andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-34 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
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6 Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me. [sent-13, score-1.03]
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same-blog 1 1.0 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
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Introduction: “Just like literature, only smaller.”
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Introduction: I don’t have much sympathy for well-paid academic plagiarists who are too lazy to do their jobs, but I actually can feel for the author in this story who posted fake positive Amazon reviews of his own books and negative reviews of his competitors’. I mean, sure, this is despicable behavior, I won’t deny that, but it’s gotta be harder and harder to make money writing books. Even a so-called bestselling author must feel under a lot of pressure. I was recently reading a book by Jonathan Coe—he’s just great, and famous, and celebrated, but I doubt he’s getting rich from his books. Not that there’s any reason that he has to get rich, but if even Jonathan Coe isn’t living the high life, that’s not good for authors in general. It’s a far cry from the days in which Updike, Styron, etc., could swagger around like bigshots.
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Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
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Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
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Introduction: Alex Tabarrok writes : There is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. . . . Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit: Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences. Excellent points (and Tabarrok has additional good points that I haven’t quoted). We’re not all
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Introduction: Joshua Vogelstein points us to an article by Shaaron Ainsworth, Vaughan Prain, and Russell Tytler: Should science learners be challenged to draw more? Certainly making visualizations is integral to scientific thinking. Scientists do not use words only but rely on diagrams, graphs, videos, photographs, and other images to make discoveries, explain findings, and excite public interest. . . . However, in the science classroom, learners mainly focus on interpreting others’ visualizations; when drawing does occur, it is rare that learners are systematically encouraged to create their own visual forms to develop and show understanding (6). Drawing includes constructing a line graph from a table of values, sketching cells observed through a microscope, or inventing a way to show a scientific phenomenon (e.g., evaporation). Although interpretation of visualizations and other information is clearly critical to learning, becoming proficient in science also requires learners to develop many
Introduction: Columbia College has for many years had a Core Curriculum, in which students read classics such as Plato (in translation) etc. A few years ago they created a Science core course. There was always some confusion about this idea: On one hand, how much would college freshmen really learn about science by reading the classic writings of Galileo, Laplace, Darwin, Einstein, etc.? And they certainly wouldn’t get much out by puzzling over the latest issues of Nature, Cell, and Physical Review Letters. On the other hand, what’s the point of having them read Dawkins, Gould, or even Brian Greene? These sorts of popularizations give you a sense of modern science (even to the extent of conveying some of the debates in these fields), but reading them might not give the same intellectual engagement that you’d get from wrestling with the Bible or Shakespeare. I have a different idea. What about structuring the entire course around computer programming and simulation? Start with a few weeks t
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Introduction: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
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Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
3 0.91345859 763 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-13-Inventor of Connect Four dies at 91
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Introduction: Burak Bayramli writes: I wanted to inform you on iPython Notebook technology – allowing markup, Python code to reside in one document. Someone ported one of your examples from ARM . iPynb file is actually a live document, can be downloaded and reran locally, hence change of code on document means change of images, results. Graphs (as well as text output) which are generated by the code, are placed inside the document automatically. No more referencing image files seperately. For now running notebooks locally require a notebook server, but that part can live “on the cloud” as part of an educational software. Viewers, such as nbviewer.ipython.org, do not even need that much, since all recent results of a notebook are embedded in the notebook itself. A lot of people are excited about this; Also out of nowhere, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation dropped a $1.15 million grant on the developers of ipython which provided some extra energy on the project. Cool. We’ll have to do that ex
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Introduction: Lyric Semiconductor posted: For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits (0s and 1s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. A processor steps through many of these operations serially in order to perform a function. However, today’s most interesting problems are not at all suited to this approach. Here at Lyric Semiconductor, we are redesigning information processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities: from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000x efficiencies in cost, power, and size. Om Malik has some more information, also relating to the team and the business. The fundamental idea is that computing architectures work deterministically, even though the world is fundamentally stochastic.
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