Tag: John Farrier

Dr. Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University grades exams so that the highest scoring exam receives a 100% grade and all others fall below on a curve. It wasn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario, but his exams are hard. Fröhlich’s students devised a cunning plan to all get A grades. It involved boycotting the exam:

Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich.

This approach, Fröhlich said, is the “most predictable and consistent way” of comparing students’ work to their peers’, and it worked well.

At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is.

As the semester ended in December, students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A.

Dr. Fröhlich abided by his grading policy and gave all students A grades, as well as congratulating them on their cooperative spirit:

Fröhlich took a surprisingly philosophical view of his students’ machinations, crediting their collaborative spirit. “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done,” he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.

Link -via The Volokh Conspiracy | Image: Paramount Pictures

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2013/02/19/Clever-Students-Use-Game-Theory-to-Get-Perfect-Scores-on-an-Exam/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+%28Neatorama%29

When you watch a President of the United States give a formal speech, you’ll probably see a plaque bearing the Presidential seal on the podium. This was not always so. In 1850, President Millard Fillmore thought that the office of the President should have its own seal, so he sketched out this design and sent it to Edward Stabler, a sealmaker:

The heavy lifting was definitely done by Stabler. Born in Maryland in 1794, Edward Stabler was self-taught and began his career engraving jewelry at the age of 16.  By the time he retired in 1863, Stabler had designed seals for nearly every department in the Federal Government, several states, cities, and many businesses.

Read more about the history of the Presidential seal at the link.

Link -via Explore | Images: US Department of State, Daily Graphic

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2013/01/28/The-Earliest-Seal-of-the-President-of-the-United-States/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+%28Neatorama%29

Humanity. It had a good run, wouldn’t you say? Now it’s over. According to the UK’s National Pig Association, pig farms will be unable to keep up with production necessary to feed the world population the pork-based nutrients necessary to live:

New data shows the European Union pig herd is declining at a significant rate, and this is a trend that is being mirrored around the world. Pig farmers have been plunged into loss by high pig-feed costs, caused by the global failure of maize and soya harvests. All main European pig-producing countries report shrinking sow herds.

Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: ClaraDon

Do you love bacon? Enjoy it while it lasts at our Bacon Store!

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2012/09/24/Catastrophe-Global-Bacon-Shortage-Unavoidable-Next-Year/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+%28Neatorama%29

(Video Link)

The father of psychology spent the last year of his life in Britain. A BBC radio crew visited him at his home on Dec. 7, 1938. He was suffering from jaw cancer and uttering every word was agonizing. But he managed to make the following statement:

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over.

Link -via American Digest

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Your decision to ditch your friends on the middle school field trip to the Pearl Brewery has ended badly. How badly? You can read the many ways in which you have failed at You Chose Wrong, a blog filled with terrible endings in Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

Link -via io9

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Every design element of an Apple Store is arranged to subtly encourage visitors to become customers. The computer screens, for example, are angled at 70° to compel users to adjust them. Touching the screen lets users experience Apple products tactility and increases the desire to purchase one:

The point, explains Carmine Gallo, who is writing a book on the inside workings of the Apple Store, is to get people to touch the devices. “The main reason notebook computers screens are slightly angled is to encourage customers to adjust the screen to their ideal viewing angle,” he says — “in other words, to touch the computer.”

A tactile experience with an Apple product begets loyalty to Apple products, the thinking goes — which means that the store exists to imprint a brand impression on visitors even more than it exists to extract money from them. “The ownership experience is more important than a sale,” Gallo notes. Which means that the store — and every single detail creating the experience of it — are optimized for customers’ personal indulgence. Apple wants you to touch stuff, to play with it, to make it your own.

Link -via Kottke | Photo: Oswaldo Rubio

via Neatorama http://www.neatorama.com/2012/06/19/how-apple-gets-you-to-touch-their-computers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+%28Neatorama%29