Treating students as people is awfully inefficient, after all

Oh, my. Inside Higher Ed has an article that has to be read to be believed: the problem with universities are their faculties, we need to get rid of tenure, hire more part-time, untenured faculty on short term contracts, cut back on those expensive bits of infrastructure like libraries and theaters, increase teaching loads across the board…in other words, turn education into a commodity with universities as the assembly lines that crank out graduates, while letting all those over-educated professors know that they too can be replaced by some yahoo with a mail-order degree. It’s a recipe for the complete demolition of higher education in this country, replacing it with some cookie cutter B-school model.

Fortunately, I don’t have to blow a gasket over it, because that guy Bérubé has already turned it into a colossal joke. It seems to be the only appropriate way to deal with these unrealistic libertarian fantasies.

Evo-Devo in NYR Books!

This really is an excellent review of three books in the field of evo-devo—

From DNA to Diversity: Molecular Genetics and the Evolution of Animal Design (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll),

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and

The Plausibility of Life:Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—all highly recommended by me and the NY Times. The nice thing about this review, too, is that it gives a short summary of the field and its growing importance.

Last chance until the Fall

We’re having our last Café Scientifique Morris of the 2005-2006 school year tonight, at 6:00, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse here in beautiful downtown Morris, Minnesota. Our speaker is Mark Logan of the Mathematics discipline, who’s going to be talking about “Origami in Math and Science”—that wonderful interdisciplinary stuff we liberal arts colleges do so well, tying together math and art.

It’s a good thing we’re doing it tonight so that we don’t suck away Sean Carroll’s audience for the Café Scientifique Chicago tomorrow.

PT-141

Sciencebase has a short article on a potential new aphrodisiac. It’s called PT-141, or bremelanotide, or Ac-Nle-cyclo[Asp-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Lys]-OH (“PT-141” is the useful search term if you want to hit up PubMed), and it’s a melanocortin agonist that works directly on the brain. It can be delivered as a nasal spray. It works on men, promoting erections, and it also seems to be effective on women, increasing sexual appetite.

[Read more…]

An argument for the kindness of the ungodly

Should the godless be a little more generous in dealing with believers? Here’s an argument that advocates a little more charity; that we ought to recognize that belief in the supernatural is a nearly universal human condition, that it’s a useful coping mechanism for dealing with the unknown, and that it’s a mistaken belief, not a moral failing.

I’m not entirely convinced. You can substitute the word “ignorance” for “supernatural belief/spirituality/religion” and it fits the whole argument just as well. Yet I don’t feel any desire to make excuses for ignorance, and I certainly don’t have sympathies for the promoters of ignorance.

Don’t hate me for this…

I’ve turned on the requirement to login and register with TypeKey in order to make a comment. Can’t stand it? Things not working? Leave a comment (if you can) or mail me (if you can’t).

This is a trial, we’ll see if it works. I’m willing to turn it off again if it causes more grief than it solves.

Ooops. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the TypeKey page. It’s simply a centralized site where you register once, get a password, and then you can use that password to make comments on various sites, including this one. It doesn’t cost anything, it’s fairly easy to do.

Another hint: some people are having problems that seem to be traceable to their browser’s cache. Try reloading pages or clearing the browser cache so that it will display the version with the new TypeKey requirements.

Aaaargh, more commenting problems

I owe many people some apologies: this site has been quietly eating your comments. There are filters set up to catch and discard spam comments, and they work very well. I’m getting thousand or so junk comments a week that are not making it through to be displayed.

Unfortunately, about a 5% of the junked comments are false positives. I’ve gone through and tried to restore the ones I could find, but that represents a far too substantial loss of blameless comments.

I’ve set up the comments section now to optionally allow TypeKey registration. I’m hoping that the software is smart enough to realize that if you’ve gone through TypeKey, you are not spamming, and that that will improve the accuracy of spam detection—so use it, if you don’t mind TypeKey. I might go further still and require TypeKey at some point; I suspect most people would rather jump through a few more hoops and have better reliability, than type something up and have the mysterious and ineffable spam filter decide to quietly shuffle your words off to the holding pen before erasing them a few days later.

Let me know any objections or suggestions you might have.