Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 60

hm

I was having a look at the admissions criteria for undergraduate degrees at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. Each year Britain goes through a crisis of conscience because about 50% of undergraduate admissions are students from fee-paying schools, who represent some 5% of the student population; I wondered what the requirements were for degrees which can assume virtually no relevant work at secondary level.

My vague assumption was that they would be looking for students with strong evidence o...

yes!!!!!

Anatol Stefanowitsch is back!

mute inglorious Nabokovs

Went to a meeting / dinner at Golden Parachutes, a gallery in Kreuzberg run by Jesi Khadivi and Paul Tyree-Francis. Paul and Jesi are planning to open the space to anyone who is interested in offering a course, seminar or other event; the idea was to talk about some possibilities.

This coincided, as it happens, with Obama's speech on education and also with a piece in the Guardian on the severe decline in British universities of degrees in modern languages, following the removal of the langua...

express lanes

You have here a simple question that anyone can access. Doesn't matter that you've never run a linear regression in your life. If you've ever shopped for groceries, if you've ever stood in line with a candy bar, a soda bottle, and a matinee starting across town in ten minutes, you have an opinion here.

Courtesy MR, Dan Meyer's post on queuing speeds in grocery stores.

Camfed

Just got this newsletter from Camfed.



Can a book change lives? We believe this one can.
Drawing on years of rich and varied reporting experience in Asia and Africa, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book Half the Sky chronicles the stories of women who have escaped from slavery, narrowly evaded death in childbirth, and hoisted themselves out of the depths of poverty.

Among the women they profile is Angeline Murimirwa (née...

isn't science amazing

"The feedback we are getting says what inspires young people is the chance to do hands-on experiments and tackle real-world problems. Health and safety regulations have limited schools' ability to do this. We need to maintain an excitement in science and show it's not about learning dull facts."

Molotov cocktails for GCSE! You know it makes sense.

Britain struggles with the perennial problem of getting students to see that science is not boring, here. (But things are getting better! 5% more s...

Did you know?

You can read an interview of Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) by Joey Comeau on A Softer World.

hm

Things are still a bit tricky. I write posts and put them in the drafts folder. I told someone the other day that I would try to write a review and not put it in the drafts folder, but I have failed; there were larger implications. It's very bad. Still, I'm definitely catching up on Dinosaur Comics of yesteryear.



If I'm not careful I will end up just embedding the entire Dinosaur Comics oeuvre, which is not really a solution for Drafts Folder Syndrome, but anyway, Pi Approximation Day, wish...

CYOA

Things are a bit tricky at the moment. Andrew Hussie's guest post on Dinosaur Comics captures the mood.

survival tip

A recent paper* turns the modern spotlight of statistics onto that pressing issue of how best to survive a big cat attack. The authors analysed data from 185 puma attacks on humans in North America over more than 100 years. The response was severity of injury, ranging from no injury to death. The predictors were age, group composition and behaviour. I am not sure about age but I am guessing that you shouldn't go walking by yourself in puma country for a start. The modern data crunch used to reve