The learning outcomes approach recognises and encourages learner-centred learning.That is from a document (pdf download) recommended to me; for assisting primarily 'academics with teaching and unit of study development commitments' in writing their 'learning outcome' in 'higher education courses'.
John Timmer in Ars Technica: Epic fraud: How to succeed in science (without doing any).
Early Computing's 'Deal With the Devil': Marc Perry interviews George Dyson, dwelling on themes from Dyson's new book -- Turing's Cathedral -- on the early history of Computer Science.
Nick Rowe: Selection bias and disagreement in blogging.
Greg Downy at Neuroanthropology: Talent: A difference that makes a difference.
Post-Harry-Potter English fiction, particularly, page-turning-unputdownable three-hundred-paged 'entertainers', is of a certain mould. For instance, it must cater to 'young adult' and so, all elements in the book should be PG13. The dialogues should be singularly constructed out of simple words with fewer syllables and ample um ah and yu knows strewn around to pad up for the rest of the human consciousness. All old and experienced humans and non-humans will and must listen, obey and follow the 'young adult' protagonist, who will be brave in soul and weak in flesh, but always with a 'vision' that is gifted for his/her virtuous inexperience, a vision or mission or goal that is superlative, indefatigable and unfathomable by any adult in the story. Either that or such development demands effort from the writer and distracts the reader from the 'main narrative'. The story must have some fantastic element, magic by default; it should show off gizmodons and geekery as 'futuristic science ideas' but should always explain them as meta-magic spawned via agarbathi smoke and glabaderifst spells. The story should have non-human lifeforms, vampires by default, preferably succubus, fantastic creatures of fright and delight, always submissive to the protagonists (if for adult, amorous in all its fangs and tendrils) and takes orders in English, preferably teenspeak. And the girls should be in (malnutrition-ed) form-fitting leathers wielding swords as weapons, while the gents are clad in somersault-friendly, shapeless robes. And importantly, none of the characters must be developed to any level of maturity or depth -- All the World is a Stage, hence, all ephemeral Stage-fests must thrive only in the all-pervading now. All of which is OK, but who gets to decide on how dumb the readers should be -- the writer or the reader?Miéville has already won the Clarke Award three times – which is not his fault[...] However, a fourth award to this writer would send out a misleading and damaging message to the world at large: it suggests that not only is Mr Miéville the best the SF world can offer at the moment, he is shown to be more or less the only writer worth reading.[...] Although Miéville is clearly talented, he does not work hard enough.[...] He also uses far too many neologisms or SF nonce-words, which drive home the fact that he is defined and limited by the expectations of a genre audience.[...] A better writer would find a more effective way of suggesting strangeness or an alien environment than by just ramming words together. Resorting to wordplay is lazy writing. [...] I also find Miéville’s lack of characterization a sign of author indifference [...] unless he is told in clear terms that he is under-achieving, that he is restricting his art by depending too heavily on genre commonplaces, he will never write the great novels that many people say he is capable of. In the short term, to imply that this (Embassytown) is the best science fiction novel of the current year by giving it a prize, or even shortlisting it for one, is just plain wrong.After reading Railsea, I agree with Mr.Priest -- whether a Mr. Scalzi agrees or not. I will not pre-order another book by China for some years.
Two moving accounts:
Ashwin Nayak in In Theory: Turing Centennial Post:
We were walking through art galleries in San Francisco when Luca brought up the Turing centenary events that were taking place around the world. None of the events celebrating his work referred to Turing’s homosexuality. Luca wondered whether the celebrations would be complete without revisiting this aspect of his life. As a response, he was thinking of having a series of guest blog posts by contemporary gay and lesbian computer scientists about their experiences as gay professionals. How would they compare with those in Turing’s times? [...]
Standard Deviation ("... true story of a student currently studying at IIT-Madras...") [P. 20 in the pdf]:
Hello. You do not know me. Even the people around me don’t really know me. Because I have a secret, something I’ve kept to my world for a very long time; something I wish to reveal. But not confess; that makes it sound criminal. I need closure and for that, I must be true to myself. So here goes.
I’m gay.
Vincent van Gogh, at the heights of his powers, shot self with a gun he didn't own. Or did he? The Sacre Bleu, an iridescent blue color in most paintings by the Impressionists remains alluring and mysterious to art lovers. Would that hue have a common source, timeless and indefatigable? The creative spirit that paints, sculpts, writes, the hand that moves to create, does it belong to the one who muses or the Muse herself? Christopher Moore answers all these and some more in his inimitable style in Sacre Bleu.
