I have a vehicle affected by this and was trying to gauge the appropriate level of alarm. The best info I can find indicates that there have been 88 "rupture" events out of 1.2 million deployment as of last year. So I do not think it makes sense to worry too much at this point, as those are pretty unlikely events, even if it is really more like 1000 bad explosive deployments so far. There do seem to be some concerns about high humidity areas and strong temperature variation locations being more likely to have issues and originally the recalls were focused on the southern US and other warm areas, though now the plan is to replace them all.
Much of the coverage has been alarmist- "your car is going to kill you!" so it was good to see that the fraction is low. But it was very troubling to read about how evasive and duplicitous the manufacturer has been as the problems should have been detected and addressed much earlier.
There are a bunch of good Martin Gardner books to consider. A couple of possibilities are:
"Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles" has a great range of puzzles across a range of topics
"Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing" though not explicitly about math, has lots of good engaging content. Kids of that age often love codes.
Various "Aha"/"Gotcha" series ones
various logic puzzle ones
These are generally good in that they encourage mathematical thinking and analysis and don't rely much on prerequisite material. And they are well done, with a good playful attitude about things. And they are often Dover books and reasonably priced, as well!
Alon Levy, transit expert (particularly about costs of construction,) has this recent update about the proposal. His earlier analysis brought up a number of concerns about cost and how it would actually work. Basically, at the speeds that are claimed, the required gentleness of the curves means expensive construction. Or just going fast and cheap and thus having barfing passengers.
I wouldn't call that "getting around journal issues." A better name for it is "cashing in on Springer's undeserved reputation as an arbiter of quality" to sell weak books to people who think "Springer = quality" because they do publish some selective quality journals. In fact, Springer/Elsevier/etc. have shown time and time again that they are far more interested in profits than in genuine scholarship. And indeed, it is a problem that librarian book selections are often not well-informed, but to be fair, faculty do not generally get involved in those decisions, despite the fact that they are often much better qualified to make such decisions.
Open search is a plus but I don't think the central issue. Since in my research fields, it's common to post the preprint of the work (either on the arXiv or on their own webpages) generally search engines find stuff and just searching for the article title gets a decent version of the work. Not all authors are good about this but even if people do put all their stuff where it can be found, it is still unhealthy for the research community to have overpriced journals by for-profit publishers as there are a number of bad outcomes that arise from publishers' economic incentives.
In my research fields, reviews and editorial boards do not carry the weight of research publications-- not remotely. It may vary by discipline, etc. A research article in a weak journal or without much content carries less weight than a good result, and being on some editorial board can carry some weight but it's unlikely a weak candidate for tenure or promotion would be on a the board of a good journal. Reviews should be done but people get very little credit for that. Generally, people don't even quantify how much reviewing they do; they just mention the journals that they've been asked to review for.
This is great- Elsevier and Springer (and other for-profit publishers) have been charging exorbitant prices for journals and there have been some other mass resignations where people started a free or at least affordable alternative with pretty much the same board. One of the first big ones was the journal Topology, which reconstituted itself with the exact same editorial board in a non-profit setting, described here. That was in 2006 and though I'd hoped this would spread like wildfire, it has only happened about a dozen times since then.
There are good quality affordable journals, run by professional societies or universities, which are an excellent alternative to Elsevier and other expensive for-profit journals. For the health of science, it is important that people choose to submit there. For untenured people who are under a great deal of pressure to submit to "top journals" it poses a difficult quandary, but for those of us for whom that isn't a concern, I don't see a reason to continue to support journals and publishers which have repeatedly done poorly.
The Cost of Knowledge has lots of information about efforts to improve the scientific publishing culture.
There have been other cases of prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria who resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?
In other Elsevier news, more journal shenanigans are described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions. It's not clear what the high prices of journals are paying for when there are intermittent episodes like this.
It's Gilbert Strang, looks like auto-correct got that one. And that was the text chosen by the faculty member who didn't want to use the one by his colleagues in this case. Strang is quite a reasonable book and a natural choice. Many people have used it over the years.
