The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality. By Evan R. Goldstein Cambridge, Mass. Illustrations by Harry Campbell for The Chronicle Review In the basement of the Northwest Science Building here at Harvard University, a locked door is marked with a pink and yellow sign: "Caution: Radioactive Material. " Inside researchers buzz around wearing dour expressions and plastic gloves. Among them is Kenneth Hayworth. He's tall and gaunt, dressed in dark-blue jeans, a blue polo shirt, and gray running shoes. Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. Why? But first he has to die. "If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself," he explains to me one drab morning this spring, "so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue.
" It's the kind of scheme you expect to encounter in science fiction, not an Ivy League laboratory. To understand why Hayworth wants to plastinate his own brain you have to understand his field—connectomics, a new branch of neuroscience. W. Patrick O'Connor: Applying to College: The Myth of Grit. "Excuse me, Dr. O'Connor? It's Meredith's mother, Mrs. Hart? " "Of course. "I'm fine.
"OK, I can set up a meeting with you and Meredith. "Actually, I'm hoping I can ask this now. "I see. "Well, when we met with you in August, we reviewed our college list, and you mentioned we couldn't get in to East Coast U. " "Actually, Mrs. "--unless she had some significant additional factor. " "It seems you remember exactly what I said. " "Yes I do, and I'm here to tell you she has one. " "One what? " "Significant additional factor. " "I see. "It's grit. " "Grit? " "Yes. "I didn't even realize Meredith was taking wood shop. " "Oh no, it's not about that. "Angela Duckworth at Penn? " "Why, yes!
"Meredith has grit? " "Of course she does. "It is? " "Absolutely. "Mrs. "Oh, I know that, Dr. "You want me to write about--" "Her failures. " "To show--" "Her grittiness. "Mrs. "No, but I hear they haven't changed in the last five years. " "That's true -- they haven't. "'Describe an experience where you had to overcome adversity. "Grit. " True grit: Noncognitive skills provide more complete picture of college applicants. You can learn a lot about yourself when you’re faced with a challenge. It turns out college admissions officers can learn a lot too.
The idea that SAT scores and high school grade point averages aren’t enough to create a complete picture of a college applicant is nothing new. These things might measure intelligence, as can IQ tests, but it’s still important to look at an applicant’s noncognitive skills: grittiness. In psychology, grit is a person’s passion for a long-term goal, a motivation that enables the individual to overcome challenges in order to achieve that goal. Grit can be used to explain why many top CEOs graduate from state schools instead of Ivy League universities, or why some soldiers in the U.S. military handle post-combat psychological trauma differently from others.
And yet the idea of factoring “noncognitive skills” into the college admissions process should be silly. Grittier West Point cadets were more likely to stay after their first summer. Our College Crisis: A PowerPoint Presentation by Bill Gates - Jordan Weissmann. Crowdsourcing the Best Digital Humanities Content: Introducing #DHThis, the Digital Humanities Slashdot. In the world of print, editors traditionally serve as a screening mechanism to ensure that only the best work sees the light of publication.
In academia, peer review serves the same purpose. By relying on the judgment of other experts, a journal ensures that only certain types of work will appear within its pages. But with the advent of the Internet and easy-to-use content management systems like WordPress and Blogger, the power to publish is now in anyone’s hands. How then should the process for deciding quality be redefined for the digital age? If you have been frustrated by the editorial model and the gatekeeping systems within traditional peer review, here is your chance to contribute to a new platform to re-envision scholarly publishing.
This post introduces a experiment: DHThis.org, a new platform where a community instead of a small group of editors select the most valuable content within the digital humanities. Get Involved To be part of the community, just sign up! How it Works. Where Feminism Went Wrong - The Chronicle Review. By Debora L. Spar In 2005, I was teaching a first-year class at Harvard Business School. As usual, slightly under a third of my students were women. As always, I was the only female professor. So one evening, my female students asked me and one of my female colleagues to join them for cocktails. They ordered a lovely spread of hors d'oeuvres and white wine. They presented each of us with an elegant lavender plant.
