Helen Epstein, in an aside in her fine piece on public-health innovator Sara Josephine Baker, suggests it rises partly from the excellent healthcare, daycare, and social services we give our military: [T]here is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. […]
Continue reading →From Today’s Times: Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor With Educators: Though the issue is one of the most frequently studied by education scholars, there is little consensus about grouping’s effects.Some studies indicate that grouping can damage students’ self-esteem by consigning them to lower-tier groups; others suggest that it produces the opposite effect by ensuring that […]
Continue reading →In a passage highlighted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Stephen Pinker, in an interview in The Observer last week, argues that statistical ignorance is our intellectual culture’s great failure. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the […]
Continue reading →The fine writer Steve Silberman has posted a collective homage to good teachers at his blog NeuroTribes. The loveliest is his tribute to his husband Keith, who holds a PhD from Berkeley and teaches science in a high school. Lucky be his students. Steve asked several writers to answer the question, What’s the most important […]
Continue reading →One of the pleasures of living in the UK, where I’m two-thirds of the way through a year here, is the stellar quality of some of the television programming, and particularly of the many science and cultural series produced by the BBC. A wonderful post by scientist and blogger Stephen Curry last week, Artful History, […]
Continue reading →The scientific paper is a wonderful thing. So how is it holding science back? I’ve got a guest post over at the Guardian science blog network pondering just that. In particular I look at how making the scientific paper the effective currency of science — instead of just one of several ways to share the […]
Continue reading →This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say “by product”) of social cognition and behavior. May be something to that, Razib says — but it would be nice “get in on the game of normal human variation in religious orientation (as opposed to studies of mystical brain states which seem focused on outliers).”
Continue reading →Six months ago I thought this country was ready to deal with the serious problems in our schools. This new survey would suggest that’s the case. But having watched the healtcare reform debate/debacle, I now have my doubts.
Continue reading →