Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
So, when I first heard that Morgan Freeman said that the Tea Party is racist, my immediate reaction was “Duh.”  I mean, we’re talking about people who were mostly fine with the iron fist of the state for 8 years.  Then, the moment that a black guy with the middle name “Hussein” takes over, [...]

By Thoreau
1)  I showed my wife a picture in this morning’s paper (dead tree edition, can’t fine online picture) of a few dudes dressed in Revolutionary War attire at last night’s debate.  She was convinced that it must be an Onion hoax.  As you know, the overlap between the “real” news and the Onion is [...]

By Thoreau
A group at the Gran Sasso mine is claiming to have detected something that might be superluminal propagation of neutrinos.  Before we get too excited, keep in mind the following:
1) I don’t see a peer-reviewed article.  I see a seminar announcement.  Let’s wait for something in Physical Review Letters before we celebrate the next [...]

By Thoreau
What is the practical difference between a business expense and re-invested profit?  I know that profits are taxed, and that expenses are (almost by definition) subtracted from revenues to calculate profits.  I would assume that if a business manager and/or his accountant has an IQ above room temperature, they will try to categorize as [...]

By Thoreau
Blogger GMP is having a blog carnival of theoretical and computational scientists, to counteract the heavy presence of biomedical folks in the academic science blogosphere.  (As the resident cynic, I predict that a bunch of the entries will be by computational biologists chasing R01 funding…)  So, I’ll say something about theoretical physics, and how [...]

To the Talking Dog’s blog. That makes him just about a month older than UO.

By Thoreau
If somebody offers you money to do something, and you decide that doing it would be a compromise of your professional standards, you shouldn’t insist that they pay you for an unprofessional deed that you have no intention of doing.  I mean, I don’t go around talking about the benefits of a 100% corn [...]

There were many years in which I could have written Doug Mataconis’s Friday post, “You Can Be Compassionate Without Supporting Big Government,” and for all I know, I did. I supported the true empathy of unforced charity, worried about government programs “crowding out” civil society, and believed that the “coerced” nature of redistributive policies made [...]

By Thoreau
I want to begin this by making one thing absolutely clear:  There are people who do careful, thorough work in educational research, there are well-executed studies with large sample sizes and careful analyses, and this post is not in any way intended to slight them.  That said:
I am not an expert in educational research.  [...]

By Thoreau
Since the previous thread has turned into a discussion of safety training, I want to bring up another area of mandatory training:
I actually took human subjects research training.  I was participating in a group of faculty who got some resources to redesign classes, and one condition was that we had to get IRB approval.  [...]