You don't have to make tenure and promotion "contingent" upon developing public-domain materials. You can just encourage it by allowing such work to count toward tenure. Such work is very time-consuming, especially if you're doing it for some form of publication because you have to make sure you're not infringing and that the work is near enough to perfect that it doesn't make you or the institution look bad in some way. All too often preparation of teaching materials counts for little or nothing, and the publication of online or free stuff or self-published stuff isn't regarded as counting for much. Frankly it often doesn't; it's just too easy for a lazy person to "publish" some twaddle as they look for promotion. So, in addition to allowing this stuff to count toward t&p, you also need some editorial oversight, which means you need some institution to pay for the people who will be doing that work, even if that "pay" is just release time.
A lot of recent research, which I will unkindly not cite, since you can get it with the Google, says that, no matter how much cardio you get otherwise, sitting at a desk all day is trashing your heart. Something about chemical signals sent from inactive leg muscles.
Sure. But that doesn't do anything to explain bipolar disorder, which is orders of magnitude beyond alienation/depression/anti-social behavior. The mania is unbelievable, people literally thinking they are god or can read minds, or losing any inhibitions in pleasure-seeking.
A quick Google search turns up several papers that take the Chronicle seriously enough when it comes to astronomical observation. Sure, some observations, like the convenient "heavenly light," but others, like the "sheets of light"--aurora borealis--seem plausible enough.
I use ethernet daily at home to back up my computer and to move video files, and I use it for all network needs at campus, where the wifi network is overburdened by increasing enrollments and omnipresent smartphones.
I was a student in those days. Yes, it might have been more difficult to keep track of paper. May have been; I'm not actually ready to concede that, as I had no trouble with my paper notes. We could talk about the f-ing typewriter, and how I always failed to notice I'd reached the end of the page and typed a solid black band.... But if I did concede that shuffling paper was somehow harder than shuffling computer files, I would say that such difficulty was minimized by the fact that there was far less material available to research and therefore we were held to a lower standard for number of sources and completeness of the field. Not only was it impossible to get material from major databases online, as there was no online really, but also physical delivery of books and articles was slower, more cumbersome, more expensive (at least as experienced by students and faculty). It was much more common to buy more books and to pirate more articles (via photocopy) than is necessary today. At any rate, the lowered expectations caused by lack of availability of material, and just a general dearth of the stuff (research has taken off in many fields since then), you had to do less reading. So there was less to keep track of. At any rate my dissertation contains about 2.5x as many items in its bibliography than do comparable dissertations in the same field that were written at the 70s and 80s. (Also way more words: professors haven't adapted to the fact that a typed page was about 125-150 words and a laser-printed page is 350+ words, so they still say "give me a 35-page chapter.....")
That matches my experience as a US college student in the 80s. But I don't buy the claim about inadvertent copying and pasting. "Oops, I stumbled, the mouse flew across the screen with the button down, and then my nose and forehead hit CTRL and C at the same time, as I struggled to get up, my ear and my tongue collided with the computer once more, likely hitting CTRL and V. I can only explain not noticing this with the confusion caused by my head injury."
As someone who finished a dissertation a few years ago, who has written scads of blog entries on my field, several articles, and a book chapter, I call BS on the notion that "it's hard" to avoid plagiarizing. I started college before the Internet. Research is easier now compared to then. And it's easier to cheat because ou don't actually have to type in the material you're swiping. But it's still easy to avoid plagiarism. All you have to do is record your sources when you take notes. Then credit them when you write: Joe Blow says rhyma lima ding dong. Easy peasy.
Are you serious AC? I'm not an uber-geek by any means, but a MacOS install is dead easy. And Windows isn't too bad. Just time consuming as all hell. I've only installed a Linux three times, and two of those were Ubuntu. So, again, not an expert, but all three times with Linux there were driver issues that required lots of thinking and tinkering and Googling. All in all, they took less time than a Windows install might, but that's because Windows has to download half of Redmond.
