Recommended reads #137

You might remember how I’ve said How People Learn is a supreme book that is foundational for evidence-based teaching practices, though it’s almost 20 years old and getting a dated?? Great news! The National Academies have now released How People Learn II. And you can download it for free!

This year’s crop of MacArthur Fellows just came out. As always, some amazing people and work are being supported. I was psyched to see developmental psychologist Kristina Olson (whose work was so spectacular, this year she managed to break the long drought of women recipients for NSF’s Waterman Award).

Why UC Merced is not the “dumb” university. I love this. I looooove this. The same argument can be made for so many other schools that aren’t stratospheric in rankings. It’s a 4-minute read.

Earlier this year, the editors of Wikipedia judged that physicist Donna Strickland wasn’t accomplished enough to merit a biography on their site. A few months later, she received the Nobel Prize.

The Value of Undergraduate Teaching for Research Scientists

Mentoring for Inclusion: The Impact of Mentoring on Undergraduate Researchers in the Sciences

NSF takes another great step, while NIH continues to fail us:

NSF's new term and condition for awards requiring harassment notifications is now available online, along with FAQs and responses to comments: https://t.co/b9dnwUJ6fm #sciencetoo

— National Science Foundation (@NSF) September 21, 2018

University presses are thriving

Primarily white institutions still aren’t hiring black faculty like they said they would

Have you been getting those Chinese robocalls? I have. Here’s the deal with them.

“Gender discrimination may be like the famous invisible gorilla of selective inattention fame: While men in science are able to focus on their work, that focus keeps them from noticing… discrimination against their women colleagues.”

This story about Matilda the Anteater and her treatment for an ant allergy is both endearing and fascinating. (And it also kinda breaks my heart that I know so many people who need healthcare as good as hers.)

How to choose a narrative framing for scientific papers

The Opportunity Atlas is absolutely fascinating. It uses census data and other economic data to examine how fine-scale geography and how your parents’ income affected your income as adults. Playing around this where I live now, and also a bit west where I grew up, it’s fascinating — the relatively wealthier families in my hometown raised kids who were earning less than their parents, but the kids that were in lower income families did better than their parents. But some other areas a few miles down the road have an opposite effect. I only spent about 10 minutes with it, and there’s a lot of complexity to deal with, but it seems like a powerful took for learning things and even more so for generating new questions.

The book in the image — Inferior by Angela Saini — is an amazing piece of scholarship. I’m not that far into it, but, wow.

I hope you can find joy in your weekend.