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In a recent New Yorker article, Atul Gawande compares medical—especially surgical—care to the service at the Cheesecake Factory chain of restaurants. While the analogy seems somewhat absurd at first—no doubt Gawande's point—we are soon sucked in to his comparison. The cooks and servers at Cheesecake Factory master hundreds of recipes, serving thousands of customers exactly what they ask for, night after night. Why, he asks, can't medical care work the same way? Why can't doctors deliver a measurable standard of care on a routine basis?

An Australian correspondent writes: "I'm a current postgraduate student from Australia in my first year of a two year Master of Philosophy (Masters by research) degree in an evergreen humanities discipline. I'm interested in doing my PhD in the US for reasons that are long and not really logical (though I'm stubbornly set on it). I was wondering if you (or your readers) could assist me in figuring out how competitive PhD (tuition and stipend, preferably) scholarships are over there in the humanities?"

It is not possible to overstate the degree to which Doonesbury defines the cultural milieux from which so many of us in higher education and associated knowledge industries are drawn from. How many of you have Doonesbury cartoons taped up to your office door? Raise your hand if Doonesbury is the first thing you look for in your morning paper.

Every so often we all get the sense that we might be stuck in a rut. Chances are, it’s probably true. From Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit – why we do what we do in life and business: “… a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.”

One week before classes start, but I'm busy doing other things in preparation.

As a faculty administrator with a travel schedule that gets me away from my station, I rely on a small group of dependable colleagues (who need to be tenured faculty) to act as officer-in-charge (OIC). I literally live much of my official life vicariously through a parade of OICs who have to make routine and (less often) controversial decisions in my name. At the opposite end, I haven’t had much experience being a temporary administrator.

There's a difference.

It starts innocently enough. We save a PDF file to our desktop or in a folder. After some more work we suddenly have a folder stuffed with files and we lose the sense of structure that ties the work together. Folders and subfolders appear to try and capture structure, filenames no longer carry any meaning, and the mass of files and folders loses meaning. Then the process repeats itself.