Humour magazine The Onion imagines peer review extended to fifth grade students.

This clip from the television version of one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life illustrates dramatically how the existence of the media can affect everyday behaviour.

David Brake

She shared this overheard conversation snippet in this blog post:

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

I only wish that my doctorate (when it comes) would give me that power

I’ve been listening to an interesting BBC radio history series The Idea of a University and just heard about a satirical book (not seemingly still in print) “Redbrick and these Vital Days” by a Liverpool academic, E Allison Peers. It includes this marvellous descriptive passage about a typical day in the life of ‘Professor Deadwood’ (based apparently on the author’s view of Alan Dorward).

He has a leisurely breakfast at half-past-eight, followed by pipe and paper; reaches the University between ten and half-past; reads his letters and perhaps writes one; saunters into the Common Room for a cup of coffee; calls on a colleague, or the Bursar, or the Clerk to the Senate; returns to his room, glances through the latest issue of a learned review, has a few words with a pupil - and lo, it’s lunch-time. After lunch in the refectory, followed by a chat about the day’s news in the Common Room, he gives a lecture at half-past-two, and immediately afterwards hurries home lest he should be late for tea. After tea comes the day’s exercise (unless it happens to be a day when he has no lecture, in which case he plays golf in the afternoon) and after dinner he spends a couple of hours with a new book on his special subject (or a book from the circulating library on something else), after which, the paper again, a nightcap, and bed at eleven after a somewhat tiring but thoroughly well-spent day.

They don’t make jobs like that any more - do they?

P.S. It seems I am not alone in thinking that what I will be doing in part when I teach is what the founder of Keele University, Lord Lindsay, saw as the purpose of university education: “to enable everyone to read the Times intelligently”.

David Brake

Blog scholar Alex Halavais recently wrote an entertaining blog post about his experience of cheaters - how to cheat good - culminating in this gem:

When you copy things from the web into Word… don’t just ‘Edit > Paste’ it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on.

By an odd coincidence the New York Times has an article on the increasing use of technology by students to enable in-class cheating. I hope that it is no. 6 on the most emailed list because of appalled professors not because students are looking for new cheating ideas!

This weblog posting by Lilia Efimova about the difficulty of categorising data during analysis tickled me since I am experiencing some of the same difficulties at this point in my own research, particularly as she refers in her post to Borges’ own musings on the subject. I am half tempted to group my bloggers using the ‘ancient Chinese’ method including:

• Bloggers that are included in this classification
• Innumerable ones
• Others
• Those that resemble flies from a distance

I bring your attention to a piece on Slate about browsing the net when you should be listening to your prof.

There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I’m currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking notes. Another is looking at the registrar’s Web site. The other two keep checking their e-mail.

The LSE has wireless connections to many but by no means all classrooms and to my surprise even now laptops are fairly rare in the lecture halls here though certainly a higher ratio than one in ten - one professor I remember three years ago told off a student for typing on one!

The Chronicle alerts me to the work of Joseph R Ferrari, who has co-written a volume, “Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings“. To my astonishment our library doesn’t have it yet (but I’ve put in a request). If you are interested there’s an online discussion with Ferrari starting 14:30 EST today.

I can’t resist a quote from near the bottom of the Chronicle’s article:

Karem Diaz, a professor of psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, has studied the behavior among Peruvians, whose expectations of timeliness tend to differ from those of Americans.

"In Peru we talk about the ‘Peruvian time,’" Ms. Diaz writes in an e-mail message. "If we are invited to a party at 7 p.m., it is rude to show on time. … It is even socially punished. Therefore, not presenting a paper on time is expected and forgiven."

Few Peruvians are familiar with the Spanish word "procrastinaci?n," which complicates discussions of the subject. "Some people think it is some sexual behavior when they hear the word," Ms. Diaz says.

How did I come across this? Well, I’m meeting my supervisor this afternoon so naturally I had to check the weblogs I normally read first (in this case Arts and Letters Daily).

