I want to add a data points (anecdote). I'm an English professor. For several years, I've noticed that students will keep repeating the same easily-corrected mistakes in paper after paper. I offer corrections, advice, and instruction in class. I began to suspect that students were not reading the comments. I gradually came to believe that the phones out in class were not being used for note-taking. This semester I have taught a content-heavy lecture course. Since it's new, and I'm up for tenure, and student feedback is extremely important at my institution, I decided to kiss some ass by recording lectures during which I gave test review--especially since about 50% of students show up for class. I then posted those recordings on Blackboard for my students. Despite this, the test scores stayed around 60%. Now, this is asking questions like "Which of the following was the first Gothic cathedral?" (We talked about that cathedral for a week) or "Which emperor started the construction of Constantinople's first city walls?" (Dur, Constantine?) And students were getting these wrong. So I looked at the statistics for the audio files I'd posted. Out of four audio files, one for each test, one had been listened to. Bog standard MP3, low nitrate. No technical problem. And students WERE logging in to check grades. Nope. They clearly just gave not shit one about studying. (NB: I don't entirely suck as a teacher; my students typically compliment me for making material interesting, etc, on evals.) I read a lot about how helicopter breeders and spoon-feeding teachers are destroying the minds of youth. About how phones, etc, are destroying the minds of youth. Well. I don't know. But something is. TL;DR? Short version: Fuck this. When I get tenure, I'm going to spend all day in my office reading comic books.
I upgraded to Mavericks from Snow Leopard because a lot of my mainline apps were only getting Mavericks-compatible updates. The best thing I can say about Mavericks is that it doesn't suck as much as I expected. I'm not noticing a slowdown, but I moved to an SSD for the OS drive at the same time, and I'm on an '09 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM, so those things may be concealing an OS-related slowdown. At any rate, I'd say that you shouldn't make the move to Mavericks if you don't have to, especially if you have an older machine. It's mostly just a bunch of stupid eye-candy. Yes, I know: App Nap!* Memory efficiency! Battery efficiency! But my battery use was already fine, RAM is often dirt cheap, and App Nap's main function on my machine is to pop up the rainbow pinwheel when I'm in a hurry.
Tolkien's edition of Gawain and the Green Knight is really good. A layperson can easily learn how to pronounce the Middle English of the text, which being a bit "Northern" is somewhat "older" and different than that of Chaucer. There's also a useful glossary. It's really a great book. If you like Tolkien, and you haven't read it, you should probably take a look at it. On the other hand, the claims above about Tolkien being the person who brought the Medieval into the Modern must come from a very narrow perspective. The Medieval was always there. Think of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, or of Walter Scott. And Tolkien was far from the only fantasist whose work drew heavily on the Medieval. In fact, and I know this is heretical, but there are works out there that are in many ways better than his. But his world is amazing, his scholarship quite useful, and, in my opinion, he was on the right side of the issue with C.S. Lewis. (As a final note, he made an interesting contribution to an interesting little mystery, the "Nodens" ring and inscription. Also fun to check out.) A final, final note: Seamus Heany's version of Beowulf is a pretty good read too.
Some institutions intentionally don't look too closely. The university at which I work, a state university in the southeastern US, will take a person with a degree from the University of Phoenix or even with an honorary degree. Doesn't matter, just as long as you have the right political connections. The Tennessee Board of Regents actually passed a resolution or made a statement, I forget the correct terms, that a degree is a degree. This is when a basketball coach was found to have a diploma mill degree. And then there are all the faculty who are found to have completely lied about their degrees.... So, no, I think sometimes this sort of publication credential gaming is just one part of a larger and very corrupt system. (And this may draw fire: I think this has gotten worse and worse as university administrations have become heavier and heaver and costlier and costlier AND as those posts have come to be filled, at least at mid-level schools by people with no real academic credentials, among which I'd include business and education degrees.)
