What are MOOCs good for?
A wide-ranging review of the state of MOOCs:
Is the Securities and Exchange Commission trampling academic freedom?
As it turns out, not at all: Thus, the salient point is that the proposal appears in the proxy only because the Harvard SRP voluntarily decides to avail itself of an SEC rule that forces the company to put the statement on the company’s proxy. In order to benefit from this rule, the proponent has to agree to abide by SEC rules that prohibit proposals from making statements that suffer from...
Just how random is the peer review process?
Pretty damn random: The NIPS consistency experiment was an amazing, courageous move by the organizers this year to quantify the randomness in the review process. They split the program committee down the middle, effectively forming two independent program committees. Most submitted papers were assigned to a single side, but 10% of submissions (166) were reviewed by both halves of the committee...
Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates
Once again, glad that I am heavily funding my retirement. Google has spent years analyzing who succeeds at the company, which has moved away from a focus on GPAs, brand name schools, and interview brain teasers. Many schools don’t deliver on what they promise, Bock says, but generate a ton of debt in return for not learning what’s most useful. It’s an “extended adolescence,” he says. Succeeding...
College ratings are the Holy Grail
Had a listserv exchange with Bob Morse about the feds’ college ratings system, criticizing it and US News’ graduation rate model. He said “You are right that USNEWS is a for-profit company and we aren’t doing social science level analysis.” Here was my reply: For-profit status has nothing to do with it. When I make an error in one of my articles, I mislead about a dozen...
Innovator’s Dilemma sounds as valuable as big data
The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive. On March 10, 2000, Christensen [author of The Innovator’s Dilemma] launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent...
Most significant event of the 21st century thus far
A new Terminator movie with Schwarzenegger is coming out:
Women are indeed safer in college, despite the rhetoric
Some common sense from Emily Yoffe at Slate: Gillibrand said in announcing the legislation, “We should never accept the fact that women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus. But today they are.” This is one of the frequently made assertions about campus violence, but the evidence to back it up is lacking. Being young does make people more vulnerable...
Study shows null results are rarely published
A team at Stanford University reports online this week in Science that scientists are unlikely to even write up an experiment that produces so-called null results. A study of 221 survey-based experiments funded by the TESS (Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences) program at the National Science Foundation has found that almost two-thirds of the experiments yielding null findings are...