In all fairness, many people invested in degrees for teaching expecting ANY job, but now there are none, and schools are even canning people. Blaming the loan people is dumb, and I suppose blaming anybody is. But the economy and the state/federal govt have sure taken a dump on education. (I'd like to know where this $75k figure is coming from. In Iowa, you'd be looking at the mid-40s to high 50s in a well-funded school district. In Tennessee (god help you), you'd be looking at $35k. In Long Island, I was offered a job for $57, but that would just about rent me a broom closet with a diet of baloney sandwiches.)
Where was she going to school that she racked up $200,000 for a masters?! I'm sorry, but that's just crazy, especially if she plans on being a teacher. You know that most teachers would only make that much money in six or more years? And the master's took EIGHT years? That's getting a bit on the long side for a _doctorate_. Seriously, even with a full-time job, you should be able to pull off a master's in three; you can get those things in a box of cracker jacks these days. But you're right about student loans being a problem, but I hope they don't choose you guys for the poster, because your case doesn't inspire much sympathy.
I'm with you; students do deserve a real education for their tuition. I think U. of Phoenix, Kaplan, and the rest, are--for the most, most part--scams. My point is that the instructors aren't at fault. These institutions pay so poorly that an instructor must be overloaded to make a living, or to reach the full-time point at which they'll get any insurance. And the institutions set the curriculum AND have pretty rigorous requirements for the methods by which students are evaluated—methods adapted to the technology and the profit structure more than to pedagogical outcomes. Blaming the teacher under these circumstances is like blaming the burger flipper for not producing a healthy meal--the poor slob has to work, and YOU'RE the one who "walked" into the McCollege. Sadly, and I mean REALLY sadly, many four-year institutions are beginning to investigate ways to make their general education courses more like these monetized models, and for similar reasons: they want to reduce the "overhead" of teacher pay and physical infrastructure. I wish that I and other teachers could deal with you directly. You could cut your tuition by more than half, and I could still more than double my salary. But I'm afraid my stationery doesn't make as nice a diploma as the one you'll get from Degrees R Us.
Those "instructors" are underpaid and have far too many students. I know some of them, work with some who moonlight at Kaplan, Phoenix, and others in order to pay the bills. There's no way even the best and most highly-motivated teacher can be a real teacher given the workload they must maintain at these places just to keep the lights on at home. Further, the curricula are micromanaged at these places. They want the teacher to just plug and chug, and they really, really are waiting for the day when an algorithm can "evaluate" student work for them. The true purpose of these places is only to transfer money from federal aid programs to the investors. They have very little to do with education. (That said, even public universities are trending this way as they become increasingly top-heavy with administrators, many who've had some sort of MBA kool-aid, and who must make cuts because of yearly budget cuts to the institution. And, yes, it will be education that's cut, not athletics, infrastructure, or research--because those are assumed to bring in money.)
This varies widely from state-to-state and school to school. What you have to do is research, just as if you were purchasing a widget. Find out what sort of agreements your CC has with the U you hope to attend. It also helps too if you have prepared some information about the curriculum. Keep syllabi and completed papers in case you need to argue for a class. Also, when it comes to "advising" at most universities, well, it will suck. So you might want to spend some time making sure you're talking to someone who gives a damn. Or find a way to politely get them to give a damn about them, such as not being surly or impatient or entitled or impatient or what-have-you. (Surprisingly, these are the go-to strategies for many undergraduates, so I'm including them here as Bad Ideas, not because I have any reason to suspect anyone at/. Would be be surly, entitled, arrogant, or impatient.) I have had very good experience obtaining transfer credit, but I sat down with the person and went through each class, point-by-point, reciting what we'd covered, what I'd learned, and what requirements of the degree the class would cover. I did this from memory. That's persuasive. Of course, all this said, I found out something. Too much transfer credit, especially at the graduate level is not a good idea. If, for example, your field is to be the study of blue baboon mating calls, you don't want to transfer Primate Nookie 101--because you need to be courting your thesis or dissertation committee, getting faculty to know you who will go to bat for you, find money for you, mentor you, etc. So you want to take a lot of classes in your specialty to meet those profs. (And seriously, a final note: don't bother courting non-tenure faculty like me. We can't do you any good, beyond telling you maybe who to court or how to find the bathroom.)
