As seen at Bardiac

As seen at Bardiac:

http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html

[Edited to add: Apparently I was supposed to write something as well.

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment. (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)

The experiment is explained on Scott Kaufmann's blog; he explains it better than I could. It's basically to measure the speed of memes for an MLA paper he's writing.

1. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I'm one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)

I think everyone's done this already, but here goes: please do the meme.

1. Ping Technorati.

Professors as students

A long time ago, I used to do workshops for fellow faculty members. The people who came to the workshops were all volunteers who wanted to learn something specific. Since it involved computers, we met in a lab, and none of the things I said before turning them loose on their computers took more than 5-10 minutes.

I learned that I could count on the following:

If there were 15 people in the group

• Most would listen to what I said, look at what I'd put on the screen, and work with it.
• 1 or 2 would have clicked ahead instead of listening to me, gotten themselves stuck, and frantically be waving their arms for help.
• 1 would have been sitting in the back, talking (not in low tones) to the person next to her, chatting away, cracking jokes, and laughing while I gamely tried to explain things at the front of the room. (Yes, a few times I stopped talking, stared in her direction, and waited, just as I do in class. This worked for about 90 seconds until she started up again.) As soon as I stopped talking, her hand would shoot up and she'd say, "What was that? What did you want us to do?"

One of the things I took away from these experiences is that there are people who cannot shut up if they are not the center of attention; they can't help themselves, and you just have to work with them. I think that the experience of being a teacher doesn't help with this tendency, since if you're in a room with others, you're used to being the one doing the talking.

I've seen this in small group committee meetings, too, where people will deflect conversations to irrelevancies, interrupt the chair, interrupt others, talk aloud to themselves, and so on. Again, this isn't malicious; if anything, it's just high spirits and the sense of a small committee meeting as a social as well as a work occasion. I think that sometimes they act this way because they're used to being the one doing the talking (see above) and sometimes because they believe it helps to kill time in the meeting. My take is a little different: if we stay focused and get the work done early, we can leave early.

Professors like to complain about their students' inattention in class, but what these experiences have taught me is that we're not so different after all when it comes to being task-oriented when sitting in a confined space.

Please tell me vacation isn't over

It was a fine Thanksgiving: immediate family, lots of togetherness watching old movies, and lots of togetherness-alone time as well (sitting in the same room reading and not talking).

The turkey, stuffing (two kinds--vegan and other), squash, stuffed mushrooms (vegan), vegetables, and the rest all turned out well, especially the turkey. To quote from one of my favorite old movies, The Women, "If you put a pork chop [read turkey] in a hot oven, what's to keep it from getting done?" Although I liked reading all the exotic recipes on other people's blogs, part of the point of Thanksgiving for us is the traditional food, so that's what we had. The only departure from tradition is the route of the Thanksgiving walk/hike that we take while the turkey is roasting; this year, we went to a nearby park that I'd somehow never visited and walked as the snow came drifting down.

And now I have a to-do list with too few items crossed off and a stack of papers sitting in an orange folder telling me that this time is over? Bah, humbug.

Random bullets of Thanksgiving break

In the face of others' excellent posts this week on anonymity in blogging, "why I blog," selflessness in academe, conference presentations, and other topics (go read them--lots more on the sidebar!), here are short snippets from the last few days.

• A tip for editors: if you ask me to review something and return my report electronically, when I do so, please, please take 2 seconds to hit reply and say "Got it--thanks!" Don't turn me into an e-mail stalker ("Did you get the report I sent on X?"), or, worse, a borderline obsessive type who sends a paper copy just in case.
• Naps. Is there any pleasure as great as dutifully trying to read a dull but necessary book, getting sleepy, and realizing that, for a change, you don't have to make heroic efforts to keep awake but can just go ahead and take a nap instead?
• Food. jo(e) writes about her mother baking cookies and making doughnuts. We all like to bake in my family (my sister does pies, while my forte is cookies and cakes), but no one but my mother makes doughnuts, and she makes them only when there are enough people around to eat them quickly--not much of a trick given our large extended family. She'd get out an ancient deep-frying kettle with a cloth-covered electrical cord--yes, that's how old it was; I think the patent number was "1"--add the shortening, and plug it in. The ancient kettle was retired a few years ago for one with some of these newfangled things called "safety features," but the doughnuts are still great. They taste best when someone drives to the cider mill and gets a few gallons of fresh-pressed local cider while the doughnuts are frying. Cold cider. Hot doughnuts and doughnut holes. Enough said.

