Try the T-Mobile prepaid plan. $100 gives you 1000+ minutes that last a year before expiring. For less money, the minutes expire I think after 90 days. Once you've spent $100 the minutes don't do bad as long as you recharge even a nominal amount each year.
ps. For someone contemplating a career in academia, I can reccommend "Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia" by Emily Toth. Nominally, it's aimed at women in academia, but the advice is applicable to everyone. Lots of the issues there are more on the humanities side rather than the science/engineering side, but it's a good resource and a quick fun read.
Tenure evaluations and expectations vary widely across academic disciplines, and different fields have different publishing rates. Numbers such as "x articles per year" are going to vary alot. 15 articles is nothing for some fields in psychology, and two papers is a lot in some fields of mathematics. Still, a tenure evaluation depends upon 3 main components:
Research/scholarship: papers published, external funding, patents, projects, etc.
Teaching: undergraduate and graduate courses, supervising graduate students (if applicable), developing/revising courses
Service: helping to run the university/college by serving on committees, having adminstrative roles, doing a fair share of the unpleasant work of administration
At a strong research university, the research component is all important and unless your teaching is a complete disaster, you'll get tenure with strong research. At other institutions, the factors are weighted according to the role of the institution. At many places, a reasonable but not strong research record is adequate if there is good teaching, and a weak classroom record is fine if you are a strong researcher. At primarily undergraduate institutions like liberal arts institutions (in the US), teaching is the most important aspect together with at least some nominal amount of research or scholarship, construed broadly. At every institution that I know, service is something that can help a weak tenure case, but only very rarely is a good service record the main basis for a positive tenure decision.
There are a lot of different attitudes about the role of the anonymous referee, in different fields and in different settings. In computer science and mathematics, where most of my publications are, the role of the referee depends upon a number of things. A few comments relevant to my disciplines:
The responsibility for correctness lies with the author, not the referee. It is good if the referee spots problems but it is not the obligation of the referee to certify that every last detail is correct.
Often, the primary responsibility of the referee is to comment on the importance, priority, relevance and how much interest there is in the work.
In the CS world of conference refereeing (as opposed to CS journals) there is often absurd time pressure. Articles/abstracts are due at midnight local time on some date, so things are typically hastily written, and referees must review things in a very short timeframe and practically never get a chance to check things carefully. As far as I am concerned, the conference publication model in CS is terribly broken. There have been some calls for reform, but those have been coming for at least the last 10 years or so and over that period it's gotten worse, not better.
In math, it can take a year for a referee to work through something techical, so the process is slow.
Typically, referees are uncompensated for their work. Some people take their refereeing duties seriously, and some do not. Generally, those who do a good job in a timely fashion are asked more often to referee more things, which is not exactly a reward.
Don't forget about one of the more colorful episodes in the license vs. buy issue. That was the time that a parking garage in Hoboken New Jersey let a poorly-negotiated software licesnse expire, rendering a robotic parking structure inoperable yet full of cars which were stuck there for several days, as discussed on Slashdot some time ago
At many institutions, those with good outside funding are rewarded with teaching fewer courses. The typical courseload in a strong research department in science is generally lower than that of a strong research departemtn in the humanities, as the grants tend to be much larger (and much more essential) on the science side, especailly lab sciences.. If you ask a typical engineering prof "would you rather have a lighter teaching obligation or have the students get a tuition reduction?" I think about 99% of them would opt for less teaching.
Really? Have you actually programmed on a DEC system? That was the most abominable IO record access semantics I have ever met in my career. Indeed I did. Every system had/has its quirks, and it's not fair to compare the VMS environment to modern ones. DEC produced a great deal of interesting things, and if that is your biggest beef with them, that's pretty minor in the scheme of things.
The online grocery market is going strong in NYC with Fresh Direct (among others, but the market leader), which is a great implementation of the concept and has widespread use, to the point that some buildings now have cooled areas in their lobbies for Fresh Direct deliveries.