With respect to your low uid# and the awesome bit of Schiller in your sig, I have to point that the age of the vellum does little to prove that the text originates earlier than some assumptions. Vellum was used over and over. So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.
I wish the author of that article provided links to the information about letter forms. I'd like to read about that. The age of the vellum doesn't help much, as vellum was often re-used. Of course, there may be evidence that this text was the first use of the vellum, though the article does mention finding previous text with a blacklight. Maybe I should be glad there aren't links to this other research. I might lose half my morning.
Do a slower and more thorough Google search. You might find out why I advised "root it and install a more capable e-reader app," you might want to Google that too. Forgive my impatience if you have a model of Kindle that isn't based on Android.
The obvious part: Root it and install a more capable e-reader app. My recommendation: I prefer Moon+ Reader Pro, which will not only give you a highlighted and annotated file you can use elsewhere, it can also, with one click, generate a document with annotations and highlights only that you can e-mail to yourself. I should not that this is something even Acrobat Pro can't do, and also note that Moon+ is more feature complete and easy to use than is Adobe's offering for Android. NB: I don't have any stake in Moon+, nor give a crap what money they make. I'm sharing because I spent too much time wading thru all the e-reader apps to find this one.
In my experience (just over 20 years teaching English courses), students in the first two years of college are horrible now compared to 10-15 years ago. At upper levels, students are indeed working much harder. But part of the harder work is a lot of flailing around because most bright students have never had to study, organize, research, or any of the basic scholarly skills. School has just been so easy. ---- I'm reluctant to address grade inflation on slashdot because so much of the discussion on teaching here is from only the student perspective, and typically from disaffected students who see education as some sort of market exchange. It's got a much older set of models, and that complicates the hell out of things. For reasons good and bad, faculty tend hang onto some Medieval ideas like mentoring, patronage, whipping people into shape, and separating wheat from chaff. As I said, good and bad reasons. ---- But major influences on grades just don't come up in these discussions, so I'll offer two: retention and rehiring. Administrators and evaluating bodies continually yell "retention." What can you do if all your students suck because they're getting shit for a high school education? Dumb down the classes and pass them. Or don't, and your department suffers. Or you do. That brings me to rehiring. Many classes, right on up to the senior level are now taught by "contingent" faculty--the majority of faculty now are contingent. Nontenured. Rehired year by year. If you're contingent, you'd better listen when someone howls retention. And you'd better make damn sure that little Pauly Privileged doesn't go running to your chair bawling because he got a C for his paper copied from Wikipedia. Better give that brat a B so that you can keep paying your student loans. Presto! Grade inflation. ---- There are other reasons. And I know everyone here is super brilliant and earned those A grades.
Well. Maybe the KKK is greatly reduced, but the "Southern Strategy" is alive and well, as is racism, as both a factor in campaigns and elections, as well as in districting for elections, zoning, and education funding. Hell, what about Birmingham being back in the Supreme Court of the Voting Rights Act?
A pair of F2s passed on either side of my house once. One was about 100 yards away, the other was less than 20. I wasn't shitting myself, but I was juggling a beer, a cigarette, and a rather small pipe as I peeped up thru a basement window. If I'd had glue to sniff, that'd have been in the rotation too. F2 is plenty big enough, thank you! Each of the two utterly destroyed houses along the two east-west streets they were traveling.
Clearly the parent hasn't read much history. Military over-expenditures and boondoggles go way, way back. Hell, I was just reading about similar problems in the 14th century.
