A battle in Texas over whether academic value can be measured in dollars and cents.

Carol Johnson took the podium of a lecture hall one recent morning to walk 79 students enrolled in an introductory biology course through diffusion, osmosis and the phospholipid bilayer of cell membranes.

A senior lecturer, Ms. Johnson has taught this class for years. Only recently, though, have administrators sought to quantify whether she is giving the taxpayers of Texas their money's worth. Read more…

Posted via email from Simply Charly’s Posterous

Sir Isaac Newton was a towering genius in the history of science, he knew he was a genius, and he didn’t like wasting his time. Born on Dec. 25, 1642, the great English physicist and mathematician rarely socialized or traveled far from home. He didn’t play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. He dismissed poetry as “a kind of ingenious nonsense,” and the one time he attended an opera he fled at the third act. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. “I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime,” said his assistant, Humphrey Newton, “thinking all hours lost that were not spent on his studies.” Read more…

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Professor Philippa Foot, who died on October 3, her 90th birthday, was one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy; she was an early exponent of what is known as "moral realism" or "cognitivism", the view that there can be true moral propositions and that values cannot be wholly separated from facts. Read more…

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