The author was at the institution since at least 1986. So he wrote the text while teaching there before becoming department chair, and the department adopted it. There wasn't the idea of "getting" (hiring) someone who has had written a book they happened to like. More likely, he'd been teaching the course, got his notes published as a book, they weren't more terrible than any of the other dozens of weak linear algebra texts, and they fit that particular course well, so his colleagues said it was OK to require the book. He got a junior member of the department involved in co-authorship later, probably the "you do all the revising work and we'll share the proceeds" process, and the department continued to require the book. He did recuse himself from the discussions about the textbook adoption, which shows some self-awareness, but still it is a clear conflict-of-interest to profit financially from a textbook adoption decision.
ps. The author Goode has been at CSU-Fullerton since at least 1986 according to his profile at mathscinet. His most recent research publication was 1995. The author Annin has been there since 2005 and perhaps he became a co-author in one of the updated versions. It is not uncommon for a senior faculty member to get a junior one to help update an older text, and publishers like it when there are new editions as it kills the used book market for a while.
Even if the author was not the chair at the time of the adoption, a tenured faculty member will vote on an untenured faculty member's tenure decision and this power imbalance is routinely exploited every day on campuses across the country. My guess is that the faculty member in question had objections to the text but did not say anything until after he (and his wife) had tenure and was less vulnerable. He is still vulnerable (may eventually want promotion from Associate Professor to Professor, may not want a junky teaching schedule, etc.) but less so than before.
According to the article, the proposal would pay the ISPs costs to retain the information. Given the value of the data (blackmail, harassment, etc.) there is strong incentive for many independent agents to try to get it and the track record on security for far less valuable information is not so great. I'm sure the ISPs costs are overstated and their incentive to do a great job securing the data properly is not so clear.
That sounds easier to do that it probably is; I'm not sure about Pearson but almost every publisher has exclusivity requirements and it would stun me if Pearson didn't have something like that as they have been doing this for a long time.. Once the publisher typesets and prettifies your course notes, they have the exclusive right to distribute them, etc. Unless that was negotiated at the outset (and it would take someone with some integrity to do that) it is unlikely to be feasible now. The easiest things to do would be donate the proceeds or use another book.
A professor assigning a textbook that he or she wrote happens fairly often as people tend to write texts for courses that they teach often, and tend to write texts when they are not happy with what options are already out there, and they generally think that they cover things in the best way possible, since they wrote it. Often a text evolves from course notes and is shopped around to various publishers, one of which is happy to accept it and polish it up and charge extortionate prices for it. If it gets adopted on its own merits at other institutions, great for the publisher and author.
But there is an obvious conflict of interest when a faculty member requires a text that he or she wrote for a course at the home institution, as the author/instructor gets some of the money (not much, though, even for a $180 text, I'm afraid.) At a normal university with standards and ethics, there generally is a mechanism for making textbook adoption decisions revenue-neutral for the instructor. I know of places where the part of the proceeds from the sale at the home institution of the author is sent directly from the publisher to something like the department colloquium fund, or sometimes if the publisher can't cope with the complexity, the author just donates the apportioned proceeds from sales at the home institution to a student support fund or tutoring lab or something like that.
Apparently, in this department, there is no such mechanism for the revenue (or the authors are not worried about the conflict of interest) and the authors apparently do get money from the text being required at their own institution. It is easy to see how another faculty member, now tenured, can feel that it is unfair for the text to be required, if the text isn't that great (most aren't) and if the money is going to his or her department members despite the fact that it is not the best value book. When the people profiting in question are part of the department administration (chair, assistant chair) that makes resistance more difficult, as department staff can retaliate in various obvious and subtle ways and there can be pressure to comply with unethical practices.
At a normal university, there would be conflict-of-interest policies that apply and would probably prevent a department from forming a policy to require a course purchase which benefits a faculty member financially. At Cal State Fullerton, either there aren't any strong policies, or they are being ignored, apparently. The instructor who is not following this unethical policy does have tenure (his wife is also tenured in the same department) so though he can't be readily dismissed or denied tenure, but still because the people who are financially impacted by this make decisions which can affect him and his wife, this is big headache.
