Letters Remain

Category: learning

  • Entrepreneurs Not Learning From Mistakes

    Entrepreneurial failure is an integral part of eventual success and an important opportunity for learning, or so goes the conventional wisdom (hence in some part the quote—commonly attributed to Lisa Amos—that entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before success). Ignoring the anecdotal success-after-failure stories that stick in peoples’ minds, a team at Harvard Business School decided to…

  • Language Incomprehensibility Flowchart (It’s All Greek To Me)

    Language Log was asked; When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word one says, it’s “Greek to me”. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it “sounds like Chinese”. […] Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph? To answer the query, Mark Liberman checks…

  • The Perils of Pop Psychology

    In response to Jane O’Grady’s Open Democracy article critiquing the ‘neuro-social-sciences’, Julian Sanchez outlines his thoughts on the perils of pop psychology: There are arguments that simply can’t be made in the span of even a longish newspaper or magazine article. If one is writing for a lay audience, in fact, I feel pretty confident that…

  • Teaching Children to Argue

    With a primer on each of the “three basic tools of argument” (logos, ethos and pathos), Jay Heinrichs gives a cogent argument for why you should teach your children to argue. I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas…

  • University of the People

    Three weeks ago the United Nations announced the launch of the world’s first tuition-free online university; the University of the People. With a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements, students from over 52 countries have already enrolled. Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can…

  • The Higher Education ‘Bubble’

    Is the current ‘value’ of higher education artificially inflated and unsustainable? In other words, could higher education be the next ‘bubble to burst’? The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at some of the early warning signs that seem to be suggesting so, and offers a couple of solutions to this apparently looming crisis. Over the…

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…

  • Learn Statistics, Damn You!

    Thanks to my moderate knowledge of statistics, I know that I have a lot more to learn in the field and should never make assumptions about data or analyses (even my own). Because of this I share a grievance with Zed Shaw who says that “programmers need to learn statistics or I will kill them all”.…

  • Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius

    I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…

  • Development of the Infant Brain

    Looking primarily at the research of Alison Gopnik, Jonah Lehrer looks at the development of the infant brain. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even…