Blogs

Danny Boyle's Olympic Opening Ceremony was unexpectedly enjoyable. From the opening ring (courtesy of Bradley Wiggins) of a 27 ton bell, to the closing festivities, it conveyed a multilayered and multivalent sense of many aspects of what Britain is and isn't (a point deftly made by the New Yorker late last night). As Boyle himself put it, "The Ceremony is an attempt to capture a picture of ourselves as a nation, where we have come from and where we want to be."

We all know the score: despite the continued growth in post-graduate degrees, full-time, permanent positions in academia are increasingly rare. In 2009, part-time faculty members represented more than half of all faculty in teaching positions and only 30 percent of all faculty held tenure track positions. Certainly, to search for work in today’s over-saturated academic market, in the depths of a recession, is no easy task; as a newly minted PhD, this is a fact I know all to well.

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.