A happy brief post: trifecta!

• SCOTUS upholds marriage equality!
• SCOTUS upholds the ACA!
• The CSA battle flag comes down in South Carolina and everywhere else!

Wonders of Technology?: Kindle Page Numbers

Back in 2011, Amazon announced with great fanfare that it was including page numbers, real page numbers, in its Kindle books.  I was excited about it back then, too.

Has that promise come to fruition?

Sort of.   Of maybe 15 random Kindle books on my iPad, here's the breakdown:

• 4 have actual page numbers corresponding to actual published books.
• 4 more have "page numbers" corresponding to someone's Platonic conception of an edition that never existed.
• 7 just have location numbers and that infuriating thing where they try to figure out my reading speed, as though you never jump back and forth in a text.

Some observations:

• The public domain texts are least likely to have page numbers, real or imagined, as you'd expect. 
• Newer trade books are more likely to have page numbers, but that's not a given.  
• Jon Krakauer's Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town has real page numbers, as does David Shields and Shane Salerno's Salinger.
•  Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's just-published The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland and Susan M. Schweik's older The Ugly Laws do not; they only have location markers. 

At least Amazon tells you whether there are real page numbers or not.  If you click on the "length" dropdown tab, it will say one of two things:

• "Contains real page numbers based on the print edition, ISBN #whatever."  This will have the real page numbers.
• "Based on the print edition, ISBN #whatever." This will not have the real page numbers.

There's an new and expensive book that would be really helpful for the upcoming research trip; it's long and weighs a ton, so I was thinking about the Kindle edition (still very expensive--over $60). Since the extremely expensive book is "based on the print edition" but without page numbers, I think I will pass on it.

But wouldn't you think that after four years, the publishers would have gotten the memo about readers wanting page numbers?

Time for a media fast

Here's the news cycle that the web encourages:

Say you find a story that for some reason interests you, like maybe the Rachel Dolezal story, to name a nonstressful example.

You read the first reports as they start to come in from feeder sites.  Then you go to the NY Times, WaPo, Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed or other actual news sources. You click on their links.

Then you go to HuffPo, Jezebel, Slate or other quasi-news aggregator sites. You notice that what's reported in all these various sites and that the sites conflict with each other. In the Dolezal story, for example, that would be all the variations on number of siblings and so on.

Maybe you check out the comments to see if any insiders have information.  Maybe you even click on the listicle aggregators ("Five things to know about Rachel Dolezal," "What Twitter thinks of Rachel Dolezal," etc.) that are basically automated collections of what people no better informed and far more angry, hostile, and profane than yourself think of the issue.

Maybe you read the long, thoughtful opinion pieces, or at least skim them. 

If you're on Facebook, people have stories and opinions. Lots of opinions.

If you're on Twitter, people have opinions and outrage.  Lots of outrage.

As new revelations come out, you read those, too, because whether it's fracking or Rachel Dolezal or some other story, you want to see how it ends.

Before you know it, you've sunk way too much time in following a story that isn't worth that kind of time and attention.

It's not that you should barricade yourself away from the news or refuse to have conversations about it.  But you realize that you should have spent your time instead on something worthwhile where your attention could make a difference.

It's like the information is rat food in a Skinner box, and you are the rat, pressing the bar for more. The food pellets, though, are composed of anger, outrage, and stress.

So here are five things I intend to do the next time I start scurrying down this particular web rabbit hole. 

1)  Go outside and run my hands over the lavender, which is in bloom, so my hands will smell like lavender as I type.
2)  Pick some weeds out of the garden.
3) Stand up and read something.
4) Turn off the wifi or use Freedom.
5) Log the time I'm wasting, with RescueTime or something else, or stop going on Facebook.

Maybe this is a media diet rather than a fast, but it's a start.

*Edited to add: I don't mean to be ungrateful about Facebook--it does let me connect with friends and family members--but a break sounds like a good idea.

We should not say his name

We should not say his name.

We should not read his manifesto.

We should not listen to the thousands of words being wasted on trying to decide whether he was mentally ill or hated religion.

We know why he did it: racism.

We know how he did it: abusing the trust of a welcoming congregation to spread hatred, violence, and death.

We know what he would like: publicity.

We should not give it to him.

Random bullets of mid-June

New and improved with categories!

• Education in the News. Bet you thought this would be about Rachel Dolezal, didn't you?  No, this one needs Margaret Soltan's fine touch, so I hope she'll write about it.  Are you curious about what Scott Walker is going to do with the $250 million he gained by destroying tenure and gutting the University of Wisconsin?  Here's the answer: building half of a new $500 million basketball stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. 