"Unless you were a Saxon, I suppose." And they don't count, right? And spare the condescending "Northman-dy," especially when you're giving a version of history one could get from reading Asterix channeled through an Archie comic. It is in fact arguable, and has been argued by those more informed than me, that the decrease in violence by the "Vikings" was a product of being able to settle in York, Normandy, and so on. In essence, once they'd gotten what they wanted (and the climate improved back home), they stopped waging war to get what they wanted.
I'm reluctant to enter this conversation, given its very low standards for mutual respect, but I can't let this common, but to me incorrect, argument pass. How can we know how things would be without religion? That's just an initial logical fillip.
But how about all the pain that religion HAS caused? Europe was at war of Catholicism versus Protestantism for several hundred years. Islam and Christianity have been at war for longer than that. Granted, there were side issues of imperialism. But how about the persecution of Mormons? Mormons persecuting gays? What about the various killing sprees over doctrine in the early days of the Catholic church, when various heresies were eliminating by exterminating their adherents like so many cockroaches? Or (despite the Church's whitewash to the contrary) the tacit support or active participation of Catholic bishops in the German Nazi party of the 1930s-40s? (By the way, I qualify it as "German" and by date because I live in a city that will soon see a Nazi rally--one supported by numerous Christian organizations, such as the World Church of the Creator.) There are a myriad of examples, including persecution of Protestants in France in the 18thC, persecution of certain _types_ of Protestants in the United Kingdom at the same time, persecution of Jews, well, pretty much all the time. Most of my examples are of Christian abuses because that's what I know best. I'm sure the Buddhists and Hindis and Taoists and so on have had their hand in the bloodbath too.
Here's where religious apologists will say "But all these people were doing it wrong." They certainly were. But they were doing it. And if you say "They weren't Christian," be happy these folks aren't around to mete out the witch-burning, dunking, impaling, gassing, stoning, or what-have-you they'd think you deserve for not doing it right yourself.
This is not to say religion is all bad. But I suspect that the sum total of misery the world has received from the religious may well equal, or even exceed, any benefits of religion. By all means, I'm not saying religious people should go away, shut up, or even keep their sweaty Mormon and/or Baptist butts off my front porch (August is too hot for you to show up suggesting that I'm in for the worst fate you can imagine). But I do think liberal Christians should see to their coreligionists and quit worrying about atheists. And they should sure as hell keep their meddling little fingers out my government and schools.
Omnichad and Zugmeister---thanks very much for the help and advice. If the thing is drawing 220 at peak, it's not so bad, especially as I've pulled the video card (stupid failing fan on Radeon 8500) and as it mostly just idles along under whatever load Azureus puts on it. Still, I think I'll have to get one of these Kill-A-Watt things; they're surprisingly cheap, only 1.4 boxes of diapers (my new cost metric).
Can someone tell me how to get a rough estimate of the power draw on my old G4? It's a twin 500MHz gigabit Ethernet model. I tried googling, but I can't find this question addressed anywhere. I've been using the machine as a file/iTunes/Bittorrent/web server because I already had it AND I'm poor. But if it's costing me too much on electricity, I may just buy a hard drive to replace it, or maybe something to replace the server function.
M1 is a bit old school. There are a LOT of spammers, and you'd need a higher rate of fire. I'd suggest a Saiga 12. Or if you really want the retro look, an AK-47 is still hard to beat.
Re:Are tech. advances contributing?
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, OK. But keep in mind your bias. Very few homes nation-wide had or could afford personal computers in the 80s. Since then, a number of technologies have proliferated (and become more affordable, to a degree) that encourage interacting with the device/medium in scripted ways: cable television, the internet, computers, computer and console games, cell phones. All these things happened at the same time that obesity began to skyrocket and (according to this article) creativity began to decline. This is also the same time when our schools began to get "back to basics" and cut programs like art, photography, and even recess. Variety is important, and moving from one screen to another doesn't cut it. Still, I'm uncertain about my own claim here, as a great deal of creativity begins at a very young age. I'm also not taking into account that the 80s marked the beginning of greatly increasing hours at work for most adults, and greater competition for jobs, as well as a tendency to spend more and more on consumer goods and service, an increase influenced by more readily available consumer credit. So much less parental involvement is possible. I say that as an often-exhausted parent. I guess, for me, it boils down to a perfect storm of impending idiocracy. I say this as an English teacher. I can see the change in the papers I've collected in the last five and ten years.
