Others’ resolutions

I don’t think edamame is strictly complying with the green things policy – they are a legume, and the spirit of the green things resolution is clearly spinach, broccoli, et al. You’ve already broken it! After all, if you were going to go by the letter of the resolution you could eat candy snakes or something.

I’ve always tended to agree with you that if you want to do something you should just do it, or not as you see fit. Making resolutions always seemed for the weak willed. I do remember in 9th grade though we had to make a resolution as a writing assignment or something. Mine was “achieve a higher level of consciousness.” I think I’d just recently read Dune.

Hi,

“Make more stuff.”

It means cook your own food. Don’t buy so much shit.

Have a nice year!

Antti

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I made the resolution to do a better job of selling worms that year. I remember because it was recorded in some sort of school newsletter and people thought it was funny. With the help of my father my older brother and I had a small business selling worms to fishermen in the summer. I’m pretty sure I did a better job of doing it though I’m not sure if it was because of the resolution or not. (Doing better mostly consisted in going out on more nights to gather worms with my father.)

I very much like making resolutions, there are a couple of reasons for this.

— I feel making resolutions is an excellent chance to quickly sum up hopes for the next year, a practice that is a very nice resetting of the mind on priorities and a sifting to the top of interests that I feel are most germane to the direction in life I want to go. It’s a chance to look at a longer period of time and to try to decide who you want to be at the end of next year.

— I feel writing these things down gives me a better shot at completing them than if I didn’t write them down at all. There have been studies done on success rates for resolutions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year's_resolution#Success_Rate
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/12/28/the-psychology-of-new-years-resolutions/
The success rate is not high, but it’s way higher than zero.

— Mostly, I make very specific resolutions, many of them are items that may be considered plans or goals. For example, I plan to be living in Brazil this time next year. However, it will be a significantly complicated challenge to do so, and by no means is it a certainty. Another of my resolutions is to spend more time in silence (no media, radio, children, etc). This is a difficult to track resolution — but writing this down clarifies the interest for me which leads me to:

— I post them visibly above my workspace and I refer to them all year long. This does help.

— I keep all of my resolutions, and it’s very fun to go back through 4 or 5 years of resolutions with a satisfied “Yep, I did that” or “No, I didn’t do that because my interest changed” or, and often enough, “No, I didn’t do that, and it continues to be a goal that will get re-listed.”

So yes – I keep them religiously – and usually I have 20 or 30 bullet points of them. I always look forward to making them and spending some time summing up the year and thinking how the next could be improved.

Does writing a book count as making stuff?

Not according to the bibliometric indexes used by the Danish Ministry of Science. If it’s an anthology, even worse. If you were working at a Danish university, you would be considered a liability by your head of department. ;-)

On a more serious (?) note: Everybody talks and writes about New Year’s Resolutions around this time of the year but at the age of 44 I have yet to meet someone who have actually made, let alone kept one. Do I know the wrong people, or…? (And no: I have no resolutions myself.)

My brother has the two same News Years resolutions every year.

First, drink more Bloody Marys

Second, eat more pork.

They seem staggeringly reasonable to me.

My resolution is to be resolute in the face of much ado about nothing !! :-)

About 10 years ago, I made a New Years’ resolution not to eat anything when I was already full just because it tastes good. I’m still keeping that one.
Of course the tight link between wrong-doing and consequences is a big help.

@praisegood barebones and @eszter: Oh, dear. I guess, I asked for it… Well, I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

Now, I assume that you are vaguely familiar with the performance board evaluation exercises introduced in the UK by the Conservative governments (if not, Christopher Bertram can surely inform us). Basically, at regular intervals evaluation boards will descend on British academic departments and with the help of a lot of indicators – bibliometric and others – decide if they produce research of value or not.

The Scandinavian countries (Social Democratic governments or not) in general have enthusiastically adopted the gospel of New Public Management, including in the field of higher education. So Norway, Denmark and Sweden are in the process of removing basic research funding to universities and replacing it with a system building on productivity-based indicators. We don’t make our students any wiser (we produce STÃ…s or HSTs or whatever) and we don’t gain further academic insight – we produce publication marks which again will be used for the distribution of appropriations.

Our bureaucratic overlords have decided that basically there is only one legitimate form of academic publishing – the peer-reviewed journal article written in English. These are what will earn you – or rather: the department you are associated with – money. The number of marks or points you earn depend on the status of the journal, your work appears in, but basically a journal article (provided it is published in a proper academic language and not German, French, Hungarian or – heaven forbid – one of the Scandinavian languages) beats not only book chapters but also monographs. So if we assume the existence of Eszter having a Scandinavian double (Esteri Hargittainen?), our Esteri would have to consider if she couldn’t have made more stuff by splitting the book into articles and hawking them at various prestigious academic journals. After all, the book would earn her department one, possibly two points, while three or four article would earn the department eight.

And yes, these rules also apply to the social sciences and humanities at Scandinavian universities. To our overlords, technology and natural sciences are the models for all academia.

But – a brief look at Eszter’s CV informs us that she is an associate professor at NWU (belated congratulations with your tenure, btw!) and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center and it may not be unreasonable to assume that the powers that be at Harvard are just a bit more flexible than Scandinavian bureaucrats. In which case, producing a book may indeed count as making more stuff.

And with this back to the New Year’s resolutions!

PS: Yes, I know that Esteri Hargittainen is pseudo-Finnish and that Finland is a Nordic, not a Scandinavian country. :-)