I'm sure what you describe happens. I'm also sure--because I've been in the classroom as student or teacher--that a lot of young white men get butthurt when the concept of white, male privilege is broached in the least way. Some guys at that point will immediately holler that they're being oppressed. As a teacher, I will be the first to admit that K-12 and college are filled with horrible, ignorant, non-thinking, reactionary teachers of all political stripes. But we've done that to ourselves. In all the states I've taught in (at the college level), K-12 teachers start out and often continue to earn at the same level as a non-experienced starting line worker in a non-union auto-plant, about $32-34k a year. You're not going to get intelligent people with that sort of cash. And then there are the "education" programs out there that teach tons of nonsense (which is only superseded by the sort of nonsense peddled by the home-schooling industry). Anyway: sure, some teachers suck and are bullies when it comes to race. But in my experience it's far more often that complaining student is a whiner. (I don't use this blunt tone in class. I prefer to slowly encourage the precious little snowflakes to think, rather than to alienate them by speaking to them like the adults they think they are.)
A lot of people don't seem to understand how tax brackets work, nor do they read closely. Mr. Anonymous Coward is a good example. Let's take a look: "I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%." If the 90% tax bracket kicks in at five million dollars, the first dollar earned after five million would be taxed at 90%. You'd only get a dime on it, and Uncle Sam would get 90 cents. Everything earned by that would be taxed at the lower rates of the lower brackets. The first 50k would still be taxed at less than 15%. That's not "in poverty."
As a professor, I'd welcome a monoculture. I'd love for all my students to have the same machine with the same OS and the same apps. Otherwise, every class with a computer component becomes a class in teaching half the students how to change systems settings or whatever on different machines. The average student doesn't have any great computer competence, despite the "digital natives" hype. They can get on Facebook or use Google, but inserting a header in a document or hooking up to an external monitor is beyond them. I can really understand why other educators would want a "monoculture." (However, I think the emphasis on computers in education is misplaced and overhyped. My students, at the college level, would benefit much more from learning touch typing and a few basics than from whatever malarky they're being taught now.)
Meh. I spend 40 hours a week after work teaching underprivileged children yoga. I volunteer to be a practice dummy at the police firing range. I've donated all my major organs to the Red Crescent, and I've sent my bones off to fertilize the roses at the local battered women's shelter. I developed a forty-two bazillion line software project intended to help developing nations coffee farmers integrate the principles of feng shui into outhouse production, and I have given up my own sex organs to be used by sex surrogates for elderly veterans. And I've accomplished all of this while taking care of my own family and my own job, up hill both ways, ten miles, in the snow, every day!
Looking at things like impact factor of the journal or the number of times the article is cited require reading/counting* skills most deans don't seem to have--at least based on how most of them seem unable to read contracts or faculty handbooks. (*It seems skills learned while counting beans do not transfer well.)
Why is this modded "insightful"? It should be modded "completely ignorant of history." Marriage is legislated as far back as Hammurabi's code. It is regulated in the Islamic Hadith, in Jewish law, in early Christian law, and in Daoist and Confucian systems. I'm sure it's regulated in other religious systems, but I don't have knowledge of them. And the statement "Religion cannot coexist with government"? The list of state religions is too long to list before I finish my coffee. Not to mention all the religions that are coexisting with government right now. I say all this as an atheist and critic of the value of religions. We have enough fantasists in high office, on TV, in pulpits as it is. We don't need to go modding this particular denier of reality as "insightful."
I keep reading about this bubble, but I don't experience in my daily life. I am by political inclination pretty far to the left, but I run into plenty of right-wing opinions, from the libertarians on Slashdot to the Tea Party people on Facebook. I interact with moderate Republicans at work and extreme (God needs to cleanse this nation! Gold Standard!) Republicans in my neighborhood. I have no sense that there's a bubble. I sometimes wish there was a bubble that could filter out all the idiots. Some of the best days of my life were spent hanging out with people of varied and conflicting views who were all intelligent and capable of mutual respect and civility. I'd love a bubble like that. But, again, I don't see any damn bubble in my daily life. Why's it getting broadcast so much? Cui bono?
