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Today is the first day of the new semester. I don’t teach until Wednesday, but it was my daughter’s first day on our campus as a full-time student. After two and a half years elsewhere, she’s spending a semester with us, saving money for a summer trip abroad and getting a different perspective on what it is her parents do all day.

Because the nation is rightly fixed on improving degree completion rates, the discussion about America’s higher education agenda is at risk of becoming so pedestrian that terms like access and success lose their meaning. In similar fashion, once everyone and everything became “green” it was less clear to me what was meant by a “green economy,” “green jobs” or “green politics.”

Just in case my nerd cred needed any burnishing, I devoted part of the break to reading On Being Presidential, by Susan Resneck Pierce.

I discovered “The Daily Dozens” while attending a workshop at the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing at Bowling Green State University. The Dozens are a daily writing exercise designed to kick-start ideas by doing something that we all love and are good at--making lists. A poet might use such an exercise to come up with images, or a series of conceits to hold a poem together. A fiction writer might come up with quirks for a character. An academic might use the Daily Dozens to generate thoughts on an article, solutions for an intellectual problem, or lesson ideas.

I promised I would provide two more big Internet issues. The second issue is the "ownership" of personal accounts on social networking platforms of individuals who are also employees.

Why do you live where you live? Did you move for a job, a partners job, or for the location? Perhaps it is the schools? Avent, an economics correspondent for The Economist and primary contributor to the Free Exchange blog, thinks that the most powerful explanatory variable of location choice is housing prices.

Even thought I wasn't in Seattle, I was able to still engage, learn, and participate.

The advent season invariably leads me to engage in a self-reflection on whether (and to what degree) I have been naughty or nice. Oftentimes, I am very confident I have done more good deeds than bad, mainly because I have little occasion to potentially do ill to somebody. As long as I did things on my own (as a professor, researcher and writer), my actions bear little direct consequence to others. I would like to think I have a modest amount of social capital after being in the academic profession for 20 odd years, which I could bank on in case I veer towards the naughty territory.