So true. It's far easier to pirate and ebook than to check one out of my local library. And yesterday I needed a book, wanted it fast, but it was only on Amazon. And I have a Nook. Research, installation, purchase, DRM-removal, conversion and all, learning how to break the DRM and get reading on the Nook took me less than 10 minutes. And in future, I'll be able to break DRM and get it on my Nook almost as fast as any other book. It only takes seconds to drag and drop a file on the DRM-stripping applet. On the other hand, I spent a couple of hours last spring trying to get a book checked out of my public library and onto the ereader software on my laptop. I never succeeded. After that two hours, and a final crescendo of cussing, I just went and got the book at Pirate Bay. I don't mind buying books, especially books I can justify professionally, like the one I needed yesterday. Heck, those are the only books I buy; I don't want to litter my house with more damn paper books, and I want to buy ebooks. But I don't like the runaround. And it sure doesn't deter me; it just motivates me to be a jerk.
I surf some sleazy websites, but my infections have come from e-mail attachments sent by coworkers and from a couple of flash videos I snagged from YouTube. All of the skanky pr0n I've downloaded seems to have been disease free.
Setting up ClamXav to scan the folders likely to be infected is a bit of a drag, but it's not much of a drag on system resources. I did this last week after a scan flagged some files on my Macbook as infected. They were mostly e-mail attachments from students and FLV files I'd gotten via Facebook posts. I figured that, since I share files quite a lot with colleagues, it'd be a good idea to check myself. The nice thing with ClamXav is that you can set it to scan lots or a little; it's not like that godawful stuff on Windows that seems designed to frack up your machine (excluding Security Essentials, which is very nice). The end result is a negligible drag on my processor, less than 1% if top is right, and I'm checking a very full list of candidate folders: all the launchagents, caches, internet plug-ins, along with obvious spots like ~/Downloads and the Mail.app attachments folder. I've been having ClamXav doing a full similar set of scans on an PPC machine for years now. It's a dual G4 500MHz machine, which is pretty weak by today's standards, yet ClamXav's process barely registers in top on it.
One popular theory holds is that it's the strongest bodily drive you can deny without causing death. Regulating this drive thru shaming and sumptuary law creates misery, which then leads the miserable to turn to spiritual authorities for comfort. Bada-bing; you got yourself a powerful positive feedback loop that puts Prada on the Pope.
The USA got really lucky. In part because the continent is so damned big. In part: big thank you to to a little guy named Napoleon. And to the folks who led the Haiti rebellion and got us the Louisiana Purchase at a bargain basement price. Also a shout-out to a bumbling Parliament working at cross-purposes because it had other/bigger fish to fry (such as electoral politics). And of course, a big big up to our original black founding fathers who got the "opportunity" because of an odd philosophical perversion to work for free to build this great nation. Now, people in Africa facing modern innovations like radio, barbed wire, and machine guns, well, the situation they faced was very, very different. Colonialism changed a lot as warfare grew increasingly asymmetrical. I know this will draw a lot of hate. But read about, just for one example, the Belgian Congo. Or check out the impact of the Cold War across Africa. And check the racist white man's burden bullshit at the door of the library.
There's a big difference between consumer goods, durable goods and infrastructure. As a side note to that, the provision of tube wells in the Sahel only led to increased desertification. So it wouldn't be much of a "gift" anyway.
No it won't. Some sinks in, some evaporates. And people don't generally pen up water to just let it sit there for recreational or hydro uses; they pen it up so that it can then be used on crops and such. So, no, flows would be drastically impacted. But if you don't buy the reasoning, just spend a little time Googling about water in the history, and present, of the US West.
This is very true, and I agree, but I want to add a however. However, when my college students, mostly from poor background, say they can't afford a textbook or a netbook, I do notice that they can afford that iPhone or honking big Android phone. And its service plan, because these kids ain't on Virgin mobile but are generally on Verizon.
I like guns, and I used to shoot a lot when I had more time. I don't think a firearm is a good idea for property defense. There are a lot of reasons. It's not trivial to be competent with a gun. The danger of a gun around the house in a ready state is not inconsequential. And the legal repercussions are, at the least, a much greater nuisance than filing an insurance claim and replacing lost items. I'd recommend just making your home less attractive to thieves with maybe a dog but certainly closed curtains, lights and a radio on a timer, and trying to be less predictable in your schedule. There are exceptions for some neighborhoods, and those exceptions, for me, would be if there's a lot of crime involving harm to people. For example, I lived in a neighborhood with lots of young people doing armed robberies that involved rape and murder. That's when you need a gun. But even more, you need to move. I mean, if you can avoid, why live in fear?
