — how welcome do you feel at your school?
Photo: Participants at a 2011 protest tape their mouths to illustrate what they believe is a 1st Amendment issue involving 11 Muslim demonstrators accused of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times
Bigotry towards Muslims and Jews exists at every level of society, college is no exception.
College is this very strange and perhaps wonderful portion of our life, for many of us it is the very first opportunity that we’re allowed to rigorously explore our identities at our leisure (ideally or rather, we get to explore at a level that is NOT simply a paragraph in your AP World History course.) Solid communities are formed, ideas are dispersed, people of differing backgrounds coalesce towards something and sometimes what’s lost is out ability to communicate with individuals who are working towards that something. With that said, I have not read the report so I cannot comment on the specifics but I’m wary of making any strong assertions outside of those I made above because the UC and Mark Yudof are run by awful people who do awful things to save face.
Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans. But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) as quoted in “This really happened: A Republican congressman said federal student loans is the start of a “slippery slope” that could lead to a Holocaust“ [via Think Progress]
Meritocracy debunked.
Top 25 Colleges for Latinos
By way of political-linguaphile,
Hispanic Magazine creates a yearly rank for the best colleges and universities for Latino students. Included on this list are academic institutions that continue to successfully recruit and retain Hispanic students.
To create this list of the top 25 colleges and universities for Latinos, the following criteria has been used:
- Total Hispanic student enrollment
- Number of Latinos graduating
- Number of Hispanic-related degree programs
- Number of Hispanic student organizations and minority support programs
- Number of Hispanic faculty
EDITED OUT 1-3.
- 4. University of California, Berkeley
110 Sproul Hall, #5800
Berkeley, CA 94720-5800
Tel: (510) 642-3175
School Website
Undergrad students: 25,151
Graduate students: 10,317
Type of school: public
Campus type: urban
Tuition & fees: $3,633 in-state, $14,227 out-of-state
Hispanic students: 10 %
Most popular majors: molecular/cell biology, English, and psychology
Let me just state that UC Berkeley has wonderful programs in place to help out Latin@ students but that 10% seems generous. I’ve been told the Latin@ enrollment at UC Berkeley is at pre-affirmative action lows (or so it was last year) AND for a state with as many Latin@’s as California, I find even a generous estimate of 10% disheartening.
It’s a big school and I love it but it can be a lonely place for Latin@s in the sciences.* With that said, please apply and don’t be afraid to rep your barrio or city or whatever. We have good Latin@ food, that matters.
*For example, there are zero Latin@s in my bioengineering courses but I know they exist.
We don’t need a Spanish-speaking Obama,” said George Rodriguez, president of the conservative South Texas Political Alliance. “We don’t need affirmative action politicians. By that I mean, we need the best-qualified person as well as a person who has the values of America at heart to lead us.
Univision News Tumblr: Julián Castro: Is the “Latino Obama” ready for the national stage?
Two simple things. First of all using ‘affirmative action’ to describe a politician that’s also a POC is stupid. Affirmative action has/had a purpose and many POC (and white women) are grateful for the one of the few policies that not only acknowledged that there is no level playing field in the United States of America but also actively sought to do something about it in some form. The educational system in the United States of America is, to state it bluntly, sexist and racist. If you have any doubts about that, you haven’t made an effort to learn about it or you have not been listening. Sit down. Second, complaining that Julian Castro does not have “the values of America at heart” is foolish. He graduated from Stanford and earned his law degree at Harvard, you’re not dealing with Ted Kaczynski. To his credit though, George Rodriquez is obviously commenting on something he doesn’t know shit about because Julian does not even speak Spanish. And this thing about “values of America at heart”, whose America and what values?