There has been support from faculty in other departments which is a good sign but the fact that it got this far is one sign of an unhappy dysfunctional math department. There are hundreds of commodity linear algebra and differential equations textbooks out there, with lots of different approaches. Most of them are terrible, but there are enough good ones that this kerfluffle seems pretty ridiculous.
When the American Museum of Natural History in New York redid the fourth floor exhibits about dinosaurs, they chose to arrange the specimens in a tree-like structure representing their phylogeny (well, subject to the constraint that it's basically a big loop with a few bumps and nooks and crannies.) At the time (this was the late 1990s,) it was controversial because most museums grouped specimens by function (carnivores, herbivores, etc.) instead of by their evolutionary path. In fact, the AMNH welcoming film to the dinosaur floor (the Meryl Streep-narrated one) really does quite a nice job explaining the tree and the museum visitor's path through the tree as they walk the halls.
It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available..
Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link.
It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.
One of the issues that isn't addressed in these debates is the poor data about truly unvaccinated children. One thing to be aware of is that some of the "personal belief exemption" data may have some flaws related to poorly-interpreted data. In some cases, it may overstate the presence of anti-vaccination communities. That is, some of those listed as PBE are still vaccinated but nevertheless chose the "PBE exemption."
I know of at least a dozen fully-vaccinated children in public school in an affluent school district in California, whose parents are scientists, engineers, and medical researchers, who have moved to California for work. Enrolling a child in a California public school is a often morass of paperwork. In particular, there needs to be documentation of vaccination or you need to select the "PBE" exemption. (Or other exemptions, including the genuine medical exemptions for compromised immune system, etc.) The requirements of documentation are onerous, particularly for people who are busy getting settled with new housing, new jobs, and many other issues. Vaccination records from an out-of-state doctor are generally not considered sufficient. It is possible, upon moving to CA, to get new primary care physicians for your children, make appointments, and get the proper certification. However, that takes a good deal of time (months in many communities) and is considered by many people a waste of resources. A number of school administrators recommend to arriving parents that rather than deal with the documentation (and keep their children at home until the paperwork is all sorted out), they merely check the "PBE" box on the form, which takes one second and no money. The "personal belief" was simply that the documentation was overly onerous for people who had better things to do than waste time satisfying unusually specific documentation requirements.
The media reports of "anti-vaccination communities are common in affluent school districts" may instead be merely that a number of affluent school districts have clued in the new arrivals that they can avoid trouble by claiming the PBE. A school district where the enrollment staff informs people about the PBE option as a way to avoid paperwork appears, when looking at the data, to be a school district filled with anti-vaccination morons.
There is much more reliable data about incoming kindergartners- these children, sometimes new to school of any type, are generally already California residents with California doctors, and the chance that a PBE exemption for them does indicate that their parents are nutballs is much higher. But the overall data needs to be viewed with a more critical eye.
My memory was that the scrolling Terminator listings were assembly source code from Nibble magazine. I'm not sure what particular program, but it was a very recognizable format even when it just flashed on the screen briefly. I think there was some checksum code that came with the printed Nibble magazine that could you could check to make sure that you'd typed in things correctly. So I was probably one of the few people in the theatre who was amused that just as the Terminator robot was about to hunt and kill something (or whatever it was), he appeared to be doing a quick check to make sure that the "Hunt and Kill Something" code that had been typed in from the magazine was typed correctly.
The internet is good at these types of things: here is a site with screenshots from the Terminator movie and indeed it was Nibble magazine source code, and the checksum program was KeyPerfect. The source appears at a quick look to be for some kind of disk utility, perhaps a RAMdisk or something. The code seems to be named OVLY (overlay?) and I recognize VTOC as a virtual table of contents on a disk sector.
My memory was that the scrolling Terminator listings were assembly source code from Nibble magazine. I'm not sure what particular program, but it was a very recognizable format even when it just flashed on the screen briefly. I think there was some checksum code that came with the printed Nibble magazine that could you could check to make sure that you'd typed in things correctly. So I was probably one of the few people in the theatre who was amused that just as the Terminator robot was about to hunt and kill something (or whatever it was), he appeared to be doing a quick check to make sure that the "Hunt and Kill Something" code that had been typed in from the magazine was typed correctly.
