I’m blogging from the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This morning, I was part of a session (along with Bora Zivkovic and Jean-Claude Bradley) entitled “Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication”. I thought I’d make a few brief comments about the session while my impressions are still fresh, but I reserve the right to say more later.
Category Archives: Personal
Arcane nerd knowledge revealed: a nice way to solve Rubik’s Cube.
Yesterday, one of the elder Free-Ride offspring’s teammates brought a Rubik’s Cube to soccer practice. While this youngster fiddled with the cube during a water break, I mentioned that I knew how to solve it. I was asked to transmit this knowledge, and I promised to write it up and send it to the player at this morning’s soccer match.
And I thought, “You know, there are probably others who might like this information.” So I made a quick detour to the scanner, and am sharing the very same information with you all.
I’m pretty sure that revealing this knowledge won’t get me drummed out of the Nerds’ Alliance, but I guess we’ll see.
Fifty years after Sputnik.
Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite. I don’t remember it (because I wouldn’t be born for another decade), but the “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” heard ’round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents’ generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.
Special incentives for your donation to my DonorsChoose challenge.
You know from my last post that we’re working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve. You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them).
But I’d like to sweeten the deal by offering some incentive to everyone who donates to my challenge. Here’s what you can get:
Does specifying one’s guilty pleasures require an analysis of ‘guilt’ and ‘pleasure’?
Sean, Chad, and Steinn ponder the lameness of academics in self-reporting their “guilty pleasures”.
Quoth Sean:
I immediately felt bad that I couldn’t come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.
But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
Chad kind of blames technology:
Actually, it’s a little tough to come up with anything that really works, in this age of blogging. After all, a guilty pleasure is something you don’t want other people to know that you enjoy, and a lot of the really good candidates in my life are here for the whole world to see.
Steinn rejects the original question:
I’m not into guilt, and there are real academic pleasures; emotional states that come with the job.
We should revel in them.
As someone with a professional interest in ethics, and — perhaps more importantly — raised by two parochial school graduates, I know a little something about guilt. Let’s see if I can make Sean feel a little less like Caligula.
A postcard from academe: my tenure dossier.
You may have noticed a lull in my postings here. I’ve been laboring to put the finishing touches on my dossier for my sixth year review. This dossier is the document on which a succession of committees will be basing their decisions as to whether San José State University will be tenuring me and promoting me to associate professor, or whether they will be thanking me for my service and sending me on my way.
It’s an awful lot of responsibility to put in the clutches of a three-ring binder, don’t you think?
My mug has a disclaimer.
However, it would seem that the disclaimer is ambiguous. Otherwise, why would my better half and I disagree about what the disclaimer means?
It’s not like either of us is the sort to propose an alternate interpretation just to be difficult. Honest!
Anyway, here’s the front of the mug. It’s a nice design. (And if you have a serious hankering for a mug like this one, my understanding is that they are currently being given away to folks who subscribe to Seed. I don’t know that any are available yet on eBay, but surely it’s just a matter of time.)
I probably should have paid more attention to non-standard logics.
The good news: My department chair really likes the project I’ve proposed for my sabbatical leave.
The bad news: The smart money says that my leave won’t be approved unless I cut down the amount I say I’ll accomplish during the year off.
That’s right. If you have a lot you want to get accomplished, you can’t have time off to accomplish it, whereas if you have only a wee bit to do, you are most welcome to a leave.
Cue the dinosaur with the voice of Rob Knop to remind me to stop expecting things in academia to make sense. Meanwhile, I have some cuts to make.
A good way to spoil free wifi at the coffee house.
Over-amplified live music. (You’d think a church group — which is what this band turns out to be — would be down with acoustic music instead.)
If we don’t get our DSL back soon, I’m going to need some really good earplugs.
Requiem for a landline.
While sometime the phone would ring
Just as we were sitting down to eat
Or telling a bedtime story
Or trying to get out the door
Or drifting off to sleep,
There was a comfort in being
Reachable
By those who needed to reach us
And in whose reach we wanted to be.
But now, the unsteady dial tone is gone.
The earful of static has gone silent.
The landline, she is dead.
And verily, we might mourn,
Then let her rest in peace,
Survived by the cell phones.
But we need our DSL
As an academic needs her coffee*
(Or as a twentyish Objectivist needs his Rush CD),
And so we wait
For the phone company guy
To break up the concrete
And perform the bypass surgery
That will connect us again
To the system of tubes
That feels like home.