It’s been ages since I posted a True Lab Story, mostly because I’ve been too busy to do anything really dumb. I had a good day for True Lab Stories yesterday, though, so here’s a tale of something idiotic I did, or, rather, had my students do. I have a student working on a project […]
Month: June 2007
Unseemly Self-Congratulations
The final step in the tenure process here is the Very Nice Letter. I’m not sure that it’s an official step, as opposed to an established tradition, but whichever it actually is, at the end of the process, a candidate who passes the tenure review gets a letter from the faculty committee that handles tenure […]
Consider the Source
Inside Higher Ed today offers an opinion piece about “assessment” which is the current buzzword in academia. It correctly identifies a split in academic attitudes toward internal (“for us”– assessment of classes and programs within the academy) and external assessments (“for them”– assessments to be used in comparing institutions, as called for by the Spellings […]
Shocking News from Academia: Special Alcohol Edition
Two news releases came across my EurekAlert feeds containing findings that I’m shocked– shocked!– to learn about. The first delivers the startling news that “A high percentage of young males appear willing to purchase alcohol for underage youth.” They conducted a “shoulder tapping” study, in which young-looking students approached strangers outside liquor stores, and asked […]
Hugo Nominees: Best Novelette
This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse. The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories […]
Parents These Days
Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting addition to the discussion of class and networking, offering a description of a talk by danah boyd (whose name I have been capitalizing, which apparently isn’t right) about the history and usage of MySpace and Facebook. What’s particularly striking is the opening: danah began her discussion with two quotes, one […]
More on Class and Networking
Yesterday’s Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess. There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this morning, though, with Travis Hime […]
The State of Theory
There’s a lot of buzz in physics blogdom about the Strings 07 meeting, which starts today in Spain. They currently have a list of speakers, and promise slides and video to come. Also, there’s a new paper by Edward Witten on the arxiv, cue sound of heavenly choirs: We consider the problem of identifying the […]
Oh, No, William and Mary Won’t Do
I mostly read science-oriented blogs these days, where I get to hear again and again about how awful the treatment of academic scientists is, and how physics departments are horrible Kafkaesque operations dedicated to crushing the souls of postdocs and junior faculty. Which makes the train wreck that is the Philosophy department at William and […]
Irrational Exuberance at the LHC
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has suffered some setbacks in recent months, but they aren’t letting that hold them back: CERN has announced that the Large Hadron Collider will switch on in May 2008, with collisions at full energy starting in summer 2008. “We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always […]