You're leaving some very significant details out of the story of van Meegeren. First, the man (Bredius) who sold the fakes is the same guy who validated the fakes. And not only did that fellow have a vested interest a person benefitting monetarily (hugely monetarily, as these things were hot on the market), finding "new" Vermeers was a huge deal at the time, made you famous. This fellow Bredius was getting old, his rep slipping, so finding a stack of new Vermeers from this secret source made it easy for him to deceive himself about the legitimacy of the van Meegeremeers. That said, you have a point about mystique, one well-covered in Berger's Ways of Seeing. BUT, I bet most people would take a look at the Girl with a Pearl Earring and say "very nice." It is to me, anyway. Certainly there's a lot to be said about paintings, particularly, as a token of wealth and power. The point you're on the way to making, about "staying power" seems a funny one to me. Why exactly is staying power the measure of "greatness"? And what the fuck is greatness, and why should we give a damn? No one really listens to Grandmaster Flash these days, but he was hugely important in his moment. Similarly, there were long periods of time when people ignored John Donne or the presocratic philosophers, and then those figures rose to prominence again when their value once more became apparent or when they were needed once more.
I know a guy who's a former rabbi and is currently a professor of religion. He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality. Basically, you don't just rape strangers. You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women. He told me a lot more about it, but I'm afraid that I can't recall all of it. I'm not offering this as a counter-argument, just as a possible interesting avenue to consider.
Irony is actually quite complex and has been the subject of a long conversation lasting for millennia. Since your "get over it" is annoying and knowledge seems to cause you pain, I'll continue. There are numerous forms of irony: classical, rhetorical, romantic, tragic, cosmic, verbal, dramatic, and poetic. Rhetorical irony, according to Cicero and Quintillian, can be further subdivided into eleven categories, including--esp. notable on this occasion--sarcasm and mycterism (sneering). I suppose whether or not this is "stuff that matters" depends upon your perspective. But, whether it matters to you or not, it still is. And it matters to others. Just change the channel if you don't like what's on.
Not all reading is prose with indented quotations or other formatting that doesn't re-flow well. Everything I would need to read on such a device has formatting that needs to be preserved. A short list of such features: indented quotations, verse, 2+ column lists, graphs, charts, figures. And you really earn your handle with the remark on PDF: all my professional publications available online are in PDF. This is true of just about all fields' journals. Basically what I'm saying is that reflowable text is fine for a limited subset of pleasure reading, but most professional reading relies upon spatial organization and graphical representation of information.
Well, there goes my ability to save my students trips to the reserve room. Like many others, I slap things on Blackboard (POS) or other CMS. Now that'll no doubt be prohibited. And here's the comparison. I had to sign away the rights to my dissertation in order to graduate. Why? Digitizing. Oh sweet irony! The library has a corp come in to do the digitizing of dissertations. That costs, so the library signed a deal where the corp gets the right to disseminate the material with little or no money coming back to me or the school. They digitize my work and then get to sell it to others for to cover their costs. Forever. If I become well-known, and my work becomes valuable (I should be so lucky!), they'll have my work to peddle in perpetuity. What's the point of comparison? The sore feeling in my bottom, and your bottom, and the bottoms of students and faculty across the nation.
I'm glad someone else brought up the Nature boycott. I fully support it. These publishers are milking and bilking as they see other revenue streams dry up.
This is a great idea, and many younger faculty are pushing for it. And something like it was more prevalent in the days of the course pack--back before copyright got so well-enforced. There is, however, one major, major problem. Academic advancement is based on publication. And publication means something official, sanctioned, passed by the gatekeepers. So if a prof. writes a book or collects materials and puts them online herself, she's done nothing to advance her career. In the first seven years of your career, this could mean failing to get tenure, which means losing your job. After tenure, you need to publish a) to advance to the next rank of professor and b) to secure your department's standing in the college, which means keeping secure its lines of funding for tenured faculty, research money, graduate student funding, number of classrooms you can get, and so on. The answer is pretty simple: such self-publications as you describe should be counted as professional work. However, that means that people outside your field, with little competence in your field, or perhaps little competence at all, as they'll be college administrators, will have to decide on the value of your self-published work. Given that it's often to the benefit of the college to deny professors tenure for political or cost reasons (new people are cheaper), I would be very reluctant to trust the judgement of administrators. Another option that gets floated is to have outside certifying boards, but that would likely be expensive and slow because we'd quickly see a rapid boom in such materials. So, in short: what seems efficient and would be a good thing can't happen because it doesn't contribute well toward evaluation of people. Does that remind you of pointless final exams and fill-in-the-bubble evaluations? It should.
