Borland Educational News and Views

Saturday, December 01, 2012

A Class On Stupid

Is it me? Or is this just plain ... dumb?

Students at Occidental College can now take a class that's genuinely daft. Critical Theory and Social Justice 180 is titled, simply, "Stupidity."

It's hard to decide which is most stupid: the very notion of a major institute of higher learning offering a (way too) serious course on stupidity, the course description (a truly masterful example of vacuous academic jargon), or the kind of dazed and confused cultural context that could give rise so such things in the first place (tellingly, "United States" is listed as the core course requirement this class fulfills).

The decussate levels of irony here are so numerous and humorous it's hard to know where or how to begin comment on them.

From the Occidental College catalog:

180. STUPIDITY.

Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beavis and Butthead. This course examines
stupidity.

That's the actual course description.

Click here to see for yourself.

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Thursday, November 01, 2012

How Much College Debt Is Too Much?

As tuition increases make higher education harder and harder for average American families to afford, more and more are now forced to consider "mortgaging the farm" to get kids through college.

The average college grad leaves school with $20,000 debt collar wrapped around his or her diploma, and while this is not a catastrophic sum, the question of where to draw the line concerning college debt is certainly an important one for students and parents to consider, especially during uncertain economic times.

An interesting and informative article by Kim Clark in U.S. News and World Report discusses the details:

One third of all new bachelor's degree recipients in June of 2008 started their working lives without owing a penny in federal or private educational debt. Only 10 percent of last year's graduates owed more than $40,000, according to the lead author of the report, College Board researcher Patricia Steele. (She did not count credit card debt or other noneducational liabilities such as car loans.)

The median borrower graduated last year owing almost $19,999, a $1,026 increase from the typical debt load of 2004 graduates. "Most people would say that is a reasonable amount of debt to take on for a baccalaureate degree," especially if students stick with federal loans, which now allow borrowers to adjust their payments to their income, Steele says.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent Bloomberg interview that unless colleges whose tuition schedules are "out of whack with reality" manage to reign in the cost of education they could soon find themselves pricing themselves into irrelevance as consumers turn increasingly to "no-frill" institutions offering less expensive three-year degree programs and other cost-cutting measures.

With real family incomes in retreat, and textbook prices going through the roof, even budget-conscious students at low-cost community colleges are often finding it difficult to make ends meet without taking on sometimes oppressive levels of educational debt.

For those about to face the prospect of taking out substantial student loans, this short piece by Associated Press outlines important things to keep in mind.

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Contact Chris

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Monday, October 01, 2012

Math as Art (Part 2)

In an earlier post on this subject (click here), I wrote about the pioneering work of Michael Trott, who as "the worlds most advanced Mathematica user" has brought together like few others the realms of visual art and mathematics. Today's post contains a few selected links intended as starting points to ignite and inspire your curiosity and act as further impetus for your own look into the alluring world of mathematical art.

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The tantalizing Wolfram Research Graphics Gallery is the best place I know of to begin enjoying and appreciating the wonders of numbers in visual form:

http://gallery.wolfram.com/.

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Another interesting point of embarkation is the following page highlighting works of mathematical art exhibited at recent major conferences:

http://www.bridgesmathart.org/amsmaa.html.

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The following "Pythagorean Tree" generators are simple ways to create mathematical art of your own:

http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/aburns/flash/pyth4.html;

http://www.nsf.gov/news/overviews/mathematics/interactive.jsp.

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Fractals are fascinating, relatively recent products of mathematical research famous for the alluring beauty and entrancing effect of their images. The internet abounds with sites devoted to the study of fractals (a simple google search will yield upward of 8 million hits!).

Here are a few to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal;

http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/frac/;

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/;

http://members.cox.net/fractalenc/encyclopedia.html.

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Long Island University mathematics professor Anne Burns has published a "Gallery of Mathscapes" showing some of her works as a mathematical artist:

http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/aburns/gallery/gallery.htm.

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The National Science Foundation has a superb, highly accessible general mathematics site suited for lay people with more advanced interest in the subject (highlighting recent mathematical news, research, discoveries, etc.)

http://www.nsf.gov/news/overviews/mathematics/index.jsp.

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Last, but absolutely not least, is the Wolfram Functions Site. Containing "the worlds largest collection of formulas and graphics about mathematical functions," a visit here is not for the faint of heart, but for math fans who just have to "have it all:"

http://functions.wolfram.com/.

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Contact Chris

borlandeducational.com

Saturday, September 01, 2012

Wordle Word Graphs

Once in a while a simple yet brilliant and beautiful idea comes to life online and reminds us that computer technology wasn't invented just to drain our free time, create dependence and then frustration when these vital tools fail to work, and give us another excuse to avoid personal contact with other human beings.

Wordle is one of those ideas. Take a famous speech, a letter to a friend, a junk email message, or any piece of textual information and Wordle can turn it into a thing of beauty and usefulness, marrying form and function to delight the senses and divulge hidden meanings in color, word, and shape.

Think of Wordle as a cross between painting, language, and math that enables anyone armed with a piece of text to engage creatively in all of these activities at the same time.

Wordle takes your text, analyzes which words are used and how often they appear, and creates a verbal montage that shows, based on the size of the words appearing in the wordle, the relative frequency of the particular words comprising that text. By showing graphically the popularity of words contained in a given piece of writing, Wordle reveals with striking clarity those ideas and themes given the most emphasis by the work's author. One gets the distinct feeling that wordles even somehow manages to expose the author's true intentions, giving viewers the opportunity to spy on the writer's unconscious mental processes and discover his or her latent motivations.

Above is a wordle I created out of Barack Obama's victory speech on election night, 11/4/2009.

Users can customize their creations by changing fonts, color schemes, layout, orientation, etc. to form endless variations of the same wordle. There's even a "Randomize" button to generate random versions!

Finally, you can publish your best wordles for the world to see in the Wordle Gallery.

And Wordle costs ... absolutely nothing!

Not only that, but users are completely free (with proper attribution) to use wordles they create in any way and for any personal or commercial purpose they like, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License that governs images created by Wordle.

Try it out yourself! Click here to go to the Wordle site, and start making your own wordles for fun, learning, or profit.

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Contact Chris

borlandeducational.com

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Tech Tools Fight Online Idea Theft

The internet has delivered the world's libraries into the palms of our hands. It's also made plagiarism as easy as copy and paste.

Stealing ideas, phrases, sentences, or even whole paragraphs or larger sections from online sources is the simplest thing in the world to do and for many students has become a tempting way out from under the stress and pressure of heavy academic workloads. Understandable as the underlying motivation may sometimes be, plagiarism, the use of another's ideas or written expressions without attribution, is a high academic crime, a form of cheating.

In recent years, however, espial software that combs the contents of academic papers for exact online matches have been developed that makes it more difficult for students to successfully take credit for the work of others.

An interesting and informative piece by Christina Stolarz in The Detroit News goes into further detail:

To combat the problem, thousands of high schools in more than 80 countries have bought memberships from a plagiarism detection service — online software called Turnitin — in the past year to check whether their students are stealing sentences, and even entire paragraphs, from the Internet.  On average, Turnitin reviews more than 10,000 student papers nationally each day, of which 30 percent contain a significant amount of plagiarism, according to company statistics. Turnitin is used in some prestigious institutions, including the United States Military Academy at West Point and Rutgers University, but it is just one in a handful of online plagiarism detection services.

To read the article in its entirely, click here.

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Contact Chris

borlandeducational.com