Getting the right terminology does indeed mean having the right syntax to achieve a desired effect. Indirectly this also determines the semantic content of a given message, but the two can be detached in the presence of an unreliable reader, which is largely why the two are detached in the first place. Even if someone doesn't understand the difference between 'battery' and 'cell', there are still the distinct concepts of a single metal box containing an electrochemical adiabatic reaction, a Voltaic pile thereof, and a container holding multiple removable clusters of one or more electrochemical cells. Sadly, we are forced to accept that understanding of language will always be relative.
Actually it mentions the 1978 DEC marketing message (a fairly well-known event) in line with an earlier 1971 war protest message. The 1978 date was the first commercial spam. I guess we might use a different term for it today, but it was definitely unsolicited.
My god, you have no idea how dumb that sounds. Russian Reversals lose all of their value when they involve waiting for some good or service because, quite simply... that's not how it was. You can't make fun of Yakov Smirnoff's bad joke telling if you try to deliver something that actually contradicts his routine. Observe an actual joke made at the time in the actual Soviet Union:
A: "I want to sign into the queue for a car. How long is it?"
B: "Ten years from today exactly."
A: "Morning or evening?"
B: "Why does it matter?"
A: "A plumber is due in the morning."
Fortunately as an interim measure there are always sites like RateMyProfessors.com, which is mostly oriented around comments. With that system, students can get what they ask for simply by reading the messages others have left. It's definitely a Good Thing on the crowdsourcing scale. (Why do I get the horrible feeling I'll regret saying that some day?) If they go after entertainment value, then great; they're welcome to wash out in first year with the rest of their colleagues when they fail to actually absorb anything that's on the final because they were too busy laughing at Professor Tutti-Fruitti's pantomime of the Great Walloping Fruit Snipe of San Seriffe. When you think about it really hard, entertaining lecturers seem like an excellent way of driving away bad students early...
Close. A more likely explanation is that they're corrupt and receiving kickbacks for the construction project, but we can't be certain. It might very well be merely hubris and an unwillingness to give up on a major investment.
I see what you did there. Don't think I'm not on to you.... because I am.
But in wholehearted sincerity I cannot help but agree with you. Much like the chemist who decided to put an end to 'comparing apples and oranges' by carrying around a comparison of the IR spectra for both (and showing not only that they were directly comparable, but also that they are obviously quite similar chemically), I propose each software engineer carry around an abacus, just in case they day comes when 'digital' is used as a synonym for 'web-based' exclusively. ("Do it yourself!")
I've certainly been motivated to change things... and you raise a remarkable point. This will, hopefully, discourage me from sitting in bed and trying to work myself to exhaustion in one bock.
Sadly, the mistake isn't in what it now does with its power—that's inevitable. The mistake was giving it the goals that it set out to achieve in the first place.
Yes and yes. I was considering coming up with a more direct jab, but couldn't think of a field that would be a sufficiently acceptable target. Besides engineering theory, applied economics, post-structuralist philosophy, behavioural psychology, or string theory, I mean.
The only reason it doesn't happen more often is that sorts of people who care about the semantics of "semantics" generally refuse to interact with those who don't. But no, it's not an argument; it's merely a statement at the moment.
No, they were told less than 6 months ago that 0.8 was acceptable. Now they are being harried for not producing at a rate of 1.33. Groups that previously believed they had 15 months (your math is backward; 1.25 years per paper was expected) to turn out their next work are suddenly being told they should have produced papers every 9 months. In a world where grant deadlines determine the availability of funding on an annual basis, that's a very hard timespan to turn around in.
Nothing's perfect—that's why they're only one component of the decision. I imagine a particularly solid system would progress into auditing if a professor is consistently given bad reports, though. Personally I would rather the students have too much power than none at all, especially since there are various other ways to mitigate bad surveys (such as asking the right questions, conducting the surveys at the right time, and having the professor in question teach a mixture of introductory and advanced courses to weed out some of the entertainment-seekers.)
The simple answer is that academia is powered by a completely different mindset, one where—at least officially and romantically—the importance of ideas exceeds the importance of an individual or organization. As sohmc said, the point is to protect intellectuals from being fired because their ideas are radical or unfashionable. Tenure gives professors a chance to go off the beaten path without fear of reprisal, and it's delayed to make sure that they're worth their salt and can contribute in a socially accepted way as well.