Stragglers

Like most places, our school has a set advising period. It started in mid-October when the department sends out messages, puts up posters, and supplies sign-up sheets for faculty members to put on their doors. After a couple of weeks, the department usually extends the "official advising period" and puts up more brightly colored and imposing posters ("IMPORTANT!").

I'm not sure why they bother, because advisees seem to come in two kinds: the ones who sign up the first day and come in bright and early in the advising period with a full slate of courses they need to take, and the others.

The others are just showing up now, once they've figured out that they can't register until they've seen an advisor. They're writing me slightly aggrieved notes:

"I came by to sign up for a time, but there weren't any time slots left. " (That's because the advising period ended two weeks ago, but never mind; I e-mailed the person back and set up a time.)

Or

"I'm available these times [none of which intersect with any times I'm available.] Please e-mail me and let me know when we can meet." (I respond by telling the person when I'm available and leave him or her to figure it out.)

Somehow, it all works out. The stragglers usually have no idea what they want to take (what a coincidence!), so those appointments take longer, but they get the courses they need, or a close approximation. Then they depart, leaving behind them only the smell of Dayquil and cough drops (for all of them have vicious head colds, an added bonus when you're sitting next to them for half an hour being coughed on), ready to be surprised by the whole process again next spring.

Request from an unknown student

Sent Saturday evening at about 11 p.m.

Hi Undine,

I'm a 3rd-year student in [Unrelated Department] and would like you to participate in our research project about [unrelated subject]. We would like you to participate on [day this week when I'm not on campus].

Signed,

Student

*******

Uh, no.

Believing firmly in helping students with this kind of thing, I'm usually a sucker for this kind of "interview a professor for a class," "fill out this survey" kind of academic citizenship, but on short notice and a day I'm not on campus? I sent a polite note declining the invitation but refrained from observing that hailing a professor that you've never even met by her first name might not make the best impression. (First names for professors are the norm for grad students but not undergrads around here.)

Random Bullets of Conference

I am at semi-big and very interesting conference. The weather is lovely--unseasonably warm for this area, I hear--, the panels are good, and all my conference stuff (presenting paper, attending meetings, chairing a panel) is over.

It's at conferences like this that you remember why you go to these things and put up with all the expense and stress of the travel: to talk with people who are as interested in Major Author as you are, and to hear about More Obscure Author that you immediately want to look up and read. You get to catch up with people that you only see at conferences, and you find out what they're working on.

In fact, my conference experience is a lot like What Now?'s, so I'll just link to her.

Good times!

Got ballots?

[Edited to add: Voters, thank you!]

I don't usually post about politics because (1) other people have more nuanced reactions than "What on EARTH were you thinking?" and (2) I'm usually too busy banging my head on the keyboard when reading the latest set of baldfaced lies and platitudes from the Dear Leader and his puppetmaster Rove.

Like Maggie May, I'm nervous about this election; like a lot of other people, I got all hopeful in 2004 (not to mention 2000) and then was crushed.

Even without the Election Ladies, I've voted already (in a vote-by-mail state) and just want to say this: Vote, and vote so that it counts. I say this because I've run into a few people who've said quite airily that they intend to vote for, I don't know, the Plaid Shirt party or something else just as a protest against the system. Don't do it!. We saw that in 2000 (I'm looking at you, Nader voters, though no one now admits voting for him), and look where it got us.

Vote so that maybe there's a shot at turning this country around.

