I think I hate this graphic. It purports to calculate the odds of your existence, and concludes that the chance is 1 in 102,685,000: So the odds that you exist at all are: Basically zero. Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.”
Graphic, and why it’s bullshit, below the fold.
(Also on Sb)
I hate to see a great university system get thumped upside the head by chowder-brained legislators, but that’s what’s going on in New York. The chancellor of CUNY is pushing for a major revamp of the curriculum, system-wide. This ignores the unique culture at each institution and tries to turn them into cookie-cutter degree factories, and ends up targeting the lowest common denominator.
City University of New York’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is about to turn the prestigious system of senior and community colleges into a glorified high school. And few people seem to even want to try to stop him. This is bizarre, as Goldstein is a CUNY graduate himself and has been credited with major accomplishments since he took the lead at CUNY in 1999 (e.g., he raised admission standards, created the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism).
Goldstein has recently begun what is known as the “Pathways to Degree Completion” initiative, which is being quickly rammed down the throats of the faculty members at all CUNY Colleges, in blatant disregard of faculty governance, interfering with curricula and the structure of majors, and possibly resulting in the elimination or great reduction of entire departments, mostly in the humanities (beginning with foreign languages, arts, assorted studies programs, history, and philosophy). The science and math requirements also are being reduced to ridiculous minimum common denominator standards, all in the name of increasing the graduation rate and decreasing the time to graduation of CUNY students — apparently the only currencies understood by the inept (to say the least) State legislators up in Albany.
This is a familiar story. All administrators care about is a couple of simplified parameters for “success”: the average time to degree completion, which is supposed to be around four years, and the percentage of incoming students that graduate. It’s throughput, baby, how fast can we shovel ’em through and get ’em out the other side with a diploma.
There is a good solution to this problem. That is, you hire enough faculty to staff all your programs with good teachers, they teach the students well, they have time to advise and guide students efficiently to degree completion, and they’re there to catch any students who threaten to fall through the cracks, and give them personal assistance. In other words, you give the students the best possible education and help them over any hurdles so they emerge from your program knowing stuff and best of all, knowing how to learn more.
Any faculty reading this are laughing cynically right now, because that’s not the solution we generally get to follow.
The poor and realistic solution recognizes the fiscal reality that state legislatures want to cut, cut, cut higher ed’s budget, and so administrators are looking at cheap ways to get graduation rates up and years to graduate down, and there is an easy way: cut graduation requirements. Standardize the curriculum. The job of the college is no longer to deliver an education, but to issue diplomas, which are awarded for attendance in a defined series of classes. I’m sorry to see that CUNY wants to get into the business of mass-producing diplomas.
Hey, 99%, this is an issue for you, too. The higher education system in this country has been starved for decades — state contributions to university budgets have been steadily declining, and tuitions have been rapidly increasing to compensate, squeezing out many worthy prospective students. What’s driving it is the short-sightedness of legislatures that don’t realize what’s involved in teaching and learning, and want to low-ball education. You get what you pay for, and I don’t think we need university administrators who cater to economic catastrophe rather than advocating for good education.
(Also on FtB)
I hate to see a great university system get thumped upside the head by chowder-brained legislators, but that’s what’s going on in New York. The chancellor of CUNY is pushing for a major revamp of the curriculum, system-wide. This ignores the unique culture at each institution and tries to turn them into cookie-cutter degree factories, and ends up targeting the lowest common denominator.
City University of New York’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is about to turn the prestigious system of senior and community colleges into a glorified high school. And few people seem to even want to try to stop him. This is bizarre, as Goldstein is a CUNY graduate himself and has been credited with major accomplishments since he took the lead at CUNY in 1999 (e.g., he raised admission standards, created the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism).
Goldstein has recently begun what is known as the “Pathways to Degree Completion” initiative, which is being quickly rammed down the throats of the faculty members at all CUNY Colleges, in blatant disregard of faculty governance, interfering with curricula and the structure of majors, and possibly resulting in the elimination or great reduction of entire departments, mostly in the humanities (beginning with foreign languages, arts, assorted studies programs, history, and philosophy). The science and math requirements also are being reduced to ridiculous minimum common denominator standards, all in the name of increasing the graduation rate and decreasing the time to graduation of CUNY students — apparently the only currencies understood by the inept (to say the least) State legislators up in Albany.
