Category Archives: Public Philosophizing

3quarksdaily: Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger

Philosophy: you either get it or you don’t. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a … Continue reading

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Using Brain Research to Design Better eLearning Courses: 7 Tips for Success

The brain is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve by obtaining new knowledge and skills, even before birth. Unfortunately, retaining information can be challenging, simply because instructors and course designers do not always use methods that facilitate remembering. … Continue reading

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Multiverse Controversy Heats Up – Scientific American

The multiverse is one of the most divisive topics in physics, and it just became more so. The major announcement last week of evidence for primordial ripples in spacetime has bolstered a cosmological theory called inflation, and with it, some … Continue reading

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The Dream of Intelligent Robot Friends – Carla Diana – The Atlantic

Karotz is an Internet-enabled console in the shape of an abstracted rabbit. One sits on my coffee table, continuously connected to WiFi, programmed to broadcast certain bits of live information such as Twitter messages, news headlines or weather reports by … Continue reading

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The Overwhelm

Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, talks with the Atlantic Monthly. Schulte scrutinizes this state of affairs: Why do we all feel so overworked? How is that feeling different for men … Continue reading

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What Would Plato Tweet? – NYTimes.com

…For the past few years I’d been obsessed with trying to figure out what lay behind the spectacular achievements that had occurred there. In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, … Continue reading

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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine

An interview with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner… In most places in the world, you live your social life and your ordinary life in the lab. You don’t know anybody else. Sometimes you don’t even know other people in the same … Continue reading

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Public Books — Stop Defending the Humanities

Those who matter most to the humanities fall, I think, into two classes. The most important is that relatively small group of 18-year-olds (disproportionately few from poorer families) who are inclined to study the humanities. Our immediate future rests primarily … Continue reading

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What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? | David Graeber | The Baffler

My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible direction, and then … Continue reading

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Take Four Minutes To Reflect On Your Place In The Cosmos : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

…regardless of our resolutions and regardless of our ability to achieve those resolutions, our lives on this lonely cosmic outpost, this \”Pale Blue Dot,\” continue on. Until, of course, they don\’t. And that, in itself, is something to consider as … Continue reading

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Would teaching economics backwards help students be ready for the world?

Who really knows… but it might be worth the experiment! …here’s one temporary fix for introductory economics: teach it backwards. Reversing the order in which introductory economic classes are taught today might be the easiest way to respond to the … Continue reading

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Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference … Continue reading

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Science’s rightful place is in service of society | Dan Sarewitz

Science policy must concentrate less on how much money is spent, and more on how to translate investments into public good via Science’s rightful place is in service of society : Nature News & Comment.

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A Wizard of Oz Moment for the Web: Pull back the Curtains

Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency. Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers … Continue reading

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Schoolhouse Block: Science Students and the Government Shutdown | The Student Blog

It’s Day 5 of the government shutdown and the Panda Cam is still off. What does this mean for American science students? One of the biggest effects making its way around the science blog-o-sphere is the cutting of funding for scientific research. … Continue reading

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Assessing impact » Testing hypotheses…

Steven Hill (@stevenhill), Head of Research Policy at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, responds to a recent publication by Steven Hrotic and me here: Assessing impact » Testing hypotheses…. Here is the original publication, which is available open … Continue reading

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Hirschman on creativity

Nice Albert O. Hirschman quote brought to us by Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker: …The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it … Continue reading

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Academic Sustainability

The academy may be filled with leftists–so we are told–but it has yet to apply its Marxist interpretive skills to its own situation. For the academy suffers from epistemic overproduction. We can expect a crash. This overproduction shows itself both … Continue reading

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Alternative alternative metric

Maybe more ways our 56 Indicators can be used to assist in a different approach to success: not only in Academia but the general day to day of living a measured life and working in a measurable way. Finding new … Continue reading

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Nigel Warburton’s negative vision of what philosophy isn’t | jbrittholbrook

Does not resisting impact requirements mean you’re not a real philosopher? Nigel Warburton’s negative vision of what philosophy isn’t | jbrittholbrook.  

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Friends With Benefits – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Some real gems in this piece from today’s Chronicle, with which we collaborative humanists at CSID are much in sympathy. I sample the piece here, but it is well worth reading in full: No one works alone. It’s just a … Continue reading

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56 Indicators of Impact

In 2011, several core members of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID) at the University of North Texas held a meeting during which we imagined different ways to indicate the impact of our activities. We scribbled them on … Continue reading

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What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance | Andrew Taggart

Dr. Andrew J. Taggart, Philosophical Counselor, considers the role of the public philosopher and gives a shout out to our efforts here at CSID. On April 1, 2010, the professional philosopher Jonathan Dancy, who happens to be the father-in-law of … Continue reading

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Communities of Integration Workshop – Field Philosophy

I’m very pleased to be attending the upcoming workshop at Arizona State on “Communities of Integration” at the invitation of Erik Fisher of STIR fame. You can get a sneak peak at the developing website, including our contribution on Field … Continue reading

Posted in Future of the University, Gas Fracking, institutionalizing interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Metrics, Public Philosophizing, Science and technology ramifications, STEM Policy, Transdisciplinarity | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Document: an Open Letter From San Jose State U.’s Philosophy Department – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

This is a must read. The Document: an Open Letter From San Jose State U.’s Philosophy Department – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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