By Ben Merriman. On May 28, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology passed the First Act. Among other things, the legislation would cut some $50-million in funds to the National Science Foundation for research in the social sciences.
Elected officials might have more than one reason to oppose NSF support for the social sciences. More...
By Stanton L. Jones. It is bracing to have my institution—Wheaton College—held up in the pages of The Chronicle as the embodiment of “The Great Accreditation Farce,” the headline on Peter Conn’s essay. Conn suggests that Wheaton and other religious colleges are “intellectually compromised institutions” that betray the intellectual standards that should mark accredited institutions of higher education. Colleges like ours, he argues, “systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education,” a serious charge that deserves consideration. More...
By Guest Writer. The following is by Robert Epstein, a former editor in chief of Psychology Today and author of 15 books on psychology.
Early in 2013, I was appointed the first full professor of psychology at the University of the South Pacific, which serves more than 25,000 students throughout the 12 island nations in this vast and often breathtakingly beautiful part of the world. It was a late-career adventure for me and my wife. Full professorships are rare here, and my appointment came with a private lunch with the president of the university. I had never been welcomed anywhere so graciously. More...
By Prof. Hacker. There are a great many text editors on iOS, the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Just one glance at Brett Terpstra’s list of markdown editors can attest to the range of offerings available on the platform.By Anastasia Salter. Summer is a big time for academic transitions. Last week I talked about tools for finding a new home, but once you’ve found somewhere to go, it’s a lot of work to get there–I’m writing this while surrounded by unpacked boxes and stacks of books. One of the first steps is to clear out of your former campus, which can be complicated depending on how many years you’ve spent invested not only in your physical office but in all of the campus’s digital services. Read more...By Jason B. Jones. If you’re consistently in bad meetings, it’s time to look in the mirror.No one would accept consistently terrible classes. No one would continually repeat research procedures that didn’t yield interesting data. But there’s this weird assumption that meetings are just inherently bad and unimprovable. Read more...
By Lucy Ferriss. I must love language more than I love truth. Example: The venerable Economist, along with several other publications, recently reported on a study whose tentative conclusion was that female-named hurricanes—or, more precisely, feminine-sounding hurricanes—cause more death than their masculine counterparts. The reason behind this apparent rise of the Valkyries is that those who hear of, say, Hurricane Tiffany fear her far less than those who hear of Hurricane Boris. They therefore take fewer precautions and put their lives more at risk. More...
By Rose Jacobs. Many people talk about becoming a different person in a foreign language—funnier or bolder or more suave. What they don’t mention is that, on the way, you become a computer. That’s what struck me last month when reading about “Eugene Goostman,” the first machine to pass the Turing Test, by convincing 10 of 30 judges that it was a human based on a five-minute, instant-message conversation. More...
By Ilan Stavans. I love the expression “sudden death.” It refers to a FIFA tie-breaking rule last used in 2002, when South Korea and Japan hosted the World Cup, but most of matches in this year’s El Mundial, as the games are known to Spanish-language viewers of Univision, all felt like sudden death, at least in the round of 16, which concluded Tuesday. (By the way, Univision’s newscast has been far superior to ESPN’s, at least at the level of wordplay.) The Netherlands-Mexico match was a nail-biter (I’m Mexican!), as was Costa Rica vs. Greece. Watching these games is like reading a superb thriller: Tension is high and time seems to stand still. More...
By Ben Yagoda. If you’re looking for a great summer read, and you anticipate a summer with a lot of time on your hands, I highly recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit. Its 928-page length is to some extent a function of the fact that it covers four separate topics, each of which could have been a book of its own: a brief biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a brief biography of William Howard Taft, a study of the two men’s complicated political and personal friendship, and (the ostensible subject) an account of the two presidents’ relations with muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and S.S. McClure. More...
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