monkey's uncle

Priceless. Steve Pinker wrote a spectacular review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, in the New York Times today. I regularly read and enjoy Gladwell’s essays in the New Yorker, but I find his style sometimes problematic, verging on anti-intellectual, and I’m thrilled to see a scientist of Pinker’s stature [...]

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It’s that time of the year again, it seems, when I have lots of students writing proposals to submit to NSF to fund their graduate education or dissertation research.  This always sets me to thinking about the practice of science and how one goes about being a successful scientist. I’ve written about “productive stupidity” before, [...]

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Nicholas Kristof has an interesting Op-Ed piece this week in the Times.  Reporting on University of Michigan Professor Richard Nisbett’s new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Kristof argues for the general malleability of intelligence.  He writes,
If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty [...]

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How do we evaluate the quality of published work?  This has become an issue for me recently for one general and two more specific reasons.  The general reason is that as one approaches one’s tenure decision, one tends to think about the impact of one’s oeuvre. The specific reasons are, first, I have a paper that [...]

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