Category — General

“US loses its tourism allure”. Fewer and fewer Norwegians are opting to spend their holidays in the United States. A new survey indicates that half of all questioned view the US as an unattractive travel destination. (Aftenposten) Travel bureau Berg-Hansen commissioned the survey and was… [The Practical Nomad]

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this just figures…. it figures to be just about right. i wouldn't come here if i was living elsewhere unless i had too, look at what we do to people… even our own citizens, and we've recently been caught repatriating people inappropriately, leading to 'torture by proxie' in other states. most rational people would go someplace safe and interesting instead of here, someplace with a rational leadership.

is this article on attrition in graduate school or is it a subtle argument for removing money from graduate education?

He also calculated that Notre Dame would save $1-million a year in stipends alone if attrition went down by 10 percent, because programs would not over-enroll students to compensate for attrition. “We don't mind spending if there's a product at the end,” he says.

why is science the model of goodness here?

“One reason the sciences have lower attrition rates is that you are admitted to be in the Joe Schmoe lab,” she says. You and Professor Schmoe “have spent some time getting to know each other and vet each other.” That's quite different, she says, from a student who plans to study international labor economics but, after doing years of course work, realizes that there is no one in the department for him to work with

i posit that the key to the lab experience is not the doctor, but the logical outcomes of expected labor. in good labs, people have a path, it is clear, and they can work it. this is not always true in all labs, nor is it always true in any discipline, but by combining that with the likelihood that there are graduate student mentors in your lab that you can model, things get 'easier'.

Ms. Golde emphasizes that this is another way that the sciences are structured differently from the humanities. In a science department, students are in the lab from the start, working next to undergraduates, researchers, and professors. In English, on the other hand, the first couple of years of graduate school are taken up mostly with classes. “It's just like being a supercharged English undergraduate,” she says. “It's not anything like being an English professor.”

nor should it be, just like a science or engineering graduate student might be not like a professor, but more like a laboratory assistant.

it is entirely unclear to me what the problem with attrition is other than money… at least from the institutions view, from the view of faculty and student, there is alot of emotional investment, but i'm not sure the arguments made in the article really hold water at all.

]Cheaper Segway scooter clone proves a big hit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. From BBC News | TECHNOLOGY. It's $1000 vs. $4500 for a Segway, but it doesn't self-balance… [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

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3 wheels would have been better, but everyone knew this would happen.

oh i could spend hours listening to these. I think they need a northern pennsylvania accent, someone from sullivan or bradford counties, because it is much different from the pittsburg accent.

I've just submitted my last course request that I will need to submit in a while (you never know). It was for my last 6 credits of research and dissertation for my dissertation. This means that I expect to finish this degree this spring.

Let's see, i started taking classes in my ph.d. in the spring of 2001 and if i finish in the spring of 2004, that is spring 2001, 2001-2002 year, 2002-2003 year, 2003-2004 year. 3.5 years of part-time study, working 40 hours a week or so. that really should be considered good, i think.

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• Virginia levied the fourth-largest cut in the nation of higher-education spending during the past two years, slashing college budgets by 17.8 percent.

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• The annual funding shortfall for all public colleges, as calculated by state officials, has doubled since 2000 to roughly $400 million .

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• Average faculty salaries at many schools are in the bottom third of their nationwide peers.

Everybody Googles Everybody. Well, not quite everybody. Not quite yet. But people do google people. This came up in the infamous MLA thread, where an Anonymous Member of a Job Search Committee warned: I'll be interviewing people at MLA, and, trust me, we've… [Invisible Adjunct]

Bags. Having a good laptop bag is really handy; if you have plenty of place to put things, odds are you'll actually find you have those things when you get to Aarhus or Atlanta or wherever you suddenly discover that you need a different dongle. [Mark Bernstein]

—— i like their style.

Fla. Judge Orders Public Defender Arrested in Courtroom. This needs publicity. Please pass it on. Osceola Circuit Judge Margaret Waller had a Public Defender arrested in court because… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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this judge was out of line. the defendant gets all the rights remember, all of them and all of the documents too, they get every right to defense, and this Judge Margaret Waller doesn't seem to understand that. it is the prosecution who is at fault here as it is described. Judge Margaret Waller should, if this is true, be removed because she doesn't seem to understand the innocent until proven guilty part of the system, which implies that the innocent get all the tools necessary to prove their innocence.