Library update

One of my students stopped by this week to talk about her term project. The class has several options for a project, but one option involves analyzing old periodicals. When I discussed this in class, some students didn't know that those were on the shelves, and only a few had ventured into the dim caverns of the library where they're kept. I waxed rhapsodic about the joys of reading old periodicals, winding up with, "And it's really fun!" Their faces told me that their idea of fun might involve something other than the library, but they still seemed interested (or had the good manners to seem interested).

The student who stopped by was one who had ventured into the dim caverns of the compressed stacks--and seemed to be as excited by that adventure of discovery as I am: "I love old books!" It's nice to know that some in the class share this feeling. Take today, for example: If it's dinnertime on a cold, dark, rainy night, and I've been up since 5:15 and on campus since 8:00 a.m. , and if the last thing I feel like doing is going to the library before heading home, I can usually find the motivation to track down books and make copies if I can go to the old periodicals/books area as a reward.

I mention this in part because of a recent comment posted to a previous post about book dumping at Cal Poly Pomona (go to the comments page to read the whole thing; I'm not sure about the etiquette of reposting the entire comment on the blog):

"The 200,000 books in storage are going to be thrown away. The library is being converted into a book crematorium."

A hypothetical situation

Okay. Say you belong to an organization and that the organization has a newsletter. Say that you've volunteered to lay out the newsletter in Publisher because you are a soft touch, aka a sucker. Because it's Publisher, and you know how to wrestle it into a form that looks nice, you do this for the organization.

Bear in mind that you are not an art professor, nor are you a trained expert in design. Even after you've designed the masthead and the layout, it takes a good three hours to lay out the publication.

This is three hours during which you are not doing your own research, grading papers, preparing for class, or sitting with your feet up and having a glass of wine. You are sitting and obsessing about the relative space occupied by text boxes when you ought to be grading the papers that your students have patiently been waiting to see.

When someone who's responsible for the content and proofing then says to you, "You know, I think this bit from page 3 would look better on page 6," and you know that that means moving everything in between, with all the headaches of moving anything in Publisher, what would you do?

a) Say "You sure have a good eye for that! I'll get on it right away."
b) Ignore the suggestion.
c) Address the situation by making an even more creative suggestion as to what the person who made the suggestion can do with the newsletter.

Me and My (Deadbeat) Shadow

In department news: many meetings, but nothing I can blog about. I did learn some important lessons (not in a situation involving me) about whom the department will and will not support once push comes to shove, though.

I also got two phone calls on my cell phone yesterday, neither of them for me. When I got a new cell phone number about a year ago, I didn't realize that it came complete with the ghost of past owners. I'm still getting 2-3 calls a week for "Todd," my deadbeat shadow.

I've learned at least a few things about Todd.

He apparently liked to gamble. A lot. I get a lot of calls alerting me to hot tips at some gambling site.

He apparently didn't have a day job, since if I don't keep the phone turned off, it's apt to ring in the middle of a meeting at any time of the day.

He also was apparently a person of considerable interest to a Chicago law firm, which liked to call and leave very long automated messages on my voice mail demanding that Todd call them back immediately. This went on for a long time because whoever was responsible for sending out the messages apparently never listened to see whose voice mail it was. I finally called the law firm and told them to stop calling.

He wasn't too good with handling money, since I get calls from collection agencies demanding that Todd call them back immediately. A live person actually called yesterday, so I was able to tell him that "Todd" hadn't owned this phone in quite some time. Maybe that'll stop a few of the calls.

I do want the calls to stop, but it has been sort of interesting piecing together the life of my deadbeat shadow.

OT: In other news . . .

I see that Jane Wyatt has died. As an old movie buff and John Galsworthy fan, I remember her as Dinny Cherrell in One More River, but to everyone else she's Margaret Anderson of Father Knows Best, and, more famously, Mr. Spock's mother on Star Trek. Although I don't usually associate family members with movie stars, Jane Wyatt has always reminded me strongly of my mother-in-law (still with us, fortunately), with all that serenity and graciousness. They even went to the same college.

