Studying the Booty Call
Perhaps apropos yesterday's post musing over whether "dating" is the appropriate way to describe an adulterous relationship, Michael Munger points us to a forthcoming article in the Journal of Sex Research entitled "The '"Booty Call': A Compromise Between Men's and Women's Ideal Mating Strategies." I render no judgment on the value of the research of Jonason et alia but find their ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 6, 2009 11:16
Science Editor Quits After Hoax
Yet another bogus paper was accepted for publication in an academic journal: The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 18, 2009 13:14
Will Teach for Food
Reacting to news that "more than 120" professors at Tehran University have "collectively resigned in protest to the killings of students by suppressive forces," Thoreau responds in a way quite familiar to many of us: The important question for any postdoc (or any untenured professor at a school in a budget crisis, *cough*) is, with 120 faculty jobs empty, are they ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 18, 2009 08:08
Top U.S. High Schools
Newsweek ranks the Top 1500 U.S. high schools by a rather odd formula "the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors." Aside from taking of tests -- and not, say, scores on said tests -- is the sole criteria strikes me as ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 9, 2009 16:08
Teenager Expelled For Possession of Grooming Tool
Taylor Ray Jetter, a fifteen-year-old middle school student, has been expelled from school for possession of a "tool capable of inflicting bodily harm" -- an eyebrow shaver. The Penn Hills school board decided Tuesday night to uphold a 15-year-old student's expulsion for showing up at school with an eyebrow shaver in her handbag. A Linton Middle School teenager was expelled after a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 3, 2009 00:40
Texas Limits ‘10%’ Admissions
Texas has modified its revolutionary "10 percent" program for higher education admissions after university administrators complained that they were "going to lose control over our class." The "10 percent" plan in Texas has been one of the most successful experiments ever tried to get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria. It spawned similar (if less ambitious) programs ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 1, 2009 06:57
Citing Professor X
Eugene Volokh's post "Professor X Says" has, as best I can tell, nothing to do with the leader of a certain band of uncanny Marvel mutants. It does, however, provide seemingly obvious but oft-missed advice on how one should handle arguments in academic writing: If you want to endorse Professor X's view, be clear and candid about it; say "As Professor ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 29, 2009 14:21
Supreme Court Diversity
There's a shocking lack of diversity on the U.S. Supreme Court, WaPo staff writer Robert Barnes points out. There hasn't been a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant put forward in the five nominations since Justice David H. Souter came to the court in 1990. With Souter's impending departure, the demographic will be seriously underrepresented on a court that features five Catholics and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 26, 2009 06:49
Obama Shrugs Off Arizona State Degree Snub
Recall the flap over Arizona State's refusal to award President Obama an honorary doctorate? He handled it quite nicely. [caption id="attachment_36191" align="alignright" width="291" caption="President Barack Obama fist bumps an unidentified graduate at the Arizona State University commencement ceremony at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Ariz., Thursday, May 14, 2009. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)"][/caption] President Barack Obama says Arizona State University officials aren't ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 14, 2009 07:46
Internet Changing Brain from Storehouse to Index
Responding to the growing meme that the information overflow created by the Internet is making us dumber, Peter Suderman responds that, Reading on the web is almost certainly affecting the way we process information, but it’s not making us stupid. Instead, it’s changing the way we’re smart. Rather than storehouses of in-depth information, the web is turning our brains into indexes. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 11, 2009 08:16
Colleges Discriminate Against Asians
Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, asserts that, "given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent." Matt Yglesias is stunned and rightly appalled: "We’re a country that congratulates itself on having dismantled Jim Crow and the system of 'quotas' that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 4, 2009 08:10
‘Dr. Shanklin’ Now ‘Ms. Shanklin’
Margaret Sultan passes along the story of East St. Louis Senior High School principal Ethel Shanklin, who has been referring to herself as "Dr. Shanklin" for two years. It turns out, she only completed a two-year "education specialist" degree which she thought was a doctorate. Shanklin said, "I don't have a piece of paper stating that I have a doctorate," but ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 20, 2009 10:41
Greensboro College Cuts Salaries 20 Percent
Chris Lawrence passes along a News 14 report that North Carolina's Greensboro College has imposed a 20 percent across-the-board salary cut. Administrators explained Friday that eight people were laid off. Salaried employees will have to take a temporary 20 percent pay cut beginning May 1. "We wanted to protect our lowest paid employees, and we have a number of people, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 20, 2009 06:20
Ricks: Close Service Academies, War Colleges
Thomas Ricks believes that we should shutter West Point and the other service academies because they're expensive and, as far as he can tell, they produce no better officers than ROTC. Plus, their instructors don't have PhDs, making them essentially junior colleges. The first of these assertions is thinly sourced but worth exploring. The second, though, is rather silly. About a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 19, 2009 10:46
Arizona State: Obama Not Worthy of Degree
Arizona State has invited President Obama to be its commencement speaker but has decided not to award him an honorary degree, Dawn Teo reports for HuffPo. Universities typically confer an honorary degree on commencement speakers, particularly those who have reached the pinnacle of their career or achieved the top of their field. Arizona State University (ASU), though, says it will not ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 10, 2009 06:32
