By Robert Talbert. It’s hard to believe, but right now we are about 2/3 of the way through our semester, and with each week that passes, I’m getting more experience and insight with the use of specifications grading. Several people have mentioned on Twitter that they are following these updates with interest — and I don’t mind being the guy who goes first and makes all the mistakes. So here is an update on how things are going on the specs grading front. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. In a Lingua Franca post a few weeks ago, I needed to use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent the different pronunciations of the English word garage. I didn’t explain much about the IPA; I took it for granted. We do with chemistry formulas using the element symbols in the periodic table, trusting that an educated public will understand CO2 or H2O (and maybe even NaCl or H2SO4). You get a certain amount of basic chemistry in high school or even earlier. However, my treating knowledge of phonetics similarly is not quite so justifiable. More...By William Germano. I know I’m not the only one who’s noticing display text—advertising, announcements, and the like—angling for the reader’s attention by placing a period after each word. So that you have to read it slowly. And feel the importance. Of every word. Of. Every. Word.By Ben Yagoda. If the phrase “copy-editing memoir” quickens your heart, then you’re in store for a treat: Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton), by Mary Norris of The New Yorker. One of the many tasty tidbits in the book is that Norris’s title at the magazine actually isn’t copy editor, but rather “page OK’er”. More...By Allan Metcalf. At last it’s March, a month to celebrate the arrival of spring and the anniversary of America’s greatest word. On March 23, three days after the vernal equinox, comes the 176th anniversary of the birth of that word: OK.By Lucy Ferriss. They drop into our In boxes like mad, twitching flies, these contests apparently designed to make us feel either startlingly young or hopelessly old and out of it. It’s either “How many of these ancient pieces of technology did you use?” or “How well do you know 2014 Pop Culture?” I pass on most of them, but when our editor sent me The New York Times’s Language Quiz, I took the bait. More...
By Erin E. Templeton. The higher ed landscape was rocked this week with the news of the imminent closure of Sweet Briar College. Inside Higher Ed broke the news on Tuesday afternoon. In the aftermath of the announcement, many questions are being asked. The Christian Science Monitor asks, “Are Women’s Colleges Still Relevant?” (Disclosure, I teach at a women’s college, so for me the answer is a resounding YES). Bloomberg View asserts that Sweet Briar is closing “the right way.” Inside Higher ed tries to explain where the endowment will go. A crowd-funding effort to save the college is underway. Our own Chronicle suggests “Sweet Briar’s Demise is a Cautionary Tale for Small Colleges. In a more dramatic fashion,, Bloomberg Business claims, “Small U.S. Colleges Battle Death Spiral as Enrollment Drops.” More...
By Ryan Cordell. The other day I was working on a project that required some image editing power. That’s not a typical requirement in my work, and so I didn’t have a good image editing program installed on my work computer. My first instinct was to download GIMP, a free alternative to Photoshop. More...
By Amy Cavender. I’d been waiting for that for a long time. I love Evernote (as do several of my colleagues here at ProfHacker, as is clear from the number of posts in which it gets a mention). I’m so fond of it, in fact, that I’m a premium subscriber, so I’m not about to walk away from it anytime soon. It’s fantastic for keeping track of information I want to access later. More...
By Andy Thomason. Three higher-education leaders are urging federal lawmakers to repeal sequestration and increase research funding in the budget for the 2016 fiscal year. In a letter on Friday, the presidents of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the American Council on Education wrote that continued limits on federal investment in scientific research and higher education would threaten the position of the United States as the world’s top economic power. More...
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