This comes up frequently. Does anyone who says this have ANY idea of how little royalties are for these books? Does anyone ever stop to consider that the prof who wrote the book might well believe that the book he or she wrote is the BEST book in the field? (Of course it may be crap, but the author is likely to be convinced of its value.) I regularly assign students to read things I've written--not books, mind you, but brief essays or other preparatory materials. The only difference is no money is changing hands. But, if and when I have enough material, it will become a book I will then likely assign. The way I see it, I am thereby freed up to talk about OTHER things, such as nuances of the material, recent developments, or applications. Finally, I can't imagine that anyone teaching is doing it for the money. If you're in the sciences, you likely are or could be making much more in industry. In the humanities, you're not going to be making money no matter where you go--and you knew that starting out. This tiresome idea that the prof is price-gouging students is why faculty can't provide simple services like bringing in a box of bluebooks, folder, or what-have-you and asking a nickel apiece for them. Instead students have to make an extra trip to the campus bookstore to get charged more for the same item. Anyway, seriously, at their most malevolent, for the majority, faculty are indifferent to students. But the greatest part of us actually like and care about the people we teach.
I think this oil spill is a little more abstract than seeing one of our continent's major cities inundated and its populace not only more or less abandoned but for the major response to be the allocation of armed troops to the area. Further, New Orleans and its black citizens have a bad history that would make people likely to be suspicious. Yes, this is a mess. But what exactly would have happened if Obama had said no offshore drilling? Wouldn't that have made Palin and other Republicans ecstatic for just one more "look at the commie negro" opportunity? Frankly, the whole political scene in the US is a cesspit, and it's because we already live in the world imagined in Idiocracy. From the gutted schools to the sycophantic media to the narcissistic and selfish populace, we're all to blame for this. Just turn up the AC, turn on the tube, crank up Red Dead Carjack, lean back and enjoy the coast into oblivion.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "ogle," smartypants.
Just got one more data-point from a friend: math teacher with master's teaching at a private high school in Manhattan makes $50k.
In all fairness, many people invested in degrees for teaching expecting ANY job, but now there are none, and schools are even canning people. Blaming the loan people is dumb, and I suppose blaming anybody is. But the economy and the state/federal govt have sure taken a dump on education. (I'd like to know where this $75k figure is coming from. In Iowa, you'd be looking at the mid-40s to high 50s in a well-funded school district. In Tennessee (god help you), you'd be looking at $35k. In Long Island, I was offered a job for $57, but that would just about rent me a broom closet with a diet of baloney sandwiches.)
Where was she going to school that she racked up $200,000 for a masters?! I'm sorry, but that's just crazy, especially if she plans on being a teacher. You know that most teachers would only make that much money in six or more years? And the master's took EIGHT years? That's getting a bit on the long side for a _doctorate_. Seriously, even with a full-time job, you should be able to pull off a master's in three; you can get those things in a box of cracker jacks these days. But you're right about student loans being a problem, but I hope they don't choose you guys for the poster, because your case doesn't inspire much sympathy.
I'm with you; students do deserve a real education for their tuition. I think U. of Phoenix, Kaplan, and the rest, are--for the most, most part--scams. My point is that the instructors aren't at fault. These institutions pay so poorly that an instructor must be overloaded to make a living, or to reach the full-time point at which they'll get any insurance. And the institutions set the curriculum AND have pretty rigorous requirements for the methods by which students are evaluated—methods adapted to the technology and the profit structure more than to pedagogical outcomes. Blaming the teacher under these circumstances is like blaming the burger flipper for not producing a healthy meal--the poor slob has to work, and YOU'RE the one who "walked" into the McCollege. Sadly, and I mean REALLY sadly, many four-year institutions are beginning to investigate ways to make their general education courses more like these monetized models, and for similar reasons: they want to reduce the "overhead" of teacher pay and physical infrastructure. I wish that I and other teachers could deal with you directly. You could cut your tuition by more than half, and I could still more than double my salary. But I'm afraid my stationery doesn't make as nice a diploma as the one you'll get from Degrees R Us.
