By Barbara Fister. Librarians often say proudly that we are neutral. This often is taken to mean “we aren’t allowed to express opinions” with a side of “we must never, ever suggest that information a patron seeks is factually wrong.”
By Rosemarie Emanuele. In Statistics, we talk about different types of error that may arise when decisions are made. Thinking of the state of the world as being the “null hypothesis” (for example, a criminal defendant is innocent or the world is flat), if we reject that world view in favor of another (the defendant is guilty or the world is actually round), we can either be correct or incorrect. If we are incorrect in rejecting the way the world is assumed to be, we call this error “type one error”. Committing such error, we may have been led to change behavior in ways that we would not want, as when we incarcerate an innocent person. Read more...
By Lee Skallerup Bessette. My son has started doing karate. He’s afflicted with my degree of hand-eye coordination, especially when it comes to mimicking something someone is doing, which is to say, neither of us are very good at it. The sensei is facing the group and tells the students to lift their right arms. My son, rather than lifting his right arm, will instead lift his left arm, perfectly mirroring the sensei. Read more...
By G. Rendell. A longstanding conflict within the sustainability movement has pitted what passes for conservatism in modern discourse and what has traditionally constituted conservatism -- adventurist neo-liberal catering to entrenched economic powers versus stewardship of community values dating back thousands of years. Each camp can present compelling logic although, as in the upcoming UN Climate Summit, they more often talk past than to one another. Corporations and communitarians each presume that their respective value system is the only one capable of addressing the crisis and, not surprisingly, each puts forth an image of the crisis that plays into its own value system. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. The Apple Watch has already absorbed too much of my attention and mental energy. By Joshua Kim. It feels sort of good to be excited by a new consumer technology. Hasn’t happened in a while.
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham. Two years ago, I attended a summer school at Heidelberg University on doing scholarship using material objects as sources. At the end of our one-week institute, one of the professors asked all the graduate students in the room to answer this question: “If your dissertation were an object, what would it be?” More...
By Justin Dunnavant. As archaeologists, it is customary for us to keep research journals while conducting fieldwork. Earlier this year I found myself excavating in a remote part of Ethiopia, camped out on the side of a mountain. Every night I would sit down for 15 to 30 minutes and write about the day’s work, weather, new foods, and other day-to-day experiences. More...
By Matt Reed. I’ll get to the responsible, adult part of the blog shortly. But first a giddy update: The Dog is home!!!! (Insert mental pic of me doing the Snoopy dance.) We had some wonderful volunteer helpers who helped us get the word out and used reported sightings to triangulate the best spot for a trap. Now she’s home! And she has a GPS collar in her future. Read more...
By Matt Reed. The Chronicle got one right. It outlined yesterday some discontent among sociologists at the cost of attending the American Sociological Association annual conference. If you don’t live in or near the host city, the combination of registration, airfare, hotel, and food can easy run over two thousand dollars for a single conference. And the ASA isn’t unique in that. Read more...
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