Learning Is The First Step
There are lots of studies on the link between education and religion. Mainly they find a low-magnitude negative correlation between the level of education and religiousness. More interesting studies uncover a more complicated picture, however: More educated folks are more often church members and more likely to have attended church in the past week. Source … Read more
Today I want to issue a challenge: Show me a single valid criticism of Christianity. I plan on dealing with Huemer’s Scary Bible Quotes, but let me know if you are aware of any other criticisms. In anticipation of such things I thought to make a list of some of the worst objections to Christianity … Read more
This article discusses 5 random facts related to immigration policy. #1 Economic analysis mainly shows that more immigration is good for everyone. My analysis even indicates that deporting illegal immigrants is more costly than beneficial. See this article for more info. #2 91% of Americans living in Mexico are “Illegal” LatinLife gives a heavily biased … Read more
DRY is a good first-pass rule of thumb, but RYE is optimal. “Repeat yourself efficiently” Examples: Add a data-attr to an HTML element so that some data can be read from it using $elem.data() rather than a longer jQuery selector chain $elem.closest(‘.thing’).find(‘otherthing’).val() Benefits of concision, readability, and performance Database normalization Foreign key relationships are duplicate … Read more
This article reviews two articles I recently encountered related to miracles: 74% Of Doctors Believe In Miracles, 55% Have Seen Them From a fellow atheist: How unlikely would an event have to be for you to consider it divine providence? From the first article: The poll also indicated that American physicians are surprisingly religious, with … Read more
Many apologetic arguments or empirical findings present evidence for the existence of God. I previously identified Pascal’s Wager as an interesting sort of argument that advocates for belief in God without establishing the existence of God. I built on that argument to provide a more robust Vandivierian Wager. In this article I present a separate … Read more
I am continuing my dissertation research in order to find a suitable topic. This article highlights potential research questions. There are a variety of Self-Directed Learning Strategies observed by researchers, but are these trainable things or are they categories created in the mind of researchers which are not useful for causal intervention? Design: Random control … Read more
This article is the first in a series noting interesting papers in the economics of education. See this article for more details. Journal of Engineering Education (2017), Change and Education Research. J. Eng. Educ., 106: 3. doi:10.1002/jee.20158 This brief editor’s page highlights the importance of discipline-based education research. I’d never heard of such a thing … Read more
I am blogging a series of articles reviewing key papers in the economics of education. This article is the parent of the series. Read the paper selection methodology here. Part 1 Journal of Engineering Education American Educational Research Journal American Journal of Education Internet and Higher Education Review of Educational Research (this journal is datalicious) … Read more
This article documents how I went about identifying key papers as a starting point in researching the economics of education. Organization: Motivation Approach Results Motivation First, let me give some motivation and background. I’m in the early stages of dissertation writing and my primary interest is in the economics of education. In particular, I am … Read more