There was Beneath Apple DOS, a fabulous book from the time which was invaluable for figuring out what was going on. My understanding was that Don Worth and Peter Lechner disassembled the shipped code and sorted out how things worked, with great explanations. Those were a great guide and helpful for writing all kinds of software. I suspect that a similar effort these days would not be resolved without legal intervention- I have no idea if they even asked permission or if it would have occurred to people that you might want to ask. (This PDF of the book says that Apple was not in any way involved in the book, did not endorse it, etc right on the title page.) Then again, the source code for important parts of the ROMS at the time (Woz's Sweet16) was distributed with the computer in hard copy manuals. I learned a great deal from reading the Sweet 16 source for that and also from Beneath Apple DOS. Beneath Apple DOS wasn't full source code, but it did explicitly identify what blocks of code did what in a way that made it easy to understand what was going on and how to change things.
As a researcher in mathematics, I am fortunate to have a great position and supportive research environment. I still get a paycheck and my day-to-day life continues more-or-less the same, but there are a number of thoughtless consequences indirectly for me, mainly due to the National Science Foundation being currently unfunded. My NSF grant money was delivered some time ago to my grants office and I can spend money as usual for my postdocs and students, so it isn't affecting me there directly. Instead, we have the following consequences:
The NSF webpages are down. That means no reports on existing grants can be filed, not a big deal. But it also means that no new grant submissions can be filed. There are many deadlines in the fall and this is usually a very busy time for grant submissions. I expect that deadlines will be shifted, but that is a huge hassle as in my fields, generally there are once-a-year deadlines and there is a big buildup and plan to time things around the deadlines. Deadlines are carefully distributed throughout the year to avoid congestion with grants offices and to avoid proposing researchers getting overwhelmed. That is all out the window with no idea about how things will be resolved.
No NSF review panels are meeting. In my fields, being asked to do a panel is both an honor and a serious burden. It is a lot of work to read proposals, often in related areas not exactly in areas of primary expertise. Twelve people are asked (per panel) to consider dozens of proposals, each hundreds of pages long (total, most of the important stuff is in about 50 pages.) These are essentially volunteers, top-level researchers from around the world who feel it is important to choose wisely which researchers are funded. Panels are scheduled to meet at the NSF with travel arrangements made by them. Generally it is a very intensive time with tight timelines. All of that is on hold. No new panels are being scheduled, existing panels are in limbo despite people having already read proposals and begun to evaluate them, and panels that already met can't have any further progress on funding decisions. Scheduling panels is a pain and there will be massive congestion and chaos once things get going again, assuming there is again a budget.
To my mind, these are a big disruption. For people in the lab sciences whose funding is disrupted, projects that have been ongoing or building up can be seriously affected. For people whose funding record will have a big role in their hiring, tenure, and promotion situation, this is a huge stress-inducing situation.
Blegh. This is a completely unnecessary disruption to thousands of scientists and researchers. Science research funding in the US has always been a pain, even when things go smoothly. Excellent researchers have left for Europe over the years due to frustrations with the NSF system, and things like this will exacerbate that problem.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant system is even larger scale and is also totally on hold, with consequent disruptions. And with the life sciences, uncertainty in projects can be more problematic as it is often harder to put things on hold. I feel sorry for people whose funding needs to be renewed, is under consideration, or needs adjustment now as this is a huge hassle.
Good summary, speaking as another tenured faculty member. There are a number of things which are not addressed in the study which complicate any analysis:
Younger tenure-track faculty tend to rarely teach introductory courses as large lectures in institutions I have been at. Generally, young, untenured faculty are given teaching reductions during their probationary periods to focus on research and getting grants, which are the primary determinants of whether or not they get tenure.
Tenured active researchers who are enthusiastic and productive about their research generally teach less overall and are less likely to teach intro courses. There are some active research faculty who relish the large-lecture environment and the "showmanship" aspects that it entails, but in my experience those are not typical and most researchers prefer to teach upper-division and graduate courses.