Quick list for those who don't care to click through one per page for 19 pages:
DEC, Tandem, Apollo, Borland, Amiga, Commodore, Ashton-Tate, Fox, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, Gould, Infocom, Sequent, Poquet, Taligent, Word Perfect, Lotus, and Compuserve are the "dearly departed"
I can't comment much on the PC-heavy end of the list, but DEC stands out to me as the one which least deserved to die. DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and watching it shrivel and die was painful.
I'll second/third this reccommendation. T-Mobile's prepaid plan works well and I got a bunch of old Samsung phones on eBay a while ago and now lend them out to visitors to the US when they arrive here, with prepaid T-Mobile SIMS. Some of the Samsung phones include the GSM 900 band and work fine in many European countries and Oz/NZ, as a bonus. And T-Mobile has been great about unlocking multiple phones for me and I've heard several other people who've been impressed with T-Mobile's service. Even if their prepaid plan weren't the best deal, I'd be willing to pay more for being treated like a responsible adult when I talk to customer service. Their coverage is not on par with the bigger providers away from the metropoli and big highways, but I've been very happy with them overall.
Actually, the routers and servers along the way were probably going to be on anyway. But had he shut of his 300W computer and 50W monitor and a few lights for an hour, that would have saved more electricity than 50 LEDs would use in three weeks. (500W * 1 hr = 1 W * 500hr)
It's not just publishing- we should also refuse to referee articles for expensive journals. There is an excellent article in this month's American Mathematical Society Notices about the mass resignation of the Journal of Topology editorial board in protest of unfair pricing: here and there is a description of the Banff Protocol here.
The Banff Protocol:
We agree neither to submit to, referee for, nor participate in the operation of any journal that charges an excessively high per page subscription fee, as compared to the average of the 25 highest impact journals in pure mathematics**
Nice scheme! Hopefully, though, you never visit France, Switzerland, etc. and try to use those ridiculous keyboards! Shift to get numbers? Qu'est-ce que c'est?
(Of course, if you are French, hopefully you never have to leave and have to deal with non-shifted numerals, and so on...)
The 6502 to 68000 CPU switch was really the only total discontinuity, and that wasn't exactly just a few days agoActually, the Apple IIe card for the Mac LC worked very well for me and a number of instituitions in my area at the time. I have some documents here on OS X that originally came from my Apple II via that route. I have some articles I wrote which have been viewed/edited on the following processors, all in Apple machines:
several original 6502s in old Apple II and II+ machines
several Z80s at various speeds, running CPM on a cards in my Apple II machines
68000, running on a card in my Apple II (ran under Apple DOS and the UCSD p-system)
6809 on the Apple/// and 65C02 on the IIc
68000 and bunches of various 680x0 on 68k Macs, including 68040 on the Mac IIfx with all its weird architecture (no 68010, though)
601, 603, 603e, 604, 604e on various PPC boxes and ARM on a loaned eMate somewhere in there
Not to mention all the various processors on various VMS, Unix etc. machines along the way... Text is text, after all...
To be fair, I didn't use the IIe card for the LC to move most of my documents over- I had done that long before, using dialup connections and Kermit/FTP-type programs. Somehow I missed the whole IIgs world, though-- for that period I was using my souped-up Apple II and various Unix boxes.
There are a number of suggestions already mentioned, and to be honest, there is a huge range of courses that would be valuable. A standard weakness I see in CS grads is poor exposure to analysis of algorithms and computational complexity. CS students often struggle with those topics because of either poor preparation in discrete math or not enough exposure to mathematical proofs.
As far as getting good experience with mathematical proofs to my mind, just about any pure math course which is interesting to the student and has some emphasis on proofs would be useful- combinatorics, algebra, analysis or even topology or logical foundations. Getting comfortable with mathematical proofs will serve CS students well, not from the particular topics covered necessarily, but from making complete (hopefully concise) arguments (proofs.) Being able to express your arguments precisely and convincingly is a very important skill. People will judge your development and coding skills through the window of your communication skills so doing as much as you can to improve your ability to communicate mathematically/precisely will work well.
