Sounds like Mostly Harmless minus the matrix algebra: “People are constantly looking at the world around them and trying to learn from it, and that’s natural,” MIT economist Joshua Angrist says. “But it turns out to be very difficult to sort out cause and effect, because the world is complicated, with many things happening at once.” Angrist, the Ford Professor of Economics, has long been one of...
Natural experiments on airplanes
If someone beside you ordered a snack or a film, Gardete was able to see whether later you did, too. In this natural experiment, the person sitting directly in front of you was the control subject. Purchases were made on a touchscreen; that person wouldn’t have been able to see anything. If you bought something, and the person in front of you didn’t, peer pressure may have been the reason...
Future of higher ed: faculty cleaning toilets
Scamming the peer-review process
In-depth article in Nature about faculty taking advantage of online review systems to get their papers published. They suggest fake reviewers and set up email accounts, so that they end up reviewing their own papers! I love how they were found out: Most journal editors know how much effort it takes to persuade busy researchers to review a paper. That is why the editor of The Journal of Enzyme...
Future of higher education: hand-to-hand combat
What’s sad is that faculty and administrators have their heads in the sand as to what is coming down the pike. As usual, law schools are the canary in the coalmine: Summer was waning and students were already packing for the fall semester, but Prof. Daniel B. Rodriguez, dean of the Northwestern University School of Law, was still fielding phone calls from incoming students seeking to...
Higher ed has a conference like this, it’s called ASHE
At This Conference, Scientists Spout Bogus Theories on Bugs, Yawns and Belly Fat
“Get me off your fucking email list” academic paper finds publisher
Annoying, I was just about to publish a paper on the same topic: The original paper (selection above) was written by David Mazières and Eddie Kohler and is entitled “Get me off your f—–g mailing list.” It is available here. After receiving a spam email from the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, Dr. Peter Vamplew of Federation University Australia’s School of Engineering and...
So can we stop talking about STEM? Please? Pretty please?
From Business Week: But scholars say there’s a problem with that argument: The tech worker shortage doesn’t actually exist. “There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies...
Worst college majors: don’t study art history or the Bible
While I am skeptical of using the Payscale data to judge individual institutions, benchmarking majors across schools is much less problematic. The list fits with what you might suspect about a) the cognitive abilities of students in these majors and b) what these majors might earn in the marketplace.
Eyewitness testimonies, like student-self reports, are useless
Of all the tools at an investigator’s disposal — DNA analysis, forensic evidence, witness testimony — by far the least reliable are the recollections of witnesses, studies suggest. More often than not, they raise more questions than they answer and sometimes produce deeply flawed cases. “Surveys show that large proportions of people, at least in the United States, think that human memory works...