From the study The freshmen who got the biggest boost tended to be less academically qualified students, judged by SAT scores and such, in the hardest subjects. To me, this indicated that the talents being measured are reflective of more basic level information, and perhaps related to improving student organization and study skills. Some adjuncts are excellent at giving the structure and feedback that weak students need (their livelihood may depend upon such skills) whereas other faculty may not have the patience to help get poorly-prepared students up to speed, and their livelihood depends upon other skills such as research, mentoring graduate students and postdocs, and so on.
The first two points result in a biased sample- tenured faculty teaching intro classes may well be dominated by "dead wood" faculty who have to teach more because they are no longer as productive in research, and are more likely to teach intro courses. I have been in departments where one strategy to get unproductive faculty to retire is to assign them to large intro lectures for non-majors. That is not a recipe for learning success and may be sufficient to bias the results downward as seen in the study. It appears there is just one institution in the study (Northwestern, a private university in the American midwest) and if that is a common practice there, that makes the whole thing pretty moot.
Another point is that it does take a while for junior faculty to find their teaching footing, particularly in the large lecture-theater classes. Often, small changes in administrative or organizational methods have a big impact on how happy the students are or how much time they put into the class. With greater instructional experience, particularly in large lectures, it is not surprising that a seasoned adjunct instructor may do better by these metrics that a hotshot excited untenured researcher, no matter how enthusiastic the latter is.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two separate questions with different answers brought up here:
For me:
I have a vehicle affected by this and was trying to gauge the appropriate level of alarm. The best info I can find indicates that there have been 88 "rupture" events out of 1.2 million deployment as of last year. So I do not think it makes sense to worry too much at this point, as those are pretty unlikely events, even if it is really more like 1000 bad explosive deployments so far. There do seem to be some concerns about high humidity areas and strong temperature variation locations being more likely to have issues and originally the recalls were focused on the southern US and other warm areas, though now the plan is to replace them all.
Much of the coverage has been alarmist- "your car is going to kill you!" so it was good to see that the fraction is low. But it was very troubling to read about how evasive and duplicitous the manufacturer has been as the problems should have been detected and addressed much earlier.
There are a bunch of good Martin Gardner books to consider. A couple of possibilities are:
These are generally good in that they encourage mathematical thinking and analysis and don't rely much on prerequisite material. And they are well done, with a good playful attitude about things. And they are often Dover books and reasonably priced, as well!
Alon Levy, transit expert (particularly about costs of construction,) has this recent update about the proposal. His earlier analysis brought up a number of concerns about cost and how it would actually work. Basically, at the speeds that are claimed, the required gentleness of the curves means expensive construction. Or just going fast and cheap and thus having barfing passengers.
I wouldn't call that "getting around journal issues." A better name for it is "cashing in on Springer's undeserved reputation as an arbiter of quality" to sell weak books to people who think "Springer = quality" because they do publish some selective quality journals. In fact, Springer/Elsevier/etc. have shown time and time again that they are far more interested in profits than in genuine scholarship. And indeed, it is a problem that librarian book selections are often not well-informed, but to be fair, faculty do not generally get involved in those decisions, despite the fact that they are often much better qualified to make such decisions.
Open search is a plus but I don't think the central issue. Since in my research fields, it's common to post the preprint of the work (either on the arXiv or on their own webpages) generally search engines find stuff and just searching for the article title gets a decent version of the work. Not all authors are good about this but even if people do put all their stuff where it can be found, it is still unhealthy for the research community to have overpriced journals by for-profit publishers as there are a number of bad outcomes that arise from publishers' economic incentives.
In my research fields, reviews and editorial boards do not carry the weight of research publications-- not remotely. It may vary by discipline, etc. A research article in a weak journal or without much content carries less weight than a good result, and being on some editorial board can carry some weight but it's unlikely a weak candidate for tenure or promotion would be on a the board of a good journal. Reviews should be done but people get very little credit for that. Generally, people don't even quantify how much reviewing they do; they just mention the journals that they've been asked to review for.
This is great- Elsevier and Springer (and other for-profit publishers) have been charging exorbitant prices for journals and there have been some other mass resignations where people started a free or at least affordable alternative with pretty much the same board. One of the first big ones was the journal Topology, which reconstituted itself with the exact same editorial board in a non-profit setting, described here. That was in 2006 and though I'd hoped this would spread like wildfire, it has only happened about a dozen times since then.