If you are looking for a valuable course from a range of possibilities, don't underestimate the "shop around" method for electives. Depending upon how your institution's registration process works, you may have the opportunity to sit in on a bunch of possible course the first week and decide which professor/subject matter appears to be most valuable. Typically, there is a great deal of variation from professor to professor, so you may find it more valuable to take a course where the topic doesn't seem immediately applicable, but which has a professor who can communicate the mathematics well and who can help students develop their abilities to prove things.
I don't know the full story but this reminds me of looking for WiFi in the Geneva airport. There were a couple of premium pay-to-connect WiFi networks as well as an open wireless network named "hidden." I assume that just like in Boston, the pay WiFi folks were none too pleased with a free alternative, so they asked the owner of the open one to make it hidden, and thus there is an open wireless broadcasting its ID -- "hidden." Not only did it work fine, it gave me a nice smile!
having your own text as a required book for the course can easily be FAR worse than this.
Absolutely! At reasonable institutions, the convention is that when a faculty member has as a required text his or her own book, the part of the proceeds from those sales go to a departmental account for cookies for grad students, or something comparable and neutral. I have been at many institutions, some have reasonable conventions like that, and at others, the faculty member just takes the money, which I think is unethical.
In the one case when I required one of my own books as a text, I was at a less than reasonable (OK, terrible) institution where the convention was to just take the money, and when I decided to give the money to the departmental student travel fund, I was attacked by other faculty members for making them look bad. That is, making it clearer that they were the slimy weasels they are. Am I glad that I got a professorship at a much better institution!
Ancedote from that terrible institution: for more than one of the faculty authors there, the only place in the world where that text is used is there, so almost all of the faculty members' book revenue (it's not much, BTW, just because the book costs $100+ doesn't mean the faculty member gets much at all) came from being required in that institutions' courses (and these were terrible books.) And there was pressure, of course, for other instructors to require those same terrible texts, ugh!
BTW, for all those people who think that textbook publishing is the ticket to riches and fame- good luck! What it takes some time to realize (and many people never realize) is that writing explanations that students can understand and get much from is quite difficult, and most people are not good at it. Just because you can give great lectures (a much more interactive setting, even if there are no questions from the students) doesn't mean that you can write a decent text. There are some people who simply are much better at writing useful texts than the rest of us. Those people should write textbooks, and the rest of us should stop.
It would be interesting to see privacy decisions about the use of data from black boxes treated as an economic commodity, rather than as an absolute right. That is, why not have a choice, for example in car insurance, how about a multi-tier system for pricing for a year of coverage:
$1000/year and you do not agree to divulge any information from car electronic data recording devices and can rip them out if you want
$500/year and you agree to divulge any information EDR info relevant in an accident and keep the devices operable
$200/year and you agree to constant uploading of EDR and GPS data from your car
These numbers are totally invented, of course, but guess what most people would choose: option 3, at least if the popularity of supermarket discount cards where giving lots of personal information saves you some some money on groceries. If people are willing to trade privacy for discounts, why not let them?
The point is that though you may have a "right" to keep somethings private, but you also cannot expect to hold onto that right vigorously and get bargain-basement prices on things at the same time. Insurers would presumably be happy to have more data to charge rates which more accurately reflect their risks. If you willingly provide data that shows that you drive under 65MPH all the time, etc., in exchange for lower rates, that seems like a reasonable plan.
Mike Brown, leader of teams that have discovered 2003UB313 and 11 other objects that meet the proposed definition of planet, has the following on his webpage now:
The IAU proposal officially recognizes only 12 planets; where does the number 53 come from?
By the proposed IAU definition, anything large enough to be pulled by its own gravity into the shape of a sphere and which is in orbit around a star is a planet. The proposal officially recognizes 12 planets (the nine previously recognized plus Ceres and Pluto's moon Charon plus 2003 UB313) creates a complex committee procedure for an object to become officially recognized. This part of the proposal is perhaps the weakest. In no other area of astronomy is there a definition for a class of objects and then a committee that has to decide if an object fits the definition. There are simply definitions. If an object fits the definition it is part of the class. If the IAU proposal is accepted then scientifically all of the spherical objects out there are indeed classified as planets, regardless of how long it takes for a committee to officiailly declare them to be so.
