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Homo Economicus can vote, but chooses not to

Interesting lecture, put out by the Adam Smith Institute, about The Lessons of Public Choice Theory. It turns out that democracy is a less efficient system than the free market.

For example, voters rationally remain ignorant because their input in the election is not correlated to their knowledge about the process and the candidates. When […]

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

From Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats I learned of a paper, The camel has two humps, which describes a test that allows teachers to differentiate students likely to do well studying computer science from those who will likely never ‘get it’.

This paper sounds awfully similar to the physics conceptual test mentioned […]

Notes: Teaching Demo Workshop

1 general always have a backup plan! ask questions that show you

care about teaching want to connect with audience being in the same age groups helps build repor

can connect better have common frame of reference students don’t age, can’t connect with long past events don’t appear stodgy

Don’t let the faculty […]

Notes: Getting a Job at a State School

Getting a Job at a State School

Created Friday 04 November 2011

PUI (primarily undergraduate institute) many have balance of teaching and research

1 What is the appeal of a CalState? it’s in California the more teaching experience you can get, the better esp. if they are your own classes likes the […]

Will the US Experience Hyperinflation?

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” — Milton Friedman.

First, we should observe the circumstances under which hyperinflation can occur.

Hard Specie

A government using a hard specie such as gold and silver coins, still tends, as a natural result of beaucracy, to spend more than its revenues. However, the laws of pysics […]

Promotion of silver as a form of money

I sent the following letter to Mike Maloney, CEO of GoldSilver and WealthCycles. Let’s see if he answers back.

Promotion of silver as a form of money.

You and I both share a preference for the GOP candidate Ron Paul, who advocates a return to hard money. His ‘End the Fed’ campaign has successfully […]

Expert Tutors

Carl Wieman (who won a Nobel for deepening our understanding of Bose-Einstein condensation) lays out some of the important findings and methodology in his talk “Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science“. In that talk he outlines some of the important responsibilies of expert tutors:

Focus on the […]

Using Science to Teach Science

I’ve recently absorbed American RadioWorks feature on “Tomorrow’s College“. Especially interesting was the program “Don’t Lecture Me, where the story of some physicists gathered data about the learning and understand of their students, only to discover that the traditional lecture model of a knowledgeable expert disseminating information to a passive audience is ineffective.

Research […]