Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Education

  • Assessing the Benefits of Online Teaching and Supervision

    We are now eight months into the coronavirus pandemic with little sign that most countries will be able to get it under control without a vaccine, which means that many countries are now attempting to return to normal while managing the virus. For most countries I predict this is going to be disastrous, and even…

  • Two Strategies for Getting out of Britain if you’re Young and Scared

    Are you young, British, and scared about where your country is headed? Want to get out before it all goes down? Are you worried about what’s going to happen after you leave the EU, and expect everything to come crashing down? Don’t think that the healthcare situation is going to get better or even stay…

  • The Latest Sokal Hoax

    And let me tell you something Before you go taking a walk in my world, …you better take a look at the real world Cause this ain’t no Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Can you say “feel like shit?” Yea maybe sometimes I do feel like shit I ain’t happy about it, but I’d rather feel like…

  • The Problem is not Facebook, it’s You

    The media this week are exploding with news that a company called Cambridge Analytica used shadily-obtained Facebook data to influence the US elections. The data was harvested by some other shady company using an app that legally exploited Facebook’s privacy rules at the time, and then handed over to Cambridge Analytica, who then used the…

  • Delicious in Dungeon: A Dungeon-crawl Manga Cooking Show with Extra Gross

    I just finished reading episode 1 of this entertaining and weird manga, called Dungeon meshi in Japanese, by Ryoko Kui. It’s the tale of a group of adventurers – Raios the fighter, Kilchack the halfling thief, and Marshille the elven wizard – who are exploring a dungeon that is rumoured to lead to a golden…

  • Did School Condom Programs Really Lead to Increased Teen Pregnancy Rates?

    Hot on the heels of a (probably wrong) paper on ivory poaching that I criticized a few days ago, Vox reports on a paper that claims schools that give away condoms have higher teen pregnancy rates. Ooh look, a counter-intuitive finding! Economists love that stuff, right? This is a bit unfortunate for Vox since the…

  • The Koshien: High School Passion and Nostalgia Can Make Even Baseball Exciting!

    I am not a big fan of baseball, and I didn’t enjoy my high school days overmuch. Combining these two seems like a recipe for a bullying and unpleasant experience, and definitely not something I would have any interest in. The Koshien, however, changed my mind about high school baseball. The Koshien (甲子園) is an…

  • British Labour’s Lost Plans to Salvage British Mathematics Education

    British elections primarily interest me from a watching-the-train-continue-to-crash perspective, because I don’t think the UK has much to teach the rest of the world on how to run a social democracy well. The electoral system is completely broken; their Tories are the very picture-perfect image of the born-to-rule upper class who don’t care, their Labour…

  • Churchill’s Scientists: Missed Opportunities at the Science Museum

    I am in London for a week doing some research with small area analysis, and on the weekend had a brief opportunity to actually see the city. As is traditional by now on my annual trips to London, I visited the World Wildlife Photography Exhibition (which was a bit weak this year, I thought), and…

  • Teaching Statistics for the Modern World

    Every year I have to teach a basic statistics class to new Master’s students, but every year I find my students come from very diverse mathematical and science backgrounds without necessarily any understanding of the fundamentals necessary to grasp a classical statistics course. I have one year to polish these students up to a level…