I get contacted fairly often by students at other institutions to help them with their assignments. The message I received yesterday was unlike the usual request though:

Hello Eszter,
my name is [Firstname Lastname]
I’m a [nationality] student in [Country]
It will be really great if you could help me !
Im doing a work about your paper “Second Level Digital Differences in people’s online skills ”
I need to criticism your method of research and your conclusion and I really don’t know how to start..

Waiting for your answer , Thank you very much ….

[Firstname]…

Since I got this on April 1st, I wasn’t sure if it was a joke, but somehow I don’t think so. (BTW, the title of the paper is misquoted.)

An excerpt from my daughter’s math homework:

Discuss. (Her answer is, after all, perfectly true.)

Steve Benen complains about the filibuster. Yes, very true.

it’s hard to fix problems like this because objections to procedural stupidities are weak compared to perceptions of present partisan advantage. No one is going to fight for filibuster reform while in the minority. And fighting for filibuster reform while in the majority is always going to look partisan. How, then, do you get what ought to be a non-partisan no-brainer reform?

Would this work? Pass sensible procedural reform, but significantly post-date it? Abolish or significantly de-claw the filibuster, starting in, say, 2012? Presumably the Republicans aren’t planning on being in the minority forever. You could do the same for other procedural problems, like clogged confirmation pipes. Fixing problems several years from now is better than not fixing them ever, if that’s the only way you can do it (Then again, it may be that Republicans are planning on being in the minority forever.)

Like Maria, I haven’t exactly been ROFL in response to the trying-to-be-funny material floating out there today, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s newsletter did impress me. Since it doesn’t seem to be on EFF’s homepage, and since they’ve explicitly stated that we can repost the whole thing, I’m doing so after the jump. (I hope they won’t mind my playing with their logo either.) Enjoy! [click to continue…]

April Fool stories tend to be more ‘heh’ than LOL. (A couple of Internet geek ones I’ve gotten today; one is ‘heh‘ and the other is ‘eh?‘) But just seeing a tagline with April 1st underneath it makes me doubt any post’s veracity, even totally plausible and unfunny ones like “Brian Barry’s Obituary” (which, by the way, I’m surprised doesn’t mention ‘Sociologists, Economists and Democracy’, the only one I’ve read so presumably the most mainstream.)

Perfect example of a spoof that’s too plausible to be all that funny (or is it a spoof…?): today’s from George R.R. Martin saying he has engaged Howard Waldrop as his writing partner on Ice and Fire. It all sounds plausible, especially given the amount of abuse Martin gets from his overly entitled fans for being so late in delivering the latest of the unwieldy Ice and Fire series. (They grudge him watching football, seriously.) But the last bit where Martin says Waldrop will knock out the rest of the novel in a month or two while Martin is “in the hot tube with some babes in bikinis, sipping some Irish Mist and watching my TIVO replay of the Giants victory over the Patriots in the last Super Bowl but one” gives it away. Still, if old George really did want to outsource his sprawling epic, there are probably worse ways to go about it.

Scott McLemee has the “sordid details”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee236.

Last month, the Washington, D.C., newspaper Politico revealed the existence of a secret online discussion group for left-tilting reporters and academics called JournoList. The article provoked a furor of denunciation among right-wing bloggers, who took the existence of an Obamaphile wonk cabal as proof that something darkly conspiratorial must be afoot. … So you can imagine my surprise when, a few days later, I discovered the existence of an even more well-concealed e-mail group. It connects up the nation’s most powerful academics. For the sake of this article we can call it AcademoList. …

Scott is now in hiding – but the truth must get out. And there are more shocking revelations to come. Scott has discovered that:

AcademoList’s cover was nearly blown in 2006, when David Horowitz published The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America. In spite of the subtitle, the book actually listed only 100 dangerous professors. At the time, scarcely anyone noticed this. And if they had, it would not have been too surprising, since it was obvious that considerable ingenuity had been required to get it up to that length. … The mysterious “dangerous professor number 101” turns out to have been one of the founders of AcademoList — a truly sinister figure, and indeed the single most important player in the effort to subject the United States to both Islamic fundamentalism and the gay agenda.