Those "instructors" are underpaid and have far too many students. I know some of them, work with some who moonlight at Kaplan, Phoenix, and others in order to pay the bills. There's no way even the best and most highly-motivated teacher can be a real teacher given the workload they must maintain at these places just to keep the lights on at home. Further, the curricula are micromanaged at these places. They want the teacher to just plug and chug, and they really, really are waiting for the day when an algorithm can "evaluate" student work for them. The true purpose of these places is only to transfer money from federal aid programs to the investors. They have very little to do with education. (That said, even public universities are trending this way as they become increasingly top-heavy with administrators, many who've had some sort of MBA kool-aid, and who must make cuts because of yearly budget cuts to the institution. And, yes, it will be education that's cut, not athletics, infrastructure, or research--because those are assumed to bring in money.)
This varies widely from state-to-state and school to school. What you have to do is research, just as if you were purchasing a widget. Find out what sort of agreements your CC has with the U you hope to attend. It also helps too if you have prepared some information about the curriculum. Keep syllabi and completed papers in case you need to argue for a class. Also, when it comes to "advising" at most universities, well, it will suck. So you might want to spend some time making sure you're talking to someone who gives a damn. Or find a way to politely get them to give a damn about them, such as not being surly or impatient or entitled or impatient or what-have-you. (Surprisingly, these are the go-to strategies for many undergraduates, so I'm including them here as Bad Ideas, not because I have any reason to suspect anyone at /. Would be be surly, entitled, arrogant, or impatient.) I have had very good experience obtaining transfer credit, but I sat down with the person and went through each class, point-by-point, reciting what we'd covered, what I'd learned, and what requirements of the degree the class would cover. I did this from memory. That's persuasive. Of course, all this said, I found out something. Too much transfer credit, especially at the graduate level is not a good idea. If, for example, your field is to be the study of blue baboon mating calls, you don't want to transfer Primate Nookie 101--because you need to be courting your thesis or dissertation committee, getting faculty to know you who will go to bat for you, find money for you, mentor you, etc. So you want to take a lot of classes in your specialty to meet those profs. (And seriously, a final note: don't bother courting non-tenure faculty like me. We can't do you any good, beyond telling you maybe who to court or how to find the bathroom.)
"Unless you were a Saxon, I suppose." And they don't count, right? And spare the condescending "Northman-dy," especially when you're giving a version of history one could get from reading Asterix channeled through an Archie comic. It is in fact arguable, and has been argued by those more informed than me, that the decrease in violence by the "Vikings" was a product of being able to settle in York, Normandy, and so on. In essence, once they'd gotten what they wanted (and the climate improved back home), they stopped waging war to get what they wanted.
I'm reluctant to enter this conversation, given its very low standards for mutual respect, but I can't let this common, but to me incorrect, argument pass. How can we know how things would be without religion? That's just an initial logical fillip. But how about all the pain that religion HAS caused? Europe was at war of Catholicism versus Protestantism for several hundred years. Islam and Christianity have been at war for longer than that. Granted, there were side issues of imperialism. But how about the persecution of Mormons? Mormons persecuting gays? What about the various killing sprees over doctrine in the early days of the Catholic church, when various heresies were eliminating by exterminating their adherents like so many cockroaches? Or (despite the Church's whitewash to the contrary) the tacit support or active participation of Catholic bishops in the German Nazi party of the 1930s-40s? (By the way, I qualify it as "German" and by date because I live in a city that will soon see a Nazi rally--one supported by numerous Christian organizations, such as the World Church of the Creator.) There are a myriad of examples, including persecution of Protestants in France in the 18thC, persecution of certain _types_ of Protestants in the United Kingdom at the same time, persecution of Jews, well, pretty much all the time. Most of my examples are of Christian abuses because that's what I know best. I'm sure the Buddhists and Hindis and Taoists and so on have had their hand in the bloodbath too. Here's where religious apologists will say "But all these people were doing it wrong." They certainly were. But they were doing it. And if you say "They weren't Christian," be happy these folks aren't around to mete out the witch-burning, dunking, impaling, gassing, stoning, or what-have-you they'd think you deserve for not doing it right yourself. This is not to say religion is all bad. But I suspect that the sum total of misery the world has received from the religious may well equal, or even exceed, any benefits of religion. By all means, I'm not saying religious people should go away, shut up, or even keep their sweaty Mormon and/or Baptist butts off my front porch (August is too hot for you to show up suggesting that I'm in for the worst fate you can imagine). But I do think liberal Christians should see to their coreligionists and quit worrying about atheists. And they should sure as hell keep their meddling little fingers out my government and schools.
