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The promise of "badges" and other new forms of credentialing is that they'll help give a boost to those who do not have college diplomas or other forms of official recognition for their skills or knowledge. But will badges and the like really be able to live up to that promise?

As an undergraduate I had a wardrobe consisting of state university sweat pants, hoodies, flip-flops and free t-shirts. And why not? It was comfortable, easy, and everyone else dressed that way. However, when I got to graduate school I realized that my undergrad wardrobe was not going to cut it. There was no formal dress code, but it was clear by looking at my peers and professors that I needed to step up how I dressed in order to both fit in and be taken seriously. It is important to dress the part as graduate school is where we really begin our careers as scientists and start to interact with members of our field. Thankfully though, day-to-day academia can also be rather casual and there are many options for dressing.

Have you ever had an A/V (audio / visual) failure during a conference presentation? You are all ready to go with your talk and the projector will not work, the slides will not load, the audio is on the blink, your multimedia refuses to play?

A guest post with some good news; there is hope.

Sometimes the best way to tell what’s occupying me is to see the open tabs in my browser. I just closed eight that had to do with the recent Atlantic piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The responses I’ve been interested in focus mostly on what it might mean to “have it all” rather than taking up the well-trodden “mommy wars” positions that have become so predictable as to be boring. Perhaps the furthest from Slaughter’s original piece is Tim Kreider’s “The Busy Trap,” a lovely paean to what he calls laziness, but may simply be sustainable living.

I asked an old friend of mine who happens to be an expert in finance why we maybe shouldn't just go ahead and tax the rich, even though they're doing disproportionately well.

A new correspondent writes: Vitals > Ph.D., English/literature; associate professor at community college; eight months from tenure; 45 years-old Past...

This past Friday was the 5th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone. Over at the NYTimes Bits blog Brian Chen, author of Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future -- and Locked Us In, has some observations about how the iPhone changed phone and software industries.