Topic
Politics
A collection of 11 posts
Beyond Crazy - Measuring Productivity
James Kwak on The Baseline Scenario has a new post, titled beyond crazy, making the case that simple attempts to measure professorial productivity are rather counterproductive. It’s in line with what I was saying earlier.
Monterey Seafood Watch
I’ve talked about this before, but not here. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a well respected Seafood Watch program, giving advice on what seafood is harvested sustainably.
This came to mind because I noticed that Orange Roughy was on the menu at a local seafood place. No one should
More on R&D from Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein says only 9% of our companies are innovating, according to an NSF study. There is a link in his article to an article by Michael Mandel, which is where Ezra got his info.
This underscores the need for universities to do R&D, and thus, not to
Treating universities like businesses
I saw a link in Steve Benin’s Political Animal blog saying that Texas Governor Rick Perry wants to treat universities like a business, but that he has no idea what he’s talking about.
Reading the article, they’re right. He has no idea what he’s talking about,
Not with a bang...
So Michael Lind of Salon has a column in Salon saying what I’ve been saying for the past twelve or so years. We’re moving from a Republic to a Principate.
I would add that the executive branch has been figuring out ways to get more power pretty much
Reason vs fear in Daily Kos by Mark Sumner
Mark Sumner had an interesting post today in the Daily Kos. He makes some points that I’ve thought about for some time, that the current “right wing” in the US has become the party of anti-reason demagogues that do not necessarily even believe what they are saying.
I’ve
Interesting post about privacy from James Fallows
So James Fallows posted “Avatar” Life in the Digital Age on his Atlantic blog. He quoted a college student (“Will S.”) he knows as saying:
My existence on the internet might be with my real name, but my suspicion is that the vast majority of people are creating Avatars of
Against publicizing private lives
“In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people’s lives. We’ve become the family dog who’s allowed to eat anything that falls on the floor, and the press is the little kid in the family who keeps
Time to profile engineers
So Spencer Ackerman has an amusing tongue in cheek post:
http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/12/29/time-to-profile-engineers/
Most of the terrorists have been engineers.
As a non-engineer, I have no problem. (First they came for the engineers…)
We are so cooked
So I’m reading James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren, which is about global warming. He’s an optimist and believes that people in power will eventually do the right thing, or that they care about billions of people that aren’t them.
I used to be optimistic. I