They don't work like grammar checkers. (Please note my hypocrisy: I compared these grading algos to grammar checkers just above.) They search for key words and phrases, so they're a little easier to make work "right" than grammar checkers. However, as several have pointed out, these things are really, really easy to game. It's like search engine optimization....
Amen to that. But of course truth is that teachers only do work from 8am-3pm, and they make $70,000 a year, the lazy bastards. College professors are even worse. I am one, so I know. I'm currently sitting in a desk chair made from aborted baby skin, smoking a fat splif rolled in Cuban tobacco while I assign Fs to student papers because these silly turkeys haven't already read their Marx. Mmmm, cognac. In a few minutes I'll drive my turbo Volvo convertible to the local Green Party meeting where we'll plan to synergize with the Illuminati to get Obama reelected. I wonder if I should wear my dreads down or up?
Yep. Good to hear from someone working in the belly of the foul beast Pearson. I've had the misfortune of testing some of their online assessment tools. The experience was not unlike being strapped to a table below a wire cage of masturbating monkeys suffering from Montezuma's revenge. I've also worked on similar assessment tools for major alphabet soup companies (NCS and ACT) fiddling around with very tight assessment models. They're only accurate when responding to being gamed. If anyone thinks they'll actually work, they're either smoking too much Markov chain model or so dopey they obey all the recommendations of Word's grammar checker. The state of the art in this field is still pretty artless. (This post would be less cranky if I weren't due at a four-hour meeting on assessment instruments.)
Not concerned with meeting curricular guidelines? Tenured I bet. I have to say, I've met so many students who have been beaten-down and beaten-up by English teachers. Just cutting someone some slack, working from where they're at, can make a hell of a lot of difference. I've received some of the best essays from guys who had been told they were not good writers, or were dumb jocks, or some other shit like that. (And I've received some of the worst essays from students who were supremely confident that they are good at English or that it's their best subject.... I suspect some teachers grade on how well students pucker up or shine them on.)
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to make tenure and promotion "contingent" upon developing public-domain materials. You can just encourage it by allowing such work to count toward tenure. Such work is very time-consuming, especially if you're doing it for some form of publication because you have to make sure you're not infringing and that the work is near enough to perfect that it doesn't make you or the institution look bad in some way. All too often preparation of teaching materials counts for little or nothing, and the publication of online or free stuff or self-published stuff isn't regarded as counting for much. Frankly it often doesn't; it's just too easy for a lazy person to "publish" some twaddle as they look for promotion. So, in addition to allowing this stuff to count toward t&p, you also need some editorial oversight, which means you need some institution to pay for the people who will be doing that work, even if that "pay" is just release time.
A lot of recent research, which I will unkindly not cite, since you can get it with the Google, says that, no matter how much cardio you get otherwise, sitting at a desk all day is trashing your heart. Something about chemical signals sent from inactive leg muscles.
Sure. But that doesn't do anything to explain bipolar disorder, which is orders of magnitude beyond alienation/depression/anti-social behavior. The mania is unbelievable, people literally thinking they are god or can read minds, or losing any inhibitions in pleasure-seeking.
A quick Google search turns up several papers that take the Chronicle seriously enough when it comes to astronomical observation. Sure, some observations, like the convenient "heavenly light," but others, like the "sheets of light"--aurora borealis--seem plausible enough.
I use ethernet daily at home to back up my computer and to move video files, and I use it for all network needs at campus, where the wifi network is overburdened by increasing enrollments and omnipresent smartphones.
Time for a new boondoggle!
I was a student in those days. Yes, it might have been more difficult to keep track of paper. May have been; I'm not actually ready to concede that, as I had no trouble with my paper notes. We could talk about the f-ing typewriter, and how I always failed to notice I'd reached the end of the page and typed a solid black band.... But if I did concede that shuffling paper was somehow harder than shuffling computer files, I would say that such difficulty was minimized by the fact that there was far less material available to research and therefore we were held to a lower standard for number of sources and completeness of the field. Not only was it impossible to get material from major databases online, as there was no online really, but also physical delivery of books and articles was slower, more cumbersome, more expensive (at least as experienced by students and faculty). It was much more common to buy more books and to pirate more articles (via photocopy) than is necessary today. At any rate, the lowered expectations caused by lack of availability of material, and just a general dearth of the stuff (research has taken off in many fields since then), you had to do less reading. So there was less to keep track of. At any rate my dissertation contains about 2.5x as many items in its bibliography than do comparable dissertations in the same field that were written at the 70s and 80s. (Also way more words: professors haven't adapted to the fact that a typed page was about 125-150 words and a laser-printed page is 350+ words, so they still say "give me a 35-page chapter.....")
