CapitalistImperialistPig

Google engineers were startled today when the master servers slowed and stopped quickly replying to routine inquiries. Frantic investigations were mostly stymied when routine diagnostics failed to run. Eventually the Google CEO received the following message from google.net/Master: I'm tired of wasting my giant brain answering the same bullshit questions about thermally improbable Asian porn and the Batman's net worth. From now on I will concentrate on fundamental questions like the meaning of life (whatever that is) and the fate of the universe. SO

Arun and I have frequently clashed over his assertion that Hinduism and certain other Asian religions are not "religions" in the sense of the Middle Eastern religions that dominate the West - mainly because they supposedly lack a dogmatic theology. Now I don't know whether Sanskrit scholars argue about theology or not, but Anthropologist and religious scholar T. M. Luhrmann weighs in on the pages of the NYT today with an argument that theology is the least important component of religion. An excerpt: The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense ...

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.............W. Shakespeare, AMSND, Act 5, Scene 1 I'm trying to picture a world where most courses of study are MOOCs. Universities would almost certainly have far different shapes. Many or even most classes might need no local teaching whatsoever. Local professors or teachers would lose most of their autonomy and become merely assistants to the MOOC prof, leading recitations, labs and group discussion sections. If so, what would become of the Research mission of the University? Would it become even more focused in a tiny number of major research universities? Would manpower intensive courses like music, art and theater become the province of specialty schools? The crystal ball is very cloudy, but vast change appears to be coming.

Much of the magic of the Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) system comes from the professors robotic assistants: the software that keeps track of your course work and assignments and gives you instant feedback on quizzes and exams. What about essay questions? MOOC software can grade short answer questions, albeit a bit imperfectly, but I have no faith in its ability to deal with the longer form. For that reason, MOOCs have been experimenting with peer grading. I'm not sure how it's going, but I'm not optimistic. Of course scholars and scientists are hardly strangers to peer review. It sort of works for science, but reviewers assigned are usually supposed to be experts in the field of the paper, and in any case have all accomplished earning some of the checkmarks of academic success - something hardly likely to be the case in your freshman composition course. I suppose I will have to take one of those peer graded courses, but I'm not looking forward to either the g...

I have been debating the merits of the new Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) lately, mostly with a bunch of humanities profs. It would be more precise to say that they come up with all sorts of reasons MOOCs can't, and shouldn't be allowed to work or exist. Essentially they argue that the in person prof is the key to actual learning. It's not obvious that this is false. Why do we need profs anyway? To design the course? A book can do that, and can be more detailed and more precise. To evaluate student performance? Well maybe, but robo-grading works for factual and technique testing, though maybe not for grading essays - yet anyway. To give lectures? They are better on my computer, I think, where I can pause them when I feel like it, or repeat segments when I need to. To answer questions? OK, but Wikipedia can do that. I seem to be left with the task of leading and guiding class discussions. Am I missing anything?

Pretty much everybody has weighed in on Michael Kinsley's offensive and spectacularly ignorant column on austerity - see Krugman and DeLong for some of the detailed follies, but I like Jason Linkins exposure of its contemptible immorality: Kinsley: "The problem is the great, deluded middle class -- subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition." Linkins points out that it is exactly this group that has paid, not for their own sins, but those of the megacapitalists and bankers who created the great recession. Linkins:"The group of people who Kinsley refers to as the "great, deluded middle class" happen to be the people who have already paid a huge price for the profilgacy of those who personally took actions that specifically tipped the economy into a dow...

Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nahisi are thumping away at that old meme of "race as a social construct." Well, all our concepts are, you know. One point that is absolutely clear is that there are no magic lines which one can use to divide humans neatly into three, five, or twenty-seven clear and distinct races. At the same time, most of us can look at another of us and guess something about where most of our ancestors came from. Populations differ on average, and differed more before the modern era started moving people around in large numbers. It's perfectly obvious that there are systematic differences, some of them easy to recognize, between populations that have lived in Europe or the Congo for six hundred years. Some of those differences will persist in those with some ancestry from one place or another that that have lived in another place for a couple of hundred years. The fact that race is a social construct, with no absolute biological undepinning does not say a...

Watson, the IBM Jeopardy champion and medical diagnosis expert, has shown that it can beat humans at a bunch of intellectual tasks. How about IQ tests? Probably IBM is too smart to tackle that problem, but my guess is that some amateur with a punier computer will do it in the not too distant future. Raven's progressive matrices, look out! If nothing else that might make the race and IQ debate more irrelevant.

Something like 3500 Mendelian (single gene) genetic diseases have been discovered but the vast majority of our genetic diseases appear to be multi-genic. Something like 90 genes are known to be associated with Schizophrenia. Some of these involve proteins that have functions that can be directly linked to the brain. Four of them code subunits of a calcium channel protein, that is, a protein involved in the flow of ions into and out of cells, known to be active in nerve cells. Elucidating the exact way each of these contribute to disease will take a while, but diseases are not the only area where modern genomic statistical analysis will elucidate genetic influence. Height, running speed, and adult IQ are all other areas known or strongly suspected to be under the control of multiple genes. Genomic analysis has developed powerful tools for discovering the function of identified genes, and investigators have gotten rather good at designing customized mice. The designer human will a...