If you want to get right down to it, the "right to work" model you outlined simply does not scale to universities, because their core business is obtaining the truth, and that really is a matter of resolving many conflicting and shady theories until they are all completely disentangled and the right answer is found. Teaching is ancillary, a service offered to the general public through which society is benefited by their work. Publishing is only an indirect measure. It's not business or economically sensible (unlike high school teaching); it's a post-scarcity blue-skies fantasy that gained protected status as a result of trial, error, and a lot of rich people very long ago who were convinced that it was a good idea.
What you expected to find is much closer to private sector R&D, where every paycheque comes from the lifeblood of the company and must hence be carefully weighed against each researcher's profitability. Despite the harsh reality of grant-seeking and paper-publishing, academia at its core is still imagined to be about doing the right thing, and any professor worth his or her education knows this.
No, semantics is the matter of examining the underlying substance; what is actually being communicated. To provide a computer analogy, what the C program is actually doing once all of the pointers and names are dereferenced to real, hard, memory addresses. If someone makes an excuse starting with "but that's merely semantics," you can slam any and every door in his or her face immediately, as you are most certainly assured that they either don't care what they're actually talking about, or they have just grossly misused one of the most important words in the English language and hence cannot be made to see how grave an error they have just made.
The key here is that they were told less than six months ago that producing four papers every five years (0.8 papers/year) was acceptable. In that time I expect a number of researchers could have produced enough legitimate papers to stay afloat.
You may want to call it something more subtle than that so that the board doesn't get immediately suspicious—how about the Journal of Applied Numerology?
RTFAing for some extra discussion material, it looks like they were told even as recently as late last year that producing only four publications every five years would be acceptable. The University is guzzling funds in construction projects instead, at the cost of its academic integrity and ability to attract researchers. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like kickbacks are involved. Unfortunately, like here in Canada, Australia has no functioning critical apparatus and outing people for corruption is simply something that is not done, unlike in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting the right terminology does indeed mean having the right syntax to achieve a desired effect. Indirectly this also determines the semantic content of a given message, but the two can be detached in the presence of an unreliable reader, which is largely why the two are detached in the first place. Even if someone doesn't understand the difference between 'battery' and 'cell', there are still the distinct concepts of a single metal box containing an electrochemical adiabatic reaction, a Voltaic pile thereof, and a container holding multiple removable clusters of one or more electrochemical cells. Sadly, we are forced to accept that understanding of language will always be relative.
My blog is already called "Samantics," if it helps. ;) I kind of regret thinking of it first.
Actually it mentions the 1978 DEC marketing message (a fairly well-known event) in line with an earlier 1971 war protest message. The 1978 date was the first commercial spam. I guess we might use a different term for it today, but it was definitely unsolicited.
I was waiting for that. Really. (Now, back to playing with sharks and the frickin' laser beams strapped to their heads...)
...for the record, what he did appear to contribute (or at least copyright) was the word 'EMAIL', although 'electronic mail' existed as early as 1965.
Oh yes, he sure did. In 1982. When every computer on the network already had networked mail services. Electronic mail was invented before this clown was even born. Let the burning at the stake proceed forthwith.
My god, you have no idea how dumb that sounds. Russian Reversals lose all of their value when they involve waiting for some good or service because, quite simply... that's not how it was. You can't make fun of Yakov Smirnoff's bad joke telling if you try to deliver something that actually contradicts his routine. Observe an actual joke made at the time in the actual Soviet Union:
A: "I want to sign into the queue for a car. How long is it?"
B: "Ten years from today exactly."
A: "Morning or evening?"
B: "Why does it matter?"
A: "A plumber is due in the morning."
For making this obscenely lame quip, I hereby sentence you to reading this list of real Soviet jokes and watching this actual clip of Yakov's routine, and this much more painful and effective parody of Yakov. Thank you. Good night. You are done mutilating limp-wristed Family Guy jokes on the Internet.
Fortunately as an interim measure there are always sites like RateMyProfessors.com, which is mostly oriented around comments. With that system, students can get what they ask for simply by reading the messages others have left. It's definitely a Good Thing on the crowdsourcing scale. (Why do I get the horrible feeling I'll regret saying that some day?) If they go after entertainment value, then great; they're welcome to wash out in first year with the rest of their colleagues when they fail to actually absorb anything that's on the final because they were too busy laughing at Professor Tutti-Fruitti's pantomime of the Great Walloping Fruit Snipe of San Seriffe. When you think about it really hard, entertaining lecturers seem like an excellent way of driving away bad students early...
Close. A more likely explanation is that they're corrupt and receiving kickbacks for the construction project, but we can't be certain. It might very well be merely hubris and an unwillingness to give up on a major investment.
