Month: October 2013

Unchangeables, Notions, and Actualities

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A snippet: All around the world, but particularly in our great Republic, inventors and professors set about applying the universal intrinsic principle. Some worked with formless Unchangeables in their seance lounges,  others with religious Notions, and a rare few, such as our Mr. Edison, with bulldog Actualities. The way he looked at it, if your calculations showed you couldn’t do something, then you went ahead and did it without the calculations. Here was one for whom the forces of electricity had been waiting!   –from You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann A huge book, left behind by a …

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Rankings and Ratings for Beer: Lessons from the Classroom, and Lessons On the Classroom

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I posted earlier today on Facebook regarding the topic of ratings collection design systems for beer ratings websites like BrewAdvocate (below, referred to as “BA”), based on my experience designing grading rubrics for teaching and student evaluation purposes. I was posting in the context of others arguing that the ratings systems on various enthusiast rating websites were relatively less meaningful in the fine gradations; that a been with a 97% quality rating may not be “better” than a beer of a 95% rating. I responded as follows: Yeah, also because people’s rankings are affected by others’ rankings, and by reputation. I …

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Ominous, or, How Blogs Die

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I’ve been tidying up my Feedly subscriptions, trying to cut things down to the bare minimum so I can start following blogs I actually like and keep up with news from friends. I’m making an effort not to subscribe to (or keep up subscriptions to) every damned thing, because that was how I stopped following feeds in the first place. So anyway: the ominous. The death of a blog isn’t really ominous in itself. Lots of people have migrated to other social media platforms, though I feel sad about that in some ways: blogs work as a nice reservoir of …

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Observations on South Korea

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Tyler Cowen (at Marginal Revolution) linked an interesting and pertinent article on the cultural dimension of development and “success” in South Korea:, which sounds a lot like what I’ve been saying over the years: South Korea’s success has been deep but not wide. Almost half of its population lives, works and competes in Seoul. Its occupational structure is also narrow. The number of professions in South Korea is only two-thirds of the number in Japan and only 38% of that in America. This striking statistic is not lost on the South Korean government (few are). It has appointed a task force …

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“New”: Course Website

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I’m still busy sorting out the CPU minutes/spammer problems on my website, though I’m getting closer by the day to sorting it all out. Part of sorting it out has involved converting a bunch of old installations of WordPress that I’d set up for students into static html webpages, so that I could delete the WordPress installations, which is time consuming and, if I didn’t want to keep the blogs for the sheer point of keeping them up–later I can say, “See, I hosted blogs for my students!”–then I would have just deleted them. But, well… I didn’t. All that …

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