• Travel. Has this happened to you?  When I see "seats assigned at check-in" on an itinerary for a flight, I assume that it means "fooled you, you sucker! We're going to bump you from the flight"--because they do. Am I the only person this happens to, or have you gotten bumped if you didn't have an assigned seat?
• Work Progress.  I'll be turning in the Laocoon manuscript for copyediting and production this weekend, and it should be out next year.  Hooray! 
• Work Progress. Now to get at the overdue piece for another project.  Flavia wrote recently about the whole phenomenon of writing for companion volumes, and while I agree about their proliferation, I just signed on to do another one, after I turned one down earlier in the year. These do get cited, so they are indeed useful. 
• Cats. One of my cats hates doors being closed (don't they all?), and so if she sees a partially closed door, she will rear up on her hind feet, put her front legs together, and launch herself at the door until it opens. This is a dog behavior, sort of like huskies stiffening their front legs and launching themselves downward to break through the ice or a coyote pouncing on a mouse. I don't know where she got it from.

Thoughts on traveling here and there

When I came back into the U. S. recently from another country, the airport was crowded, with insufficient signage so I didn't know where to go.

Here was the surprising part: the customs people were pleasant. "Have a nice day," they said, and "welcome back!"

So were the TSA screeners.  We were all stressed out, since everyone had connecting flights and the lines were long and slow in a cramped, hot space.   I put my stuff in the 4 bins (laptop separate from iPad, don't forget, unless it's one of the airports where they yell at you to put them together) and put my hands above my head in the scanner booth, as directed.  When I got out, the woman who told me to go ahead pointed to my Fitbit and said, "I want to get one of those with a watch in it."

"Me, too," I said. "This is an older one."

It wasn't so much what she said as that she was making a human connection after all that stress. I noticed that the other screeners were doing similar things--just saying something mildly human and noncommittal.

I had seen one of the male TSA agents joking with a bevy of slender, pretty young blonde women waiting to go through, but that's how 40-ish men usually behave around young things.  But no: the agents seemed to pay some pleasant attention to several people, even those of us who aren't slender 20-year-olds, instead of barking at us about what we were doing wrong. 

Is this some new training that TSA is doing? If so, please continue it.

 ---

I'll be heading out for a research trip in a few weeks, and while I'm grateful for the opportunity, I would just like to stay home for a while.

Would I go if I could get the materials online? Probably, yes, because there's nothing like an archive.

But when they invent a 3D virtual reality archive in my subject area, I certainly want to try it out.

The economics of wishful thinking about campus funding

Given the resounding thump on the head that the protections of tenure just took in Wisconsin (see Historiann's posts), I've been thinking about the implications of articles that call for universal tenure, or tenure-track lines for teaching, or vast increases in lines because humanities are a good thing, or even free state-funded tuition for college students.  (See Notorious's post on this issue.)

A few years ago, there was a call for tenure-track faculty to "just say no" to any hiring of contingent faculty instead of tenure-track lines, and if that meant courses didn't get taught, well, tough beans.

Now, I like the principles behind these idealistic stands, but I am wondering about how these would work in an economic environment like this one where state legislatures continually raid the higher ed budget to fund other things, where double-digit decreases in state funding are the norm, where tuition is mandated by the state not to increase, and where some governors may well destroy great university systems so that they can make the destruction a cornerstone of their conservative credentials. See

How might the conversation go at Everystate University?  I'm hypothesizing that it might go something like this in the worst case:

Words and Widgets Faculty: "We need to teach 100 sections of Words and Widgets 101 next semester, but we don't have enough faculty."

Admin: "Increase course sizes. Put 'em in an auditorium. Hand 'em some clickers."

Faculty: "No, we won't increase course sizes."

Admin: "Okay, hire some contingent faculty."

Faculty: "No, we made a pledge not to do that.  In fact, we need 10 new tenure-track teaching faculty in our department right away to teach 3 sections apiece. We will also need you to fund the search costs. If you don't do that, we can't and won't offer 100 sections."

Admin: sounds of crickets

Time passes. True to their pledge, the Words and Widgets Department offers only 70 sections of Words and Widgets 101.  Many angry phone calls from students later, the department and Admin meet again.

Faculty: "See? We can't offer these courses without enough tenure-track teaching faculty."

Admin: "Contingent--"

Faculty. "Not gonna do that.  It would threaten our educational mission and break our pledge."

Admin.  "Here's 70% of your last year's budget, then, since you only taught 70% of the students. Oh, and we now have an agreement with MOOCs-R-US to teach the other 30% online."

Faculty: "You can't do that. You have to run it through the Faculty Senate."

Admin: "Oh, can't we, though? Bwahahahaha!"

This doesn't mean that the noble ideals aren't worth fighting for.  They are. But in my pessimistic moments, I wonder about how these might fare in the world of academe as it currently exists.

Edited to add: See Bardiac's roundup at http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/teaching-track.html