A relatively simple analysis show that there are currently 53 known objects in the solar system which are likely round. Another few hundred will likely be discovered in the relatively near future. Regardless of what the official count is from the IAU proposal these object all fit the scientific definition of the word planet and if the scientific definition is to have any credibility they should all generally be considered planets.
What should the public think about 53 planets?
Most people, when first confronted with a proposal to make 44 new planets in the solar system, seem to react by looking blankly for a second, then shaking their heads and muttering something about astronomers being crazy. Astronomers are not actually crazy, at least most of them. Astronomers have needed a good scientific definition of the word "planet" for many years now and this one works well for scientists. It doesn't, however, work terribly well for the rest of the world. The solution is the one that should have happened long ago: a divorce of the scientific term "planet" for the cultural term "planet." No one expects school children to name the 53 planets (most, in fact, don't even have names). If I were a school teacher I would teach 8, or 9, or perhaps 10 planets and then say "scientists consider many more things to be planets too" and use that opportunity to talk about how much more there is in the solar system. But at the end of the day I would talk about 8 or 9 or 10. Not 53.
Culture and science have always meant something different when they use the word planet, and with this new scientific definition so clearly far removed from what the rest of the world things a planet is there will no longer be any need to confuse the scientific word with the cultural one.
How am I going to vote on the IAU resolution?
This one is easy to answer. I am not an IAU member, I took no part in drafting the resolution, and I get no vote. If I were to vote, however, I would have to decide that while the definition itself is viable the extra non-scientific beauracratic barrage attached to the resolution would doom it for me.
Agreed- I know several very frustrated, top-quality Aussie researchers who have been unable to get tenure-track jobs in Australia despite wanting desperately to stay there. They are all in the US or Canada now with academic jobs that are much better than anything likely to come up there.
Your questions are interesting in that I know of, and have helped hire, a great number of refugees FROM private research labs (AT&T Research, Lucent, DEC/Compaq WRL...) who are interested in moving TO academia. I get the impression that a number of these traditionally great private research labs (notably the New Jersey ones, heirs of the storied Bell Labs mantle) have become less than great places to be. There has been mass exodus of top researchers from those places to academia. Why? The ones that I know well haven't liked the changes and don't want to be the last ones going down in a sinking ship. Overall, there has been less freedom about what kinds of projects they can put energy into, and more cost-justification/compromises made by short-term market-minded thinking. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the long-term direction of these labs, even those that have been great places to work recently. I think it's more than the usual "grass is greener on the other side" effect as some of these folks had been in academia before working for the various labs. For my university, it's been a great windfall, as we've had multiple strong hires in the last five years from the research labs- people who are quite senior and aren't too worried about the less-than-fantastic university salaries, but aren't interested in leaving the New York area, for a variety of reasons.
I can't see how any such contract is remotely enforceable, given that what is actually being chosen are electors- people who have pledged to vote in a particular way. There generally isn't anything keeping an elector from actually voting for the person for whom they pledged to vote; in fact, there have been situations when they voted in some other way. These situations are called "faithless electors" and are described at this fairvote.org link. So far, there haven't been any elections whose outcome has been influenced by faithless electors, but in principle, they could. It is possible that in the US, there could be a 100% electoral landslide for Candidate A, and upon actually voting, the electors all decided to vote for candidate B, or even person C, who was not even a candidate in any state. Unlikely, but certainly possible. There are some states that require electors to vote in the manner in which they pledge (most, I think it's about half) but the punishments are feeble- small fines for example.
1) Most people in Europe, Austalia, NZ and Asia that I have met realize that the Americans that they are likely to meet are not the ones who voted for Bush. The coasts have a much higher density of passport holders than the "Heartland," for example. (Active passport holders favored Kerry to Bush 58% to 35%.)