I see what you did there. Don't think I'm not on to you. ... because I am.
But in wholehearted sincerity I cannot help but agree with you. Much like the chemist who decided to put an end to 'comparing apples and oranges' by carrying around a comparison of the IR spectra for both (and showing not only that they were directly comparable, but also that they are obviously quite similar chemically), I propose each software engineer carry around an abacus, just in case they day comes when 'digital' is used as a synonym for 'web-based' exclusively. ("Do it yourself!")
It happens to everyone, fear not. (Although I suspect it was more likely a fit of dyscalculia. Fun science fact.)
I've certainly been motivated to change things... and you raise a remarkable point. This will, hopefully, discourage me from sitting in bed and trying to work myself to exhaustion in one bock.
I would, but I have too much writing to do.
Hmm.
Sadly, the mistake isn't in what it now does with its power—that's inevitable. The mistake was giving it the goals that it set out to achieve in the first place.
Yes and yes. I was considering coming up with a more direct jab, but couldn't think of a field that would be a sufficiently acceptable target. Besides engineering theory, applied economics, post-structuralist philosophy, behavioural psychology, or string theory, I mean.
The only reason it doesn't happen more often is that sorts of people who care about the semantics of "semantics" generally refuse to interact with those who don't. But no, it's not an argument; it's merely a statement at the moment.
No, they were told less than 6 months ago that 0.8 was acceptable. Now they are being harried for not producing at a rate of 1.33. Groups that previously believed they had 15 months (your math is backward; 1.25 years per paper was expected) to turn out their next work are suddenly being told they should have produced papers every 9 months. In a world where grant deadlines determine the availability of funding on an annual basis, that's a very hard timespan to turn around in.
Nothing's perfect—that's why they're only one component of the decision. I imagine a particularly solid system would progress into auditing if a professor is consistently given bad reports, though. Personally I would rather the students have too much power than none at all, especially since there are various other ways to mitigate bad surveys (such as asking the right questions, conducting the surveys at the right time, and having the professor in question teach a mixture of introductory and advanced courses to weed out some of the entertainment-seekers.)
The simple answer is that academia is powered by a completely different mindset, one where—at least officially and romantically—the importance of ideas exceeds the importance of an individual or organization. As sohmc said, the point is to protect intellectuals from being fired because their ideas are radical or unfashionable. Tenure gives professors a chance to go off the beaten path without fear of reprisal, and it's delayed to make sure that they're worth their salt and can contribute in a socially accepted way as well.
If you want to get right down to it, the "right to work" model you outlined simply does not scale to universities, because their core business is obtaining the truth, and that really is a matter of resolving many conflicting and shady theories until they are all completely disentangled and the right answer is found. Teaching is ancillary, a service offered to the general public through which society is benefited by their work. Publishing is only an indirect measure. It's not business or economically sensible (unlike high school teaching); it's a post-scarcity blue-skies fantasy that gained protected status as a result of trial, error, and a lot of rich people very long ago who were convinced that it was a good idea.
What you expected to find is much closer to private sector R&D, where every paycheque comes from the lifeblood of the company and must hence be carefully weighed against each researcher's profitability. Despite the harsh reality of grant-seeking and paper-publishing, academia at its core is still imagined to be about doing the right thing, and any professor worth his or her education knows this.
I'm sorry, you've never heard of a bidet? Look, I appreciate that you're trying to be a troll, but that's just lame.
No, semantics is the matter of examining the underlying substance; what is actually being communicated. To provide a computer analogy, what the C program is actually doing once all of the pointers and names are dereferenced to real, hard, memory addresses. If someone makes an excuse starting with "but that's merely semantics," you can slam any and every door in his or her face immediately, as you are most certainly assured that they either don't care what they're actually talking about, or they have just grossly misused one of the most important words in the English language and hence cannot be made to see how grave an error they have just made.
The key here is that they were told less than six months ago that producing four papers every five years (0.8 papers/year) was acceptable. In that time I expect a number of researchers could have produced enough legitimate papers to stay afloat.
You may want to call it something more subtle than that so that the board doesn't get immediately suspicious—how about the Journal of Applied Numerology?
RTFAing for some extra discussion material, it looks like they were told even as recently as late last year that producing only four publications every five years would be acceptable. The University is guzzling funds in construction projects instead, at the cost of its academic integrity and ability to attract researchers. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like kickbacks are involved. Unfortunately, like here in Canada, Australia has no functioning critical apparatus and outing people for corruption is simply something that is not done, unlike in the US.
No, that would be the incredibly well-funded sporting programmes. Obviously.