By Andy Thomason. Often lost in the conversation about campus sexual assault are the voices of victims — both male and female.
A new project by The Washington Post features those voices prominently. A new page on the Post’s website, with short features on 50 victims of sexual assault, is part of the project. More...
By Andy Thomason. Two-thirds of tenured faculty members age 50 or older plan to work past the age of 67, a survey by the TIAA-CREF Institute has found. More...
By Andy Thomason. Earlier this week the biochemist Richard T. (Tim) Hunt unleashed the following monologue to an unsuspecting audience at a journalism conference in South Korea:
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.
Since he made those remarks, which prompted Mr. Hunt to apologize and resign from an honorary professorship at University College London, women in the lab have added a fourth item to the list of things they do: mock Mr. Hunt on Twitter. More...
By Andy Thomason. Maybe the paleontologist Caleb M. Brown wanted to give his acknowledgments section some extra spice. See if you can spot the anomaly in the fine print of a recent paper, “A New Horned Dinosaur Reveals Convergent Evolution in Cranial Ornamentation in Ceratopsidae,” that he co-wrote in the journal Current Biology. More...
By Andy Thomason. Harvard University will receive its largest donation ever in the form of a $400-million endowment to support its engineering school, the university announced on Wednesday. John A. Paulson, a billionaire who founded the investment firm Paulson & Company, is behind the gift to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will be renamed in his honor. More...
By Andy Thomason. The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper, last week published the results of its annual survey of the graduating senior class. And while the students surveyed are, as of last week, no longer students, the survey’s findings survive as an interesting peek into life at the vaunted Ivy League institution. More...
By Charles Huckabee. The Texas Legislature gave final approval on Sunday to a bill that would require the state’s public colleges and universities to allow people with concealed-handgun licenses to carry their weapons into dormitories, classrooms, and other campus buildings, The Texas Tribune reports. Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the bill into law. More...
By Anne Curzan. If brr and brrr are already playable words in Scrabble, why not add grr? On May 21, Collins, the publisher of the Official Scrabble Wordlist, did just that. As announced on the Collins website: “Over 6,500 new words have been added to the Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist — influenced by all parts of life, including social media, slang, technology and food, plus English from around the world.” Although the words, including grr, won’tbe officially approved by the World English-Language Scrabble Players Association until September, the announcement made headlines within hours. Literally hours. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. My Lingua Franca colleage Anne Curzan recently published a post about recent additions to the official Scrabble dictionary, of which there have been a surprisingly large number. (I guess that’s the way they’ve found to keep on selling Scrabble dictionaries.) More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. We are all going to have to get used to the word metadata. Explaining what it means in simple terms is quite tricky, for it is a genuinely abstract concept. (And let me warn the purists up front that in this post I am going to be treating data not as the plural of the Latin word datum, but as an English singular noncount noun like air, fun, furniture, information, or water: I will say the data is stored, not the data are stored.) More...
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