I have a doctorate in English from a better state university (University of State_name). I worked with people well-known in my field. I have teaching awards, research awards, and publications. I'm willing to work anywhere in the US except places I can't afford (where I couldn't get hired anyway): San Francisco, NYC, etc. After searching for a job for four years, I ended up at a school in the deep South that's ranked near the bottom. I work with people who have doctorates from Brown, Purdue, Penn State, and the like. We earn, at the start $44-49k/yr. During the job search, I got quite a few interviews and would be enthusiastically supported by a few members of the committee, but would get beat out by someone a little better, or a little younger. I was lucky, though, and have always been a scholarship boy, so I don't have a crushing student loan debt, "only" $50k. But that debt is a significant burden for my family, and, without it, we would have been able to buy a house much earlier. (Also: I left out the part where I taught at a major research school for four years off the tenure track with 100-135 students a semester, half of them composition students, for $32k/yr, with only annual contracts. I worked between 55 and 60 hours a week during the semester. 40 in the summers, trying to get out publications and doing extra teaching so that we could afford to live in a f*cking shack.) So, yes, when anyone tells you "Be careful. Yes, do it for love, but for god's sake, consider the consequences!" You'd be wise to quit being a callow little Holden Snotfield and listen to what we're trying to tell you. Better yet, go look at the job market figures over at the MLA and AAUP websites. Don't be a chump.
I have no problem addressing theories of divine creation in a humanities class. It's an appropriate topic for religion, philosophy, history, etc.. But it's a problem in a science classroom. There's a limited amount of time, and students in science class should be investigating ideas that are falsifiable, amenable to the scientific method. If we want to do creationism, AWESOME! Let's bust out Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and the whole fat lot and throw up against Lyell and his gang. It'd be an awesome scrap. But, again, today's public school curricula really give very little time to science, and I'd frankly rather students learn the mechanisms of science in science class. SCIENCE. Which is based, in terms of the history of ideas, in skepticism and materialism--granted, with fat doses of mostly counterproductive hoo-ha metaphysics, but SCIENCE!!! (The last two instances of all-caps should be performed in the voice of Thomas Dolby.)
If ten a month is the standard load for a reviewer, I think there's already a problem. Reading an article should probably be allotted at least an hour. Any fact-checking will take more. I read articles for the humanities, and that's pretty easy. You can spot a bullshitter pretty quickly, in a page or two. But I'd imagine science can be trickier. So, the half-hour or so it might take me to be sure that it's crap would probably double for science. At a minimum. I say minimum because reading a stack of a dozen poetry submissions can easily take me over an hour, and that's really not very much text. Then you have the separate but connected problem of being rushed or just feeling sick and tired of the stack and rushing through it. It seems to me like it's a recipe for rubber-stamping and carelessness. I know that a science journal my ex-wife worked for sent out far fewer articles a month. But it was a small journal on a narrow topic. I think that it will boil down to, this whole issue, to the fact that you'll always be able to game the system. The process of peer-review doesn't end with publication. For good reasons.
I read an article a year or so ago claiming that this was a natural rhythm. Apparently quite a few intellectual workers had this pattern. The one I remember is John Milton. Sorry, too busy to run down the article for you!
