Eszter

It’s good if people ask for advice, but it’s not ideal if they ask for it too late. For example, when students ask me the year they are going on the job market how they should start thinking about the process, my first reaction (although I don’t say it since there is no point in stressing out the person at that stage) is that they should have started preparing years ago. Similarly, the year one is going up for tenure is not the right time to start wondering who could be on one’s list of tenure letter writers. Yet all too often this is precisely what happens, people don’t realize that some preparation over the years would have been extremely valuable if not crucial when approaching such important milestones in one’s academic career.

To help academics think about some of these matters, I have started a career advice column called Ph.Do over at Inside Higher Ed. In the first piece, More than Merit, I explain the reasons for the column. In the second, The Conference Scene, I discuss how to think about when and which conferences to attend. In the third, Conference Do’s and Don’t’s, I talk about how to maximize going to meetings without derailing one’s career. Any guesses as to which friend I refer to regarding the advice about dinners?

Future pieces will cover lots of topics ranging from collaborative work to making oneself marketable in several disciplines, applying for awards and fellowships and more. I welcome suggestions for what to address in upcoming pieces. Some of the ideas I have for future writing is already very much inspired by conversations we’ve had here on CT in the past.

I don’t think IHE has RSS feeds for specific columns, but for Twitter users, I’ve set up an account here and I’m also keeping this page updated with links although I haven’t set up a feed for it yet.

My paternal grandmother, who was born in 1908 and died in 1988, used to have this collection of three postcards (?) up on her wall. I recently saw it at my parents’ place and requested that I take it with me so I could put it up in my home. It reminds me of my grandmother whom I loved dearly (and whom, as you can probably tell from the above dates, I knew for all too brief a part of my life). On the back, my grandmother wrote: Graz 1926-27. There is also some hard-to-read handwriting on the front that you can see on the image. Only recently did I stop to look at the pictures individually. For me, their entire meaning comes from my memories associated with them as a whole.

This excellent piece by Jonathan Zittrain explains very nicely the potential downsides of how cloud computing is developing these days. (“Cloud” here refers to having all our data reside out there on others’ machines instead of on our own devices.)

A few quotes, but as we like to say, read the whole thing.

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.

[..]

The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

[..]

When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

On a related note, this post seems like an appropriate occasion to link to this great cartoon, which the artist created over 10 months ago.

Two years ago, as part of a collection of articles researching social network site uses, I published a piece (blog post here) about the different predictors of Facebook and MySpace use among a diverse group of first-year college students. Some of the reactions to that paper suggested that the the differences by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status identified in the data were only temporary and would soon change.

I now have some new data to consider possible changes over the past two years. I haven’t written this up in any formal way yet (nor do I have more elaborate statistical analyses to share right now), but I do have some figures suggesting that the differences I identified two years ago persist today.

Note that this is a new cohort of first-year students (i.e., not the same students resurveyed two years later) at the same universitywhere I conducted the study in 2007. (See details about the data collection and sample descriptives at the end of this post.)

There are two main findings here. (Click on the images for larger versions or see the table below.) First, there is a general increase in use of Facebook and a general decline in use of MySpace across the board. In 2007, 79% of the study participants were using Facebook while in 2009, 87% of the sample reports doing so. In contrast, while in 2007, 55% of the group reported using MySpace, in 2009, only 36% do so. [click to continue…]

The assumption about universal Internet access among Americans likely left some of the most enthusiastic Michael Jackson fans without the opportunity to enter the lottery for tickets to the memorial services being held today in Los Angeles. Registering for the lottery could only be done online and many millions of Americans don’t have Internet access in their homes. Worse yet, because registration was confined to the dates of July 3rd and July 4th, most public access points would have been inaccessible due to holiday closings at public libraries and other locations. Adding insult to injury, these constraints of online access are very much unequally distributed among the population leaving certain types of people – for example, African Americans – much less likely to have had the opportunity to enter the drawing.

Talking about the digital divide – or the differences between the technological haves and have-nots – is passé conjuring up seemingly outdated debates of the 1990s. Nonetheless, the fact remains that a big portion of Americans continues to live without Internet access at home or often without any Internet use anywhere. According to the
latest figures (2007) from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, over 38% of American households report no home Internet use. Broken down by race and ethnicity, close to 55% of African American households and over 56% of Hispanic households do not report home Internet usage. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has more
recent figures confirming that large numbers of Americans continue to be disconnected with Blacks and Hispanics less likely to be online than Whites and Asian Americans. [click to continue…]

I don’t always get xkcd although often enough I think it’s quite funny and on occasion I think it’s just brilliant. Here’s one I’m surprised my students haven’t put on a T-shirt for me yet. And you might recall our CT discussion of this one. Today, Randall Munroe has added another to my collection of favorites, check it out. (I even forgive him for a slight misspelling at the end. I won’t get into specifics, because it would be a spoiler. See the first comment below for more. UPDATE an hour later: typo I write about has been fixed.:)