There are good quality affordable journals, run by professional societies or universities, which are an excellent alternative to Elsevier and other expensive for-profit journals. For the health of science, it is important that people choose to submit there. For untenured people who are under a great deal of pressure to submit to "top journals" it poses a difficult quandary, but for those of us for whom that isn't a concern, I don't see a reason to continue to support journals and publishers which have repeatedly done poorly.
The Cost of Knowledge has lots of information about efforts to improve the scientific publishing culture.
There have been other cases of prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria who resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?
In other Elsevier news, more journal shenanigans are described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions. It's not clear what the high prices of journals are paying for when there are intermittent episodes like this.
It's Gilbert Strang, looks like auto-correct got that one. And that was the text chosen by the faculty member who didn't want to use the one by his colleagues in this case. Strang is quite a reasonable book and a natural choice. Many people have used it over the years.
The author was at the institution since at least 1986. So he wrote the text while teaching there before becoming department chair, and the department adopted it. There wasn't the idea of "getting" (hiring) someone who has had written a book they happened to like. More likely, he'd been teaching the course, got his notes published as a book, they weren't more terrible than any of the other dozens of weak linear algebra texts, and they fit that particular course well, so his colleagues said it was OK to require the book. He got a junior member of the department involved in co-authorship later, probably the "you do all the revising work and we'll share the proceeds" process, and the department continued to require the book. He did recuse himself from the discussions about the textbook adoption, which shows some self-awareness, but still it is a clear conflict-of-interest to profit financially from a textbook adoption decision.
ps. The author Goode has been at CSU-Fullerton since at least 1986 according to his profile at mathscinet. His most recent research publication was 1995. The author Annin has been there since 2005 and perhaps he became a co-author in one of the updated versions. It is not uncommon for a senior faculty member to get a junior one to help update an older text, and publishers like it when there are new editions as it kills the used book market for a while.
Even if the author was not the chair at the time of the adoption, a tenured faculty member will vote on an untenured faculty member's tenure decision and this power imbalance is routinely exploited every day on campuses across the country. My guess is that the faculty member in question had objections to the text but did not say anything until after he (and his wife) had tenure and was less vulnerable. He is still vulnerable (may eventually want promotion from Associate Professor to Professor, may not want a junky teaching schedule, etc.) but less so than before.
According to the article, the proposal would pay the ISPs costs to retain the information. Given the value of the data (blackmail, harassment, etc.) there is strong incentive for many independent agents to try to get it and the track record on security for far less valuable information is not so great. I'm sure the ISPs costs are overstated and their incentive to do a great job securing the data properly is not so clear.
That sounds easier to do that it probably is; I'm not sure about Pearson but almost every publisher has exclusivity requirements and it would stun me if Pearson didn't have something like that as they have been doing this for a long time.. Once the publisher typesets and prettifies your course notes, they have the exclusive right to distribute them, etc. Unless that was negotiated at the outset (and it would take someone with some integrity to do that) it is unlikely to be feasible now. The easiest things to do would be donate the proceeds or use another book.
A professor assigning a textbook that he or she wrote happens fairly often as people tend to write texts for courses that they teach often, and tend to write texts when they are not happy with what options are already out there, and they generally think that they cover things in the best way possible, since they wrote it. Often a text evolves from course notes and is shopped around to various publishers, one of which is happy to accept it and polish it up and charge extortionate prices for it. If it gets adopted on its own merits at other institutions, great for the publisher and author.
But there is an obvious conflict of interest when a faculty member requires a text that he or she wrote for a course at the home institution, as the author/instructor gets some of the money (not much, though, even for a $180 text, I'm afraid.) At a normal university with standards and ethics, there generally is a mechanism for making textbook adoption decisions revenue-neutral for the instructor. I know of places where the part of the proceeds from the sale at the home institution of the author is sent directly from the publisher to something like the department colloquium fund, or sometimes if the publisher can't cope with the complexity, the author just donates the apportioned proceeds from sales at the home institution to a student support fund or tutoring lab or something like that.
