By G. Rendell. For several years now, I've worked with a few self-selected faculty members at Greenback U to create and administer undergraduate research projects.  Most of those projects have been conducted within the constraints of semester-long courses, and most of them have focused student attention on some aspect either of Greenback's campus or of the surrounding Backboro community.  Practicalities (time, money, travel, etc.) mitigate in favor of research that can be conducted locally and, to be honest, emphasizing the local nature of sustainability challenges and solutions is part of my agenda. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. When the Academy Award winning song “Let it Go” sings about snowflakes as “frozen fractals”, it is calling to mind a mathematical concept closely linked to the idea of “chaos”. I found myself thinking of the idea of chaos this past week, as things seemed to get lost on an almost daily basis, and I felt that I could not seem to regain control over the minutia of my life. Read more...

By Laura Tropp. When I wanted to play as a child, I simply headed out the front door, rang the bell of a neighbor, and we would start a kickball game. Today, in order for my child to play with a friend, play dates have to be arranged. When did playing become so scheduled?  Has the drop-in play date disappeared? Is it because children’s time is over-planned? Are families too busy? Or is it that we are so used to mediated technology that showing up unannounced is simply not done anymore. Read more...

By Eric Stoller. Before I became an acolyte for a certain "fruit company," I was a PC/Windows guy. One of my first summer jobs involved doing work with a computer that was running Windows 3.1. When my parents purchased a desktop computer with Windows 95 (a replacement for our Commodore 64), I spent hours playing games, digging around the file system, and "surfed (crawled)" the Internet via a 14.4 modem. The high school library had a computer lab in it that featured Apple computers. I wasn't interested. Windows was what I knew. More...

By Kelly Hanson. Summer is upon us here in Southern Indiana, and in between barbeques and long weekend bike rides, I have some epic plans for my dissertation this summer. The trouble? The lack of semesterly structure makes me feel like I am untethered. Summer, for me, is one of the most difficult times to write. My summer productivity has been hit or miss in the past. But this summer, I am ready to get this chapter done. Read more...

By Laura B. McGrath. I get nostalgic as summer arrives each year; I remember neglecting my homework to go play outside, so excited for the lawn sprinkler. And when school was finally over, well, life just couldn’t get better. In my rose-colored memory, my summers looked a lot like The Sandlot and Troop Beverly Hills (I neither played baseball nor scouted, but I have an active imagination). Read more...

By Kaitlin Gallagher. All good things must come to an end. I’ve had a wonderful time writing for GradHacker over the past two years, but this will be my last post. Many of my previous posts have centered on how to manage the stress and the overwhelming nature of grad school. My guest post before I became a permanent author was about the mid-degree crisis I was facing. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Hello. My name is Josh, and I am a Twitter free rider.
I read your tweets (sometimes), but I don’t produce tweets for you to read.
I appreciate when you tweet about something that I write, but I am tweeting about what you write.
I use Twitter in the worst way - for promotion.  
Each day I make a bitmark, a link on bitly, which then automatically posts a tweet and a Facebook post. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. Who among us in not excited by Google’s driverless electric car?
No steering wheel. No break pedal. No gas pedal. No gear shift. You do get a start button and a panic button.
I think that it is great that Google is building these driverless cars.  34,000 people die every year in car crashes, which although down from a high of 54,589 in 1972 is still a level of carnage that boggles the mind. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. I’m getting ready to send Audible, owned by Amazon, another $229.50.  
Giving Audible these dollars today will mean that I can buy my audiobooks at $9.56 each.  
This is a good deal.  
The selection of audibooks on Audible is growing quickly. Read more...