Traffic fatalities and gun deaths are both just over 32,000 per annum in the United States. Most gun fatalities are self-inflicted, last I checked, around 60%. So I'd say that the cops are doing a damn fine job when they're ticketing/arresting people speeding, running lights, drinking/texting while driving and so on. Of course this particular cop seems to be a limit case, a bad example. As are those redlight cameras that are about revenue and not safety. Still, I don't think it's right to claim that traffic tickets are some kind of low-hanging fruit. It's also to comforting, easy, and disingenuous to point fingers at "real" bad guys when all of us are self-centered enough to occasionally put someone's life at risk because we're running a few minutes later, or want to eat or something else while driving. We can debate helmet laws and such, but I think we'd still have to acknowledge that traffic control is an important form of police work.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to add a data points (anecdote). I'm an English professor. For several years, I've noticed that students will keep repeating the same easily-corrected mistakes in paper after paper. I offer corrections, advice, and instruction in class. I began to suspect that students were not reading the comments. I gradually came to believe that the phones out in class were not being used for note-taking. This semester I have taught a content-heavy lecture course. Since it's new, and I'm up for tenure, and student feedback is extremely important at my institution, I decided to kiss some ass by recording lectures during which I gave test review--especially since about 50% of students show up for class. I then posted those recordings on Blackboard for my students. Despite this, the test scores stayed around 60%. Now, this is asking questions like "Which of the following was the first Gothic cathedral?" (We talked about that cathedral for a week) or "Which emperor started the construction of Constantinople's first city walls?" (Dur, Constantine?) And students were getting these wrong. So I looked at the statistics for the audio files I'd posted. Out of four audio files, one for each test, one had been listened to. Bog standard MP3, low nitrate. No technical problem. And students WERE logging in to check grades. Nope. They clearly just gave not shit one about studying. (NB: I don't entirely suck as a teacher; my students typically compliment me for making material interesting, etc, on evals.) I read a lot about how helicopter breeders and spoon-feeding teachers are destroying the minds of youth. About how phones, etc, are destroying the minds of youth. Well. I don't know. But something is. TL;DR? Short version: Fuck this. When I get tenure, I'm going to spend all day in my office reading comic books.
I upgraded to Mavericks from Snow Leopard because a lot of my mainline apps were only getting Mavericks-compatible updates. The best thing I can say about Mavericks is that it doesn't suck as much as I expected. I'm not noticing a slowdown, but I moved to an SSD for the OS drive at the same time, and I'm on an '09 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM, so those things may be concealing an OS-related slowdown. At any rate, I'd say that you shouldn't make the move to Mavericks if you don't have to, especially if you have an older machine. It's mostly just a bunch of stupid eye-candy. Yes, I know: App Nap!* Memory efficiency! Battery efficiency! But my battery use was already fine, RAM is often dirt cheap, and App Nap's main function on my machine is to pop up the rainbow pinwheel when I'm in a hurry.
Tolkien's edition of Gawain and the Green Knight is really good. A layperson can easily learn how to pronounce the Middle English of the text, which being a bit "Northern" is somewhat "older" and different than that of Chaucer. There's also a useful glossary. It's really a great book. If you like Tolkien, and you haven't read it, you should probably take a look at it. On the other hand, the claims above about Tolkien being the person who brought the Medieval into the Modern must come from a very narrow perspective. The Medieval was always there. Think of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, or of Walter Scott. And Tolkien was far from the only fantasist whose work drew heavily on the Medieval. In fact, and I know this is heretical, but there are works out there that are in many ways better than his. But his world is amazing, his scholarship quite useful, and, in my opinion, he was on the right side of the issue with C.S. Lewis. (As a final note, he made an interesting contribution to an interesting little mystery, the "Nodens" ring and inscription. Also fun to check out.) A final, final note: Seamus Heany's version of Beowulf is a pretty good read too.
Some institutions intentionally don't look too closely. The university at which I work, a state university in the southeastern US, will take a person with a degree from the University of Phoenix or even with an honorary degree. Doesn't matter, just as long as you have the right political connections. The Tennessee Board of Regents actually passed a resolution or made a statement, I forget the correct terms, that a degree is a degree. This is when a basketball coach was found to have a diploma mill degree. And then there are all the faculty who are found to have completely lied about their degrees.... So, no, I think sometimes this sort of publication credential gaming is just one part of a larger and very corrupt system. (And this may draw fire: I think this has gotten worse and worse as university administrations have become heavier and heaver and costlier and costlier AND as those posts have come to be filled, at least at mid-level schools by people with no real academic credentials, among which I'd include business and education degrees.)
With respect to your low uid# and the awesome bit of Schiller in your sig, I have to point that the age of the vellum does little to prove that the text originates earlier than some assumptions. Vellum was used over and over. So, unless we have some clear evidence that it has not been reused, the manuscript text may well be written on vellum significantly older than itself.