2) The "obnoxious American" stereotype is partly a result of biased sampling. If there are two Americans somewhere, and one is a fat, obnoxious, non-local-language speaking lout with a Hawaiian shirt and a camcorder and the other is a quiet, sensible, local-language speaker, the locals may not even notice that the second is an American, let alone remember the encounter. I am an American, and when I am in Europe, I am frequently mistaken as being Dutch, perhaps because I have a beard, a bicycle and can communicate passibly in any one of about five standard European languages, even if I don't happen to speak the local language. I also usually do not go out of my way to correct this misconception...
map of possible antipodal land locations
on
Earth Sandwich
·
· Score: 1
This map shows possible locations for land-based antipodal points, which have large areas of Greenland and some of Siberia overlapping Antarctica, as well as the more reachable Argentina/Chile with China pairings. There are also some northern South America with Phillipines and other island areas possibilities. But it is no surprise that the NZ/Spain pairing was the first realized, as those are both close to reasonable cities that are likely home for people who visit his page.
I remember a story a while ago about a man from northern Spain (Galicia) who went to visit the village antipodal to his, in NZ, but unfortunately he did not have the foresight to construct a sandwich. That could have been with two slices from the same loaf if he had planned ahead.
One think that may help here is some sort of collaborative effort, where whole bunch of people work on a textbook together. That way no single individual needs to put that much time into it.
In my experience, textbooks written collaboratively tend to be worse than those written by a single, capable author. Students have a hard time reading a text, and if the "voice" of the author changes, even sublty, this can make it harder. My experience with this is mostly from a wide variety of calculus and engineering math texts, and may not apply to other discplines as sharply, but most students really struggle reading the text. Most professors, unfortunately, have a hard time judging texts' readability as they already know the material and are often more concerned about other aspects of the text than whether or not the students will find the text readable. I know many many faculty who have thought that they could write a better calculus book than the standard ones, and all those texts either are never completed or end up being terrible for a variety of reasons. One of the publishers I work with reports something like less than 10% completion for texts they enter into contracts with overall.
most of our textbooks were basically just lecture notes written by our professors and printed by the university press, and most of them were very good.
In general, if the lecturer and the author of a text are the same person, that is a very good thing. The emphases, notation, and overall approach are very likely to coincide and be more cohesive. As a student in the course, the text seems natural. But with a different lecturer, those same notes may be quite inpenatrable.
so maybe the "snazzy 3d figures" and other stuff like that is actually a total waste of effort and money.
Having been on a number of textbook selection committees (blegh, I wasn't quick enough to say "Not it!") unfortuately these things have come to be expected. Again, faculty often are not capable of making good judgements of how readable a text is to a moderately prepared student, and oftenn make judgements based upon (to my mind) relatively spurious issues like order of topics, notation used, or whether or not they will need to revise their notes extensively.
Slashdot Mirror
Try the T-Mobile prepaid plan. $100 gives you 1000+ minutes that last a year before expiring. For less money, the minutes expire I think after 90 days. Once you've spent $100 the minutes don't do bad as long as you recharge even a nominal amount each year.
ps. For someone contemplating a career in academia, I can reccommend "Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia" by Emily Toth. Nominally, it's aimed at women in academia, but the advice is applicable to everyone. Lots of the issues there are more on the humanities side rather than the science/engineering side, but it's a good resource and a quick fun read.
At a strong research university, the research component is all important and unless your teaching is a complete disaster, you'll get tenure with strong research. At other institutions, the factors are weighted according to the role of the institution. At many places, a reasonable but not strong research record is adequate if there is good teaching, and a weak classroom record is fine if you are a strong researcher. At primarily undergraduate institutions like liberal arts institutions (in the US), teaching is the most important aspect together with at least some nominal amount of research or scholarship, construed broadly. At every institution that I know, service is something that can help a weak tenure case, but only very rarely is a good service record the main basis for a positive tenure decision.