That matches my experience as a US college student in the 80s. But I don't buy the claim about inadvertent copying and pasting. "Oops, I stumbled, the mouse flew across the screen with the button down, and then my nose and forehead hit CTRL and C at the same time, as I struggled to get up, my ear and my tongue collided with the computer once more, likely hitting CTRL and V. I can only explain not noticing this with the confusion caused by my head injury."
Of course that's casual memory and not research. Research is supposed to be documented.
As someone who finished a dissertation a few years ago, who has written scads of blog entries on my field, several articles, and a book chapter, I call BS on the notion that "it's hard" to avoid plagiarizing. I started college before the Internet. Research is easier now compared to then. And it's easier to cheat because ou don't actually have to type in the material you're swiping. But it's still easy to avoid plagiarism. All you have to do is record your sources when you take notes. Then credit them when you write: Joe Blow says rhyma lima ding dong. Easy peasy.
Are you serious AC? I'm not an uber-geek by any means, but a MacOS install is dead easy. And Windows isn't too bad. Just time consuming as all hell. I've only installed a Linux three times, and two of those were Ubuntu. So, again, not an expert, but all three times with Linux there were driver issues that required lots of thinking and tinkering and Googling. All in all, they took less time than a Windows install might, but that's because Windows has to download half of Redmond.
So true. It's far easier to pirate and ebook than to check one out of my local library. And yesterday I needed a book, wanted it fast, but it was only on Amazon. And I have a Nook. Research, installation, purchase, DRM-removal, conversion and all, learning how to break the DRM and get reading on the Nook took me less than 10 minutes. And in future, I'll be able to break DRM and get it on my Nook almost as fast as any other book. It only takes seconds to drag and drop a file on the DRM-stripping applet. On the other hand, I spent a couple of hours last spring trying to get a book checked out of my public library and onto the ereader software on my laptop. I never succeeded. After that two hours, and a final crescendo of cussing, I just went and got the book at Pirate Bay. I don't mind buying books, especially books I can justify professionally, like the one I needed yesterday. Heck, those are the only books I buy; I don't want to litter my house with more damn paper books, and I want to buy ebooks. But I don't like the runaround. And it sure doesn't deter me; it just motivates me to be a jerk.
No, no, no: pure maps is cartography and applied maps is geography.
I surf some sleazy websites, but my infections have come from e-mail attachments sent by coworkers and from a couple of flash videos I snagged from YouTube. All of the skanky pr0n I've downloaded seems to have been disease free.
Setting up ClamXav to scan the folders likely to be infected is a bit of a drag, but it's not much of a drag on system resources. I did this last week after a scan flagged some files on my Macbook as infected. They were mostly e-mail attachments from students and FLV files I'd gotten via Facebook posts. I figured that, since I share files quite a lot with colleagues, it'd be a good idea to check myself. The nice thing with ClamXav is that you can set it to scan lots or a little; it's not like that godawful stuff on Windows that seems designed to frack up your machine (excluding Security Essentials, which is very nice). The end result is a negligible drag on my processor, less than 1% if top is right, and I'm checking a very full list of candidate folders: all the launchagents, caches, internet plug-ins, along with obvious spots like ~/Downloads and the Mail.app attachments folder. I've been having ClamXav doing a full similar set of scans on an PPC machine for years now. It's a dual G4 500MHz machine, which is pretty weak by today's standards, yet ClamXav's process barely registers in top on it.
One popular theory holds is that it's the strongest bodily drive you can deny without causing death. Regulating this drive thru shaming and sumptuary law creates misery, which then leads the miserable to turn to spiritual authorities for comfort. Bada-bing; you got yourself a powerful positive feedback loop that puts Prada on the Pope.
