Another post as a response to something written by Jeremy Fox! I think it becomes time that I meet him in person so that I can address him by “Jeremy” instead of “Dr. Fox”, “Fox”, or “the author”. I tried to remove all the salesmanship from my response, though, because I wanted to make sure that 1) I summarized his blog post correctly, and 2) expressed my thoughts as clearly as possible.
Talk about climate change, and be sure that your analyses are rock solid, because you will get some serious backlash. What interests me most is the danger of “if the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything will look like a nail” thinking.
http://www.statisticsblog.com/2012/12/the-surprisingly-weak-case-for-global-warming/ is a blog post written by a graduate statistics student, with this summary:
“TL;DR (scientific version): Based solely on year-over-year changes in surface temperatures, the net increase since 1881 is fully explainable as a non-independent random walk with no trend.
Here is another convert of the magic of the whiteboard: http://lifehacker.com/5950957/how-a-whiteboard-helped-a-terrible-delegator-keep-a-team-on+task.
He provides a list of why whiteboards work:
“Whiteboards are big enough for everybody to see.Whiteboards make you want to fill the space, and therefore expand and branch your thoughts.Whiteboards inspire you to keep writing, to keep pushing on what’s in your head, because it feels awesome to swing your arms that widely. Whiteboards feel less like you’re committing to an idea than throwing it out for consideration.
An oldie, but worthy of a link: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/10/05/whats-the-most-important-lesson-you-learned-from-a-teacher/
I have since tried to identify a specific teacher and lesson for my own story, but I am not good at recalling memories, and my university teachers were pretty old school, sage-on-the-stage types of teachers, not exactly my style.
The one person that keeps coming up is my first kayak instructor (name forgotten) when I was 16 (?), in France. It was just me and him, and he really focused on breaking kayaking down the basics: reading the water (currents and countercurrents) and weight position in the boat (left-right and front-back), followed by exercises that internalized those basics before moving to the next step.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/back-from-yet-another-globetrotting-adventure-indiana-jones-checks-his-mail-and-discovers-that-his-bid-for-tenure-has-been-denied
“The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.”
“Seems to me that there’s not really a contradiction between System1 (intuition) and System 2 (rational) modes of knowing. Instead, one’s just faster than the other. Both are useful, both are necessary. But the great achievement of science has been to tell us that intuition always has to be checked. In essence, science is the overturning of intuition by slow, painful, careful System 2 reasoning.”from http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2011/11/intuition-and-counterintuition.html