bigideas

The following is a rough write-up of my notes from the intro to our August 2008 event. We had a really interesting and wide-ranging discussion, which I haven’t attempted to summarise, so please feel free to add what you remember from the night in the comments.

A recent post at Good Math, Bad Math concerns a proposal for evaluating university courses that tries to measure outcomes. One relatively easy outcome to measure is salary; another is the qualification earned. But, like Mark CC, I started to feel surprisingly skeptical about the whole idea.

The next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday 29 July 2008. As usual, we’ll meet in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in central London (nearest tube Tottenham Court Road). Doors open at 7:30 and we’ll aim to kick off at 8.

Yes, we said we’d get organised this year, and so we have. The following is a preview of the Big Ideas schedule for the rest of 2008. We’re very excited about this — we have some really excellent speakers lined up and the whole programme will, we think, build into something really substantial.

On 9 June 2008, four Big Ideas regulars — Danny Birchall, Rich Cochrane, Nathan Charlton and Robert Kingham — gathered at the Crosse Keys pub in the ancient City of London to discuss London Nationalism. Does it make sense to talk about a city expressing a “nationalism” over and above its supposed “identity”?

One of the things mathematicians soon learn to look for when they meet a new mathematical object is its “subobjects”, which are parts of the object that have the same type of structure as the whole thing. In our case those are “subgroups”, which are subsets of a group that are, themselves, groups.

The image of Tokyo is courtesy of wili hybrid.

What criteria apply to an institution or individual to make them English? Does it involve a love of tea and fair play, an general feeling that Scots’ grievances are largely baseless or just English parentage? Is it ever possible to nail this stuff down?

Welcome to the 70th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival, a fortnightly round-up of quality philosophical posts from the blogs of the world. It seems to have been a busy two weeks, so hopefully there’s something here for everyone; apologies to those who didn’t make it in.

Columnist Charlie Brooker recently stirred up this familiar hornets’ nest by writing a piece about censorship of computer games, inspiring a slew of comments comparing the medium to films and novels. Are modern computer games a valid art form, and should Grand Theft Auto IV be treated just like a painting or a symphony?