Between the topic of Michèle’s posts, the discussion that followed John H’s note on manners and now John Q’s query about seminar questions, it’s a good opportunity to describe an incident I experienced years ago. I was surprised economists didn’t get more of a mention in the thread following John H’s post earlier given what I’ve seen in their colloquia. I have close-to no experiences in philosophy exchanges (and yet I dare call myself a Timberite…), but I’ve attended quite a few talks among economists so I’m used to their style of Q&A. As some have noted, it often starts a few slides in – or in some famous cases the speaker doesn’t get to proceed past the title slide for most of the time allotted – and being rather aggressive seems standard. If that’s the local norm, they are likely used to it and it doesn’t raise any eyebrows. However, what if you put such an economist in a room full of sociologists? Is it okay for him to import his style or should he take a moment to familiarize himself with the local norms? [click to continue…]

At IHE, Scott Jaschik has a piece about a site that sells corrupted files to students as a way to get a few extra hours or days to finish an assignment. The idea is that the student submits a corrupted file, it takes the instructor a while to figure this out, in the meantime the student finishes the assignment.

Although I’ve never had students send me corrupted files, I’ve certainly had them supposedly send me attachments that weren’t there in reality. Of course, most people have, at one time or another, forgotten to attach a file to an email so it’s hard to assume it’s always intentional, but one wonders.

The piece made me reflect on what other excuses are emerging in the new digital environment that weren’t in vogue earlier. I’ve had students claim to have lost their Internet connection at home making it difficult to meet a deadline. While on the one hand, I tend to be skeptical of this, ISPs are sufficiently bad that it’s not completely implausible. What’s your favorite digital-era bogus excuse?

As a tribute to old excuses that presumably some still use, here’s a link to the “The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society” [or pdf] by Mike Adams in case there are people who haven’t seen it yet.

I just wanted to post a quick note about one of our upcoming guest bloggers so readers who’re not familiar with her work can read up on it. Michèle Lamont is most recently author of How Professors Think, a book that’s already inspired discussions here at CT. Other books of hers you may have come across (or if not then should check out) include The Dignity of Working Men and Money, Morals and Manners. Also, her co-edited volume (with Marcel Fournier) on Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality is standard text on Sociology of Culture syllabi. And then there are her many articles. This is just a heads up.

I’m starting a new research project (if I manage to get some funding) related to job searching. I was talking about it with my friend danah and she sent me a link to the McDonald’s online job application site for Singapore. (That latter bit is not obvious from the site at all, but it seems to be the one for Singapore.)

I looked at the first page an applicant has to fill out and found a question about religion with the options to the right on the screen shot. To be sure, this is not signaled as required information, nonetheless, I found it curious. For one thing, why is there no “Other” option? Anyone know anything about why such a job application would have this field in Singapore? Could this have to do with handling certain types of food? And somewhat unrelated (presumably), any thoughts on why McDonald’s doesn’t make it more clear on the site and form that this is the Singapore-specific job application form?

I’ve uploaded a copy of the full screen here in case you’d like to see the question in context and don’t want to click through to it.

I’ll be in Paris later this month and am looking for the following type of hotel. I’d like it to be in/near the 16th or 5th, 6th or 7th. (Yes, I know, those are rather different neighborhoods. I once lived in the 16th and am somewhat nostalgic even though it wouldn’t be most people’s first touristy choice.) I’m not looking for anything either super fancy or run-down, it doesn’t have to be charming or cute, not that those latter qualities would be a problem.:) I don’t care about the size of the rooms, but I do care about cleanliness. It doesn’t have to be the cheapest place, but it shouldn’t be too expensive either (up to, say, about $200/night). I realize a lot of these parameters are relative, if you could say why you’re recommending a place, that would be great. Ideally, it would be a few blocks from a metro station. Free wifi would be splendid or a cafe nearby that has it would be great as well. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Following up on my blog post from a few weeks ago, a couple of colleagues and I have published a formal response to the media frenzy covering the study that claimed a relationship between Facebook use and lower grades.

Back when the story broke about Aryn Karpinski’s research, most media outlets ran with the claims made in the original press release or even took it to a next step by suggesting a causal relationship between Facebook use and lower grades. Only a few outlets took care in reporting, among them the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the last few days, the BBC has had a piece considering the various perspectives.

By the way, this is the quickest turn-around I’ve ever experienced with an academic publication. Below the fold is a bit more describing how it came about. [click to continue…]

The following should be really neat. Today at 3pm ET, the Berkman Center will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha search engine or “computational knowledge engine”. I saw a preview of it by Stephen Wolfram a month ago at Foo Camp East and was mesmerized. Stephen Wolfram will be talking about the system with Jonathan Zittrain at today’s event. Join the live Webcast, participate remotely using the Berkman Center question tool, by interacting with its Twitter account or on IRC.

UPDATE (4/29/09): The video of the session is now available here.

It started last night: links showing up on Twitter and elsewhere to articles about how Facebook users do worse in school. It’s not hard for people then to jump quickly to the conclusion that Facebook use results in worse grades (e.g., Study: Facebook Hurts Grades). Unfortunately, I know of no data set out there that could help us answer that question. The few people who have relevant data sets could establish correlation at best. I myself have not found such a connection in my data, but let’s back up a bit. [click to continue…]