Blogs

As I put together the annual report for the library, I spent a lot of time looking at numbers. One of them was the average cost of articles we provided to faculty published in journals we can’t afford and which we couldn’t get free through interlibrary loan. The average cost we paid per article? $41.89. This is making me think about the costs of our stern new religion of austerity.

An occasional correspondent writes: "How much do instructors have to adapt their courses and their styles to the needs of the students?"

Probably the closest that I'll get to being invited to give a TED Talk is Chris Anderson tweeting about something that I wrote. Last week, in response to my critique that $14.99 is too expensive for a 6 book / 3 month TED book subscription (through TED's new iOS app), Chris tweeted from @TEDchris, "Is $15 too much for 22 short, multimedia enabled books?! http://bit.ly/NNXitg http://bit.ly/Njqo1c"

There is a concept in statistics called “expected value.” This is the expected outcome of any situation that involves probability, and is found by multiplying the possible outcomes by the probability that each will occur and then adding these products together. Expected value calculations are why it is generally thought that one should not play the lottery, as some claim that the lottery is a “tax on people who did not do well in math

I almost always choose the chocolate cake.

Well, maybe not the pets themselves. Maybe more their owners. Especially when it comes to dogs, because dogs can't help the fact that for millenia they've been bred for subservience. Cats, on the other hand, might have to take the rap themselves.

Summer is the time when many faculty members vacate our shared campus space and retreat to home offices (or travel)...

In a conversation a few days ago, some thoughtful faculty noted in passing that the state’s constant drumbeat about job placement and STEM fields -- two different things, btw -- was becoming a factor in faculty morale in the humanities and social sciences. They heard every invocation of college-as-personnel-office as an attack on what they do, and as a harbinger of even-more-diminished resources to come.