Blogs

The dreaded written comprehensive exam. Many graduate students will have to pass some form of comprehensive exam at some point in their program. This can often include putting together a multi-page grant-style project proposal. Putting one of these together can be a daunting process if you are unprepared. But have no fear, there are ways to make crafting a solid document far less painful.

There is a concept in math called “one to one correspondence”, in which members of one set may be matched with members of another set, so that each member of one set is matched with exactly one member from the other set. I thought of this concept lately when I found myself working one-on-one with several of my students as they struggled to master some difficult concepts from the class they were taking.

David Roberts at Grist recently posted a good, if not entirely earth-shaking, analysis titled "Two reasons climate change is not like other environmental problems". His main points are that carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas -- is not like other air pollutants in that it tends to persist, and that changes to climate -- once they take effect -- are effectively irreversible in any timeframe relevant to human experience.

Should a public college partner with a private company to train scabs?

It may be much harder to write a short paper than a long paper, but it’s much more interesting to tell a story – any story – in six words.

The news business, the fight against CIPSA, and an important Supreme Court decision - all on my mind this week.

This week I led a discussion on academic/vendor relations with a product group at an edtech company. The meeting was in Canada. I never left my office in Hanover NH. We did the whole thing on a Web based collaboration platform.

I was working on my laptop (as usual) while my children played around me. They were dressed up in play costumes, started marching and kept referring to each other as Susan and Elizabeth. When they started chanting “Women should vote,” I realized, of course, they were playing 1st wave feminist movement (don’t you love the nerdy games of professors’ children?). I’ve been reading Sheryl Sanderberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and watching the COO of Facebook on television call it a “sort-of -feminist manifesto” to inspire a new women’s revolution. I began thinking how the children of the future might re-enact her movement.