When I was in graduate school during course work, a fellow grad student told me this anecdote: Just as their seminar had finished up, and the 10 or so students were mulling around and packing their things, the professor, who was nearing retirement, turned to them and said: you have no idea how much the faculty is afraid of you graduate students.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Why I Left Academia: Part III, The Aftermath by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
The next few days following my defense, or to be honest, the next few weeks, still feel emotionally distant, almost as if it happened to someone else. I felt numb, the dumb shock of the loss of my career, was, and in many ways, still is too acute to bear. I was in mourning for the passion and love I had poured into my dissertation. I was mourning the reality that my ethics-driven account of how intersectional feminism can-and must- be applied to contemporary art history didn’t matter, that it had never really mattered.
The academy already has some horrific problems. Those shown here in gory detail really make me want to vomit. This feels to me like it should be the equivalent of Susan Fowler writing about Uber in her damaging article Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber, but she’s writing about the academy. Somehow it feels like this story is not going to be damning enough or get the traction it needs to make sweeping changes where they ought to happen either at her former institution or at institutions across the world.
I hope that trustees at universities and colleges everywhere read this and push hard for change since it appears that the issue isn’t being solved at the Dean level. This type of academic dishonesty is rotting away at the structure that underpins the enterprise–it’s not just a small blemish on the exterior of the facade.
If you’re not following Dr. Harbin, I recommend her blog.
👓 Why I left Academia: Part II by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
The two weeks leading up to emailing my dissertation to the entire committee plus my outside reader (a professor from a different university who also need to approve your dissertation, a requirement for most humanities Ph.D.s) are a blur. Every waking moment was spent writing, editing, and emailing drafts that never received comments, or even acknowledgement that they had been read. This was followed by proof-reading and re-writing my dissertation entirely on my own. This was nothing new. I had to email my dissertation mostly un-read by my advisor to my entire committee (a scandal in and of itself), because, as my advisor wrote in a terse email to me, they did not have time to read it.
The harrowing plot thickens…
👓 Why I left Academia: Part I by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
This is my personal story of why I decided to leave Academia. While sad, I know I'm not the only one to have experienced this. This is why I am sharing the story of my Ph.D, my dissertation, my dissertation committee members, my experience with the dean, how my defense went, and why.
A gut-wrenching story with a brutal ending. I’m hoping that multiple outlets will pick up this entire story and give it greater exposure.
👓 Trump Defends McMaster Against Calls for His Firing | New York Times
Nationalist wing of the president’s political coalition unleashes a relentless attack on the national security adviser. “He is a good man,” Trump replies.
👓 Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now | The Next Web
At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful. That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Peter Sunde‘s talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest. TNW sat down with the pessimistic activist and controversial figure to discuss how screwed we actually are when it comes to decentralizing the internet.
👓 Kill Process or How I discovered the IndieWeb (finally) by Lars Peters
I'm currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It's about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That's when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.
Includes a recommendation for my article…
👓 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | New York Times
The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.
What does it mean if someone can delete hundreds and thousands of hours of sound culture overnight?
in If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? in the New York Times
👓 Big names in statistics want to shake up much-maligned P value | Nature
One of scientists’ favourite statistics — the P value — should face tougher standards, say leading researchers.
The related articles listed at the bottom, many of which I’d previously read, also give some great additional background.
👓 EXCLUSIVE: First human embryos edited in U.S., using CRISPR | MIT Technology Review
Researchers have demonstrated they can efficiently improve the DNA of human embryos.
👓 First Support for a Physics Theory of Life | Quanta Magazine
Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.
Interesting article with some great references I’ll need to delve into and read.
The situation changed in the late 1990s, when the physicists Gavin Crooks and Chris Jarzynski derived “fluctuation theorems” that can be used to quantify how much more often certain physical processes happen than reverse processes. These theorems allow researchers to study how systems evolve — even far from equilibrium.
I want to take a look at these papers as well as several about which the article is directly about.
Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.”
Some truly harsh words from his former supervisor? Wow!
maybe there’s more that you can get for free
Most of what’s here in this article (and likely in the underlying papers) sounds to me to have been heavily influenced by the writings of W. Loewenstein and S. Kauffman. They’ve laid out some models/ideas that need more rigorous testing and work, and this seems like a reasonable start to the process. The “get for free” phrase itself is very S. Kauffman in my mind. I’m curious how many times it appears in his work?
👓 ‘Personalized Learning’ and the Power of the Gates Foundation to Shape Education Policy | Hack Education
There are two obvious sources of funding and PR for “personalized learning” – the Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The former has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “personalized learning” products and projects; the latter promises it will spend billions.
There are some out-sized influences in the education space. If only the US Government were better at pushing influence in this area…
👓 A Domain of One’s Own in a Post-Ownership Society | Hack Education
The University of Mary Washington’s initiative, “Domain of One’s Own,” is phrased thusly as a nod to Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she famously quipped that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” We can critique – and certainly we should – the class implications and expectations in Woolf’s commandment here; and we must consider both the financial burden and the transaction mechanism of a push for domains in education – as Maha notes, for example, many students in Egypt don’t have a credit card with which to make online purchases. “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days,” Woolf wrote in 1929. (That 500 quid is the equivalent to about $37,000 when adjusted for inflation.) But Woolf is not simply talking about having a piece of paper – a title, for example – that decrees she owns the room. It’s about having the financial freedom and a personal space to write. To own is to possess. To own is to have authority and control. To own is to acknowledge. It implies a responsibility. Ownership is a legal designation; but it’s something more than that too. It’s something more and then, without legal protection, the word also means something less.
There is some important internet philosophy going on in this article. Though written for an education-based audience, I think it’s got an important message for everyone about owning their own space online and being able to write and freely express themselves.
👓 John Heard, the Frazzled Father in ‘Home Alone,’ Dies at 71 | New York Times
Mr. Heard played pained characters in dramas but was best known as the dad who embarked on a family trip to Paris without his youngest son.
The family is actually quoted as saying he wanted to be known for his other work rather than for Home Alone, yet the New York Times choose to dishonor him anyway. It’s so sad as he was a really solid character actor with a great body of work. I’m hoping that his obit will get more people to go back and dig up Cutter’s Way.
I recall thinking about him fondly a month ago as I watched The Pelican Brief, but may remember him best for his frustrating turn in Big as well as a bevvy of great guest roles on television.
👓 In tweet storm, Trump decries ‘illegal leaks’ and asserts ‘all agree’ he has complete power to pardon | Washington Post
The president said a Post report of Attorney General Jeff Sessions's discussions with the Russian ambassador was based on leaks that “must stop.”
I suspect there would be a revolution if Trump pulled out pardons for family or campaign aides much less himself.