Whoa. The MLA has officially devised a standard format to cite tweets in an academic paper. Sign of the times.
It was bound to happen, eventually.
"What is crucial to understand is that academic publishing is not a free market. Researchers send papers to journals for free, because their jobs depend on it. Senior scientists don’t charge journals to review potential articles, thereby helping the editors to identify the best work, because that is a part of being an academic. Libraries have to subscribe, because the researchers they serve cannot work without access to the scholarly record. Academic publishers thus have a captive work force and a captive audience."
— From the same amazing Boston Globe piece, the quickest and clearest summary of academic publishing’s dysfunction I’ve ever seen. It is VITALLY IMPORTANT that everyone in the ecosystem understand these basic facts. (via arlpolicynotes)
(via infoneer-pulse)
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"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
— Niels Bohr, Danish physicist (via adriantumble)
(via sds)
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Liz modeling her new academic regalia, which arrived in time for next month’s Georgetown commencement ceremonies, her first as a professor.
(Seems like an appropriate choice of apparel these days, between the Royal Wedding get-ups and the last blast of Harry-Potter-mania).
Thanks to all the friends who pitched in for this awesome PhD graduation present—she didn’t get to wear it for her own graduation, but I think she’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future!
"Only 3% of the members of the American Congress have PhDs, compared to 20% in Germany. More than 100 have served in the military."
— In the German parliament, doctoral graduates are in unusually high demand. Far fewer American eggheads go into politics. (via theeconomist)
(via theeconomist)
Tweet"At some point someone may actually ask you what you’re talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided. You must always give the questioner the impression that they have missed the point, and so send another verbose salvo of postmodernspeak in their direction as a “simplification” or “clarification” of your original statement. If that doesn’t work, you might be left with the terribly modernist thought of, “I don’t know”. Don’t worry, just say, “The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek. I can only say that reality is more uneven and its (mis)representations more untrustworthy than we have time here to explore”. Any more questions? No, then pass the cheese and crackers"
—
“How To Speak and Write Postmodern”
One of the reasons I was glad to stop at the master’s degree level (and in a “professional” program, no less). This piece by Stephen Katz, however, is full of gems.
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Does college make you smarter?
Students study in Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle. The authors of Academically Adrift find that in the first two years of college, “with a large sample of more than 2,300 students, we observe no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills for at least 45 percent of the students in our study.”
WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization. The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge “Greek” documents and artifacts. “Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far,” said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns—everything.”
(Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source)
I love that they made him a Georgetown professor! (h/t Okey)
"What’s worse, there are no faculty norms related to teaching. Many professors spend much of their lives teaching students, yet we live with the bizarre anomaly that they are never taught how to do it. The lucky ones may get a few days of preparation and some “tips for teaching” before becoming TA’s for the first time, in graduate school. After that they’re on their own, sinking or swimming each in his or her own way."
— Faculty Norms Inhibit Excellence - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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What Exactly Is a Doctorate? Click on the image for the full series of enlightening images, by a computer science professor at University of Utah. It seems like it could both encouraging and discouraging at the same time. But it definitely shows the accomplishment.
