All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

A Letter to “Dear Abby”:
This bit of hilarity came in from the inbox. Enjoy! DEAR ABBY,My husband has a long record of money problems. He runs up huge credit card bills. At the end of the month, if I try to pay them off,…

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heh heh heh, were it not a good description, this would be funnier. now the humor is tainted with tragedy.

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.

Boston.com / News / Local / Sale of spanking tool points up larger issue: “On a spring day, Susan Lawrence was flipping through a magazine, Home School Digest, when she came across an advertisement that took her breath away. In it, ”The Rod,’ a $5 flexible whipping stick, was described as the ”ideal tool for child training.’”

(Via .)

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interesting concept….. training children, not teaching children. sure… there is some training involved i suppose.

Joel on Software – Advice for Computer Science College Students: “Without further ado, then, here are Joel’s Seven Pieces of Free Advice for Computer Science College Students (worth what you paid for them):”

(Via .)

worth a glance.

A natural, low-tech solution to tsunamis: mangroves: “The coastal trees and shrubs saved hundreds of lives in India by protecting villages from the waves.”

(Via Christian Science Monitor | World.)

hah, i was just thinking about this last night…. well something very much like it.

Paris fights for its game sector: “In the anarchic world of video games, unusual international juxtapositions are actually the norm.”

(Via IHT.com: Technology.)

where will ubisoft land?

Indian Larry: “”

(Via .)

Publishing crisis: “

The MLA’s Profession 2004 features four essays on the ‘crisis in publishing’ by Judith Ryan, Philip Lewis, Jennifer Crewe, and Domna C. Stanton. All of the essays converge on a number of key points:

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• Tenure requirements need rethinking. Somehow.

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jeremy:
i think this isn’t the place for intervention. the place for intervention is the production of ph.d.’s, the use of ph.d. students as a labor force and parallel to that the adjunctification of the humanities. The overproduction of ph.d.’s will keep the requirements for tenure high. the growing research competition will also likely increase the requirement on the humanities and humanities departments. why would you tenure a humanities person with only one book? when your standards in engineering are one patent or more…? it is a losing game of increasing expectations.

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Missing from this discussion, as far as I could tell, were the $20,000 questions: why publish? To what end? Would the quality of academic scholarship go up if we expected books later in a career, instead of sooner? If scholarship is a conversation, with whom are we conversing? And to whom are we speaking? To what extent do ‘hot topics’ have an academic audience? How can we determine what scholarship has lasting merit, when it’s often the case that we won’t be able to tell for years (or decades?)? Who determines what constitutes ‘quality’? How well does peer review succeed in its aims? And, to bring in rational choice for a moment, will academic publishers who expect us to buy their books ever start pricing books cheaply enough for us to buy them–without foregoing that month’s gas bill, that is? Merely adjusting the numbers required for tenure–numbers of books, numbers of articles–leaves the core issues untouched.

“

(Via The Little Professor.)

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we publish to compete. as for cost, the costs for publishers will skyrocket because everything is pushing them that way.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Three storms threaten to strike U.S. at once: “Moisture-laden storms from the north, west and south are likely to converge on much of America over the next several days in what could be a once-in-a-generation onslaught, meteorologists forecast yesterday.”

(Via .)

i’ve not heard of it yet…