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Updated NRC data, rankings site outage
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DEC
17
2010
2
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Students know effective teaching when they see it
So says the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a major ($45M) effort to assess teacher quality funded by the Gates Foundation. Preliminary findings were released earlier in the week.
Key quote from the report:
> When a teacher teaches multiple classes, student perceptions of his or her practice are remar...
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DEC
10
2010
2
AM
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Science funding: an alternative approach
From Wired, an alternative to agencies and foundations for science funding: 3 different Kiva-style microfinance organizations that pool small donations from many individuals to fund particular projects. This kind of thing can't scale to anything NIH-like - the NIH's annual budget is literally one million times grea...
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DEC
02
2010
4
PM
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NSF in the crosshairs
The New York Times recently launched a crowdsourcing initiative to see how people would choose to balance the federal budget. The Times gave people the option to pick and choose from a collection of budget cutting measures that had been proposed by various committees and think tanks: The Simpson/Bowles deficit comm...
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DEC
01
2010
3
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Gender differences in science: a cure?
Science has a fascinating study at the University of Colorado at Boulder: a simple, 30 minute intervention erased the gender gap in physics grades in a randomized, double-blind study. (Here are two summaries for those without a subscription.)
The gist: in weeks 1 and 4 of the 15 week course, students spent 15 mi...
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NOV
23
2010
4
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Leaving academia
Harvard CS professor and blogger Matt Welsh just announced that he will be leaving Harvard to join Google.
His reasons sound similar to my own motivation for leaving Dartmouth 12 years ago for Microsoft:
> The cynical view is that as an academic systems researcher, the very best possible outcome for your rese...
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NOV
21
2010
1
AM
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Rankings update
Quiet on the blog is often good news: it means that web site improvements are in thw works. Today we've rolled out some nice speedups of the rankings site.
One of the hazards of working with great hardware and software when developing a site is that it's easy to forget that there are lots of people running old b...
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NOV
13
2010
2
AM
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Graduate enrollments are up
The Council of Graduate Schools has released their annual report on graduate enrollments here.
Here's their key point:
> “The strong growth in first-time graduate enrollment is an indication of the continued high value of graduate education,” said CGS President Debra W. Stewart. “In particular, the 6.0% gain ...
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NOV
10
2010
3
PM
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DIY stem cells
In the 19th century gold and silver rushes here in California, a few miners struck it rich by discovering gold and silver. But many more of the companies that persist to this day made their fortunes by providing services to the miners. Levis, Wells Fargo, etc.
I wonder if there are similar opportunities on the ...
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NOV
09
2010
3
PM
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The Next Big Thing
Today's Times has an article on hot fields in science. Right now it's stem cells, but the article asks about how much one can predict big breakthroughs in general.
The interviewees are skeptical of the ability to predict big discoveries, but:
> ...even if it’s impossible to predict a particular major discover...
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NOV
04
2010
3
PM
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Waiter, there's a drosophila melanogaster in my soup
I've merged the two BLS data sets mentioned in the previous post and have added the merged set as the *third* sheet in the Google spreadsheet - there are links at the bottom of the spreadsheet to the different sheets. (The whole merge took about 20 lines of python, a language that *every* science and engineering gr...
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