03.24.06
Upcoming: R&R
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I have left Harvard as of July 1, 2008 to take a position at
NYU.
This website has been cached and left static. Feel free to browse
my new website,
aka "What the heck is a Clinical Associate Professor?"
03.16.06
It’s time to give teaching more weight | csmonitor.com
Jonathan Zimmerman has an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor called “It’s time to give teaching more weight.” He uses the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers to point out that universities need to pay more than just lip service to improving the culture of teaching.
Asked what he would do with the undergraduates who had gathered in his laboratory for instruction, one Johns Hopkins University professor quipped, “I shall neglect them.”
He was joking, of course, but only in part. And the joke will continue until we devise new ways to evaluate and reward teaching. As my New York University colleague Ken Bain has written, all professors should have to “construct an argument” for their teaching - just as they do for their scholarship. This argument would explain the objectives of their courses, the classroom strategies they use, the ways they measure student learning, and so on. Like any good argument, it would draw from evidence gathered during the course: syllabi, tests, and student comments.
He goes on to say that teaching should be seriously considered as part of the tenure process, which makes sense as well.
I believe that a truly great university should aim for both exceptional research and exceptional teaching. How hard is that?
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AOL fails QR
There’s a piece in America Online News’s Daily Pulse called
Where are we headed? about the war in Iraq. Included is a time series of the number of soldiers lost since the war began:
Based on this representation, someone might believe that the number of coalition deaths is declining sharply now. However, this graph compares all of 2005 with the first 2.5 months, or 73 days, of 2006. I can’t tell where that giant blue dot is centered — maybe around 125 — but whatever it is, the crudest approximation requires multiplying it by 365/73 = 5 to compare the total with the total from all of 2005. That would be something like 625 deaths this year.
(Technically, too, the 2003 number should be scaled up to represent the fact that the war did not begin until March of 2003).
A month-by-month chart shows a different trend in the combat deaths:
These show a growth in the monthly death count by about 0.5 per month. It’s true that there is a decline in the last few months, but looking at earlier parts of the data show that that has happened before, only to tick back up again.
I learned about AOL’s graphic from the Center for American Progress, an organization which is critical of the current administration. But the criticism here is neither towards the president nor of the war effort, but towards AOL who published such a misleading graphic. I too am only writing here as a mathematician to criticise the mathematics of the situation. The war very well could be drawing to a close, but the four numbers depicted in the AOL graphic aren’t a reasonable indicator of it.
I got my data from icasualties.org, which combs newspaper accounts and matches them with Department of Defense releases. They count 2314 deaths since the beginning of the conflict, only six of which have not been confirmed by the DoD
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03.10.06
Make pages using the Symbol font display correctly in Mozilla/Firefox
I found a nice little entry on everything2 about how to Make pages using the Symbol font display correctly in Mozilla/Firefox. Very helpful.
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03.09.06
Mathematica Notebook from Class
Some of my Math 21a students were asking about the Mathematica features I used in class, such as plotting two surfaces on the same axes, or rotating graphics. Here’s the notebook from March 8’s class. Hope it helps. I’ll try to do this more often if there’s interest.
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