Category: Of Random Interest

I just read a great essay: How to End Grade Inflation by Michael Berube (prof at Penn State).

He humorously identifies the problem: English departments have basically worked on the A/B binary system for some time: A’s and A‑minuses for the best students, B’s for everyone else and C’s, D’s and F’s for students who miss half the classes or threaten their teachers with bodily harm.

And then proposes a clever solution: What to do? If we so desired, we could recalibrate grades at Penn State, at Princeton or at any college in the country. The principle is simple enough, and it’s crucial to every diving competition: we would merely need to account for each course’s degree of difficulty.

Every professor, and every department, produces an average grade — an average for the professor over her career and an average for the discipline over the decades. And if colleges really wanted to clamp down on grade inflation, they could whisk it away statistically, simply by factoring those averages into each student’s G.P.A. Imagine that G.P.A.‘s were calculated on a scale of 10 with the average grade, be it a B‑minus or an A‑minus, counted as a 5. The B‑plus in chemical engineering, where the average grade is, say, C‑plus, would be rewarded accordingly and assigned a value of 8; the B‑plus in psychology, where the average grade might be just over B‑plus, would be graded like an easy dive, adequately executed, and given a 4.7.

I have to say, I like it. I don’t think any universities are going to go for it, but I wish they would…

Feel constrained by your meal plan? Try what one USC frosh did…

I went nuts today trying to figure out a problem with this website–I couldn’t create an entry with a link to Dennis’ message. For some reason Movable Type (the software that maintains this site) wouldn’t save anything with the link text in it. It drove me up the wall!

Anyway, I wound up reconfiguring the entire way that I archive messages on this site before finally deciding to change the text directly in the database.

I mention all this to explain why the front page is all links to past messages–a temporary byproduct of the aforementioned reconfiguration. It will pass as new content is added.

Usually when Christians talk about roleplaying games you can expect a lot of heat and very little light (artfully mocked by the Dead Alewives’ classic bit Dungeons and Dragons). That’s why I was so thrilled to run across the article Roleplaying the Faith which contained several fascinating links.

Roleplaying is a part of geek culture, and Stanford is a bit of a geek campus, so I thought these might interest some of you: Religion and Roleplaying, the Christian Gamers Guild, and Tracy Hickman’s essay on Ethics in Fantasy (for the record, Hickman is a Mormon).

I noted earlier that one of our our alumni was a finalist in the Miss Singapore Universe competition.

The finals are Saturday. Paula and I can’t wait to find out if she’s Miss Singapore Universe. Paula was quite close to Adeline last year, and misses her so much she actually began crying while looking at photos of her online.

Anyway, I stumbled across the official page today. She’s the first gal (top left photo).

Of course, we already have two Miss Universes in our house…

In honor of today’s very special nature, I thought I’d mention The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes download sight . There’s some funny stuff there.

Glen & Paula had their first child today at 4:03pm. Read more and see photos!

Hope you’re having a great spring break. Of course, if you are then you’re probably not obsessively checking this website…

Anyway, Andrew’s off to Russia and Lynette’s on her way back from Oxford. Andrew got pickpocketed in London–I hope he blogs about it.

As you’ve probably heard, alumna Adeline is a finalist in the Miss Singapore Universe competition.

Finally, if you haven’t seen the previews, there’s a new teen movie coming out called Saved that pokes fun at the Christian high school scene. Tim Bednar has an interview with the director (thanks to Andrew Careaga for the lead).

Rick Warren (pastor and author) is the subject of a very favorable article in Time.

My favorite excerpt: Remarkably, Warren has managed to spread his approach to the gospel without extensive national media coverage or a TV ministry. He turned down an invitation from Oprah to be on her show, though he says he’d like to meet her someday. “Too many ministers start out as servants and end up as celebrities,” he says. “I want to use my influence to do some good, and I can get more done out of the limelight.”

Most of the controversy about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was predicated on the assumption that at worst it would provoke profound anti-semitism and at the best it would leave people unswayed (as regards the culpability of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus).

Looks like everyone was wrong–just ask the San Francisco Chronicle. The film seems to have nuanced people’s views and made them less willing to assign specific blame.

See a related article in the Washington Times download dive bomber movie .

Note: the survey was pretty small. Read the Chronicle story to get the scoop on the methodology.