Omnichad and Zugmeister---thanks very much for the help and advice. If the thing is drawing 220 at peak, it's not so bad, especially as I've pulled the video card (stupid failing fan on Radeon 8500) and as it mostly just idles along under whatever load Azureus puts on it. Still, I think I'll have to get one of these Kill-A-Watt things; they're surprisingly cheap, only 1.4 boxes of diapers (my new cost metric).
Can someone tell me how to get a rough estimate of the power draw on my old G4? It's a twin 500MHz gigabit Ethernet model. I tried googling, but I can't find this question addressed anywhere. I've been using the machine as a file/iTunes/Bittorrent/web server because I already had it AND I'm poor. But if it's costing me too much on electricity, I may just buy a hard drive to replace it, or maybe something to replace the server function.
Don't you have a .22 you could start the guy out on, or was it more fun to intimidate him with the high-recoil stuff?
M1 is a bit old school. There are a LOT of spammers, and you'd need a higher rate of fire. I'd suggest a Saiga 12. Or if you really want the retro look, an AK-47 is still hard to beat.
Well, OK. But keep in mind your bias. Very few homes nation-wide had or could afford personal computers in the 80s. Since then, a number of technologies have proliferated (and become more affordable, to a degree) that encourage interacting with the device/medium in scripted ways: cable television, the internet, computers, computer and console games, cell phones. All these things happened at the same time that obesity began to skyrocket and (according to this article) creativity began to decline. This is also the same time when our schools began to get "back to basics" and cut programs like art, photography, and even recess. Variety is important, and moving from one screen to another doesn't cut it. Still, I'm uncertain about my own claim here, as a great deal of creativity begins at a very young age. I'm also not taking into account that the 80s marked the beginning of greatly increasing hours at work for most adults, and greater competition for jobs, as well as a tendency to spend more and more on consumer goods and service, an increase influenced by more readily available consumer credit. So much less parental involvement is possible. I say that as an often-exhausted parent. I guess, for me, it boils down to a perfect storm of impending idiocracy. I say this as an English teacher. I can see the change in the papers I've collected in the last five and ten years.
You're leaving some very significant details out of the story of van Meegeren. First, the man (Bredius) who sold the fakes is the same guy who validated the fakes. And not only did that fellow have a vested interest a person benefitting monetarily (hugely monetarily, as these things were hot on the market), finding "new" Vermeers was a huge deal at the time, made you famous. This fellow Bredius was getting old, his rep slipping, so finding a stack of new Vermeers from this secret source made it easy for him to deceive himself about the legitimacy of the van Meegeremeers. That said, you have a point about mystique, one well-covered in Berger's Ways of Seeing. BUT, I bet most people would take a look at the Girl with a Pearl Earring and say "very nice." It is to me, anyway. Certainly there's a lot to be said about paintings, particularly, as a token of wealth and power. The point you're on the way to making, about "staying power" seems a funny one to me. Why exactly is staying power the measure of "greatness"? And what the fuck is greatness, and why should we give a damn? No one really listens to Grandmaster Flash these days, but he was hugely important in his moment. Similarly, there were long periods of time when people ignored John Donne or the presocratic philosophers, and then those figures rose to prominence again when their value once more became apparent or when they were needed once more.
Um, the story of Sodom and all predates the Roman period by a significant margin.
I know a guy who's a former rabbi and is currently a professor of religion. He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality. Basically, you don't just rape strangers. You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women. He told me a lot more about it, but I'm afraid that I can't recall all of it. I'm not offering this as a counter-argument, just as a possible interesting avenue to consider.
Irony is actually quite complex and has been the subject of a long conversation lasting for millennia. Since your "get over it" is annoying and knowledge seems to cause you pain, I'll continue. There are numerous forms of irony: classical, rhetorical, romantic, tragic, cosmic, verbal, dramatic, and poetic. Rhetorical irony, according to Cicero and Quintillian, can be further subdivided into eleven categories, including--esp. notable on this occasion--sarcasm and mycterism (sneering). I suppose whether or not this is "stuff that matters" depends upon your perspective. But, whether it matters to you or not, it still is. And it matters to others. Just change the channel if you don't like what's on.
