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Author Archives: Kelli Barr
Five habits of great students: Lessons from top-ranked STEM school | WSJ
I like this piece from the WSJ. The authors are a world history and an English teacher at the top-ranked high school for STEM education. They identify five habits of their most successful students: 1) frequent reading in a variety of subjects … Continue reading
Posted in Interdisciplinarity, STEM Policy
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Does technological liberation have to come at a price?
A good read from Evgeny Morozov at the WSJ: Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb? Once we step into this magic space, we are surrounded by video cameras that recognize whatever ingredients we hold in our hands. Tiny countertop robots inform … Continue reading
Institutions starting to walk the Broader Impacts walk
CSID’s own Robert Frodeman is slated to keynote an upcoming Broader Impacts Infrastructure Summit. This summit marks the first of its kind for its focus on institutional infrastructure, primarily at universities and colleges, to support faculty and staff in coordinating, … Continue reading
Posted in Accountability, Broader Impacts, Conferences Upcoming, NSF, STEM Policy
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What are the goalposts for science, and why should we care?
I recently ran across this analysis by Dan Hind in Al Jazeera. It’s a delighfully cogent summary of the main drivers of the scientific enterprise: unaccountable power in the form of national and corporate investment, which determines to a large … Continue reading
Mothers of Jews who like bacon: Where Facebook meets identity politics
Tom Scott did something extraordinary last week: he typed in searches on Facebook’s new Graph Search feature and posted images of the results on his tumblr, called ActualFacebookGraphSearches. … which sounds quite un-extraordinary. Except that Scott – something of an … Continue reading
“The Individual and Scholarly Networks” webinar: Notes from the not-so-underground philosopher
My initial reaction is that the single-day webinar in which I presented on Tuesday (and in which I was the only humanist – !) was a success. Excepting some minor and very intermittent technical difficulties with sound and visual, the presenters … Continue reading
Is visual content separable from the implied message?
As an example of the interface of aesthetics, visual content in this case, and ethics, the implied message and its implications, I would rate this as good design (intellectual) merit, but poor ethical and social merit (impact)… … which, in … Continue reading
Posted in Broader Impacts, Public Philosophizing
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Science is “being harmed,” but all I can muster is a bit of schadenfreude…
A somewhat alarmist outcry went up Monday on HuffPost regarding the state of scientific publishing, and it’s dripping with cynicism. Here’s a snippet that I think is representative of the author’s perspective; he seeks to draw an analogy between the … Continue reading
The politics of prudence; or, how I learned to stop worrying about climate change and love therapeutic nihilism
Frankenstorm Sandy, currently ravaging the northeastern US, is testament enough to the predictable unpredictability inherent in global warming. What I mean by “predictable unpredictability” is something like the following: though we cannot know exactly how individual weather systems in particular … Continue reading
The science of the future is… art?
Philosopher Santiago Zabala has a piece out today in Al Jazeera about the saving power of art. Globalization, he claims, has wrought an era where the aesthetic calling is not l’art pour l’art – art for art’s sake, or what … Continue reading
Cashing out the academic piggybank, but on who’s backs?
Why would a tenured professor quit academia to work in industry? Most would answer this question with recourse to salary figures or the greater opportunities for upward mobility. Terran Lane, a former computer science professor at the University of New … Continue reading
What is absolutely knowable?
Philosophy of science has pegged this question as the beating heart of the Enlightenment’s leaps and bounds in fields of science: the search for the absolute truth of nature. Robert Crease argues in his recent book World in the Balance … Continue reading
Here’s the map… what’s the territory?
Maps of science have been proliferating for a number of years now, and interest has been heavily correlated to the advancement of mapping technologies. Philosophy has finally produced a blip on the mapping radar, and the results are pretty interesting. … Continue reading
Is there a conflict between altmetrics and peer review?
Some Thoughts on Peer Review and Altmetrics | Partially Attended An interesting take on my abstract for the upcoming altmetrics12 workshop from Ian Mulvaney – Head of Technology for a neat new publishing endeavor in the UK called eLifeSciences. …after … Continue reading
Posted in Future of the University, Metrics, Open Access, Peer Review
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At odds with one’s ends – the academy and Google talk judgment
A recent LSE Impact blog piece about the steering effects of publication pressures highlights that inattention to policy on the part of academics is largely the result of ‘rewarding A and hoping for B’ – Aristotle would call this a … Continue reading
Dude, where’s my culture?
Justin E. H. Smith recently authored a piece in the NYT Stone blog regarding cultural bias inherent in the teaching of Western philosophy. It hooks up nicely with his review of the experimental philosophy movement – dubbed x-phi – spearheaded … Continue reading
A turning of the pedagogical tides?
An interesting read in the Chronicle discussing the pedagogical strategy of ‘flipping’: “the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture,” which can take all kinds of specific forms, like group work, interactive learning assessment (i.e. quizzes or recaps halfway … Continue reading
The ‘most important questions’ in science policy
A group of scientists in Britain has authored a list of the 40 most pressing, unanswered questions concerning the intersection of science and public policy, the result of a workshop at Cambridge University. Some have met the exercise with open … Continue reading
Science has a reflexive moment (sort of)
I came across this report from a workshop that discussed the need for consideration of the societal impacts, both beneficial and potentially harmful, of recent developments in the field of synthetic biology by synthetic biologists. It seems to represent a … Continue reading
A call for accountability in economics
Similar to a former post of mine about econometrics, this Chronicle article makes the case that the institutional incarnation of economics (i.e. economics as an academic discipline embedded in university and college institutions and its attendant culture) needs a reality-check; … Continue reading
Just another friendly neighborhood corporate takeover…
… of education. As a publicly educated Floridian, this hits home: long-time school board member of Orange County, Florida, Rick Roach discusses his experience taking the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), required annually for certain grade levels in public schools. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Vandana Shiva’s eco-logic: Seeds as culture
World-renowned activist and intellectual Vandana Shiva describes in a recent video interview why she has spent practically her entire life advocating against the imperialism and colonialism of global agribusiness’ genetically modified, commodified crop strains. [@ 3:15] Interviewer: “What is the … Continue reading
Contrary to conventional wisdom…
… or is it? A recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece details several studies which argue that life choices such as raising a family are not the primary cultural factors that drive women out of professional careers. In the field … Continue reading
Posted in Public Philosophizing
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I looked for a Thesaurus and found a map instead
The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus turns word-searching into meaning-mapping. Type in a word for which you want a synonym or antonym, and the program spits out a visualization of the connections based on linguistic meaning between the searched word and its … Continue reading
Posted in Public Pedagogy
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Even experts need help sometimes
Michael O’Rourke, lead investigator on the Toolbox Project out of the University of Idaho, recently discussed his work with Graham Hubbs, also from UI, on the blog Philosophy TV, where two philosophers video chat on issues ranging from modern epistemology … Continue reading