Link Dump 2015-08-31

2015-08-31

• The existence of poor quality comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education just goes to show that every community has problems. (That's me being stoic.)

• How a professor got tenure because of his "disabled" child.

• Philosophers on the Ashley Madison hack. I wish there would be a "philosophers on modern relationships".

• A good parable about privilege.

• Coca-Cola funds a lot of research into obesity, mostly pushing the message that people should exercise more. Is there a name for the fallacy of using absolute instead of relative benefits in a resource-constrained environment? That is, it's not so much about whether exercise helps (yes it does) but whether it helps more than a good diet (no it doesn't). Something about an opportunity cost bias?

• A review of a fascinating podcast about the intersection of food, imperialism, and technology.

• In defense of 1859 BCE + 8463 feet + 118 people = 10440. I have to wonder though: why add them? You could just as well multiply the numbers, or take the exponent - or god forbid, use them as arguments in a nested Busy Beaver function.

• Every year, professors at Beloit College publish a "Mindset List" that describes the world that the incoming college freshmen class grew up. The one that scares me a little is #36: "First Responders have always been heroes". This presumably refers to 9/11, which occurred when the born-in-1997 freshmen were about four years old. They literally don't remember a time before the war on terror.

• The EU has a right-to-be-forgotten law, which requires that Google (and other internet services) accept requests for certain links to be deleted. Google has now been ordered to delete the links to pages about the links it deleted.

• A really cool graph showing how median income is correlated with the gender ratio of college majors.

• I don't understand why stun guns might be an exception to the right to bear arms. The argument seems to be that, because they are non-lethal, they cannot be used in a military setting... and therefore in the context of the second amendment, cannot be used in a rebellion against a totalitarian government. The argument I want to try is, given that governments have GPS-guided missiles, either: 1) normal firearms are also useless, and therefore are not protected by the second amendment, or 2) regular citizens should be allowed to own and operator guided missiles.

• I've always liked the idea of typography as a field of study, because it's subtle and aesthetic but also scientific - much in the same way that architecture is. Typography usually brings to mind the design of typefaces, but here's a talk about the design of documents, and how the constraints of the web - or rather, the lack of constraints of the web - presents new challenges that typographers and authoring tools have yet to meet.

• A problem I will eventually have to deal with: how do we cope with the growing number of computer science students?

• For a while colleges were really into Second Life and built virtual classrooms to be used. They are of course all abandoned now, but the structures still exist for perusal.

• The problem with the "leaky pipeline" metaphor in STEM education is that, first, it assumes people want to get a tenure-track position, and second, it doesn't take into account how people get into STEM. Plus, the pipeline metaphor doesn't apply to post-bachelor transitions anyway.

• Philosophers on decriminalizing prostitution.

• One common piece of knowledge you hear about in psychology/neuroscience classes is that language is processed specially in the brain, by several regions in the left hemisphere. Turns out that this pattern may not be true of whistled Turkish. (That whistled Turkish exists in the first place is kind of wonderful.)

• I have gotten increasingly interested in how technology may be biased due to cultural factors, and here's an example of how machine learning may also be suspect.