Wednesday Morning Links
* “Professor Furedi, how do you get around learning outcomes?” a young lecturer asks me in a breakout session. I have just spent 10 minutes explaining the corrosive influence of learning outcomes on education to my audience at the recent Think Festival in The Hague. Nevertheless, I am caught off guard by my blunt questioner. That is probably why my reply is a bit more candid than I had intended it to be. “I just make them up and ignore them,” I say.
* The good folks on the most-excellent BBC Radio/Open University statistical literacy programme More or Less decided to answer a year-old Reddit argument about how many Lego bricks can be vertically stacked before the bottom one collapses.
* Chris Hayes: ‘The Time For Choosing Sides On Climate Change Is Now.’ To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios.
* American Kafka: A former death row inmate with intellectual disabilities has languished in the Texas prison system for over 30 years despite having no valid criminal conviction.
* The Sublime Sci-Fi Buildings That Communism Built.
* Teaser trailer for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.
* 49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.
* And Bill O’Reilly explains how Christianity is not a religion. The War on Christmas is confusing, y’all.
There’s a fairly vocal movement among UNC-CH students to get the university to divest from coal, and while I see their demands and arguments for their position in the school paper all the time, I never seem to see any responses from the administration, though…
Ellen Crouch
December 5, 2012 at 12:41 pm
I find it really interesting, simply because (unlike divestment from South Africa) it’s not clear to me how divestment is supposed to DO anything. You can’t enforce economic sanctions against the lifeblood of our economy; all you can do is be a beautiful soul about it.
gerrycanavan
December 5, 2012 at 1:20 pm