April 2009
4 posts
The Mark Taylor op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times may not be perfect, but it does illuminate a few points: 1) The absurd specialization in many disciplines (and anthropology is rife with this) is crippling and stifling, both professionally and intellectually; b) programs geared toward “solving problems” will be more relevant in the future. These, obviously, go hand in hand. I...
I just read about some workshop, described as follows: “Whether we wish them to or not, students often rely on Wikipedia as a source of information. This session will discuss ways of teaching students to use critical judgment when reading Wikipedia articles.” This is the kind of academic high horse whose head I want to sever and stuff in the bed of Pierre Bourdieu (note: I have never...
1 tag
I’m playing with R right now, and enjoying it. I am trying to find a way to attractively present a scatterplot of 10,000 data points. Since the correlation on one figure is freaking huge (Spearman’s ρ=0.79, p=2×10-16 or something ridiculous), the scatter will look like a big diagonal glob of goo, but on the other one there is no correlation whatsoever, so it will look like a much less...