Bookmarks from Saturday June 13th-Friday June 18th 2010
The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries | A Hamburger Today
this looks awesome. DIY + nerd science!
It’s Complicated David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up.
“Souter’s speech thus represents much more than an ode to a changing Constitution or a forceful admission that something that sounds suspiciously like “empathy” means that “judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own.” Souter’s words even transcend his own high-minded call to “keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.” What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”
Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors
“interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the “teaching to the test” that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. ”
The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds – Personal – The Atlantic
“There’s a way of looking at the ugliness after Reconstruction–the rise of the Lost Cause, the Klan, the lynchings–as a tragic search for Southern white male identity. First the old slave patrols go. Then the Confederate Army is subdued and humiliated. Then blacks began to dominate “manly” athletic pursuits. Then Martin Luther King exposes the immorality of the Southern system. Reeling from “each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
HEY STOUFFERS! F$$K YOU IN YOUR F$$KING TOASTED A$$HOLE.
via . « Grocery Eats groceryeats.com post very NSFW (but very funny)
Almost All Is Vanity – PostClassic
“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets.”
“Success Is Just Another Form of Failure” – PostClassic
“The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.”
Is there an Bubble in Higher Education? (via DIY U)
“We don’t often hear higher education talked about in such baldly commercial terms. Most faculty and campus administrators have visceral negative reactions to this kind of language. But that doesn’t mean that colleges—even not-for-profit colleges—aren’t essentially run as businesses. It just means that (a) they’re often run as businesses badly because it is considered distasteful to draw on the lessons and vocabulary of the business world, and (b) educators often fail to identify the tensions between their school’s mission and its operating model, thus making it less likely that they will be able to confront some of the system’s ethical challenges successfully. But since the heart of DIY U is an economic argument, it is worthwhile to try framing issues in the language of economics. As the title of this post suggests, the specific question I want to address is whether there is a bubble in the college education market.”
link: DIY U: Is There a Bubble in the Higher Education Market?
making the simple more complex?
I’m starting to think we should teach theory by performance practice. pieces by bach, beethoven, and handel can be so different that without context these pieces can be incompressible to most students.
- is it possible to learn it all? (western canon of art music)
- if not what should we study?
- the ‘best’ pieces?
- the most commonly performed? and what do we leave out?
no matter which pieces we decide to study i really think the sooner we can start looking at music from the it’s elements (form, melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre) the more relevant our teaching will be of the skills needed to decode and perform music.
at the end of the day we need to find better ways to make the complex more simple instead of the simple more complex