Don't forget about one of the more colorful episodes in the license vs. buy issue. That was the time that a parking garage in Hoboken New Jersey let a poorly-negotiated software licesnse expire, rendering a robotic parking structure inoperable yet full of cars which were stuck there for several days, as discussed on Slashdot some time ago
At many institutions, those with good outside funding are rewarded with teaching fewer courses. The typical courseload in a strong research department in science is generally lower than that of a strong research departemtn in the humanities, as the grants tend to be much larger (and much more essential) on the science side, especailly lab sciences.. If you ask a typical engineering prof "would you rather have a lighter teaching obligation or have the students get a tuition reduction?" I think about 99% of them would opt for less teaching.
Really? Have you actually programmed on a DEC system? That was the most abominable IO record access semantics I have ever met in my career.
Indeed I did. Every system had/has its quirks, and it's not fair to compare the VMS environment to modern ones. DEC produced a great deal of interesting things, and if that is your biggest beef with them, that's pretty minor in the scheme of things.
The online grocery market is going strong in NYC with Fresh Direct (among others, but the market leader), which is a great implementation of the concept and has widespread use, to the point that some buildings now have cooled areas in their lobbies for Fresh Direct deliveries.
Quick list for those who don't care to click through one per page for 19 pages:
DEC, Tandem, Apollo, Borland, Amiga, Commodore, Ashton-Tate, Fox, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, Gould, Infocom, Sequent, Poquet,
Taligent, Word Perfect, Lotus, and Compuserve are the "dearly departed"
I can't comment much on the PC-heavy end of the list, but DEC stands out to me as the one
which least deserved to die. DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and
watching it shrivel and die was painful.
I'll second/third this reccommendation. T-Mobile's prepaid plan works well and I got a bunch of old Samsung phones on eBay a while ago and now lend them out to visitors to the US when they arrive here, with prepaid T-Mobile SIMS. Some of the Samsung phones include the GSM 900 band and work fine in many European countries and Oz/NZ, as a bonus. And T-Mobile has been great about unlocking multiple phones for me and I've heard several other people who've been impressed with T-Mobile's service. Even if their prepaid plan weren't the best deal, I'd be willing to pay more for being treated like a responsible adult when I talk to customer service. Their coverage is not on par with the bigger providers away from the metropoli and big highways, but I've been very happy with them overall.
Actually, the routers and servers along the way were probably going to be on anyway. But had he shut of his 300W computer and 50W monitor and a few lights for an hour, that would have saved more electricity than 50 LEDs would use in three weeks. (500W * 1 hr = 1 W * 500hr)
The Banff Protocol:
Nice scheme! Hopefully, though, you never visit France, Switzerland, etc. and try to use those ridiculous keyboards! Shift to get numbers? Qu'est-ce que c'est?
(Of course, if you are French, hopefully you never have to leave and have to deal with non-shifted numerals, and so on...)
Not to mention all the various processors on various VMS, Unix etc. machines along the way... Text is text, after all...
To be fair, I didn't use the IIe card for the LC to move most of my documents over- I had done that long before, using dialup connections and Kermit/FTP-type programs. Somehow I missed the whole IIgs world, though-- for that period I was using my souped-up Apple II and various Unix boxes.
There are a number of suggestions already mentioned, and to be honest, there is a huge range of courses that would be valuable. A standard weakness I see in CS grads is poor exposure to analysis of algorithms and computational complexity. CS students often struggle with those topics because of either poor preparation in discrete math or not enough exposure to mathematical proofs.
As far as getting good experience with mathematical proofs to my mind, just about any pure math course which is interesting to the student and has some emphasis on proofs would be useful- combinatorics, algebra, analysis or even topology or logical foundations. Getting comfortable with mathematical proofs will serve CS students well, not from the particular topics covered necessarily, but from making complete (hopefully concise) arguments (proofs.) Being able to express your arguments precisely and convincingly is a very important skill. People will judge your development and coding skills through the window of your communication skills so doing as much as you can to improve your ability to communicate mathematically/precisely will work well.