I wish the author of that article provided links to the information about letter forms. I'd like to read about that. The age of the vellum doesn't help much, as vellum was often re-used. Of course, there may be evidence that this text was the first use of the vellum, though the article does mention finding previous text with a blacklight. Maybe I should be glad there aren't links to this other research. I might lose half my morning.
Do a slower and more thorough Google search. You might find out why I advised "root it and install a more capable e-reader app," you might want to Google that too. Forgive my impatience if you have a model of Kindle that isn't based on Android.
The obvious part: Root it and install a more capable e-reader app. My recommendation: I prefer Moon+ Reader Pro, which will not only give you a highlighted and annotated file you can use elsewhere, it can also, with one click, generate a document with annotations and highlights only that you can e-mail to yourself. I should not that this is something even Acrobat Pro can't do, and also note that Moon+ is more feature complete and easy to use than is Adobe's offering for Android. NB: I don't have any stake in Moon+, nor give a crap what money they make. I'm sharing because I spent too much time wading thru all the e-reader apps to find this one.
In my experience (just over 20 years teaching English courses), students in the first two years of college are horrible now compared to 10-15 years ago. At upper levels, students are indeed working much harder. But part of the harder work is a lot of flailing around because most bright students have never had to study, organize, research, or any of the basic scholarly skills. School has just been so easy. ---- I'm reluctant to address grade inflation on slashdot because so much of the discussion on teaching here is from only the student perspective, and typically from disaffected students who see education as some sort of market exchange. It's got a much older set of models, and that complicates the hell out of things. For reasons good and bad, faculty tend hang onto some Medieval ideas like mentoring, patronage, whipping people into shape, and separating wheat from chaff. As I said, good and bad reasons. ---- But major influences on grades just don't come up in these discussions, so I'll offer two: retention and rehiring. Administrators and evaluating bodies continually yell "retention." What can you do if all your students suck because they're getting shit for a high school education? Dumb down the classes and pass them. Or don't, and your department suffers. Or you do. That brings me to rehiring. Many classes, right on up to the senior level are now taught by "contingent" faculty--the majority of faculty now are contingent. Nontenured. Rehired year by year. If you're contingent, you'd better listen when someone howls retention. And you'd better make damn sure that little Pauly Privileged doesn't go running to your chair bawling because he got a C for his paper copied from Wikipedia. Better give that brat a B so that you can keep paying your student loans. Presto! Grade inflation. ---- There are other reasons. And I know everyone here is super brilliant and earned those A grades.
Well. Maybe the KKK is greatly reduced, but the "Southern Strategy" is alive and well, as is racism, as both a factor in campaigns and elections, as well as in districting for elections, zoning, and education funding. Hell, what about Birmingham being back in the Supreme Court of the Voting Rights Act?
A pair of F2s passed on either side of my house once. One was about 100 yards away, the other was less than 20. I wasn't shitting myself, but I was juggling a beer, a cigarette, and a rather small pipe as I peeped up thru a basement window. If I'd had glue to sniff, that'd have been in the rotation too. F2 is plenty big enough, thank you! Each of the two utterly destroyed houses along the two east-west streets they were traveling.
Clearly the parent hasn't read much history. Military over-expenditures and boondoggles go way, way back. Hell, I was just reading about similar problems in the 14th century.
