By Jason B. Jones. Usually, when people complain about faculty and service, it’s along a few well-defined paths: faculty who shirk service; the resulting disproportionate service burden; or how nothing ever gets done. There is, however, another problem: the faculty member who won’t let go. More...
By Jason B. Jones. A perennial sore point in academe is the phenomenon of work-life balance. As Amy noted last year, there’s always something you could be doing. What’s more, there’s a good chance you like at least some part of the work, since it’s what drew you into the profession, and so you gladly take on more and more, until you realize that you’ve forgotten that you have a third child or sick parent, or your partner starts taking out personal ads in the campus paper, or your dog mauls you as a stranger when you come home before 7pm. More...
By Erin E. Templeton. It’s no secret that we at ProfHacker like GoogleDocs. Ryan Cordell has used Google Docs to run a peer-review writing workshop, and George Williams has previously written about using GoogleDocs to take collaborative notes at conference sessions. Guest poster Thomas Burkholder wrote about using Google Forms. I have used all of these, and today I’m going to share yet another use: for compiling a crowd-sourced study-guide. Google Docs is useful in this respect because it allows users to easily share documents. In my case, I can quickly distribute to an entire class, and students can then download or not as they wish. More...
By Erin E. Templeton. Happy Friday ProfHackers! A disclaimer: I’m writing this week’s weekend reading through pollen-induced haze thanks to a triple whammy of tree pollen here in the Southeast that has sent allergen counts through the roof from Virginia through parts of Florida. Last week, I included the news of David Letterman’s retirement. Yesterday, it was announced that Stephen Colbert will be his replacement. The LA Times argues that “Colbert is not a conservative choice.” Apparently Rush Limbaugh and other political conservatives agree: Limbaugh called the announcement “a declaration of war of the heartland of America.” More...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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