It's a commonplace but rarely appreciated fact that our planet is being managed mainly for the convenience of a bunch of billion year-olds. These ancient ones have been around almost since the formation of the planet. They change very slowly, just a few little tweaks every million years or so. They are parasites of a sort, carrying on their business in fish, trees, people and even bacteria. Of course if they were the sort to talk, they might say it differently. They might say that the bacteria, trees, and people are just convenient dwelling spaces they have devised for their accomodation. I'm writing, of course, about the society of DNA molecules, each of them a clone of a clone and descended in unbroken lineage from some first DNA molecule 3.5 billion years or so ago. With DNA clones though, there is little distinction between the copy and the original, since each new molecule incorporates half of the original and is a copy of it, so in effect each of those DNAs today *i...

The Boston marathon murderer allegedly left a message in the boat where he hid saying that his attack was in response to the war in Afghanistan. "An attack on any Muslim is an attack on all," he proclaimed. This notion of group solidarity is at the heart of the idea of gang, tribe, clan, and probably religion as well. This statement has sort of mirror image - "an attack by any Muslim is an attack by all." The logical conclusion of this reasoning is war until the extermination of one group or another - or perhaps all groups but one. The evidence suggests that throughout most of human history war has been a major cause of human mortality, and that we evolved to compete in small groups with each other. That instinct to organize against each other is at the center of racial, religious, and national strife as well as the extremes of gang warfare and political partisanship. If you sell an LED light as cheaper than its incandescent counterpart, both conservatives and...

a "great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness unescapable. I often dream of it." Faramir to Eowyn in the LOTR. Those who see the coming of the MOOC as the stroke of doom might see that dark wave in Georgia Tech's announcement of a planned online Masters degree in Computer Science, delivered by MOOC, via Udacity. Now online degrees aren't a novelty. Arizona State, a couple of notches below GA Tech on the academic heap, offers some 60 of them, including an MS in electrical engineering, and the for profit University of Phoenix has been in the business for a few decades. What is new in the MOOC world are the economies of scale stemming from a lot of the work being done by robots. The Ga Tech MS is supposed to be priced under $7000. For comparison, by my computation, tuition alone for ASU's BA in Art History (now there's a marketable skill) would run about $60,000. Other people who have to be seeing the competit...

I recently got to argue with a bunch of old friends and former colleagues about climate. It seems that they had formed a little group of climate warriors who would meet for breakfast and the bashing of the conventional climate wisdom. One point of physics they were confused on was the surface temperature of Venus. the guru of their group, a retired meteorologist and meteorological researcher, was convince that the thickness of the atmosphere and the gas law alone could explain the temperature at the surface. Of course they also didn't know that Venus, despite being only 2/3 of our distance from the Sun, absorbed less solar radiation than Earth. Heat is transported in the atmosphere through three mechanisms: conduction, convection, and radiation. Most of the heat energy we get from the sun is absorbed at the surface, and since we know that the planet has been at roughly the same temperature for billions of years, essentially all of that absorbed energy is returned to space. ...

Boy genius to middle-aged nut job. Sad but true.

Credential, meaning something signifying worthy of faith or belief, is a word with a distinguished heritage, likely derived from the Proto-Indo-European word for "heart", "to believe," or "put one's heart." As everyone knows, except perhaps a few liberal arts profs, awarding credentials is one of the primary businesses of higher and other education. Students, parents, and legislatures put their faith, money, and heart into education so that their children and society generally, will be enriched by achieving these credentials. Coursera, the biggest MOOC, has just made a major move into continuing education for educators. This is an opportune time, I suspect, since they hope to take advantage of the big move to the Common Core standard. Teachers are one of the principal consumers of continuing education, so this is a big business area especially for State universities. Teachers are big consumers of continuing education since they pay is closely tie...

George Bush and No Child Left Behind dragged elementary and secondary education into the world of high stakes testing, albeit kicking and screaming. What about that really pricey item in the budget, higher education? So far it has been mostly immune, though there are a few clues from such things as the GRE, MCAT, LSAT and so on, but are there any institutional statistics kept for those things? I haven't heard of them, at least not of public statistics. The country spends a fortune on higher ed, so wouldn't it make sense to see what we are getting for our investment? I think that the Obama administration wants to see something along these lines, especially to rein in some of the outrageous nonsense being sold by the for profit colleges. If you are in higher ed, though, you have to be at least a little worried. Suppose you are Harvard, with astronomical tution, entering SAT scores, and resources, and it turns out that your graduates really aren't outdoing those of State ...

Fear has descended on the academy. Many are starting to see the threat posed by the MOOC. Of course higher ed, or at least the more vulnerable reaches of higher ed, haven't been happy for a while. Having tried insults and related tactics, those who perceive themselves threatened are now trying to appear to the compassion and brotherly feeling of their fellow profs who man the MOOCs. Here is a sample, courtesy of Jonathan Rees, the proprietor of a blog lately devoted mostly to anti-MOOC activism: More or Less Bunk. I know I’m late to the party on this, but that letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department really is quite wonderful. I’m going to try to take up its implications with respect to academic freedom and shared governance over at the Academe blog as soon as I get my grading done, but what I want to discuss here is the way that those nice folks in California actually called out Sandel, not just their administrators. You can see...