Must be me…
The Globe and Mail has a story about an “experiment” (I use quote-unquote because I personally see nothing new about it, but I come back to this below) carried out…
Academia
Rantings over rankings
Times Higher Education has just published its influential rankings of World universities. I imagine that university presidents all over the world, at this time, are either pounding their chests, proudly…
Sliding into Fall
Oops, it did it again…. The Fall term 2011 has managed to sneak up on me, like its 2010 predecessor. All of a sudden, it’s all back. I am facing…
Exams never end
(Title of famous play by Italian playwright Eduardo De Filippo. To my knowledge, it was not inspired by his own PhD defence) Dear fellow Committee Members, as the appointed Chair…
The Chair That Sat Back
Mephistopheles relaxed after a good (evil) day’s work. He’d chalked up three witches, a magus, a handful of brick-makers who’d had too much to drink, and Michael Bay. (Boob, explosions…
Impact factor trends
A few days ago, I received an e-mail message from the Publisher of my favourite physics journal (JLTP), who was pleased to inform me that its Impact Factor (IF) climbed…
Free agent professor
If you’re a college or university teacher, whom do you work for ?” Thus begins Stanley Fish‘s latest New York Times editorial on the subject of academia. Here are a…
How useful am I?
As an academic, I question my usefulness. Society will always need carpenters (or plumbers or tailors or nurses or farmers). Their benefit is pretty clear and obvious. Will it always…
How useful am I?
As an academic, I question my usefulness. Society will always need carpenters (or plumbers or tailors or nurses or farmers). Their benefit is pretty clear and obvious. Will it always…
How useful am I?
As an academic, I question my usefulness. Society will always need carpenters (or plumbers or tailors or nurses or farmers). Their benefit is pretty clear and obvious. Will it always…
Make up your mind, already !
Academic job seekers are sometimes in the fortunate position of choosing one of several job offers (not often these days, given the difficult job market). This happens both at the…
Great blog. By the way, you are full of it.
Last week I was in Dallas, at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society, attended by members of the Division of Condensed Matter and Computational physics. For different…
Flanigan: Diminished Expectations
I'm still taking in the Tom Flanagan's comments about assassinating Julian Assange. What amazed me about the comments was how casual and glib they were - as if another man's…