Over the course of the conversation, though, things began to turn. Can women pursue their dreams without losing their sanity? Like many women of my so-called postfeminist generation, I was raised to believe that women were finally poised to be equal with men. Today, most major corporations—along with hospitals, law firms, universities, and banks—have entire units devoted to helping women (and minorities) succeed. Ever since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, American women have been haunted by the problem of more. No man can do that, either; no human can. Debora L. Frat Rap and the New White Negro - The Conversation. Adele, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Teena Marie. White musicians and fans are embracing the cultural performance—jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm & blues, hip-hop—that African-Americans have given life to over the last century. In 1957, Norman Mailer spoke to the existence of the “white Negro,” an urban hipster whose fascination and fetishizing of blackness resulted in a set of practices that reflected a white imagination: part cultural appropriation, a subtle reinforcement of segregation, and a desire to try on perceived accents of blackness.
“So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts,” he wrote. “The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” The frat-rap craze saw its origins in 2009, with the release of Asher Roth’s “I Love College.” Historically white colleges remain immensely segregated. David J. Uversity (formerly Inigral) | Student Engagement Software. College Reality Check. English's Self-Inflicted Wounds - The Conversation. What happened to English? According to the Modern Language Association, in the late 1960s and early 70s, English accounted for about 7.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States, but the portion plummeted to around 3.5 percent in the early 80s, climbed a bit to nearly 5 percent in the early 90s, then dropped steadily to 3.47 percent in 2004.
English has gone from a major unit in the university to a minor one, its standing propped up largely by freshman writing requirements and creative-writing courses. At Emory University, where I teach English, when I arrived in 1989 and soon became director of undergraduate studies, the number of majors reached 350. Today, our majors linger at around 150.
Let me give an example (one, I should note, that I’ve written about here, eliciting a rebuttal here). These standard introductory courses acquaint 17-year-olds with basic methods and subject matter. The critical approach, too, bypasses the basics. (Photo by Flickr/CC user azrasta) My Prezi Conversion. Polishing Your Prose, Word by (Needless) Word - Do Your Job Better. By Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn Here is the opening of an early draft of an essay about teaching mathematics written years ago by a celebrated professor. As he himself has acknowledged, he is a less than gifted writer, and our goal is to maintain his ideas while presenting them more clearly and gracefully. It is important to recognize the fact that every subject, given that its content is not totally reducible to some other subject area, presents a special set of pedagogic problems arising as a result of the distinctive character of their contents and their essential nature.
The problems may be regarded as particularizations of the general pedagogical considerations which must be treated by any and all teachers who seek to seriously discharge his or her educational responsibilities in a highly efficacious manner. Where to begin? The opening construction ("It is important to recognize the fact that ... ") is overwritten. Better, but can we cut more? Then how about "a ... set of"? Repurposing Anthimeria - Lingua Franca. Elaine: “He recycled this gift. … He’s a regifter!” When last we met, I mentioned some current examples of functional shifting, or anthimeria, especially adjective-to-noun (AT&T’s slogan “Rethink Possible”) and verb-to-noun (referring to someone as a good “hire”).
I didn’t get into two notorious noun-to-adjectives, fun and cliché. Nor will I today. My theme, rather, is what seems to me the most popular recent switch, noun-to-verb. Innumerable such transformations have taken place over the history of the English language, of course, and in recent decades they’ve tended to raise the ire of sticklers. A couple of days ago, I read in The New York Times a Charles McGrath review of a thriller involving guns that “have been repurposed for additional killings.” Repurpose, source, and task follow the model of contact and impact. But an noun-to-verb anthimeria subset has an additional wrinkle in its provenance. Relative use of “surveil” between 1960 and 2008 Return to Top. Stopping to Consider Language Acquisition - Lingua Franca. As is my wont, when I began reading Interpreting Imperatives by Magdalena Kaufmann (now at the University of Connecticut) I started with a part that many would probably skip: the preface.
There are all sorts of things to be learned from a preface to a book in one’s own field. The author is the former Magdalena Schwager, who did her Ph.D. at Frankfurt and moved on to Göttingen, and is now married to Stefan Kaufmann of Northwestern. One of her mentors was Ede Zimmermann. And then suddenly I stopped in surprise when I saw what she said about the respected German linguist Arnim von Stechow, her first semantics teacher: Arnim von Stechow … has never stopped to present me with thought provoking questions. The uncaring swine; he couldn’t even be bothered to stop by her office to give her a few provocative questions? Don’t imagine for one moment that what I’m doing here is dinging Professor Kaufmann for a grammar slip (as you will see, my point is quite the opposite).