George Toft has produced an entertaining presentation
in the form of a dialogue between a pizza buyer and a delivery agent that highlights some of the possible issues around privacy in the database age. Note that most of what he suggests would be technically possible even without a “National ID”. But rather than over-analysing it think of it as a bit of fun…

Defining what is pornographic is clearly tricky - does the above plaque on board the Pioneer 10 spacecraft count? Perhaps… In the course of research on online pornography for an upcoming report on harm and offense in the media I came across this quote which raised a smile in the report Youth, Pornography and the Internet - an otherwise fairly grim read:

Content drawn from mainstream art and science has been called pornographic. For example, a plaque carried on Pioneer 10, the first space probe to leave the solar system, was called pornographic because it included engravings of nude human figures. … one newspaper published the images on the plaque, but erased the nipples, saying that "[a] family newspaper must uphold community standards." Another newspaper affiliated with a religious denomination said that the plaque should have had praying hands rather than nudes. And a major newspaper printed the image in full, but received a letter from a reader that said, "I was shocked by the blatant display of both male and female sex organs. . . . Isn’t it enough that we must tolerate the bombardment of pornography through the media of film and smut magazines? Isn’t it bad enough that our own space agency officials have found it necessary to spread this filth even beyond our own solar system?" On some of the committee’s site visits, various parties objected to Internet images of classical Greek statues of the human body and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

I innocently thought I would apply Foucault’s concept of Technologies of the Self to personal weblogging (since it seems to me the personal weblog has a lot in common with the self-reflexive and discursive practices Foucault outlined late in his life). Unfortunately, I immediately stumbled into a bog of academic debate from which I am struggling to extricate myself. Little did I realise how contentious Foucault’s ideas about self are - particularly among feminists. Made me feel a bit like Mary Hudock who defines Technologies of the Self thus:

Foucault’s phrase ‘technologies of the self’ refers to ways in which people put forward, and police, their ’selves’ in society; and the ways in which they are enabled or constrained in their use of different techniques by available and disenchanting discourses where the geometric flux abdicates the signifier, leaving us even further removed from any coherent sense of “self” and with our heads on the floor after downing a whole bottle of Jack Daniels in search of the ever-elusive transendental signifier that just might, just might, lead to a sense of self.

I am not sure that even my Finger Foucault can help me now… Maybe I should have stuck with Bourdieu after all!

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I have scanned in extracts from “Too Much TV“, a picture book for kids that was apparently recommended by the Canadian government. It was published in 1984 so I guess it wouldn’t have been in time to influence my behaviour…

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Salon’s set of satirical tech/politics predictions for 2005 includes this:

Just weeks after announcing ambitious plans to digitize millions of books from five major libraries, Google burns down its electronic Alexandria before even really starting it.

The problem isn’t the anticipated copyright headaches. It’s the readers — or lack thereof.

“When news of our plans broke, we were flooded with e-mails from college students begging us to make more term papers available, not books,” says a Google executive who asked not to be named. “The kids told us that they have plenty of access to books on paper that they don’t read. What they really need is someone to do the reading, thinking and writing for them.”

Convinced that absolutely no one wants to read most of the tomes they’d just begun digitizing, Google decides to divert the tens of millions designated for the book project into hiring underemployed Ph.D.’s to build up the world’s biggest virtual term-paper library.

I certainly hope it’s scholarship and not laziness that prompts people to request copies of my MSc dissertation and other academic writing…

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The wonderful people at Pew working with Elon U have come up with a database of pundits’ predictions about the Internet in the early 1990s. I am sure of many minutes of entertainment looking through it for particularly lame predictions and prognostications. My personal favourite so far is “Will we allow ourselves to be possessed by the vision of a Net whose purpose is to help create and support HEROES? Or will we dismiss it all with a keystroke and get back to the REAL FUN STUFF on alt.flame.Joe.schmuck.the.world’s.greatest.poophead? ? Steve Crocker, 1995″ (Which do you think we ended up with?)

I might make a prediction myself - after all the guy predicting we’ll be able to download coffee got published…

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I’m a little late with this I know but Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research has found a number of quirky Christmas-related academic studies, which are summarised in his Guardian column. My favourite?

Joel Waldfogel at the University of Pennsylvania reported in the American Economic Review: “A potentially important micro-economic aspect of gift-giving is that gifts may be mismatched with the recipients’ preferences … Estimates indicate that between a tenth and a third of the value of holiday gifts is destroyed by gift-giving.”

If there are any relations reading I assure you that your own ones lost no value!

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From Piled Higher and Deeper - an entertaining comic strip on the grad student life from Stanford.

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