prod & ponder

How, I wonder, does Facebook expect me to beat Ben’s score? (Plus, it’s no fair, as Ben’s in the biz. He designed the stick figures in Blair Witch.)

Happy news: Malcolm Gladwell has returned to regular blogging.

Someday I’ll be finished with all my grading for the semester. That day is not today. That day will be Monday, and it’ll be a happy day.

To help lighten the mood around end-of-year grading, my Associate Dean sent out a link to this great posting on “How to get a lousy grade in this class.” Regrettably, this semester, teaching only graduate-level courses, I still had examples of every item on the list. Ugh. It’s enough to make on ponder this approach to grading.

(Having gotten that out of my system, let’s be clear… I’m not actually prone to the bitter, sarcastic prof routine. Teaching is a job, but it’s also a privilege, and I’m grateful for the gig and the vocation. And maybe, just maybe, I might have committed one or two of the flubs back in my student days.)

Ben looking cute, as he is prone to do…

IBM’s ManyEyes application recently added the ability to display state-level data for the US and several other countries. It also can generate multiple maps, drawn side-by-side for comparison, from a dataset.

To illustrate, and mull over, here’s a state-by-state breakdown of Iraq war casualties, first by total casualties and then by percentage of state populations.