Not all reading is prose with indented quotations or other formatting that doesn't re-flow well. Everything I would need to read on such a device has formatting that needs to be preserved. A short list of such features: indented quotations, verse, 2+ column lists, graphs, charts, figures. And you really earn your handle with the remark on PDF: all my professional publications available online are in PDF. This is true of just about all fields' journals. Basically what I'm saying is that reflowable text is fine for a limited subset of pleasure reading, but most professional reading relies upon spatial organization and graphical representation of information.
Well, there goes my ability to save my students trips to the reserve room. Like many others, I slap things on Blackboard (POS) or other CMS. Now that'll no doubt be prohibited. And here's the comparison. I had to sign away the rights to my dissertation in order to graduate. Why? Digitizing. Oh sweet irony! The library has a corp come in to do the digitizing of dissertations. That costs, so the library signed a deal where the corp gets the right to disseminate the material with little or no money coming back to me or the school. They digitize my work and then get to sell it to others for to cover their costs. Forever. If I become well-known, and my work becomes valuable (I should be so lucky!), they'll have my work to peddle in perpetuity. What's the point of comparison? The sore feeling in my bottom, and your bottom, and the bottoms of students and faculty across the nation.
I'm glad someone else brought up the Nature boycott. I fully support it. These publishers are milking and bilking as they see other revenue streams dry up.
This is a great idea, and many younger faculty are pushing for it. And something like it was more prevalent in the days of the course pack--back before copyright got so well-enforced. There is, however, one major, major problem. Academic advancement is based on publication. And publication means something official, sanctioned, passed by the gatekeepers. So if a prof. writes a book or collects materials and puts them online herself, she's done nothing to advance her career. In the first seven years of your career, this could mean failing to get tenure, which means losing your job. After tenure, you need to publish a) to advance to the next rank of professor and b) to secure your department's standing in the college, which means keeping secure its lines of funding for tenured faculty, research money, graduate student funding, number of classrooms you can get, and so on. The answer is pretty simple: such self-publications as you describe should be counted as professional work. However, that means that people outside your field, with little competence in your field, or perhaps little competence at all, as they'll be college administrators, will have to decide on the value of your self-published work. Given that it's often to the benefit of the college to deny professors tenure for political or cost reasons (new people are cheaper), I would be very reluctant to trust the judgement of administrators. Another option that gets floated is to have outside certifying boards, but that would likely be expensive and slow because we'd quickly see a rapid boom in such materials. So, in short: what seems efficient and would be a good thing can't happen because it doesn't contribute well toward evaluation of people. Does that remind you of pointless final exams and fill-in-the-bubble evaluations? It should.
This comes up frequently. Does anyone who says this have ANY idea of how little royalties are for these books? Does anyone ever stop to consider that the prof who wrote the book might well believe that the book he or she wrote is the BEST book in the field? (Of course it may be crap, but the author is likely to be convinced of its value.) I regularly assign students to read things I've written--not books, mind you, but brief essays or other preparatory materials. The only difference is no money is changing hands. But, if and when I have enough material, it will become a book I will then likely assign. The way I see it, I am thereby freed up to talk about OTHER things, such as nuances of the material, recent developments, or applications. Finally, I can't imagine that anyone teaching is doing it for the money. If you're in the sciences, you likely are or could be making much more in industry. In the humanities, you're not going to be making money no matter where you go--and you knew that starting out. This tiresome idea that the prof is price-gouging students is why faculty can't provide simple services like bringing in a box of bluebooks, folder, or what-have-you and asking a nickel apiece for them. Instead students have to make an extra trip to the campus bookstore to get charged more for the same item. Anyway, seriously, at their most malevolent, for the majority, faculty are indifferent to students. But the greatest part of us actually like and care about the people we teach.
I think this oil spill is a little more abstract than seeing one of our continent's major cities inundated and its populace not only more or less abandoned but for the major response to be the allocation of armed troops to the area. Further, New Orleans and its black citizens have a bad history that would make people likely to be suspicious. Yes, this is a mess. But what exactly would have happened if Obama had said no offshore drilling? Wouldn't that have made Palin and other Republicans ecstatic for just one more "look at the commie negro" opportunity? Frankly, the whole political scene in the US is a cesspit, and it's because we already live in the world imagined in Idiocracy. From the gutted schools to the sycophantic media to the narcissistic and selfish populace, we're all to blame for this. Just turn up the AC, turn on the tube, crank up Red Dead Carjack, lean back and enjoy the coast into oblivion.
And the propellor is a "sail" whose surfaces are not perpendicular to the wind.