Via University Diaries:
The Board of Regents at the University of Michigan will vote this year on whether to “offer new part-time tenure opportunities and to lengthen the period from eight to 10 years in which to earn tenure.” They’ll also consider a university committee’s suggestion that they “allow faculty members to work part time and still work toward tenure on a prorated basis.”
Mr. Sun gets all the cool commenters:
The idea is that in the presence of dense, fibrous tissue such as major white matter tracts in the brain, water diffusion will be restricted in the direction perpendicular to the tract but not in the direction parallel to the tract. So, by looking at the shape of water diffusion, we can infer the shape of the underlying tissue. The process of mapping the white matter architecture of the brain is called tractography, and it’s way, way cool: Tractography.
At thanks for not being a zombie: “links in search of a thesis”:
It is not yet possible to classify and explain what academic blogging is, to create implied rules, to assume that there are neat generic boundaries that define the different kinds of bloggers. The genre is too new. We’re still trying things out. If you’re going to write about academic blogging, write about it as an emergent form, constantly changing, not yet (if ever) settled.
There are plenty of venues in which the only thing the reader sees is the starched shirt facade of the professional academic, and it would be foolhardy to argue that there’s nothing wrong with leaving things this way. May we please give ourselves permission to explore a genre of writing where something different might take place?
Planned Obsolescence, on responses to the recent NYT article on academic email “abuse”:
…[N]o one heavily invested in an older media institution can analyze the workings of a newer media form objectively. The anxiety of obsolescence that all media change breeds makes it impossible for such analysis to be carried out innocently, without an agenda driven by the desire to promote the virtues of the older form at the expense of the newer. Any argument in print about the ways that electronic communication is leading us all down the primrose path really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
At Smart Mobs, “20 million sites looking for bad news”, on a Google.org project aimed at a kind of self-awareness in the web itself.
Suppose that somebody somewhere has physical access to the letters, journals, sketchbooks, and diaries of some person now deceased. Nothing that person didn’t actually write or draw personally is included—just the things they made. Lacking the journal-like material, we might fall back to the body of all their published works.
Suppose these works were presented online, as a series of daily extracts, in a blog. Assume an accomplished and near-invisible editor is in charge of the choices of material (just for this exercise: editors deserve respect and acknowledgment).
Nominate a person whose voice would interest you at least enough to read the blog via an RSS/atom feed. State why.
…and they don’t bitch about their software as much as the rest of us:
Others?
update: T. H. Huxley was proposed, but I discovered that that blog was a parody. Hush, now and I will tell you: The secret link between these bloggers is they’re all dead, and they’re all posting just their own words.
Stopped by the Big Ten Market Morgan & York store the other day on the way to work, planning to buy a sandwich for a long workday: Jamon Serrano and Cultured Butter, was my pick for the high-fat, high-thinking kind of meal I needed to get me through the day.
Tommy York was helping somebody else, who was buying some weird stuff I hadn’t bought before: lachschinken. He offered me a bit.
It’s not a substitute for the amazing complexity of the Jamon, but it’s amazing in its own way.
We’ve just wolfed down a half-pound, served like smoked salmon: cream cheese, capers, thin-sliced onion, on bagels. A near-perfect match, frankly. Highly recommended.
The Little Professor responds to an article in the CHE, in “Nightmare on Grading Street”:
…It is unfortunately the case (for us, I mean) that the most incompetent instructors may also be charming, winsome, and personable in all respects, while some of the most brilliant and influential may also be monsters of the first order. By the same token, the monster may be incompetent and the charmer may be brilliant….
She goes on to make a number of very reasonable statements about course evaluations, performance pressure and performance measurement of professors, and some systemic issues the column brought up.
I expect the original column is just messed up, myself.
It’s the sort that makes me wonder whether the CHE wants to be the Fox News of academia, or if they’ve just made a years-long habit of buying columns from straw men. Or, most frighteningly of all, is the whole astounding disconnectedness of CHE’s columnists really a reflection of a real disconnectedness among real professors? Are these outrageous-souding columns, in other words, representative of what professors think? Cause if that’s the case… whoa.
[My guess, from the short list?: Whoa]
If you come across an article in CHE in a few years complaining about how little time there is to blog, even though all professors are of course expected to do it, that might be me. Think back to this, and you’ll get the gag. [Due mainly to the fact that I surely will not be a professor....]
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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