A First Step Towards Eugenics?

I've posted stories before about incentive payments being used for various ends, such as to encourage patients to take medicine or to be good parents. Well, now it seems that a group in the US is paying drug users to get sterilised! I'm not sure I really agree that this is exploitative, whether or not I agree with it all things considered. What worries me is that it could be the first step towards more widespread eugenics, if other 'undesirable' groups were to start being paid not to breed...

Graduate Salaries

I was pleased to find that, after an extra 5 years of (postgraduate) university education, my starting salary last year was - slightly - higher than the average graduate starting salary, which is apparently £25,000. Mind you, I suppose the average for those with a degree in PPE from Oxford may well be higher...

Interviewees CVs

Via a comment on the Philosophy Smoker, I found that you can see the CVs for four interviewees for a tenure-track position in Ethics at University of Florida. Since those of us on the market often have only a vague idea of what we're up against, this kind of insight into who is competitive for such a hire is potentially very helpful. That said, however, three of them are ABD with no significant publications, so presumably being looked at more on grounds of potential and great letters of recommendation. Unfortunately, since I don't even know what my referees write, I can't know how I compare there...

How to Decide Who to Lay Off...

There's been a lot of discussion lately about King's College, London choosing to lay off several members of faculty (compulsory retirement/redundancy), for example on Leiter. In some cases, it appears that members of staff fall victim to 'restructuring' while others may lose their jobs due to lack of productivity (in practice, the difference can be hard to discern, since the former may be a mere cover for the latter).

It appears that Monty Python already discovered the best way to decide who to lay off in these difficult circumstances - namely, a fight to the death. Thanks to Chris for informing me of this sketch.

True or False?: Multiple Choice Can Test Understanding

I've always been rather sceptical of the idea of multiple choice tests, because they're often administered badly and so merely test factual recall - e.g. what year was Hobbes' Leviathan published?: a) 1641, b) 1646, c) 1651, d) 1656. That's no way to test university students, who should be developing understanding rather than merely the ability to cram many facts into their heads.

Doug Portmore interactive quiz on hedonistic act-utilitarianism, however, strikes me as a fine example of how such testing can be done well. Granted the fact that it's binary (necessarily true or not necessarily true, rather than true/false) means you'd expect someone to get 50% just by guessing randomly, and maybe notably higher with a bit of luck and knowledge. Nonetheless, to get all the answers right - as I did - suggests that one is either very lucky or has a pretty good understanding of the implications of the stated theory.

Maybe there is a place for multiple choice tests, given their advantages (ease of marking being one) and I might even send this one to my students over the Easter vac...

They Called the Titanic 'Unsinkable'...

...and they called this phone 'unbreakable' (video).

Dilbert does REF

The RAE and its planned successor the REF have been big talking points amongst academics for a while - already touched on on this blog.

While PHD comics already exposed problems with using 'impact factor' (citation counts) as a proxy for research quality, I was surprised to see that such concerns are not confined to academia (though, perhaps on reflection, it should have been obvious that 'value indicators' and such like are simply being imported from the business world). Here's what Dilbert has to say about quantifying research value.