Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Greg Smith welcomes me back to the East Coast

I arrived to beautiful spring weather yesterday afternoon–it was warmer in DC than in LA–and the bombshell from Greg Smith which you can find here.

Money quote from his op ed in the NYT:

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money.

In higher education, we face analogous ethical challenges and from my perspective, the key thing to remember at all times is that the core mission of colleges must continue to be, putting the education of our students first. In eras of austerity and tight budgets, that touchstone, can too easily be forgotten.

First a Gala, then L.A.

Headed out to a gala in DC this evening, then tomorrow out to LA to visit family and a few R&R days in Palm Springs. I’ve got the blog set up to store emailed blogposts as drafts, I’ll either publish them from my Ipad or when I get back next week.

My travel schedule for the year is coming together and the high points will be in Leuven (Belgium), Seoul and Beijing. Here in the States we will be visiting Woods Hole (as usual), Aspen and East Lansing (a first for me). Time to start putting those slide decks together!

Giving exams to large numbers of students…

Giving a midterm later today has me thinking about the future of higher education. On the one hand, when remembering my very best classes at Amherst College, I recall a well-delivered lecture as a real gem, to be savored over time, potentially life changing. On the other, the logistics of handling learning assessment metrics (such as exams) for large classes, in the era before the Internet, created very real limitations, even at an elite liberal arts school like Amherst.

My worries about for-profit distance education models principally center around the genericness of the industrial scale lecture. But there may well be new frontiers in learning assessment leveraged by technology that might be usefully appropriated here in the non-profit university world. Ideally (and this is dream-ware I realize), one would want a way to use strong AI (perhaps in the context of natural language processing) to assist human professors in the grading of exams that include essays, equations and other non-multiple-choice instruments–Exams that we might have given comfortably in a seminar class of 15, but that are currently impossible in a class of 100 students.

My favorite examination at Amherst, was in quantum chemistry–it was one week long and open book. All of the questions involved sophisticated mathematics at the very limit of my education. In fact, much of the required mathematics was taught to us by the course professor so that we could understand the chemistry! Our professor was available by phone during that week pretty much 24/7. It was an incredibly exhilarating experience to pass that exam and it was about as far removed from multiple choice as one could possibly get.

My goal would be for technology to drive us towards learning experiences and assessments like the above. If we could do something like that, then we might really revolutionize higher education.

Functional Neuroimaging under the Crosshairs..

I’ve worried about this for years. Now Dorothy Bishop puts it all out there here.  Money quote:

I do not think it is worthwhile to do poorly-designed studies of small numbers of participants to test the mode of action of an intervention that has not been shown to be effective in properly-controlled trials. It would make more sense to spend the research funds on properly controlled trials that would allow us to evaluate which interventions actually work.

University of Maryland does the obvious…

as part of its strategy to be the dominant public research I university in the National Capital Area, details are here. To my mind, it’s all they can do with their medical and law schools in Baltimore and the flagship College Park campus here inside the Beltway. It’s also a first step towards the politically difficult merger of the three as the University of Maryland.

And Mason’s “chess move” in response? Stay tuned…

Davos Man on Davos

Nick Paumgarten’s long piece from the New Yorker is here.  Money quote:

Right-wingers see insidious, delusional liberalism, in its stakeholder ethos and its pretense of world improvement. They picture a bunch of Keynesians, Continentals, and self-dealing do-gooders participating in some kind of off-the-books top-down command-control charade. Left-wingers conjure a plutocratic cabal, a Star Chamber of master puppeteers, the one per cent—or .01 per cent, really—deciding the world’s fate behind a curtain of heavy security and utopian doublespeak.


China’s Future

Time Magazine’s Michael Shuman has a really interesting piece on China here. In essence, he thinks the current state capitalism model in unsustainable because it sends inaccurate price signals which are creating huge distortions. Shuman sees China going the same way as Japan.

Shuman’s report is relevant apropos of yesterday’s blog entry here on Advanced Studies regarding some serious future challenges to international science.