Scott could only say so much, but I can now reveal that the secret 101st Dangerous Professor in America is _David Horowitz himself_ (he holds endowed chairs _in pectore_ at Yale, Harvard and Princeton). He is also the Fourteenth (sic) Imam and the Beast Foretold in the Book of Revelations. Further Fun AcademoList Factz:

• Mickey Kaus was invited to be one of the founding members of Academolist (he too holds an _in pectore_ appointment, as Snifre-Bedschietz Chair in American Politics at Long Beach College) but balked when he learned that he would have to sacrifice a goat to Shub-Niggurath at the initiation ceremony.
• In addition to Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy and the True Vindication of Camille Paglia, the AcademoList secret library hosts the skulls of Vannevar Bush and William F. Buckley Jr. Persistent rumours suggest that it also holds a birth certificate with Stanley Fish’s real name (and it ain’t Morris Zapp).
• The comments sections to _Inside Higher Ed_ columns reflect the ongoing research activities, and plans for future world domination, of one of AcademoList’s most distinguished emeritus members, Dr. Alphonse Moreau.

Further revelations are promised (and should anyone have additional useful information that they wish to share in comments, anonymously or otherwise, we are happy to guarantee their safety).

There’s “an obituary of Brian Barry”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6010790.ece in today’s Times,

I’m not particularly keen on the current Irish government, but “this”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0331/breaking59.htm seems a bit much:

Ireland may need “new faces in Government”, an analyst with debt ratings agency Standard & Poors said this morning. Frank Gill, speaking a day after the agency lowered Ireland’s credit rating, also said Ireland had a “very low” chance of defaulting on its debt during an interview with Newstalk radio this morning. Mr Gill said a change of Government may be required in an effort to stabilise the debt to gross domestic product ratio. That ratio may rise to above 9.5 per cent, according to the Government, more than three times the European Union limit. Ireland has lost its prized “AAA” credit rating from Standard & Poor’s, which yesterday downgraded its outlook for the Irish economy, blaming the deterioration in public finances. In a move that will make the cost of Government borrowing more expensive and put further pressure on the economy, Standard & Poor’s lowered Ireland’s rating from AAA, the top rating possible, to AA+.

I wouldn’t have thought that this was an especially opportune moment for credit rating agencies to start throwing their weight around given their major contribution to the ongoing crisis, but even in normal times, this would have struck me as serious over-reach. Credit rating agencies are purely private bodies, with an awful lot of political power. In theory, they impartially pronounce upon the perceived riskiness of lending to particular debtors, putting money in particular deals and so on. In practice, their decisions often prove to be quite political. But rarely as political as this. I don’t think that this comment can be interpreted as anything but a statement that Standard and Poor’s willingness to improve Ireland’s credit rating is dependent on the Irish Dail and Irish voters kicking the current government out. That’s a very dubious – and very political – action for a purportedly neutral and technical body to be taking.

Update: Thanks to nnyhav in comments for pointing to this “later story”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0401/1224243794208.html.

Reacting to S&P’s decision to cut the Republic’s rating, economists and market analysts yesterday homed in on its concern that there would not be a credible plan for the public finances until after the next election. Mr Gill told The Irish Times that the statement was not meant to question the State’s leadership, and simply reflected the challenge facing the Government and the uncertainty surrounding the banks. He also stressed that a AA+ rating was still broadly positive. “That is a very high rating and this suggests an extremely low probability of default,” he said.

I originally thought that this looked like a walkback rather than a clarification and said as such – then I saw that the Irish Times had changed their original story (without saying that they were doing this) to include the full quote which appears considerably more ambiguous than the original story implied.

Mr Gill said a change of Government may be required in an effort to stabilise the debt to gross domestic product ratio.

“It’s likely that for there to be a buy in into what are going to be inevitable tax hikes in order to stabilise the debt to GDP ratio, you are going to need new faces in the Government. This is typically the case in the aftermath of an economic crisis,” Mr Gill said

The GDP ratio may rise to above 9.5 per cent, according to the Government, more than three times the European Union limit.

Lots of schools these days have “equity and diversity” committees My guess is that no-one wonders much what diversity is in “equity and diversity” because we all have a pretty good sense of what it is – acceptance, toleration, and perhaps celebration of the various ethnic, racial, national, gender and sexual orientations in our midst. But what on earth is equity?

