Author Howard Wainer
Event Dates: September 14, 2011 – 7:00pm
Location
Princeton Public Library, Community Room
65 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ
“Uneducated Guesses: Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies”
A distinguished research scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Wainer was principal research scientist at Educational Testing Service for 21 years. His book uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today, and the policies that have resulted from them, are wrong.
Part of the Thinking Allowed series sponsored by the library and Princeton University Press.
According to their web site: “The annual Arthur Ross Book Award recognizes books that make an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations. It was endowed by Arthur Ross in 2001 to honor nonfiction works, in English or translation, that merit special attention for bringing forth new information that changes our understanding of events or problems, developing analytical approaches that allow new and different insights into critical issues, or providing new ideas that help resolve foreign policy problems. The 2011 award consists of a $15,000 first prize, a $7,500 second prize, and a $2,500 honorable mention.”
The winners will be honored at a ceremony at the Council on Foreign Relations headquarters in New York on September 8th.
Photo: Probable Bryan’s Shearwater, Midway Atoll, December 1991. (Reginald David)
So, you are asking yourself — who or what is a Bryan’s Shearwater? and why is Princeton University Press dratting him, her, or it? Well, this is a story almost 50 years in the making.
In 1963, scientists collected a specimen of what they thought was a Little Shearwater. Now, in 2011, DNA testing has revealed that it is actually a new species of shearwater which has been named after Edwin Horace Bryan Jr., who was curator of collections at the B.P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu from 1919 until 1968.
According to a press release from The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, (via The Birdbooker Report, http://birdbookerreport.blogspot.com/p/new-hawaiian-shearwater.html), this is the finding of a lifetime: “Researchers have rarely discovered new species of birds since most of the world’s 9,000-plus species (including about 21 other species of shearwaters) were described before 1900. The majority of new species described since the mid-1900s have been discovered in remote tropical rain and cloud forests, primarily in South America and southeastern Asia. The Bryan’s shearwater is the first new species reported from the United States and Hawaiian Islands since the Po’ouli was described from the forests of Maui in 1974.”
So, now that everyone’s Hawaiian checklist has gotten a little bit bigger, how will you recognize a Bryan’s Shearwater? According to the release, “the Bryan’s Shearwater is the smallest shearwater known to exist. It is black and white with a black or blue-gray bill and blue legs.” However, as the release notes, the fact that Bryan’s shearwaters have only just now been discovered means they are extremely rare and may even be extinct, so best of luck in spotting one!
While I might not actually be your publicist, these are some hints, tips, and things I’ve gleaned during my 5 years in PUP publicity. In part, this series of posts will be a response to a fantastic new blog I’ve been reading: Marketing for Scientists by Marc Kuchner (which will soon be a book from Island Press and should be required reading for any scientist with aspirations of putting pen to paper). I thought it might be fun to riff on some of the ideas there and how they are useful not just to scientists, but specifically to scientists who are authors. So here goes:
QR Codes are those square black and white blobs you are seeing everywhere (including to the right of this post). People with smart phones can download a free app that allows them to scan QR Codes from postcards, posters, billboards, and even this guy’s chest. Once scanned, the QR Code directs them to an assigned web site. They are, in short, a terrific tool for promotions and publicity when used right. MFS suggests using QR Codes on posters at conferences or on your business cards, but this is just the tip of the iceberg and publishers, like everyone else, are trying to figure out how to best use QR Codes.
Go make your best guesses at which covers they are featuring and you might win a copy of the brand-new anthology “The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.”
Official rules and how to enter are here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books#ixzz1W8z2Icjd
**IAN GOLDIN ON THE WORLD TODAY – BBC WORLD SERVICE Professor Goldin explored ideas taken from his latest book, Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, during The World Today on Monday 8th August. **VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER AT THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Also on Monday 8th August, following on from [...]
Even though the cover is reversed, that galley is easily recognizable as Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen. We expect finished books in October, but so far most of the reactions have been, well, you can see for yourself…
As Al Bertrand posted a few weeks ago, it’s easy to overlook all the activity that takes place after a book is published and English language sales have begun. In the translation rights world, promotion of books begins a few months prior to publication and often is targeted at one of the major book fairs. Preparation for Frankfurt Book Fair in October is well and truly underway, with the rights calendar almost full for five days’ worth of appointments with agents and publishers, and the selection of key titles already in progress. We’re already beginning to design our Spring 2012 rights guide and as soon as the rights guide goes out, we will be responding to interest in upcoming titles.