Apparently, in this department, there is no such mechanism for the revenue (or the authors are not worried about the conflict of interest) and the authors apparently do get money from the text being required at their own institution. It is easy to see how another faculty member, now tenured, can feel that it is unfair for the text to be required, if the text isn't that great (most aren't) and if the money is going to his or her department members despite the fact that it is not the best value book. When the people profiting in question are part of the department administration (chair, assistant chair) that makes resistance more difficult, as department staff can retaliate in various obvious and subtle ways and there can be pressure to comply with unethical practices.
At a normal university, there would be conflict-of-interest policies that apply and would probably prevent a department from forming a policy to require a course purchase which benefits a faculty member financially. At Cal State Fullerton, either there aren't any strong policies, or they are being ignored, apparently. The instructor who is not following this unethical policy does have tenure (his wife is also tenured in the same department) so though he can't be readily dismissed or denied tenure, but still because the people who are financially impacted by this make decisions which can affect him and his wife, this is big headache.
There has been support from faculty in other departments which is a good sign but the fact that it got this far is one sign of an unhappy dysfunctional math department. There are hundreds of commodity linear algebra and differential equations textbooks out there, with lots of different approaches. Most of them are terrible, but there are enough good ones that this kerfluffle seems pretty ridiculous.
When the American Museum of Natural History in New York redid the fourth floor exhibits about dinosaurs, they chose to arrange the specimens in a tree-like structure representing their phylogeny (well, subject to the constraint that it's basically a big loop with a few bumps and nooks and crannies.) At the time (this was the late 1990s,) it was controversial because most museums grouped specimens by function (carnivores, herbivores, etc.) instead of by their evolutionary path. In fact, the AMNH welcoming film to the dinosaur floor (the Meryl Streep-narrated one) really does quite a nice job explaining the tree and the museum visitor's path through the tree as they walk the halls.
It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. .
Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link.
It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.
One of the issues that isn't addressed in these debates is the poor data about truly unvaccinated children. One thing to be aware of is that some of the "personal belief exemption" data may have some flaws related to poorly-interpreted data. In some cases, it may overstate the presence of anti-vaccination communities. That is, some of those listed as PBE are still vaccinated but nevertheless chose the "PBE exemption."
I know of at least a dozen fully-vaccinated children in public school in an affluent school district in California, whose parents are scientists, engineers, and medical researchers, who have moved to California for work. Enrolling a child in a California public school is a often morass of paperwork. In particular, there needs to be documentation of vaccination or you need to select the "PBE" exemption. (Or other exemptions, including the genuine medical exemptions for compromised immune system, etc.) The requirements of documentation are onerous, particularly for people who are busy getting settled with new housing, new jobs, and many other issues. Vaccination records from an out-of-state doctor are generally not considered sufficient. It is possible, upon moving to CA, to get new primary care physicians for your children, make appointments, and get the proper certification. However, that takes a good deal of time (months in many communities) and is considered by many people a waste of resources. A number of school administrators recommend to arriving parents that rather than deal with the documentation (and keep their children at home until the paperwork is all sorted out), they merely check the "PBE" box on the form, which takes one second and no money. The "personal belief" was simply that the documentation was overly onerous for people who had better things to do than waste time satisfying unusually specific documentation requirements.
The media reports of "anti-vaccination communities are common in affluent school districts" may instead be merely that a number of affluent school districts have clued in the new arrivals that they can avoid trouble by claiming the PBE. A school district where the enrollment staff informs people about the PBE option as a way to avoid paperwork appears, when looking at the data, to be a school district filled with anti-vaccination morons.
There is much more reliable data about incoming kindergartners- these children, sometimes new to school of any type, are generally already California residents with California doctors, and the chance that a PBE exemption for them does indicate that their parents are nutballs is much higher. But the overall data needs to be viewed with a more critical eye.
Here's a reference, from my earlier comment: here.
It was recognizable in real time to an alert moviegoer at the time.
My memory was that the scrolling Terminator listings were assembly source code from Nibble magazine. I'm not sure what particular program, but it was a very recognizable format even when it just flashed on the screen briefly. I think there was some checksum code that came with the printed Nibble magazine that could you could check to make sure that you'd typed in things correctly. So I was probably one of the few people in the theatre who was amused that just as the Terminator robot was about to hunt and kill something (or whatever it was), he appeared to be doing a quick check to make sure that the "Hunt and Kill Something" code that had been typed in from the magazine was typed correctly.