This is a familiar story. All administrators care about is a couple of simplified parameters for “success”: the average time to degree completion, which is supposed to be around four years, and the percentage of incoming students that graduate. It’s throughput, baby, how fast can we shovel ’em through and get ’em out the other side with a diploma.
There is a good solution to this problem. That is, you hire enough faculty to staff all your programs with good teachers, they teach the students well, they have time to advise and guide students efficiently to degree completion, and they’re there to catch any students who threaten to fall through the cracks, and give them personal assistance. In other words, you give the students the best possible education and help them over any hurdles so they emerge from your program knowing stuff and best of all, knowing how to learn more.
Any faculty reading this are laughing cynically right now, because that’s not the solution we generally get to follow.
The poor and realistic solution recognizes the fiscal reality that state legislatures want to cut, cut, cut higher ed’s budget, and so administrators are looking at cheap ways to get graduation rates up and years to graduate down, and there is an easy way: cut graduation requirements. Standardize the curriculum. The job of the college is no longer to deliver an education, but to issue diplomas, which are awarded for attendance in a defined series of classes. I’m sorry to see that CUNY wants to get into the business of mass-producing diplomas.
Hey, 99%, this is an issue for you, too. The higher education system in this country has been starved for decades — state contributions to university budgets have been steadily declining, and tuitions have been rapidly increasing to compensate, squeezing out many worthy prospective students. What’s driving it is the short-sightedness of legislatures that don’t realize what’s involved in teaching and learning, and want to low-ball education. You get what you pay for, and I don’t think we need university administrators who cater to economic catastrophe rather than advocating for good education.
(Also on Sb)
In this TED video, Philip Zimbardo talks about an ongoing concern, the opting out of boys from academically and socially — boys are more likely to drop out of school, girls outperform boys at all academic levels, boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. The difference also leads to many man-boys who can’t interact with women except on the most superficial and cartoonish level.
He’s talking about a real problem, but I was not convinced by his explanation. He attributes it to a phenomenon called arousal addiction, where people are hooked on constant stimulation of any kind, and he blames it on the internet, video games, and porn. I get very suspicious when anyone starts talking about the internet rewiring our brains (Susan Greenfield, anyone?) because a) I haven’t seen any persuasive data that it’s a serious and significant, let alone deleterious phenomenon, and b) everything rewires our brains — we respond to experience.
This talk has a serious flaw in that the first half is all about statistics and differences between males and females, and the second half is all about a putative general phenomenon that changes our brains…but it doesn’t say anything anymore about the differences between males and females. Women aren’t excluded from the internet — they get sucked into social media, they play video games, they even watch porn. So how does this explain the declining performance of men in schools and social situations?
(Also on FtB)
I was raised in a creationist, fundamentalist home. If you’ve ever seen those videos where Ken Ham tells the crowd of kids to ask scientists, “Were you there?”, then you’ve seen a little bit of my childhood. I looked forward to getting our quarterly copy of “Answers in Genesis” (a magazine that Ham’s organization puts out). Later my dad subscribed to their “Technical Journal” of creationism because I was so interested in nature and science. When I was very young I was at one of those presentations that Ken Ham gives, and I am embarrassed to admit that at one point I even did ask a geologist “Were you there” as he talked about rock formations in Mammoth Cave.
I went to church at least twice a week, was in a christian school until college, listened to christian music exclusively, was in a very christian Boy Scouts of America troop, and I didn’t know a single person who wasn’t from one of those circles. All of my knowledge of ‘Atheists’ and ‘Darwinists’ came from creationist writings. I never had a ‘rebellious’ phase and was eager to please the authority figures in my life. So I really didn’t have any motivation for questioning the dogma I’d been given. I was growing up to be a zealous defender of “scientific creationism”.
And that was what brought it all crashing down for me, starting around my 16th birthday. I wanted to engage the other side and fight the good fight for Jesus, so I decided to figure out what the “evolutionists” could possibly have to say for themselves in the face of our awesome arguments and “facts”. The first thing I looked into was the claim that fossils formed over millions of years. Every real creationist has seen pictures of ‘petrified’ hats, boots, clocks, etc. This seemed like pretty good evidence that the scientists were wrong. But with a little bit of reading I found out that the hardened artifacts that the creationists were showing off were not, in fact, fossils. They were simply encrusted with calcium deposits. I also learned that replacement fossilization (where the organic molecules are replaced by inorganic minerals) occurs slowly because of diffusion rates, which are very easy to determine experimentally.