If you are looking for a valuable course from a range of possibilities, don't underestimate the "shop around" method for electives. Depending upon how your institution's registration process works, you may have the opportunity to sit in on a bunch of possible course the first week and decide which professor/subject matter appears to be most valuable. Typically, there is a great deal of variation from professor to professor, so you may find it more valuable to take a course where the topic doesn't seem immediately applicable, but which has a professor who can communicate the mathematics well and who can help students develop their abilities to prove things.
I don't know the full story but this reminds me of looking for WiFi in the Geneva airport. There were a couple of premium pay-to-connect WiFi networks as well as an open wireless network named "hidden." I assume that just like in Boston, the pay WiFi folks were none too pleased with a free alternative, so they asked the owner of the open one to make it hidden, and thus there is an open wireless broadcasting its ID -- "hidden." Not only did it work fine, it gave me a nice smile!
having your own text as a required book for the course can easily be FAR worse than this.
Absolutely! At reasonable institutions, the convention is that when a faculty member has as a required text his or her own book, the part of the proceeds from those sales go to a departmental account for cookies for grad students, or something comparable and neutral. I have been at many institutions, some have reasonable conventions like that, and at others, the faculty member just takes the money, which I think is unethical.
In the one case when I required one of my own books as a text, I was at a less than reasonable (OK, terrible) institution where the convention was to just take the money, and when I decided to give the money to the departmental student travel fund, I was attacked by other faculty members for making them look bad. That is, making it clearer that they were the slimy weasels they are. Am I glad that I got a professorship at a much better institution!
Ancedote from that terrible institution: for more than one of the faculty authors there, the only place in the world where that text is used is there, so almost all of the faculty members' book revenue (it's not much, BTW, just because the book costs $100+ doesn't mean the faculty member gets much at all) came from being required in that institutions' courses (and these were terrible books.) And there was pressure, of course, for other instructors to require those same terrible texts, ugh!
BTW, for all those people who think that textbook publishing is the ticket to riches and fame- good luck! What it takes some time to realize (and many people never realize) is that writing explanations that students can understand and get much from is quite difficult, and most people are not good at it. Just because you can give great lectures (a much more interactive setting, even if there are no questions from the students) doesn't mean that you can write a decent text. There are some people who simply are much better at writing useful texts than the rest of us. Those people should write textbooks, and the rest of us should stop.
These numbers are totally invented, of course, but guess what most people would choose: option 3, at least if the popularity of supermarket discount cards where giving lots of personal information saves you some some money on groceries. If people are willing to trade privacy for discounts, why not let them?
The point is that though you may have a "right" to keep somethings private, but you also cannot expect to hold onto that right vigorously and get bargain-basement prices on things at the same time. Insurers would presumably be happy to have more data to charge rates which more accurately reflect their risks. If you willingly provide data that shows that you drive under 65MPH all the time, etc., in exchange for lower rates, that seems like a reasonable plan.
Agreed- I know several very frustrated, top-quality Aussie researchers who have been unable to get tenure-track jobs in Australia despite wanting desperately to stay there. They are all in the US or Canada now with academic jobs that are much better than anything likely to come up there.
Your questions are interesting in that I know of, and have helped hire, a great number of refugees FROM private research labs (AT&T Research, Lucent, DEC/Compaq WRL...) who are interested in moving TO academia. I get the impression that a number of these traditionally great private research labs (notably the New Jersey ones, heirs of the storied Bell Labs mantle) have become less than great places to be. There has been mass exodus of top researchers from those places to academia. Why? The ones that I know well haven't liked the changes and don't want to be the last ones going down in a sinking ship. Overall, there has been less freedom about what kinds of projects they can put energy into, and more cost-justification/compromises made by short-term market-minded thinking. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the long-term direction of these labs, even those that have been great places to work recently. I think it's more than the usual "grass is greener on the other side" effect as some of these folks had been in academia before working for the various labs. For my university, it's been a great windfall, as we've had multiple strong hires in the last five years from the research labs- people who are quite senior and aren't too worried about the less-than-fantastic university salaries, but aren't interested in leaving the New York area, for a variety of reasons.
