Category — academic life

Some MAN needs to calculate the rotational velocity of MLK’s corpse, immediately!:

<—–snip—->

I also don’t think that last attempt to salvage his thesis by comparing the possession of a pair of X chromosomes to a heritable, organic brain disorder does him any credit. I’m hoping a cabal of strong, smart Harvard women is going to rise up and fire his dumb, hairy scrotum.

(via Feministing)

i agree.

Folks;

In June 2004 a workshop on Mentoring in Engineering was held at Stanford with the joint support of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM, administered by the NSF and funded by the White House) and the Stanford School of

Engineering. The two day workshop brought together graduate students and all levels of faculty for presentations and discussions on the needs, goals, methods, and best practices for mentoring students, junior faculty, and mid level faculty for academic careers. The emphasis was on mentoring members of underrepresented groups in academic engineering, especially women, but most of the topics are common to all interested in academic engineering careers. An excerpt on Women Professors With Children appears below followed by a copy of the table of contents of the proceedings. The full Workshop Proceedings are available at the workshop website http://paesmem.stanford.edu/ in both pdf format for printing and html

format for Web viewing.

A new environment for learning?: “

If
you find yourself with some extra time over the next few days and are
feeling adventurous, you should set aside a moment or two and try out
the beta version of Croquet.

Croquet is a 3-D rendered
‘operating system’ and provides an environment for navigating through,
and representing, information. Users are represented by the
avatar of their choice (I ended up as a rabbit) and can wander through
different spaces. When I saw a demonstration earlier this year,
Croquet allowed users to navigate around in the rendered environment,
find and communicate with others and access their favourite desktop
applications from within the Croquet world.

Croquet is open
source and links computers through peer to peer communications.
It does not need a lot of infrastructure; I saw it working on a pair of
computers linked with an ethernet cable. My first exposure to
Croquet left me dumbfounded. It defies definition and must be
experienced.

Be forewarned – Croquet is really still a
beta. Documentation is sparse to non-existent and the people most
likely to benefit from playing with Croquet (in its current form) are
those who can troubleshoot code. Nevertheless, the application
has great promise and the potential to change the way we do many
things. One of its first possible uses is in creating 3-D
simulations (not unlike Ancient Spaces). Other potential applications include community and social environments as well as collaboration spaces.

You can get more information at http://www.opencroquet.org. I would love to hear what uses you find for Croquet!

“

(Via EDUCAUSE Blogs -.)

‘

learning environment?

perhaps….

State: Chiropractic school angers FSU professors: “A growing number of professors in the Florida State University College of Medicine are saying they will resign if FSU administrators continue to pursue a proposed chiropractic school.

‘I would no longer wish to volunteer my teaching energies to FSU medical school, should it encompass a school of chiropractic,’ wrote Dr. Ian Rogers, an assistant professor at FSU’s Pensacola campus, in a Dec. 15 e-mail. ‘This is plainly ludicrous!!!!’

The threatened resignations – at least seven to date, all from assistant professors who work part time – reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a ‘pseudo-science’ that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments. Professors are even circulating a parody map of campus that places a fictional Bigfoot Institute, School of Astrology and Crop Circle Simulation Laboratory near a future chiropractic school.”

(Via .)

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it just makes me want to read ’society must be defended’ all over again…

7 assistant professors who work part time…… determine what a pseudo-science is… all i know is that i have friends that swear by chiropracty, and they seem happy enough.

•
Susan Sontag Dies at Age 71 at The Washington Post (reg. req’d) (Dec 28, 2004)

(Via .)

Grow up already!: “

In my referrer logs today is this gem of a search: ‘what+if+i+am+not+accepted+by+grad+school’

The world will end if you are not accepted by grad school. You will end up toothless and cold under a bridge with passersby spitting on you from above. Your life will be empty and meaningless.

Sheesh. If you don’t have an answer to this question, you don’t have any business applying to grad school.

“

(Via Caveat Lector.)

——-

it’s true you know. of course… it isn’t much different than if you go to grad school, so take your chances.

Student loan update, and some thoughts on Deleuzian networks of control: “Yesterday the Royal Bank returned the money they withdrew from my bank accounts.

Since sending my letter on Tuesday, the CBC has been the only news source to publish it and the Royal Bank the only institution to contact me. Of course I didn’t expect to change the world in three days, but I am a bit disappointed and disheartened that no one else I contacted considered my experience and concerns either news-worthy or significant enough to respond.

—-snip—-

Deleuze got it right: we no longer live in Foucault’s disciplinary society; we live in societies of control.

‘In the societies of control … what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code… The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’ … The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network … Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt…’

—–snip—-
This type of control is particularly insidious because there is no panopticon. Control is diffuse and we can’t locate – or fix – responsibility and accountability long enough to affect change. And it’s particularly dangerous because it allows each of us to play the victim of an imaginary structure.”

(Via Purse Lip Square Jaw.)

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Anne Hits it on the head as usual. this is the same thing that is happening in the u.s. in regards to anything ’security’ the imaginary structure powered by an inability to imagine difference, fixes us, into a system of normalcy that may in fact not function for any parties, but yet still controls all parties.

Cowgirl Country and Western: “Rochelle: I really need to redesign that damn blog.
Rochelle: I’m just kind of empty of ideas for it.
Jason: go for a cowgirl country and western thang

*awkward pause*

Rochelle: you scare me sometimes.

Jason: hee hee”

(Via Diary of an Aspiring Librarian.)

just as long as she doesn’t confuse it with the reverse cowgirl look….

The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome: “The Cecil B. DeMille Syndrome. n. 1. Named for the Hollywood director famous for his casts of thousands–The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Cleopatra, and many others. 2. The tendency of student writers to begin their essays, no matter how…”

(Via Matthew G. Kirschenbaum.)

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i still do this, and i think it is justified to some extent.

University Instruction as Toilet-cleaning: “

From a student column in the Oregon Daily Emerald:

Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn’t there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught?

“

(Via Kairosnews – A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy.)

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yet one more example of how students don’t know what university is about. of course, it doesn’t help that most parents don’t, and more teachers don’t, and for that matter most everyone doesn’t including universities. there is a great loss of anything other than the symbolic identity and certificatory identity of universities. the norms and traditions and expectations that were implied are slowly withering away.

for me universities are locations where people are supposed to learn, they are libraries and people who foster that learning, and they do not have any specific duty to any specific student for any given amount of money. they have a duty to ensure that students learn material and that learning is guaranteed, but not that they learn, people can fail.