I was concerned that my heroes had been misinformed on that issue, but my faith was far from shaken. I simply thought that we would need to look deeper and we would find a way for fossilization to occur rapidly (in those days I planned on becoming a ‘creation scientist’). And I was excited about writing an explanatory article for Answers in Genesis because I really thought at the time that they would want to correct their error.
But while I was doing that I also started looking into ‘carbon dating’, which was another topic that was often ridiculed in creationist literature. I was told that it all depended on the assumption that everything had always been basically the same on the earth, but since god had magically created the earth in some unknown state and then flooded the whole thing that those assumptions were flawed. I was curious as to just what those ‘assumptions’ were and did some reading. I very quickly learned that carbon dating is only one of a large number of radiometric dating techniques, all of which agree on dates. And the ‘assumptions’ of other dating techniques (especially potassium-argon dating) were really impossible to argue with and produced data that was definitely incompatible with a young earth.
I then looked into a whole range of topics covering geology, cosmology, and biology; and literally everywhere I looked I saw dishonesty coming from the creationist side. So I briefly looked into ‘Old Earth’ creationism and ‘Theistic Evolution’ but ironically I had already been inoculated against those ideas by my Young Earth Creationist upbringing. The theology made far less sense and was even less consistent if you accepted an old earth. And by that point I was so disillusioned that I was critically thinking about Christianity itself and realizing just how ridiculous the beliefs were. I still considered myself a believer but was having serious doubts.
When I finally started thinking of myself as an atheist it wasn’t because of evolution or theology (this was only a few years after starting down the path of reason, but they were long and painful years). My parents got sucked into alternative medicine and I tried extremely hard to show them that they were being fooled by opportunistic charlatans. But I made no progress and was baffled at how people could believe something that had no positive evidence and was so obviously silly. And that’s when I became an atheist. I saw the clear parallel between religious belief and fake medicine, and I gave up my belief in god entirely. I’ve been religion-free for six years and my life has only gotten better. I am openly an atheist with everyone (except my parents, who might actually be killed by that news) and I really do think the future is bright for rationality and secularism.
Adam
United States
In this TED video, Philip Zimbardo talks about an ongoing concern, the opting out of boys from academically and socially — boys are more likely to drop out of school, girls outperform boys at all academic levels, boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. The difference also leads to many man-boys who can’t interact with women except on the most superficial and cartoonish level.
He’s talking about a real problem, but I was not convinced by his explanation. He attributes it to a phenomenon called arousal addiction, where people are hooked on constant stimulation of any kind, and he blames it on the internet, video games, and porn. I get very suspicious when anyone starts talking about the internet rewiring our brains (Susan Greenfield, anyone?) because a) I haven’t seen any persuasive data that it’s a serious and significant, let alone deleterious phenomenon, and b) everything rewires our brains — we respond to experience.
This talk has a serious flaw in that the first half is all about statistics and differences between males and females, and the second half is all about a putative general phenomenon that changes our brains…but it doesn’t say anything anymore about the differences between males and females. Women aren’t excluded from the internet — they get sucked into social media, they play video games, they even watch porn. So how does this explain the declining performance of men in schools and social situations?
(Also on Sb)
We all know that comic book artist Frank Miller is an arrogant macho jerkwad, but I didn’t know the magnitude of his jerkwadiness. He’s written an angry diatribe against the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with unspeakable cowardice, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.
And then he gets really cranky.
Apparently, us liberals are hurting America, because we’ve got a war to fight against al-Quaeda and Islamicism, and we need to get out of the way so the investment bankers can fight it for us. I guess wrecking the economy was all part of a secret plan to defeat terrorism.
Anyway, ol’ Frank lives in a cartoon fantasy world where violence solves everything, and all it takes to solve a problem is a bigger gun and the will to use it indiscriminately, which I think we all could have learned from his graphic novels and movies without reading his blog. And now that we’ve read his blog, we don’t need to pay for his commercial products anymore! Miller’s simple-mindedness stands exposed even further.
