By Amy Cavender. There are a lot of benefits to doing much of our work online. Collaboration with far-away colleagues is easy, we can have ready access to our work no matter what device we’re using, and having our work backed up in the cloud can be reassuring. But there’s danger as well, unfortunately. In just the past two months, at least four universities in the United States have been victims of data breaches: the University of Maryland, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and the North Dakota University system. More...
13 avril 2014
A Gentle Reminder about Security
A Not-so-gentle Reminder about Security: Heartbleed
By Amy Cavender. A couple of days before yesterday’s post was scheduled to run, we started hearing about the Heartbleed Bug. This is a nasty one. It’s been out for quite a while, and it’s a flaw in a software library that’s used by a very high number of websites. Check the link above for the details of just how nasty the bug is. More...
Final Madness
By Ben Yagoda. We’ve finally come to the end of Language Madness, and not a moment too soon. Just as Kentucky and Connecticut, two storied programs, will face off tonight in the NCAA men’s basketball finals (finals instead of final being another instance of rampant pluralizing), the LM tournament closes out with a classic matchup. More...
No Language for Lottie
By Geoffrey Pullum. People sometimes take my skeptical comments on animal-language news stories (“Dolphin Talk and Human Credulity,” for example) as evidence that I regard animals as inferiors. Jeremy Hawker complained on Language Log that I showed no interest in animal communication, and that linguists “cannot mention the subject without making a snotty comparison with human language.” More...
Academic Language, Codified
By Rose Jacobs. A new semester of classes started at German universities this week, which means I’ve spent the last few days asking fresh rounds of students about their language goals. The greatest number in any class want, above all, to improve their speaking skills. But a significant group has also mentioned vocabulary expansion. Given that most of the students are on course to complete master’s degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering, which at the Technical University of Munich means most will need to both read and write academic texts in English, this has me mulling a creature called AWL. The Academic Word List was developed 15 years ago by Averil Coxhead, then a master’s student at Victoria University of Wellington, and contains about 3,000 words from 580 word families—groups of words that share a stem—which are not among the 2,000 most commonly used words in English but appear and reappear across a corpus of academic writing. More...
Miss Prism’s Mistakes
By William Germano. In the greatest English theatrical comedy of the 19th century, a peculiar series of events involving an infant and a handbag are the subject of an 11th-hour confession by one of my favorite literary inventions, a governess named Miss Prism. More...
The Latest Style
By Allan Metcalf. Just as California offers the most neutral and unobtrusive variety of American English (we don’t think of someone having a “California accent”), so The Associated Press Stylebook offers the most neutral, unobtrusive, and inoffensive choices in spelling, punctuation, and usage. For this reason both are worthy of note as reflecting the norm, the unmarked version of American English. More...
Adjuncts at One Maryland College See Union as Way to Get Seat at the Table
Adjunct faculty members at the Maryland Institute College of Art are preparing for a union election in which they will decide whether to join Local 500 of the Service Employees International Union. Organizers among the institute’s adjuncts, who say they earn about $4,000 a course, hope to join 2,400 other part-time professors at colleges in Maryland and the District of Columbia who are represented by the union. The SEIU is making a push to help adjuncts gain power through regional organizing efforts. More...
Recession Spurred Enrollments in STEM Fields, Study Finds
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “STEM Majors, the Liberal Arts, and the Great Recession” (report not yet available online)
Authors: Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Linda J. Sax, a professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles. More...
Report: “STEM Majors, the Liberal Arts, and the Great Recession” (report not yet available online)
Authors: Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Linda J. Sax, a professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles
Organizations: University of Pennsylvania; University of California at Los Angeles; presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting
College Plans Outreach and Training After Transgender Student’s Complaint
By . Central Piedmont Community College, in North Carolina, on Tuesday announced that it had planned a series of discussions with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups after a transgender student accused the campus-security staff of harassing her when she left a women’s restroom, The Charlotte Observer reported. More...