People (teachers, education students, other scholars in education) ask me this reasonably often, because they think that, as a professional philosopher who thinks a lot about education I ought to have an answer. I used to shrink from the question because the term “equity” is on that I never use, but recently I have become bolder. A School of Education recently asked me to prepare a lecture on “Equity, Equality, and Social Justice in Education”, and in the talk I just talked about equality and social justice, and said, bluntly, that I don’t understand “equity” and wish people would stop using the term.

After saying that, I thought I should do a couple of bits of research. The first was to run a search in amazon for books with the words “equity” and “education” in the title. 7,235 results. Fortunately, most of them seem not actually to have equity in the title, and when I looked at the 107 books published in the last 90 days I found that many only use “equity” somewhere in the text, and a few of those (including Hidden Markets by my colleague Patricia Burch) use “equity” in the way that is standard in finance circles, to mean capital. But there’s enough to confirm that equity in education is a standard phrase that ought to be easy to understand. The second thing I did was to read a bunch of books by scholars concerned with school improvement and the internal life of schools whose work I admire, to see how they use the term “equity” and figure out whether there was some obvious meaning that I was missing (Ronald Ferguson’s excellent Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, which I promise to review in the “Books Every Teacher Should Read” category when I get a chance, is the only one with “equity” in the title, but all the school reform improvement/reform books I’ve read recently use the term, and most of them prefer it to equality).

Having done that research I think I was wrong to wish that people stop using it, even though I’ve been right to resist using the term myself. It is a vague concept, but the best authors who use it do so knowing that it is very vague, and feeling, rightly, quite comfortable with that. I’ll explain.

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It seems that Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary “may have been put in charge of international space collaboration”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7973747.stm .

In case the various existing modern-version Haggadahs out there are not modern enough for you, try this. Thanks to Carl Elkin for CC-licensing this, see his page for the rest of the story.

One of the effects of the Global Financial Crisis is that the window of ideas now regarded as thinkable has expanded greatly. Willem Buiter typically works close to the edge of the window, but even so, I doubt that he would have written this in the Financial Times a year ago:

[Tax havens] should be closed down.

The easiest way to achieve this is to make it illegal for any natural or legal person from a non-tax haven country to do business with or enter into transactions with any natural or legal person in a tax haven. That ought to do it. Tax haven, again, is defined not with respect to tax rates or tax bases, but with respect to bank secrecy, that is, with respect to the information shared by the country’s financial institutions with foreign tax authorities. That information sharing should be automatic and comprehensive.

As regards regulatory havens, once common G20 standards for regulatory norms, rules and regulations has been set, countries that violate these standards would be black-listed. The obvious sanction is non-recognition of contracts drawn up in the regulatory haven jurisdiction and non-recognition of court decisions in these regulatory havens. That ought to do it.

The logic hasn’t changed in the last year, but the idea that the OECD could simply cut off economic interactions with places like the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein (let alone, say, Switzerland) wasn’t thinkable then. It is now.

Update Marshall McLuhan moment: In comments, Willem Buiter points to this piece, written a year ago, and taking an equally strong line. Despite getting this example wrong, I still think the window has shifted.

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From the Chronicle:

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube, and this week the popular video service unveiled a new section that brings together all of that campus content in one area.

It had been difficult to find college lectures on YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an education category, it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very broad. The new YouTube EDU page includes only material submitted by colleges and universities.

Spencer Crooks, a spokesman for YouTube, said in a statement that the site now features complete lectures for some 200 full college courses. “Subjects range from computer science to literature, biology to philosophy, history, political science, psychology, law, and much more,” he said. “You can search within YouTube EDU to find videos on topics of interest.”

Here it is.

I searched for Michael Sandel, and his legendary lecture on justice aren’t there. Yet.

I’ve just been at a fascinating conference on Evidence, Science And Public Policy. It was worth the trip just to hear John Worrall on evidence-based medicine point out this paper on remote retroactive intercessory prayer[1]. Assuming, as appears to be the case, that the study was totally legit (no data mining etc), the obvious question for me was why anyone would think it worthwhile (ex ante) to test this out.

But that’s not the subject of this post.

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