Of course, the business of making deals for translation rights extends far beyond the few months surrounding publication, as PUP’s deals for the last few weeks demonstrate. Summer is traditionally a quiet time in the rights world as publishers in some countries are minimally staffed over the warmest months of the year, but we’ve had an excellent crop of rights deals of late. Most recently we’ve seen a Polish language deal with Krytyka for Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg’s Beyond Mechanical Markets, which was published earlier this year. But we’ve also had offers for Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Chinese simplified rights), which we first published in 2001, and Steven Shapin and Simon Scheffer’s, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Japanese rights), which we first published in 1985 and have just reissued in paperback. In some cases, publishers considering the books have just taken a very long time to reach a decision, but usually late interest in a book comes from scholarly recommendation or media interest. Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to see what interests publishers from PUP’s backlist.
Naturally, the majority of rights interest is focused on recent and forthcoming titles. We launched Daniel Hamermesh’s Beauty Pays to international interest at London Book Fair earlier this year, and just in time for the publication of the English edition, we have received three excellent rights offers: Japanese rights have gone to Nikkei Publications, while Chinese simplified rights have gone to The Oriental Press, and Chinese complex rights to China Times.
In any case, foreign editions are an important means of extending the reach of a given book and its author, whatever the publication date of the English edition.
- Kimberley M. Williams, International Rights Manager
The marriage market, employment, and how we judge each other: UT Economist and PUP author Daniel Hamermesh on the scarcity of beauty.
This is the last of five videos in which Hamermesh explains some of the research he did for Beauty Pays. If you missed the others, find them at the links below!
I have always been fascinated by these birds, but never more so than after watching them “dance” at the Philadelphia Zoo. A group of at least 24 birds moving forward, back, sideways in perfect rhythm. They were joined by a large duck who kept up fairly well with their fast-paced dance. We may not know precisely why they are dancing (Angier’s article points to research that suggests flocks are trying to coordinate mating times so that young hatch on the same day which increases chance of survival), but one thing we do know is what their nests look like!
Well, here is an exclusive glimpse from Avian Architecture of a field of flamingo nests. Enjoy!
Featuring commentary and interviews from Princeton University Press authors, the PUP Blog is a highly respected, timely and indispensable source for learning, understanding and reflection.
Arnold writes:So, if the demand for mortgages collapses, all it takes to get back to 2006 levels is for mortgage underwriters to take a 20 percent pay cut? In a world with no discontinuities, we would not get crazy subprime lending and sudden sharp drops in demand. The no-discontinuity world is what classical economists are trained to work with. Too bad it i […]
I have taken photos of birds that are so bad, out of focus, poorly exposed, wings cut off, etc. We all have, but why would anyone keep them? I delete them, especially when I can't identify them...hah. But I have to say, there are photos I should have deleted long ago that still sit in my collection. The Cooper's Hawk photo above is one of them....i […]
That’s the title of my piece in the Fin last week. As with my previous column, Catallaxy was out with a comment long before I got around to posting here, but it seemed to me to miss the point fairly comprehensively. Ever since the first signs of the global financial crisis emerged back in 2007, […]
Arnold writes:Suppose that a bunch of mortgage underwriters get laid off. There are two possible full employment equilibria. (a) They can be instantly employed as dishwashers at 20 cents an hour. (b)They can be employed as health insurance claims processors at a salary close to what they were making as mortgage underwriters. The reason that we don't obs […]
Kevin Outterson writes of “Hand Sanitizers as Agent Orange”: Over at CommonHealth, Aayesha rounds up the literature on the limits of hand sanitizers, but fails to mention the collateral damage to the skin microbiome. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers kill many bacteria, viruses and fungi, but they don’t selectively target pathogens. They kill a wide swath of [.. […]
1. Via Chris F. Masse, alligator eats capitalist. 2. Pizza topping mark-ups. 3. Markets in everything the culture that is Japan. 4. Trade Diversion economics blog. 5. Symposium on how to fix the housing market, including me. […]
Why are cell phone taxes so high? In the United States we tax cell phones more than beer. The usual explanations for high taxes, negative externalities and low elasticity of demand don’t seem to apply to cell phones. Our colleagues Thomas Stratmann and Matt Mitchell offer an answer based in political economy. …no single politician […]
Next week, I'm going to debate Modeled Behavior's Karl Smith on "How Deserving Are the Poor?" Logistics:Date: Wednesday, February 1Time: 6:00-9:00 PMLocation: Johnson Center Meeting Room A, George Mason University (Fairfax Campus)My strategy, as usual, is to use an uncontroversial moral premise to show that the status quo is absurd. The […]
There has been an increasing discussion about the proliferation of flawed research in psychology and medicine, with some landmark events being John Ioannides’s article, “Why most published research findings are false” (according to Google Scholar, cited 973 times since its appearance in 2005), the scandals of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel, two leading psyc […]
Justin Wolfers writes: Predictably enough, I spent yesterday reading lefty blogs trumpeting Corak’s analysis, and right-leaning blogs who didn’t want to believe the inequality-mobility link, endorsing Winship. But both missed the bigger picture implications. Either you’re convinced by Corak that the data can be trusted, and that they show there’s a strong li […]
Author Howard Wainer