The USA got really lucky. In part because the continent is so damned big. In part: big thank you to to a little guy named Napoleon. And to the folks who led the Haiti rebellion and got us the Louisiana Purchase at a bargain basement price. Also a shout-out to a bumbling Parliament working at cross-purposes because it had other/bigger fish to fry (such as electoral politics). And of course, a big big up to our original black founding fathers who got the "opportunity" because of an odd philosophical perversion to work for free to build this great nation. Now, people in Africa facing modern innovations like radio, barbed wire, and machine guns, well, the situation they faced was very, very different. Colonialism changed a lot as warfare grew increasingly asymmetrical. I know this will draw a lot of hate. But read about, just for one example, the Belgian Congo. Or check out the impact of the Cold War across Africa. And check the racist white man's burden bullshit at the door of the library.
There's a big difference between consumer goods, durable goods and infrastructure. As a side note to that, the provision of tube wells in the Sahel only led to increased desertification. So it wouldn't be much of a "gift" anyway.
No it won't. Some sinks in, some evaporates. And people don't generally pen up water to just let it sit there for recreational or hydro uses; they pen it up so that it can then be used on crops and such. So, no, flows would be drastically impacted. But if you don't buy the reasoning, just spend a little time Googling about water in the history, and present, of the US West.
This is very true, and I agree, but I want to add a however. However, when my college students, mostly from poor background, say they can't afford a textbook or a netbook, I do notice that they can afford that iPhone or honking big Android phone. And its service plan, because these kids ain't on Virgin mobile but are generally on Verizon.
I like guns, and I used to shoot a lot when I had more time. I don't think a firearm is a good idea for property defense. There are a lot of reasons. It's not trivial to be competent with a gun. The danger of a gun around the house in a ready state is not inconsequential. And the legal repercussions are, at the least, a much greater nuisance than filing an insurance claim and replacing lost items. I'd recommend just making your home less attractive to thieves with maybe a dog but certainly closed curtains, lights and a radio on a timer, and trying to be less predictable in your schedule. There are exceptions for some neighborhoods, and those exceptions, for me, would be if there's a lot of crime involving harm to people. For example, I lived in a neighborhood with lots of young people doing armed robberies that involved rape and murder. That's when you need a gun. But even more, you need to move. I mean, if you can avoid, why live in fear?
They don't work like grammar checkers. (Please note my hypocrisy: I compared these grading algos to grammar checkers just above.) They search for key words and phrases, so they're a little easier to make work "right" than grammar checkers. However, as several have pointed out, these things are really, really easy to game. It's like search engine optimization....
Amen to that. But of course truth is that teachers only do work from 8am-3pm, and they make $70,000 a year, the lazy bastards. College professors are even worse. I am one, so I know. I'm currently sitting in a desk chair made from aborted baby skin, smoking a fat splif rolled in Cuban tobacco while I assign Fs to student papers because these silly turkeys haven't already read their Marx. Mmmm, cognac. In a few minutes I'll drive my turbo Volvo convertible to the local Green Party meeting where we'll plan to synergize with the Illuminati to get Obama reelected. I wonder if I should wear my dreads down or up?
Yep. Good to hear from someone working in the belly of the foul beast Pearson. I've had the misfortune of testing some of their online assessment tools. The experience was not unlike being strapped to a table below a wire cage of masturbating monkeys suffering from Montezuma's revenge. I've also worked on similar assessment tools for major alphabet soup companies (NCS and ACT) fiddling around with very tight assessment models. They're only accurate when responding to being gamed. If anyone thinks they'll actually work, they're either smoking too much Markov chain model or so dopey they obey all the recommendations of Word's grammar checker. The state of the art in this field is still pretty artless. (This post would be less cranky if I weren't due at a four-hour meeting on assessment instruments.)
Not concerned with meeting curricular guidelines? Tenured I bet. I have to say, I've met so many students who have been beaten-down and beaten-up by English teachers. Just cutting someone some slack, working from where they're at, can make a hell of a lot of difference. I've received some of the best essays from guys who had been told they were not good writers, or were dumb jocks, or some other shit like that. (And I've received some of the worst essays from students who were supremely confident that they are good at English or that it's their best subject.... I suspect some teachers grade on how well students pucker up or shine them on.)