This time, Dr Pelzer took one of those plastic models you always see in medical offices and measured a length of mandible a few inches long. This, he explained, would be removed and replaced with a bone graft taken from the fibula in my calf— one of the bones we don’t need. Dr Neil Fine, an expert plastic surgeon, would do this and patch me up so that after healing there was every reason to expect I’d be back on my TV show.That’s not how it worked out. All by myself, with nobody to blame, I found out about the work in neutron radiation being done at a handful of hospitals. It was much more powerful and narrowly targeted than gamma radiation. The leading specialist was said to be Dr George Laramore at the University of Washington Medical Centre in Seattle. “My equipment is made for your tumour,” he told me. “Of course you should have surgery first.” Harold Pelzer also recommended surgery first. So did Havey. But no. I became convinced there was a shortcut that would avoid plastic surgery and a healing period and have me back on the air much more quickly. I insisted. My doctors and Chaz advised the path of caution, but I cited reams of web printouts indicating what a miracle this neutron radiation was. Eventually, it was decided to give it a go.
The internet is said to be responsible for helping patients take control of their own diseases. Few movies are ever made about sick people courageously taking doctors’ advice. No, they get bright ideas online. I believe my infatuation with neutron radiation led directly to the failure of all three of my facial surgeries, the loss of my jaw, loss of the ability to eat, drink and speak and the surgical damage to my right shoulder and back as my poor body was plundered for still more reconstructive transplants. Today, I look like an exhibit in the Texas Chainsaw museum.
Most students can’t rely on a combination of natural aptitude, writing skills and diploma prestige to land a good job. If you’re at Arizona State, majoring in Greek is probably a big mistake. Most college students should be focusing on developing marketable human capital, which means taking courses that will leave them with specific job skills. Classics doesn’t fit this bill.I also think Freddoso overstates the importance of “the classics” or Great Books for developing a sound worldview, though this is probably my bias coming through. I think Dickens (whom Freddoso includes in an expanded definition of “classics”) is dreadfully boring, and I have no use for ancient philosophy. I actually liked the courses I took in early modern philosophy, but I think my worldview would be basically the same without them. The readings I did in my high school Latin classes made ancient Rome sound like a tawdry soap opera–fun, but not really edifying.
Is Majoring in “Classical Studies” a Good Idea? - By Josh Barro
I think Barro needs to reply to the obvious objection to his argument: that if all your training is in “specific job skills,” what do you do when changes in technological and/or economic conditions eliminate that job? The primary job-oriented argument for liberal-arts education is that it produces students who are resourceful, adaptable, and wide-ranging in their thinking and skills. Now, you may not think that liberal-arts education does in fact produce such students — in which case, make that argument, please — but it would be very foolish to deny that a rapidly-changing economy needs people with the virtues I’ve just listed. Detailed training for a single job won’t cut it any more.
Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.But [Professor Bing] Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
Paradoxically, then, `Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive’. Shakespeare was receptive to every mood, every position and disposition: hence the intermingling, the layering and counterpoint, which is one of his stylistic hallmarks. He was receptive to everything but reductive singularity: hence his stripping of unitary motive from such characters as Leontes and Lear. We praise writers for being receptive to all experience; so too should we praise them for being altogether receptive to their reading, save when that reading closes the mind rather than opens it. The range and extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness is a badge of his genius, not a blemish upon it.
Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are not as clean and beautiful as we would like to believe. Instead of blaming language for failing to capture our thoughts, maybe we should thank it for giving some shape to the muddle in our heads.
Liking art that is misogynist, racist, sexist, or homophobic doesn’t necessarily make you those things, and indictment of that art doesn’t have to be an indictment of you. This seems to be a stumbling block for a lot of people. But let me be clear: if you think Donald Glover is a great MC, I don’t think that means you beat on women or that you hate them. I think Eminem’s Slim Shady persona is virulently misogynist and disturbing, but I still think Em is a ridiculously gifted MC, and I’ve struggled with this since I was in high school. Tower Heist contains an utterly ridiculous but entirely hilarious extended joke about what Eddie Murphy thinks about lesbian sex. Is it problematic? Absolutely. But it’s also one of the funniest bits in the movie. Folks need to breathe a bit. I think our conversations about culture would be a lot healthier and more interesting if we could hold two thoughts in our hands at the same time and acknowledge that we like problematic stuff. Because really, we all do.
Google is known for making decisions informed by data, often very large sets of it. That’s a great practice, and one that undoubtedly often leads to some smart moves and happy users. In this case, the Reader team probably saw that a relatively small number of people were using those features, and decided that it was probably safe to kill them off in favor of pushing users toward Google Plus, which is a big, new priority for the company. It’s ironic in a way, because in its big push to reposition itself as a social-friendly company, Google just displaced an entire community of users, effectively shutting down a social ecosystem that had existed for years.
I think this zeroes in on the problem: Google is saying to social-minded Reader users, “We’re going to kill the social network we’ve been freely providing for you. Please use this other social network we’re now freely providing for you. Because of course there’s no way we’ll ever kill that one.” User = Charlie Brown, Google = Lucy, Google’s services = the football. I’ve seen how that turns out.
When we actually start to look at the fundamentals, it seems children learn by exploring—by experimenting, playing, drawing inferences—and there’s every reason to believe the same is true for adults. The really remarkable discovery we’ve made is that that kind of exploratory learning isn’t just the purview of scientists but seems to be very, very basic. We all have the capacity to function the way scientists do. The other kind of learning that we see, not so much in preschoolers but in school-age children, is what I call guided apprenticeship learning, where you’re not just exploring and finding out new things but learning to perform a skill particularly well. A person who’s learning that way will imitate what an expert does, then modify what they’re doing based on feedback. That’s the way you learn how to dance, play a musical instrument, learn a sport. We have reason to believe that’s something that kicks in and becomes particularly important in adolescence, when people are learning specific skills. So the point I would make is that if you look at the way we do a lot of undergraduate teaching, and I’m including myself in here, we don’t really do either of those things. There’s not exploratory learning, there’s not guided apprenticeship. An awful lot of undergraduate teaching still has this model of lecturers who get up and try to be entertaining and talk about whatever they’re doing, and students who sit in a lecture hall and take notes.
The Kylescu Bridge. Talk about the beauty of proper proportions. Via this slideshow.