I watched Woody Allen's Oscar winning Midnight in Paris a week before I read Sacre Bleu, the poster of which also used that color blue! The Paris they both depict, a cauldron of creativity and culture, is inspiring and inviting. While the movie glorifies the city and its dwellers in the 1920s, the book is more expansive in its period. Both are positive and entertaining. Surprisingly, the book doesn't utilize the Surrealists of the 1920s -- introduced effectively by Woody Allen in Midnight... -- may be because they didn't use Sacre Bleu, or more to the context, didn't paint real life. Nevertheless, Moore's book has an all star line-up of painters and artists spanning several centuries. Should not reveal more to avoid spoilers, but I was reminded of Danny Ocean's (of Ocean's Eleven) comment, which goes something like: "I always get confused with Manet and Monet; I know one of them is a painter and the other died of Syphilis." I also liked the way Oscar Wilde (and his creation The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Michelangelo are weaved into the main story. But that also prompts my crib. When Moore took a perspective to include sculptors and writers, persons involved in creative pursuits in fields other than painting, I expected him to give a scientist the same treatment as other Creators. Such a character is already there, begging to be 'mused' with all his eccentricities and ludicrous contraptions, in Professeur Bastard.
Timequake is an event where the Universe, due to some quirk, incurs a glitch in its spacetime and decides to 'relive' ten Earth years of its existence. Ten years to be relived exactly as in the first run, by every human on Earth and elsewhere, with full knowledge of what is going on as their accrued 'memory' cannot be undone due to the timequake. They should relive ten years, experiencing the consequences of their follies, of their mistakes and lost opportunities. But Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut is not only this. Timequake is a much maligned book, at least in the writing circle I frequent. One popular Tamil writer, while praising Timequake as a science fiction (which it could be), cited the blurb (about the ten year re-run) and mentioned the book is about the consequences of that event. Having read it, I am now convinced that Tamil writer hasn't.excessive and unwarranted and amounted to an abuse of his position as Editor-in-Chiefand he has
failed to provide any documentary evidence whatever that his papers were the subject of peer review,let me give my bloggers' update.
[...]those who raised their voices, in blogs or letters, were silenced by his threats of litigation.[in above quote, his = EN]
[...] English libel law can stifle justified discourse, including open scientific discussion. The burden of proof falls too heavily on the defendant to prove what they said was true, not on the accuser to show that it is false. The law is therefore more likely to stifle free speech and suppress legitimate criticism than defend the interests of science or society at large [...]Even in Feb 2009, one Jason started a blog El Naschie Watch and collected all news and "facts" about EN -- many of which were shown to be false or duped claims; browse the archive of that blog. ENW blog also linked to the original posts of John and Jacques, and after similar bafflement about their disappearance, had the time and tenacity to scrounge the internet archive to restore their content.
Two items:
El Naschie loses his case against Nature.
Short version: As chief editor of a journal, the man published tons of papers that were widely deemed to be of very poor quality. A Nature story on his retirement, and raised doubts about the peer review process for the man's papers. The man sued Nature for libel and lost.
In a section headed “The implausible absence of documentation”, the ruling also says that El Naschie “failed to provide any documentary evidence whatever that his papers were the subject of peer review”. The ruling states, “I am satisfied that his papers were not the subject of any, or any proper, peer review at all.”
Back when the scandal broke, Arunn had a couple of link-filled posts on l'affaire El Naschie.
A New Record in Retractions
An inquiry panel in Japan has recommended retraction of over 170 papers by Yoshitaka Fujii. [See also: Retraction Watch posts Report: Fujii faked data in at least 172 papers and Does anesthesiology have a problem? Final version of report suggests Fujii will take retraction record, with 172]
Thanks to Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi for the e-mail alert.
... academics produced a trashy, checkout-counter magazine?
Check out the examples -- Linguistics Today, Grammarian, and Werd -- in Mark Liberman's post at Language Log.
Men may come and men may go, as Basil Rathbone had come before and Robert Downey Jr. came later, but for me, Sherlock Holmes in tinsel life means Jeremy Brett. He is the one who lived the character faithful to what Doyle had constructed (Just as Hercule Poirot = David Suchet, although the delectable Peter Ustinov had made a valiant effort earlier). With such a staunch bias to the original, even when depicted in another media (cinema instead of the written word), I shouldn't have attempted reading the written word involving Sherlock Holmes and Watson, by a writer whose name is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I did. Only out of overwhelming urge to stroll through the swirling mists of Baker's Street one more time, to rest and rejoice in a fresh set of mysteries laid out by, hopefully, an author who raises to our exacting expectation. To my credit, I carefully chose a book, out of the myriad available, that had Jeremy Brett posing as the detective on the wrapper. The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes by Paul Gilbert. The book started promising in that the language was sufficiently Victorian to transport us back to the early 1900s and I slouched further in the couch with the Kindle DX firmly rested on my tummy with only the right thumb capable of any physical action. The game is afoot.
