Dear Purdue: Don’t Rebuild. Retreat.
I have written a (futile, naturally) please to my university to get out of the football business. Check it out.
Continue reading →Author: Freddie
ecological validity and authentic tests
Validity, as you likely know, typically refers to how well a given experimental or test instrument actually measures the given construct it is meant to measure. If an experiment is meant to test vocabulary knowledge, for example, then its validity is dependent on how well it actually assesses and reports the vocabulary knowledge of its […]
Continue reading →if it were easy to get out of, nobody’d be in it
So probably my best instinct is just to point out that this long post by Tom Scocca on smarm was followed, just a few posts later, by a post titled “Monkey Teaches Man to Play His Favorite Game.” It’s a perfect argument in and of itself, and if I were smarter, I’d just leave it […]
Continue reading →eyes on the prize
As I’ve written many times, the plight of the adjunct in American colleges and universities is a true nightmare, and a profound stain on the character of those colleges and universities. You could read all about it in more detail and at greater length than I can present here, so it’s enough to say that […]
Continue reading →minimalism is not the cure
I disagree with Matt Yglesias on many things. (I would say “we disagree on many things,” but I’m sure he doesn’t spend any time thinking about me at all.) I’m also not a fan of his writing as writing, as craft. So I might be expected to be the natural audience for this takedown of […]
Continue reading →some links for AI skeptics
It’s not unusual for me to feel exasperated by things I read online, but reading this piece on “sentient code” from VentureBeat had me throwing my hands in the air. It’s everything wrong with popular writing about artificial intelligence: filled with hype, vague where specificity is needed most, and generally credulous in a breathless, gee-whiz […]
Continue reading →the uncomfortable importance of being a star
Just to offer a brief followup to my recent piece on the myth of a STEM shortage, I want to focus a bit more on the uncontroversial value of being a star. I think that maybe the essential point is the one my engineer friend was making: companies may be hungry for STEM workers, but […]
Continue reading →finis
As an impossibly perfect coda to my recent argument about the impregnable social fortress of neoliberal brodudes, I leave you with this, a response to that wonderful George Scialabba interview I quoted from the other day.
Continue reading →STEM: still no shortage
I wrote a post over at Medium aggregating the evidence that there’s no STEM shortage. Happy Thanksgiving.
Continue reading →quote for the day
“My idea of the end of the world would be the hive, the hive mind. Sven Birkerts has a wonderful description of how the horizontal, linked world is gradually evolving in that direction, to where nobody is ever really alone. Nobody is able to just sink deep into his or her own imagination or feelings. […]
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