I'm sure what you describe happens. I'm also sure--because I've been in the classroom as student or teacher--that a lot of young white men get butthurt when the concept of white, male privilege is broached in the least way. Some guys at that point will immediately holler that they're being oppressed. As a teacher, I will be the first to admit that K-12 and college are filled with horrible, ignorant, non-thinking, reactionary teachers of all political stripes. But we've done that to ourselves. In all the states I've taught in (at the college level), K-12 teachers start out and often continue to earn at the same level as a non-experienced starting line worker in a non-union auto-plant, about $32-34k a year. You're not going to get intelligent people with that sort of cash. And then there are the "education" programs out there that teach tons of nonsense (which is only superseded by the sort of nonsense peddled by the home-schooling industry). Anyway: sure, some teachers suck and are bullies when it comes to race. But in my experience it's far more often that complaining student is a whiner. (I don't use this blunt tone in class. I prefer to slowly encourage the precious little snowflakes to think, rather than to alienate them by speaking to them like the adults they think they are.)
A lot of people don't seem to understand how tax brackets work, nor do they read closely. Mr. Anonymous Coward is a good example. Let's take a look: "I don't have a problem with someone's five-million-and-oneth dollar being taxed at 90%." If the 90% tax bracket kicks in at five million dollars, the first dollar earned after five million would be taxed at 90%. You'd only get a dime on it, and Uncle Sam would get 90 cents. Everything earned by that would be taxed at the lower rates of the lower brackets. The first 50k would still be taxed at less than 15%. That's not "in poverty."
As a professor, I'd welcome a monoculture. I'd love for all my students to have the same machine with the same OS and the same apps. Otherwise, every class with a computer component becomes a class in teaching half the students how to change systems settings or whatever on different machines. The average student doesn't have any great computer competence, despite the "digital natives" hype. They can get on Facebook or use Google, but inserting a header in a document or hooking up to an external monitor is beyond them. I can really understand why other educators would want a "monoculture." (However, I think the emphasis on computers in education is misplaced and overhyped. My students, at the college level, would benefit much more from learning touch typing and a few basics than from whatever malarky they're being taught now.)
Meh. I spend 40 hours a week after work teaching underprivileged children yoga. I volunteer to be a practice dummy at the police firing range. I've donated all my major organs to the Red Crescent, and I've sent my bones off to fertilize the roses at the local battered women's shelter. I developed a forty-two bazillion line software project intended to help developing nations coffee farmers integrate the principles of feng shui into outhouse production, and I have given up my own sex organs to be used by sex surrogates for elderly veterans. And I've accomplished all of this while taking care of my own family and my own job, up hill both ways, ten miles, in the snow, every day!
Looking at things like impact factor of the journal or the number of times the article is cited require reading/counting* skills most deans don't seem to have--at least based on how most of them seem unable to read contracts or faculty handbooks. (*It seems skills learned while counting beans do not transfer well.)
Why is this modded "insightful"? It should be modded "completely ignorant of history." Marriage is legislated as far back as Hammurabi's code. It is regulated in the Islamic Hadith, in Jewish law, in early Christian law, and in Daoist and Confucian systems. I'm sure it's regulated in other religious systems, but I don't have knowledge of them. And the statement "Religion cannot coexist with government"? The list of state religions is too long to list before I finish my coffee. Not to mention all the religions that are coexisting with government right now. I say all this as an atheist and critic of the value of religions. We have enough fantasists in high office, on TV, in pulpits as it is. We don't need to go modding this particular denier of reality as "insightful."
I keep reading about this bubble, but I don't experience in my daily life. I am by political inclination pretty far to the left, but I run into plenty of right-wing opinions, from the libertarians on Slashdot to the Tea Party people on Facebook. I interact with moderate Republicans at work and extreme (God needs to cleanse this nation! Gold Standard!) Republicans in my neighborhood. I have no sense that there's a bubble. I sometimes wish there was a bubble that could filter out all the idiots. Some of the best days of my life were spent hanging out with people of varied and conflicting views who were all intelligent and capable of mutual respect and civility. I'd love a bubble like that. But, again, I don't see any damn bubble in my daily life. Why's it getting broadcast so much? Cui bono?
