Time to say goodbye to our heroes?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton describes and disputes the "hero" model of academia, and suggests a model instead organised around teams focused on big questions. Thanks to Jan de Muijnck-Hughes for the pointer.

Reorienting our focus from the hero model’s “big people” to the consideration of big questions will address many of the challenges plaguing universities today: incremental, derivative, low-risk science; faltering funding; relentless focus on quantity of publication; irreproducible research; ongoing complaints of harassment; lack of diversity; an atmosphere that leaves students struggling with mental health; and (despite enormous funding outlays) an inadequately trained workforce in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

PLFA in Padova

Next week, I will teach six hours of classes based on PLFA, and deliver a departmental seminar on the same topic. Maybe I will see you there!

Seminar: 16.00-17.00 Tue 28 May (details)

Classes: 12.30-15.30 Wed-Thu 29-30 May (details)

Pinker's Thirteen Rules for Better Writing

Steven Pinker tweets thirteen rules for better writing. Spotted via Boing Boing.

1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?
2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.
3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”
4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”
5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.
6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).
7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).
8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.
9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.
10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”
11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.
12. Read it aloud.
13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

After absorbing these, read his The Sense of Style.

Lambdaman, supporting Bootstrap

After watching talks or videos of Propositions as Types, folk ask me how they can get their own Lambdaman t-shirt. In the past, I tried to make it available through various services, but they always rejected the design as a copyright violation. (It's not, it's fair use.) Thanks to a little help from my friends, CustomInk has agreed to print the design as a Booster. Sign up now, order will be printed on October 15. Any profits (there will be more if there is a bigger order) go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order has already surpassed our goal of fifty shirts!

Errata, please

This is a space where you can leave comments describing errata in any of my published papers. Please include bibliographic details of the paper, and a link to where the paper appears on my web page if you can. Thank you to Dave Della Costa for volunteering the first entry and inspiring the creation of this post, and to all who utilise this space to record and correct my errors for posterity.

The the impotence of proofreading

My daughter introduced me to slam poet Taylor Mali.

Craftsman or Scientist?

More from Dijkstra (see previous entry), this time on whether computing is a craft or a science. Of course, it is both. Spotted by Sebastian Fisher.

My somewhat elliptic title refers, of course, to the programmer; so much you may have guessed. What, in all probability, you could not have guessed, is that I have chosen to use the words "craftsman" and "scientist" in a very specific meaning: they have been chosen to characterize the results of two extreme techniques of education, and this luncheon speech will be devoted to a (be it short) discussion of their role in the education of programmers, in the teaching of programming. For the transmission of knowledge and skills both techniques have been used side by side since many centuries.

Knowledge Economy

UCU writes:

Wednesday’s spending review was bad news for universities, colleges and students. Student visa charges will go up, student grants will be frozen and funding aimed at encouraging the poorest students to apply to university will be axed. On Thursday, Danny Alexander announced plans to sell off student loans. All this in the same week that the OECD research showed the UK falling behind in investment in higher education at a time when demand for highly skilled graduates is still rising faster than supply.

Sign up to the Knowledge Economy campaign.