The internet is good at these types of things: here is a site with screenshots from the Terminator movie and indeed it was Nibble magazine source code, and the checksum program was KeyPerfect. The source appears at a quick look to be for some kind of disk utility, perhaps a RAMdisk or something. The code seems to be named OVLY (overlay?) and I recognize VTOC as a virtual table of contents on a disk sector.
My memory was that the scrolling Terminator listings were assembly source code from Nibble magazine. I'm not sure what particular program, but it was a very recognizable format even when it just flashed on the screen briefly. I think there was some checksum code that came with the printed Nibble magazine that could you could check to make sure that you'd typed in things correctly. So I was probably one of the few people in the theatre who was amused that just as the Terminator robot was about to hunt and kill something (or whatever it was), he appeared to be doing a quick check to make sure that the "Hunt and Kill Something" code that had been typed in from the magazine was typed correctly.
There was Beneath Apple DOS, a fabulous book from the time which was invaluable for figuring out what was going on. My understanding was that Don Worth and Peter Lechner disassembled the shipped code and sorted out how things worked, with great explanations. Those were a great guide and helpful for writing all kinds of software. I suspect that a similar effort these days would not be resolved without legal intervention- I have no idea if they even asked permission or if it would have occurred to people that you might want to ask. (This PDF of the book says that Apple was not in any way involved in the book, did not endorse it, etc right on the title page.) Then again, the source code for important parts of the ROMS at the time (Woz's Sweet16) was distributed with the computer in hard copy manuals. I learned a great deal from reading the Sweet 16 source for that and also from Beneath Apple DOS. Beneath Apple DOS wasn't full source code, but it did explicitly identify what blocks of code did what in a way that made it easy to understand what was going on and how to change things.
As a researcher in mathematics, I am fortunate to have a great position and supportive research environment. I still get a paycheck and my day-to-day life continues more-or-less the same, but there are a number of thoughtless consequences indirectly for me, mainly due to the National Science Foundation being currently unfunded. My NSF grant money was delivered some time ago to my grants office and I can spend money as usual for my postdocs and students, so it isn't affecting me there directly. Instead, we have the following consequences:
To my mind, these are a big disruption. For people in the lab sciences whose funding is disrupted, projects that have been ongoing or building up can be seriously affected. For people whose funding record will have a big role in their hiring, tenure, and promotion situation, this is a huge stress-inducing situation.
Blegh. This is a completely unnecessary disruption to thousands of scientists and researchers. Science research funding in the US has always been a pain, even when things go smoothly. Excellent researchers have left for Europe over the years due to frustrations with the NSF system, and things like this will exacerbate that problem.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant system is even larger scale and is also totally on hold, with consequent disruptions. And with the life sciences, uncertainty in projects can be more problematic as it is often harder to put things on hold. I feel sorry for people whose funding needs to be renewed, is under consideration, or needs adjustment now as this is a huge hassle.
Good summary, speaking as another tenured faculty member. There are a number of things which are not addressed in the study which complicate any analysis:
The first two points result in a biased sample- tenured faculty teaching intro classes may well be dominated by "dead wood" faculty who have to teach more because they are no longer as productive in research, and are more likely to teach intro courses. I have been in departments where one strategy to get unproductive faculty to retire is to assign them to large intro lectures for non-majors. That is not a recipe for learning success and may be sufficient to bias the results downward as seen in the study. It appears there is just one institution in the study (Northwestern, a private university in the American midwest) and if that is a common practice there, that makes the whole thing pretty moot.
Another point is that it does take a while for junior faculty to find their teaching footing, particularly in the large lecture-theater classes. Often, small changes in administrative or organizational methods have a big impact on how happy the students are or how much time they put into the class. With greater instructional experience, particularly in large lectures, it is not surprising that a seasoned adjunct instructor may do better by these metrics that a hotshot excited untenured researcher, no matter how enthusiastic the latter is.