02 juin 2013
What (and How) Do You Delegate?
By Ryan Cordell. We’re big on collaboration at ProfHacker. We write about it quite a bit. Many of us come out of the digital humanities, which as a field prizes collaboration as a virtue. But as we all know, however, collaboration is not universally so prized in the academy. In humanities fields, collaborative efforts are often viewed with suspicion—we’ve long operated on the “solitary genius” model, and still sometimes wonder “just what did you do?” when discussing a joint endeavor. In the sciences, of course, group efforts are the norm, though complicated traditions still govern how those efforts are credited in print and in promotion dossiers. Read more...Soft Skills for ScientistsSoft Skills for Scientists
ByGina Stewart. You’re a science Ph.D. seeking a job outside academe, but you’re not sure you have the requisite skills. The good news is you’re probably more prepared than you think. Nonacademic hirers want people who are self-starters and who can work independently. You already possess all of these skills, and more. As a Ph.D. scientist, you’re capable of asking and answering important questions that build on current knowledge and advance our understanding of our world. You’re accustomed to coming up with and testing hypotheses, gathering and interpreting data, and communicating the results—both positive and negative. And you know how to manage a project, raise funds, and present your ideas at conferences. All of these skills are transferable to a number of professions outside academe, including industrial research, policy and think-tank work, business administration, and patent law. Read more...How to Stand Out From a Crowd
By Diane M. Fennig. Contrary to popular belief, there is no cohort of monks guarding the secret scroll of candidates on short lists in job searches. In this digital age, however, it can be both harder and easier to get noticed in the search process. Let me suggest a few ways to increase your visibility. Read more...France’s Debate Over English Misses the Point
By Peter Gumbel. The following is a guest post by Peter Gumbel, associate professor at Sciences Po, in Paris, and author of France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism. The French government has introduced legislation that aims to attack some of the greatest weaknesses of the national higher-education system, including the fragmentation of public universities and the chronically high failure rate of undergraduates. These problems have been analyzed and agonized over for years, so you might think that the public debate over the passage of this legislation would be about how, finally, someone is trying to fix the problems. Instead, the bill introduced in Parliament on May 21 by Geneviève Fioraso, the minister for higher education, and scheduled to be voted on May 28, has provoked a controversy over an issue that neither she nor her advisers saw coming. It’s a line in the law that officially authorizes French universities to teach some classes in English. Read more...The Battle[']s Joined
By Lucy Ferriss. Living, as I do, near Bishops Corner, not far from Corbins Corner, in easy reach of a Walgreens and a Marshalls, not to mention Lyons Gulf service station, I wasn[’]t completely surprised to learn that the United States Board on Geographic Names has clamped down on the efforts of citizens in Thurman, N.Y., to name a nearby mountain Jimmy’s Peak. They[’]ve been removing (in what, misheard, might sound like a different form of mutilation) “the genitive apostrophe and the ‘s’” since 1890, after all, though “the Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.” Read more...Get Smart People
By Ben Yagoda. I’ve proven I’m not too good at touting the Word of the Year. A couple of years ago, I was all on about curate, and it didn’t even get a mention in the end-of-year tally. Nevertheless, I am giving it another try. The word I have in mind is smart. Mind you, I don’t mean smart in the sense of smart phone or smart card or smart bomb: the “smart” in those formulations seems to signify merely that the device or object purports to mimic the reactions of a human with rather limited intelligence. Read more...Redefining the Dictionary
By Allan Metcalf. Last week at the University of Georgia, down in Athens, some 60 odd people came together for a meeting. They shared a Rare, but not Obsolete, interest: dictionaries.“We are strange people,” said Ilan Kernerman, head of K Dictionaries, in Israel. “Most people do not like dictionaries.” Indeed, he wondered whether there will be dictionaries at all in the future. The answer seemed to be, Yes there will, but the dictionary of the future will require a new definition. It won’t be a book. It was the 19th biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America. The society includes those who make dictionaries and those at colleges and universities who study them, not only from America but from Asia and Europe as well. There were talks on everything from jazz in the Oxford English Dictionary to lexicography in China during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), from the Big Apple of New York City to the 19th-century Hobson-Jobson dictionary of English in India. But among more than 30 such talks, there was a common thread: Dictionaries aren’t what they used to be. And they aren’t yet what they are going to be. Read more...
Machine Translation Without the Translation
By Geoffrey Pullum. I have been ruminating this month on why natural language processing (NLP) still hasn’t arrived, and I have pointed to three developments elsewhere that seem to be discouraging its development. First, enhanced keyword search via Google’s influentiality-ranking of results. Second, the dramatic enhancement in applicability of speech recognition that dialog design facilitates. I now turn to a third, which has to do with the sheer power of number-crunching. Read more...English’s Self-Inflicted Wounds
By Mark Bauerlein. According to the Modern Language Association, in the late 1960s and early 70s, English accounted for about 7.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States, but the portion plummeted to around 3.5 percent in the early 80s, climbed a bit to nearly 5 percent in the early 90s, then dropped steadily to 3.47 percent in 2004. English has gone from a major unit in the university to a minor one, its standing propped up largely by freshman writing requirements and creative-writing courses. At Emory University, where I teach English, when I arrived in 1989 and soon became director of undergraduate studies, the number of majors reached 350. Today, our majors linger at around 150. Read more...There Is No Gene for Finishing College
By Paul Voosen. A couple of years ago, Daniel J. Benjamin, a behavioral economist and associate professor at Cornell University, noticed a disturbing trend in genoeconomics, the nascent discipline that seeks to tie human genetics to traits relevant to the social sciences, like risk aversion, happiness, or even self-employment. Most of the work was statistically weak, he found, conducted on small samples of a few hundred people. Benjamin calculated that scientists could legitimately conclude almost nothing from those studies. It was a black mark on a charged discipline, one that invariably brings up the hoary nature-nurture debate and past associations with eugenics. Read more...