Return to Top. The Trouble With English - The Conversation. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the subject of English or English departments. Their history begins, surprisingly to some, not in English-speaking countries, but on the European continent in the mid-19th century, when English-language instruction—later combined with instruction in literature and culture—was recognized as a pragmatic necessity for business and politics to communicate with the most successful liberal economy in the world: Britain. As Richard Ohmann, Gerald Graff, and others have mapped out, English departments in Britain and the United States were established a little later, some emulating, some objecting to the German(ic) philological models dominating Continental institutions after 1871.
As a hotbed of ever-new methodological, ideological, and rhetorical turns, English departments embraced New Critical, Marxist, New Historicist, and feminist paths and fought valiantly in the theory wars. None of these past challenges compares with the one under way now. The Last Word Is Beauty - The Chronicle Review. By Laurie Fendrich Steven St. John for The Chronicle Review Everybody, it seems, is writing about Dave Hickey, but nobody's really concentrating on the 74-year-old maverick art critic's thorny, profound ideas about beauty. That is understandable. After decades of lambasting the academic side of the art world for institutionalizing mediocrity, and after recently proclaiming that the gallery-museum part of that world has turned into a venal, celebrity-stoked social scene that has no use for serious art criticism, Hickey has announced that he's through with writing about contemporary art.
Of course, Hickey might not be telling the truth about giving up art criticism. As Hickey sails off into announced self-imposed exile from art criticism, he trails a lot of art-critical credentials in his wake. I first met Dave Hickey a few decades ago, through my husband, Peter Plagens, who also writes art criticism. His ideas as an art critic are imcompatible with the art world's absorption in theory. Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College - Wired Campus. Salman Khan’s dream college looks very different from the typical four-year institution. The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.
In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. “Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students),” he writes. Mr. In the book, Mr. [Image courtesy of Hachette Book Group.] Return to Top. One Rule to Ring Them All - Lingua Franca. “The end of the world will be along shortly,” a friend of mine remarked, after noticing what he thought was an erroneous whom in the hallowed pages of The New Yorker.
But the example he pointed me to was an interesting one. It does not by any means imply that we are nearing the end times, though pedants may think otherwise by the time I’m done. The sentence occurred in a book review by Nathan Heller (November 19, 2012, Page 86): Shouldn’t that whom, thought my friend, be who instead? To answer the question, we have to be precise about the relevant rule.
We’re never very sure of ourselves when it comes to whom. Style plays a role: Who are you supposed to trust? What is true, though, is that whom cannot be the subject of a tensed clause: *Whom broke this? It is worth taking a careful look at what Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style say about this kind of case (fourth edition, p. 11; the passage I refer to is in fact all due to White).
Take a second look at example [2]. Return to Top. To Make Better Decisions, Break Some Boundaries - Commentary. By Richard L. Morrill The persistent economic problems facing higher education these days make it evident that the financial models of most institutions are not sustainable. That challenge alone would be bad enough, but traditional educational models are also in trouble, as online learning upends the nature of higher education itself.
But more serious than either the economic or the educational challenge is the inability of academe's decision-making model to respond to them. On almost every campus, decisions are made via decentralized patterns of authority in departments and programs that are largely self-governing. Underneath that system of autonomy is a resistance to organizational change and a cumbersome and splintered method of making decisions that do not serve our institutions well, especially in times of crisis. The real problem, then, is at the structural level. Fortunately, new methods of leadership are emerging to respond more effectively to the dislocating elements of change. The Genius in the Classroom - Commentary. The Evolutionary Mystery of Homosexuality - The Chronicle Review. A Dot-Com Entrepreneur's Ambition: Drive Education Costs to Zero - Technology.
An Idea Too Sensible to Try, Until Now - Commentary. College, Reinvented. How Would You Reinvent College Sports? - Players. An Old-School Notion: Writing Required - College, Reinvented. Grades Out, Badges In - College, Reinvented. 2 Captains at the Helm of Each College - College, Reinvented. The 4-Letter Word That Everybody’s Talking About - Head Count. The New Traditional on Campuses - Do Your Job Better.