I have a doctorate in English from a better state university (University of State_name). I worked with people well-known in my field. I have teaching awards, research awards, and publications. I'm willing to work anywhere in the US except places I can't afford (where I couldn't get hired anyway): San Francisco, NYC, etc. After searching for a job for four years, I ended up at a school in the deep South that's ranked near the bottom. I work with people who have doctorates from Brown, Purdue, Penn State, and the like. We earn, at the start $44-49k/yr. During the job search, I got quite a few interviews and would be enthusiastically supported by a few members of the committee, but would get beat out by someone a little better, or a little younger. I was lucky, though, and have always been a scholarship boy, so I don't have a crushing student loan debt, "only" $50k. But that debt is a significant burden for my family, and, without it, we would have been able to buy a house much earlier. (Also: I left out the part where I taught at a major research school for four years off the tenure track with 100-135 students a semester, half of them composition students, for $32k/yr, with only annual contracts. I worked between 55 and 60 hours a week during the semester. 40 in the summers, trying to get out publications and doing extra teaching so that we could afford to live in a f*cking shack.) So, yes, when anyone tells you "Be careful. Yes, do it for love, but for god's sake, consider the consequences!" You'd be wise to quit being a callow little Holden Snotfield and listen to what we're trying to tell you. Better yet, go look at the job market figures over at the MLA and AAUP websites. Don't be a chump.
I have no problem addressing theories of divine creation in a humanities class. It's an appropriate topic for religion, philosophy, history, etc.. But it's a problem in a science classroom. There's a limited amount of time, and students in science class should be investigating ideas that are falsifiable, amenable to the scientific method. If we want to do creationism, AWESOME! Let's bust out Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon and the whole fat lot and throw up against Lyell and his gang. It'd be an awesome scrap. But, again, today's public school curricula really give very little time to science, and I'd frankly rather students learn the mechanisms of science in science class. SCIENCE. Which is based, in terms of the history of ideas, in skepticism and materialism--granted, with fat doses of mostly counterproductive hoo-ha metaphysics, but SCIENCE!!! (The last two instances of all-caps should be performed in the voice of Thomas Dolby.)
You were offered a dictionary definition of democratize accompanied by the etymology. Whether you profit from that gift is up to you.
If ten a month is the standard load for a reviewer, I think there's already a problem. Reading an article should probably be allotted at least an hour. Any fact-checking will take more. I read articles for the humanities, and that's pretty easy. You can spot a bullshitter pretty quickly, in a page or two. But I'd imagine science can be trickier. So, the half-hour or so it might take me to be sure that it's crap would probably double for science. At a minimum. I say minimum because reading a stack of a dozen poetry submissions can easily take me over an hour, and that's really not very much text. Then you have the separate but connected problem of being rushed or just feeling sick and tired of the stack and rushing through it. It seems to me like it's a recipe for rubber-stamping and carelessness. I know that a science journal my ex-wife worked for sent out far fewer articles a month. But it was a small journal on a narrow topic. I think that it will boil down to, this whole issue, to the fact that you'll always be able to game the system. The process of peer-review doesn't end with publication. For good reasons.
I read an article a year or so ago claiming that this was a natural rhythm. Apparently quite a few intellectual workers had this pattern. The one I remember is John Milton. Sorry, too busy to run down the article for you!
Traffic fatalities and gun deaths are both just over 32,000 per annum in the United States. Most gun fatalities are self-inflicted, last I checked, around 60%. So I'd say that the cops are doing a damn fine job when they're ticketing/arresting people speeding, running lights, drinking/texting while driving and so on. Of course this particular cop seems to be a limit case, a bad example. As are those redlight cameras that are about revenue and not safety. Still, I don't think it's right to claim that traffic tickets are some kind of low-hanging fruit. It's also to comforting, easy, and disingenuous to point fingers at "real" bad guys when all of us are self-centered enough to occasionally put someone's life at risk because we're running a few minutes later, or want to eat or something else while driving. We can debate helmet laws and such, but I think we'd still have to acknowledge that traffic control is an important form of police work.