I can't see how any such contract is remotely enforceable, given that what is actually being chosen are electors- people who have pledged to vote in a particular way. There generally isn't anything keeping an elector from actually voting for the person for whom they pledged to vote; in fact, there have been situations when they voted in some other way. These situations are called "faithless electors" and are described at this fairvote.org link. So far, there haven't been any elections whose outcome has been influenced by faithless electors, but in principle, they could. It is possible that in the US, there could be a 100% electoral landslide for Candidate A, and upon actually voting, the electors all decided to vote for candidate B, or even person C, who was not even a candidate in any state. Unlikely, but certainly possible. There are some states that require electors to vote in the manner in which they pledge (most, I think it's about half) but the punishments are feeble- small fines for example.
Two things:
1) Most people in Europe, Austalia, NZ and Asia that I have met realize that the Americans that they are likely to meet are not the ones who voted for Bush. The coasts have a much higher density of passport holders than the "Heartland," for example. (Active passport holders favored Kerry to Bush 58% to 35%.)
2) The "obnoxious American" stereotype is partly a result of biased sampling. If there are two Americans somewhere, and one is a fat, obnoxious, non-local-language speaking lout with a Hawaiian shirt and a camcorder and the other is a quiet, sensible, local-language speaker, the locals may not even notice that the second is an American, let alone remember the encounter. I am an American, and when I am in Europe, I am frequently mistaken as being Dutch, perhaps because I have a beard, a bicycle and can communicate passibly in any one of about five standard European languages, even if I don't happen to speak the local language. I also usually do not go out of my way to correct this misconception...
This map shows possible locations for land-based antipodal points, which have large areas of Greenland and some of Siberia overlapping Antarctica, as well as the more reachable Argentina/Chile with China pairings. There are also some northern South America with Phillipines and other island areas possibilities. But it is no surprise that the NZ/Spain pairing was the first realized, as those are both close to reasonable cities that are likely home for people who visit his page.
I remember a story a while ago about a man from northern Spain (Galicia) who went to visit the village antipodal to his, in NZ, but unfortunately he did not have the foresight to construct a sandwich. That could have been with two slices from the same loaf if he had planned ahead.
One think that may help here is some sort of collaborative effort, where whole bunch of people work on a textbook together. That way no single individual needs to put that much time into it.
In my experience, textbooks written collaboratively tend to be worse than those written by a single, capable author. Students have a hard time reading a text, and if the "voice" of the author changes, even sublty, this can make it harder. My experience with this is mostly from a wide variety of calculus and engineering math texts, and may not apply to other discplines as sharply, but most students really struggle reading the text. Most professors, unfortunately, have a hard time judging texts' readability as they already know the material and are often more concerned about other aspects of the text than whether or not the students will find the text readable. I know many many faculty who have thought that they could write a better calculus book than the standard ones, and all those texts either are never completed or end up being terrible for a variety of reasons. One of the publishers I work with reports something like less than 10% completion for texts they enter into contracts with overall.
most of our textbooks were basically just lecture notes written by our professors and printed by the university press, and most of them were very good.
In general, if the lecturer and the author of a text are the same person, that is a very good thing. The emphases, notation, and overall approach are very likely to coincide and be more cohesive. As a student in the course, the text seems natural. But with a different lecturer, those same notes may be quite inpenatrable.
so maybe the "snazzy 3d figures" and other stuff like that is actually a total waste of effort and money.
Having been on a number of textbook selection committees (blegh, I wasn't quick enough to say "Not it!") unfortuately these things have come to be expected. Again, faculty often are not capable of making good judgements of how readable a text is to a moderately prepared student, and oftenn make judgements based upon (to my mind) relatively spurious issues like order of topics, notation used, or whether or not they will need to revise their notes extensively.