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The Random Texan

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Dilletante * Raconteur

therandomtexan

  • My thought exactly

    Open Culture has a fascinating new post introducing a writer I’d never heard of, Walter Benjamin’s 13 Oracular Writing Tips.  Buried in tip #6 is a thought for the ages Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it. Now I just need to get my students to believe this. Read more

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  • Sex Discrimination in STEM Faculty Hiring

    Well, it’s official; a study completed by the Cornell Institute for Women in Science has revealed clear and pervasive sex discrimination in the hiring of university faculty in the STEM fields. Tip from Time Magazine, who observes that many universities have policies that will only make the problem worse. Read more

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  • Literary GIGO

    Isn’t it about time to add the American Library Association’s Most-Frequently Challenged Books list to the list? Tip from Five Thirty-Eight. Read more

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  • Guilty as Charged

    Yes, your Honor.  I distinctly recall watching several episodes of Father Knows Best when I was a lad. Tip from Happy Acres, who never disappoints. Read more

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  • Robot Employment Act

    As I mentioned  in the previous post, I’ve been working on increasing the amount of online content in my introductory biostatistics course; this is part my plan to convert the course into a hybrid course, one which is at least 50% online. Why does this make me uncomfortable? Tip from the Geek Press. Read more

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  • The Mother of all Meta-Analyses

    So I’ve been preparing a new version of my introductory biostatistics course for the past 2 weeks, and I decided to incorporate most of the videos in the Annenberg Learner online course Against All Odds.  One of the videos I’m using is Correlation, which has an interesting discussion on twin studies, addressing the perennial “nature Read more

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  • Let’s Get Tidy!

    So it turns out that being a neatnik is sound economic behavior, at least according to Marie Kondo.  So I guess my wife should be some kind of gazillionarie by now. Tip from the Shirk Report.  Why didn’t anybody tell me about this guy sooner? Read more

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  • You say “potato,” I say “po-tah-to”

    Looks like potatoes are back on the OK to Eat This list, and the usual thumbsuckers are outraged. Nutritionist Marion Nestle and other progressive reformers called foul, denouncing the change. “Really?” Nestle scoffed. “I have a hard time believing that WIC recipients are suffering from lack of potatoes in their diets.” Several watchdog groups and Read more

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  • Blinded Me with “Science”

    David Warren, like me, is tired of being beaten about the head and shoulders with observational studies masquerading as “settled science.” According to the latest research, he writes facetiously, coffee may be good for your heart….Actual science would show the mechanism by which a specific constituent in coffee, such as caffeine, operates within the human Read more

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  • A Critique of Scientism

    Biologist Austin Hughes hits the nail on the head when the writes of The Folly of Scientism in the New Atlantic. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering Read more

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