Category — academic life

In Academia, rejection will find you:
So those of us who work in this industry understand all to well the vicissitudes of labor markets. We get used to seeing the PERFECT job advertised at the PERFECT institution, so we send off our vita and gather our rec letters and hope for months that the hiring committee will realize how perfectly we are made for that job.

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Siva was rejected and didn’t apply. Last year, i was rejected and had not applied but that was a . perhaps we have a new trend?

Main Page – Pentabarf:
Welcome to the Pentabarf Wiki.
This wiki is used for documenting and supporting Pentabarf, the open source conference planning software.

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Pentabarf is a conference management system. it looks pretty nifty… it is a rails program.

One thing that I managed to do recently was finally pay off my smallest student loan, that was a minor accomplishment, it was a perkins loan through virginia tech. I consolidated my other student loans through the ford program a few years ago to lower my student loan interest. The amount of pressure that student loans put on people is incredible. While my loan payments are not high, they are important and they do limit my options. For instance, I cannot take a low paying job and pay my student loans and pay rent. But my interest rate on loans is not high, but I could probably lower it if I tried. I think about my students, who are taking out student loans for library school and I wonder if they will be able to pay them back on that salary. It is unclear to me whether that will be possible. It also worries me that people are taking out more than 100k of loans to go to school these days. I think that signals a major problem for the economy in the future.

Don’t Become a Scientist!:
Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the
mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn
how the world works? Forget it!

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it is actually worse than that.

UPDATE 1-John Wiley & Sons to buy Blackwell Publishing | Reuters.com:
Publisher John Wiley & Sons Inc.
(JWa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) (JWb.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Friday it agreed to pay 572 million pounds ($1.08 billion) to acquire privately held Blackwell Publishing
Holdings Ltd., an academic and professional publisher. The deal, which is expected to close early in 2007, will create a publisher of about 1,250 scholarly peer-reviewed journals
in areas ranging from science and technology to medicine and the humanities.
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yes, well this is fairly interesting…

so… there is this thing… called National Novel Writers Month. (its november) The goal is to write a 175 novel by the end of the month… that is the goal, 50000 words. I have another project or two to done in the same time… and they amount to about 50000 words. Is it possible to write 50000 words of academic prose in a month? yes, will it be any good? some will, some won’t, but if i manage to finish these drafts, I can then go on and revise them for months…. So, here is what I’m thinking. I’m going to do NaNoWriMo. I’m just going to post my word count to my blog each day. The goal is to add 50000 words of academic prose by the end of the month. It will be a challenge, it won’t be a novel, but it is 30 days of writing, some of which i’m traveling, but eh…. They key is to write, each and every day, averaging 1500+ words per day. Editing is of course, extra.

So from Nov. 1 to nov. 30. this blog will only be posting the wordcount and the wordcount of that day. I have three projects that i need to work on, but I’ll only be posting the totals. There will probably other little descriptions of what I’m doing that day too.

(part of this is also to break through the lack of confidence that i tend to have in my writing, i need to get past the ‘good’ bit and get to the ‘done’ bit)

so 50000 words… one month…

The world is most often presented, in academic text, popular media, and fiction, as a world of places. We are animate beings in a world of objects arranged in a locale. Our geographies have mountains and rivers and landmarks; our civilizations have capitals and governing offices and schools marked on maps; our businesses have boundings with addresses on named streets.

Place is not given, but made. People make place for various reasons: of belonging; of politics; of power and control; of meaning. But people move, thoughts progress, goods flow: we live in a world of refined movement. In studying war, and espeically in studying the shadows, I direct my research not at a set space, but at fluid targets. The shadows as I define them in this book are, at core, about movement, not merely place. They comprise in Auge’s words, non-places. This is part of the way in which they are rendered invisible. It is place that is given meaning and substance, it is locale that is populated, it is site that is “seen.”

(36-37)

Nordstrom, C. (2004). Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press.

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The shadows are lines of flight.

To be referred to, to be quoted, sorted, circumscribed by the gesture of the upturned commas, single or double: what does this mean? To be linked to, to be pointed at, made part of a discourse, drawn in, made party to it, beholden to it, responsible, culpable? A with-writer, a conspirator, a friend? To reference, be drawn in, made party to….. this is a dizzying thing, a moment of radical alienation (is it me? Really? Am I really part of this – am I here at all in all this?). To reference, to draw in, to conjure up, to evoke…. oh this of all things, this more than anything is to make neurotics of us all.

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but.. does authenticity, or authorial identity matter beyond the constructs of others? yes.. i want to be me… but i have as much control of other’s constructs of my ideas and opinions as i have in deciding which cars will pass by my window on any given day. to be cited, thus in my mind, is to contribute to someone else’s work and understanding of the world. i do not see that there is anything that needs to be profoundly deeper, or cared for at the identity-level of alienation. in short, i think the assumption that ‘you’ are being cited when someone uses your work is being overextended. I think it is better to think that someone found your writing useful

Grad School Writing Rules:
Terri’s Tips for Successful Graduate School Writing

1. Use simple language to communicate complex ideas. Follow this one rule and you’ll be shocked at how much rigour your thinking gains.*

2. Have a damn good reason for any sentence longer than 30 words. If that sentence can be broken into two, do it.
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Terri’s 10 tips to better grad school writing.

Futurelab – Research – Publications – opening education:
This series of publications aims to open up areas for debate – to provoke and stimulate new visions for education – as well as literally ‘opening up’ education, not only bringing together ideas from educational practice and research but also drawing on the fields of creative arts, media and technical innovation. In the ideas we present we also hope to ‘open up’ the walls of the educational institution – to present models of learning that show how we can create connections between learners in different settings, how we can enable collaboration between different organisations and institutions, how we can make links between different approaches to and forms of learning.

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Future lab has two papers that are worth reading. one on open source and education and one on social software and learning. Of course… the production of these papers seems more ‘brochure’ than ‘research’ at first, but there are some ideas in there that are worth considering.