By Brian Mathews. If I paid you to study in the library you would likely take me up on the offer. And if I paid you and your group to study there together, then you would definitely use the library more often. That’s the gist of a recent economics study: Letting Down the Team? Social Effects of Team Incentives. More...
By Amy Cavender. Writing — it’s one of the things we do a lot, and many of us here at ProfHacker are often on the lookout for new tools that can help us with the writing task. One of the most essential tools (other than some good ideas, of course!) for getting the writing task done is a good text editor. We’ve covered text editors before, of course, and have been particularly fond of plain-text editors, whose power Lincoln reminded us of last year. We also like being able to access our files from anywhere, so some of the editors we’ve looked at have been online: Jason introduced us to TextDrop, and George called our attention to Drive Notepad. More...
By Erin E. Templeton. We at ProfHacker like books. Apparently so do many of you. The New York Times ran an article earlier this week about the “Allure of the print book.” Esquire followed with “The Revenge of the Printed Book.” Newsweek, which ended print circulation last year in favor of pure digital circulation, has announced that it will resume hard copy in February 2014. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime Air this week that consumers may begin to receive their purchases via drone as early and June 2015. Not to be outdone, UPS announced that they too are working on entering the drone delivery market. The New York Times reports that Google is also getting into the robot game. Slate claims that the drone-delievery idea is “hot air,” perhaps akin to those jetpacks we were promised in my youth . . . In a separate article, Slate takes a rather different tack by claiming, “Birds will attack delivery drones.” More...
By Allison M. Vaillancourt. You may have gotten a Ph.D. because, like Lloyd Dobler, you didn’t want to “sell anything, buy anything, or process anything.” But if you think you can avoid the corporate world by going into college teaching (or kickboxing), think again, says Jeanne Zaino, a political-science professor at Iona College, with tongue firmly in cheek. Those people in your class who you thought were students are customers shelling out big bucks, who you must therefore please, she writes. Zaino offers a few tips for Ph.D.’s on navigating this brave new corporate world of higher ed. Read more...By George David Clark. November can be a long month for academic job seekers, perhaps the time when academe seems coldest. With several fields holding their national conferences shortly after the holidays, many applicants will know in these first weeks of December if they will have an opportunity to interview. Until then we wait and practice the morbid algebra of the market: x ads minus y internal candidates, divided by the number of qualified applicants equals … well, it’s not pretty. In the anonymous space of job wikis or the comments streams of The Chronicle’s blogs, job seekers seem suspicious, jaded, angry, arrogant, and entitled by turns, but more than anything else our worrying strikes me as deeply lonely, quick to pit the individual against a faceless system. It’s when I read our posts that I feel most isolated from my peers and colleagues.By contrast, I had a profound experience of community in my field this past July when I participated in the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Read more...By Allison M. Vaillancourt. A friend of mine who recently assumed her first senior-level position asked to schedule some talk time to discuss the topic of organizational politics. She has moved around and up through the years and has generally been regarded as a superstar wherever she’s been. But what worked in the past doesn’t seem to be working now, and she’s having trouble making sense of her new organization’s culture—and, more important, what it takes to succeed in her new role. Read more...
The following is by Philip G. Altbach, research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Microsoft’s astonishingly scurrilous campaign to damage confidence in Gmail is still active after nearly 10 years. Large ads in magazines repeat content from the Google-baiting website www.scroogled.com, which is dedicated solely to promoting fear of privacy invasions. More...
By Anne Curzan. Earlier this week, I had my copy-editor hat on and was working my way through a newsletter for a graduate program at the university. I was fixing typos, inserting and deleting commas (often for the sake of consistency), changing words to avoid repetition, and the like. Then at one point, I watched myself prescriptively cross out the phrase “freshman composition” and reword it as “first-year composition.”I have long been a supporter of nonsexist language reform, from using singular generic they to replacing –man words with nongendered alternatives. Read more...By Allan Metcalf. Today I can offer a twofer—my first sighting of a new word, and the opportunity to do good deeds that arises from it. The new word is narcissism undone, “un” done if you will. Take the “selfie,” the photo you make of yourself and blatantly upload to Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram or whatever. It’s the epitome of cute selfishness that supposedly characterizes the millennial generation. But then put “un” in front of it, and behold, you have the “unselfie,” or, with a hashtag, the “#unselfie.”A colleague referred me to “What if our selfies were unselfish?” a November 14 post on LinkedIn by Nicolas Bordas. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
