Dear Professor Høj,
I was struck by a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters with John Cook, a University of Queensland employee, as the lead author. The paper purports to estimate the degree of agreement in the literature on climate change. Consensus is not an argument, of course, but my attention was drawn to the fact that the headline conclusion had no confidence interval, that the main validity test was informal, and that the sample contained a very large number of irrelevant papers while simultaneously omitting many relevant papers.
My interest piqued, I wrote to Mr Cook asking for the underlying data and received 13% of the data by return email. I immediately requested the remainder, but to no avail.
I found that the consensus rate in the data differs from...
Education
Dear Educators:
When Educational Leadership asked me to write an article for this issue, I almost said no.
I surprised myself. I'm a writer, a blogger, and an English teacher by trade, and I never say no to a request to write. I hadn't realized how painfully I felt that the trajectory of U.S. education had skewed in the past 10 years.
In the face of the failure of funding for public schools, damaging teacher evaluation policies, stultifying infatuation with high-stakes testing, and continued national myopia regarding the influence of economic inequity on our students, to write about how to help teachers "put on a happy face" felt ludicrously peripheral.
I believed, finally, there was only one way to do this with integrity, and that was to test my own experiences and ideas in fire. I...
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Dear newbie graduate students,
To all of you about to start on the exciting, confusing, rollercoaster-of-emotions path of graduate school, I’d like to share some advice and lessons I’ve learned (and am still learning!) during my own experience as a graduate student in biological sciences.
Own your project
Graduate school is going to be vastly different from your undergraduate experiences. As an undergrad, you most likely helped out on another person’s project, running a few PCRs here, taking population samples there. You were a helper of sorts, learning a little of this and that as you went along. It was a great opportunity to get your feet wet in research. If you worked in a lab after your undergraduate studies, you probably had more responsibilities but most likely were still an...
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Dear Colleagues:
It is difficult for me to express the depth of my feelings about the heroic actions of our country during World War II. Our veterans and our allies prevented the extermination of my people.
I often wonder what my life would have been like had I lived in another country or another time; being Jewish, I could have lived a life of horror and helplessness. I am safe and free because of the spirit that moved this country to act. That spirit is best expressed in the founding documents of our nation, an immovable commitment to liberty and human dignity, a willingness to shed our blood when those rights are threatened.
It is with this in mind that I write to address recent concerns regarding the new framework for the College Board’s AP® U.S. History course.
I want to...
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Dear Troll,
Since I started blogging about my son Quinn and his disability, I knew this day would come. There’s no shortage of trolls on the internet who hide behind the anonymity of a screen name with the intent to be cruel, and I’ve seen their hostility many times before. In fact, just last week, in the wake of a robbery at the Down Syndrome Association of Houston’s headquarters, in which $10,000 worth of technology was stolen, there was no shortage of ignorant comments on the news story reporting the incident. One user asked, “how will they learn to count to potato?” Another claimed that wasting computers on “retards” was stupid anyway and that the organization deserved to be robbed. These comments, while offensive, simply serve to showcase people’s hate-fueled ignorance and aren’...
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Dear Kiva Community,
If you’re a part of Kiva’s lending team community, chances are you’ve either seen or taken part in a conversation about the loans that Strathmore University recently posted to the Kiva website. We're listening. In this blog post, we hope to address a lot of the issues that have been raised and provide answers to many of the questions we've been seeing.
If this is new to you, here’s a brief recap: A couple months ago, one of our Field Partners, Strathmore University, posted a number of loans to cover full tuitions for students from low-income regions in Kenya who could not otherwise afford higher education. Soon thereafter, many lenders raised concerns because Strathmore University was founded -- as the school describes it -- with “inspiration and encouragement...
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Dear Penn & Teller,
I really don’t want to say this, but I feel obligated to. I’m afraid you screwed up. Big time. (Of course, if this weren’t a generally family-friendly blog, where we rarely go beyond PG-13 language, I’d use a term more like one that Penn would use to describe a massive fail, which, as you might guess, also starts with the letter “f”; I think he’d appreciate that.)
I’m referring, of course, to your appearance on The Dr. Oz Show one week ago (video: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Before I begin the criticism, let me just take care of the obligatory but honest statement that I am a fan. I’ve been a fan for a long time. Indeed, I remember seeing you guys perform in Chicago back in the late 1990s when I was doing my fellowship at the University of Chicago. I’ve also...
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Dear Superintendent Cortines,
As communities across the nation face budget deficits we understand that many school administrators will have to make difficult decisions, but depriving Los Angeles Unified School District students of crucial 21st century educational resources such as certified school librarians is not the answer.
As technologies and information gathering continue to change, students are finding themselves left behind. This is happening not because they lack access to technology or informational resources but because they have lost access to one of the most valuable resources a school can offer its students—a certificated teacher librarian.
School libraries play a significant role in the lives of our children, but this move will have an even greater negative impact...
3,528
Dear Members of the Board:
I read with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation the unexpected announcement earlier this month that President Rebecca Chopp is departing Swarthmore to become the chancellor of the University of Denver.
Anticipation because as a grateful graduate of Swarthmore, I can’t help but view the hiring of a new president as an opportunity for the school to rededicate itself to the true mission of liberal education, which is to prepare students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom by furnishing and refining their minds. Trepidation because I fear that Swarthmore’s next president will lead the college further down the path of politicized research and curriculum that has become the hallmark of our finest colleges and universities.
It is your...
3,224
Dear Bill Nye:
I’ve always appreciated your ability to communicate science to the public. Your television shows taught us about our biological world and physical universe in an accessible, engaging manner. In recent years you have become an outstanding ambassador for science. You have helped many people understand that good science starts with a plausible hypothesis that is tested with careful design and statistical rigor, resulting in data that could be interpreted within the framework of the scholarly literature toward building or augmenting a scientific consensus.
You have applied this approach to teach the scientific evidence for evolution and anthropogenic climate change. You also have publicly and robustly rebutted the pseudoscientific positions underlying creationism and...
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