Which is funny if you think about it. Could anyone take 300 seriously? I giggled through it all — it was hysterically campy, all macho homoeroticism energetically portrayed with a complete lack of awareness of how over-the-top it all was. It fervently espoused an elitist right-wing view of the world, where only kings ruled divinely and the peons were all slaughtered off-stage.
David Brin has sallied forth to smite the lunacy. He takes an interesting approach: he discredits Miller’s authority on history by utterly demolishing the pseudo-history of 300. It seems hardly worth doing — didn’t we already know that 300 was a great goofy ahistorical joke? — but there’s a nice analogy to be drawn. The contempt Miller shows for the 99% protesting American economic inequality is paralleled in the contempt he shows for everyone other than royalty and professional killers in his work.
Frank Miller rails against effete, pansy-boy militias of amateur, citizen soldiers. But funny thing, none of his Spartan characters ever mentions those events, just a decade earlier! How bakers, potters and poets from Athens – after vanquishing one giant invading army, then ran 26 miles in full armor to face down a second Persian horde and sent it packing, a feat of endurance that gave its name to the modern marathon race. A feat that goes unmatched today. Especially by Spartans.
That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.
It just goes to show you can’t trust a fascist thug to recognize reality.
By the way, is it required for comic book artists to be crazy, or does it just help? (Uh-oh, I know Melissa Kaercher…what dark secrets lurk beneath her superficially normal (OK, mostly normal) personality?)
The last time American Atheists came up with a billboard design, I panned it. The message was easily derailed, and they really needed a better, more professional look. Their new design this year is better, and I think the message is sharper.
But Dave Silverman is going to punch me hard next time I see him, because I think it still needs work. It’s a bit garish and the photos make it too fussy and complicated — under normal conditions, a billboard needs simplicity and clarity, since people are zooming past it at 70mph. What will save it is that it’s going up at the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, where hordes of commuters will creep very slowly past it every day, having time to absorb and critique the message.
It’s also going to be in place in December and over Christmas. Bill Donohue will be apoplectic.
You’re getting better, though, Dave! Don’t hit me too hard.
It’s clear the bugs introduced in the server upgrade have NOT been fixed. New posts are scrambled up with old comments, and I have no idea where submitted comments are going to end up.
I recommend leaving Pharyngula for a day or two until these severe problems are actually fucking fixed. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway. Yeah, BOYCOTT PHARYNGULA.
Christopher Hitchens takes a moment to highlight the weird and sinister beliefs of the Mormons.
I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme. They can be ordered to turn upon and shun any members who show any signs of backsliding. They have distinctive little practices, such as the famous underwear, to mark them off from other mortals, and they are said to be highly disciplined and continent when it comes to sex, booze, nicotine, and coffee. Word is that the church can be harder to leave than it was to join. Hefty donations and tithes are apparently appreciated from the membership.
Whether this makes it a cult, or just another of the born-in-America Christian sects, I am not sure. In any case what interests me more is the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS, discussion of which it is currently hoping to inhibit by crying that criticism of Mormonism amounts to bigotry.
He makes the point that the LDS church is certifiable lunacy of undeniably fraudulent origin, and that “I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist or a Moonie for high office” — and there’s a dilemma. I don’t want to vote for a Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist for any office, either. Mormonism and Scientology and the Moonies are simply one other kind of religion, the only difference being that those strange recent cults are snuggling nicely in the uncanny valley of faith — we’re accustomed to the absurdity of Christianity, it no longer makes most of us blink in astonishment that someone actually believes that, but Mormons? Alien crazy ideas, instead of Grandma’s comfortable crazy ideas.
The dilemma is that Hitch’s preference would mean that none of us could actually vote for any candidate who has a chance of winning. At least not until we achieve our majority in the future.
I have a resolution, though. We acknowledge that everyone has some weird ideas in their heads, and that we can’t practically exclude people from office for thinking crazy thoughts. What we can do, though, is refuse to vote for the ones who are proud of their insanity, who brag about believing in space ghosts, and who think their dotty dogma actually provides useful policy advice.
I know, there goes the entire Republican slate, and Obama is skating on awfully thin ice himself.
