Items to Share: 14 July

Education Focus

• 10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you | Features | Times Higher Education from Tara Brabazon. I'm suspicious--this seems to be written more for effect than serious guidance, but then PhDs are very different. There's little in common between supervising a doctoral student who is a member of a lab team working full-time on a research project directed by a principal investigator funded externally, where the student is finally given her own little angle to write up in her final months, and supervising a part-timer who has devised his own project and is trying to fit it in around full-time work...

• How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education (This is an earlier revisionist take on the PhD from Brabazon) "When a student uses words such as “discourse” and “ideology” as if they were neutral nouns, it is often a signal for the start of a pantomime of naivety throughout the script. Instead of an “analysis”, postgraduates describe their work as “deconstruction”. It is not deconstruction. They describe their approach as “structuralist”. It is not structuralist. Simply because they study structures does not mean it is structuralist. Conversely, simply because they do not study structures does not mean it is poststructuralist. The number of students who fling names around as if they are fashion labels (“Dior”, “Derrida”, “Givenchy”, “Gramsci”) is becoming a problem. I also feel sorry for the students who are attempting a deep engagement with these theorists." Yes!

• Eric Mazur, Abridged "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer" - YouTube (Video) from 2009. See also Sadler P (1994) "Simple Minds" QED BBC2 19.9.94 Excerpt here 

• Watering the Roots of Knowledge Through Collaborative Learning - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education  Interesting vision of designing a university from scratch--and interesting comments, too. 

• What’s the point of a national curriculum? | Webs of Substance Interesting debate on the up- and down-sides of consistency; see the comments, too.

• Philosophy and true freedom of speech - Philosophy and Life  Mark Vernon's case for teaching philosophy in schools.

Other Business

• Human-powered helicopter hovers accurately for 60 seconds, beats 'impossible' challenge | The Verge and wins the $250k Sikorsky prize

• The heroic absurdity of Dan Brown  by Clive James. "The less his talent, the more amazing his achievement." 

• Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller is Researching Ways that Bad Memories Can be Made Less Fearsome | MIT Technology Review 

• British people are wrong about everything: here's why ...and it's difficult to get the truth over. (from Bobby Duffy, Managing Director of the Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute.)

• Nice Results, But What Did You Expect? – Phenomena  "Running double-blind studies is easy enough when your medicine looks the same as a saline drip, but it’s usually impossible in psychology. “Psychology interventions aren’t like pills, [...]If you’re receiving an experimental treatment for depression, you know that you’re receiving treatment.” 

• The Most “Intellectual Jokes”: Our Favorite Open Culture Reader Submissions | Open Culture  More.

• The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.) - NYTimes.com  (Oliver Sacks) "At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”)