Having bitten once, I should have shied. I picked another book of similar purpose, a more recent "Between the Thames and the Tiber: Further Adventures by Sherlock Holmes" by Ted Riccardi. I gave up midway through the third story in this collection, which thankfully, also had 'original titles'. There is no additional cause for dislike in this case. Seriously, what these 'stories' -- for, I wouldn't dare anoint them 'mysteries' -- uniformly lack in plump is the fine art of deduction that Doyle originated and enunciated so well through his Sherlock to unravel a seemingly unsolvable mystery through logical appraisal of clues and facts that were at times merely over the top but neither impossible nor implausible. There are more such attempts to write 'Sherlock Holmes mysteries' by other authors (counted seven). I only hope some of those stories pass muster in the mystery and deduction department. Because, with no real talent in English writing, even I can construct Sherlockian sentences (the only thing going right for these books). Like this: After having brought on my undivided attention to bear upon some of the purported mysteries, delivered in wads of accentuated Victorian text, in two manuscripts by seemingly different authors, nevertheless bereft of any real mystery or deduction whatsoever, I could only throw up my arms now in remonstrance and ejaculate, "Catastrophe."The goal of "Imagine," according to its subtitle, is to tell us "how creativity works" — to offer a scientific, mechanistic account of a seemingly ineffable phenomenon. And what distinguishes the scientific from other modes of thinking is not its technology, level of detail or even subject matter, but its ability to discover reliable cause-and-effect relationships. The clarity of physics and chemistry is rare in social science, but this is no license for presenting interesting speculations as settled truths.More...
Nicholas Carr, Knight Crusader for Online Undistractions, expanded the theme of his Is Google making Us Stupid article into a Pulitzer (non-fiction category) finalist book, The Shallows. After reading six chapters in the e-version, I bought the hard-bound print version of Shallows and completed reading it a while back. The switch to the 'conventional' version is for a reason that Shallows wouldn't anticipate, but was discussed upfront in the more pragmatic (perhaps, as it was written after Shallows,) The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (shall write on this separately). I switched not because of any inherent e-version distraction but because of lack of copious links -- yes, that distracting and abhorrent method to wormhole from one region to another in e-text country -- to flip back and forth, guided by my memory, even as I am absorbed in the e-book. It is an inherent design problem with the e-book device, mentioned in The Pleasures..., yet to be satisfactorily addressed.I am pleased to announce that Arunn Narasimhan is now a co-blogger here.
Arunn has been blogging on and off at several sites, and I have had many occasions to link to his posts. It's fantastic that, in a conversation yesterday, he and I came up with the idea of his joining Nanopolitan as a co-contributor.
The sidebar and the About page have been modified to reflect this change, and each contributor now has a separate "Intro" page: Abi and Arunn.
Over to you, Arunn!
The Hunted (cartoon), by Abstruse Goose.
Do you still want to see this Odd Particle I’ve found? (cartoon), by Noise to Signal.
A sonnet on a Higgs-like particle (video) by Vi Hart.
BoingBoing: Gettin' Higgy With it: A Roundup of Higgs Boson Jokes on Twitter.
Closer Home. On the one hand, The gods of the particles ("The Higgs bit we know. But the boson? Western science is overlooking India's contribution to the discovery") by Amit Chaudhuri, and For the Indian Father of the ‘God Particle,’ a Long Journey from Dhaka by Samanth Subramanian.
On the other hand, Higgs and the subcontinent by Rahul Siddharthan; and also on the other hand (a very snarky one!), Putting the Bose in boson. And my fist in your face-on by Achintya Rao.
Russia: Drunk professor forces students to sit through 23-hour-long science exam.
Germany: University sues over early graduation: "The School of Economics and Management in Essen is asking the court to make former student Marcel Pohl, 22, pay an extra $3,772 after he obtained his degrees in only three semesters instead of the usual 11."
... The density of equations in an article has a significant negative impact on citation rates, with papers receiving 28% fewer citations overall for each additional equation per page in the main text. [...]
That's from the abstract of a recent PNAS paper: Heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists by Tim W. Fawcett1 and Andrew D. Higginson of the University of Bristol.
It has been reported to be pretty good at flagging fraudulent data in research publications -- so good, in fact, that it has already led to resignation of a Dutch scientist; according to this Science Insider story, it has forced another (unnamed) perpetrator to resign.
And for all that, the killer app -- a new statistical technique -- is yet to be published.
Science Insider has been covering this very interesting development which, apparently, is sending panic waves into the community of social psychologists:
... and infographics!
Lots of stuff for philosophers and historians to nibble at, and (eye) candy for the rest of us...[Addendum: a bigger, richer infographic of all the influentials in Wikipedia.]
