Almost the weekend! Free time ahead. How will you fill up the abyss of meaninglessness that yawns before you? What divertissements will you use to stave off the brooding awareness of death, always looming just over the horizon? Hey, these links might help! Plus there's binge-watching, and maybe a bit of shopping.
Did the Neanderthals bury their dead, intentionally? With ritual? It's an interesting question and a new find in the Shanidar cave in Northern Iraq raises these questions again. Here's another piece on it; and here's the main piece, from the journal Antiquity.
OK so this is odd but this issue of Daedalus is dedicated to improving college teaching, and I encourage you to read it--ok, quickly--particularly if you are a college teacher. There are a number of interesting pieces, especially ones on challenging the dichotomy between career training and the liberal arts. There's an interesting, if possibly megalomaniacal paper on how "we now know" what good teaching is (written by a guy who named a research project after himself), but it actually doesn't seem too off-base, only a bit platitudinous. Oh and a nice paper suggesting, with data, that the MOOC thing is overblown (surprise!).
Some useful stuff in here on grading. I still like rubrics, though. And I do use small assignments, esp at the beginning of a class, to get a sense of the students, and to give them a sense of my criteria in action.
In recent years, as large datasets on urban areas around the world have become available, researchers like Bettencourt and Yang have begun analyzing scaling behaviors that emerge in human systems -- including cities. The field really ignited about a decade ago, she says, when researchers from the Santa Fe Institute first showed that many properties of cities also changed in a predictable way over orders of magnitude in city size.
This is fascinating: more than the interwebs, malls have declined because of income inequality (the middle class has relatively less disposable income to spend) and the shift of consumer expenses from things to services, like education and health care. An interesting change in our conception of what "consumerism" is.
Don't stop (not) thinking about your inevitable tomorrow, people!