And, in other news, I downloaded the new Internet Explorer 7. As a longtime Firefox fan, I was a little amused: see, the new IE has these cool things called TABS, so you can OPEN MORE THAN ONE WINDOW AT ONCE. What a concept! Seriously, it has some nice features, like a separate button for Google Scholar. It'll still be useful for those occasions when I'm trying to see some video (which, except for YouTube video, my beloved Firefox just cannot seem to find the right plugins for viewing).

Sunday walk, continued

Abandoned stone building
Originally uploaded by undines.

It's an abandoned building on the path beside the river, but it doesn't appear to be very old.

Sunday walk

River view 1
Originally uploaded by undines.

After giving a talk yesterday to a local group (prep time: about 10 hours for a book that I've taught frequently), I thought a walk by the river today might be nice. I was right.

Election ladies

Our state has gone to mail-in ballots, which means the end of polling places for this fall's election. The reasons were cost, "convenience," blah blah blah. Something will be lost, though.

Ever since I started voting, the polls have always been staffed by people, mostly women, who were well on the other side of 70. I'm sure that they had an official title, but I always thought of them as the "election ladies." They'd look up your name--it usually took two of them, one to pronounce your name and the other to look it up--and then you'd sign the book. They'd give you your ballot (punch card or paper ballot or a Scantron sheet and Sharpie marker, depending on the state) or point you in the direction of the mechanical voting machine. Usually there was a cheerful election lady on the way out to see that you put your Scantron sheet or punch card into the locked box or machine. Sometimes she gave you a sticker that said "I voted!"

This felt like democracy, somehow. There I was in a place where I'd never usually be (an evangelical church was the most recent site for our district), with a lot of people I'd never usually see. We were all doing the same thing--voting--and if it felt like a little slice of a Frank Capra movie, that wasn't such a bad thing.

If you think about it, the election ladies were the first generation of American women (born circa 1920s) who came of age knowing that they could vote. Their mothers probably voted after the Nineteenth Amendment passed, but that generation had known what it was not to have a vote (as many other groups have known, to the eternal disgrace of the U.S., right up through the 1960s). Maybe the election ladies served as WACS in WWII. Maybe their mothers had impressed on them the significance of being able to vote, a right that women have had in this country for less than a hundred years. Maybe (let's not get too sentimental) they just wanted to get out of the house for election day. Whatever their reasons, the election ladies have volunteered to be at the polls every time, and now they won't be needed.

I'm going to miss the election ladies.

A day in the life

Some days are made for writing, or so I hear, and some days are just days like this.

• I spent the morning on business/administrative/class stuff: sending e-mail followups resulting from the big meeting at the conference, writing an exam, and all that kind of thing.
• For the first time, I asked to attend a department meeting via phone hookup, since the commute for the meeting takes three times as long as the meeting itself. I'm not a slacker--I'll be doing the 3-times-as-long-commute for a meeting on Wednesday--but figured that maybe this would be an acceptable alternative.
• Approximate amount of the conversation I could hear: 20%
• Approximate amount that I cared that this was all I could hear: 0%
• Exact amount of gratitude I had for the administrative professional who set this up: 100%

• Since I'd been away and the law of the land apparently dictates that only pizza can be eaten in my absence, there wasn't any food in the house, so I went to pick up some groceries. We don't have Wegman's, Trader Joe's, or Whole Foods, but we do have a local chain with three types of stores: Standard Supermarket, Upscale Organic Market, and Funky Downmarket Store. I usually go to Funky Downmarket, since it has a lot of the same variety as Upscale Organic but also carries a full slate of 1950s brands for the over-80 crowd. For some reason I really like seeing all those brands (Barbasol, Gleem--for all I know, it carries Burma Shave); it feels like time travel. It also carries a full array of strange regional candies from independent candy companies, which I figured out after reading Candyfreak.
  
• More later.
  

Conference snippets

I'm in Big Airport returning from a conference, waiting for a flight that's been delayed about two hours (as they have all the way along the line) that will take me to Northern Clime airport. The conference itself was too busy to report on at the time, but here are a couple of observations:

Most presentations that I saw were excellent. You could really learn something from the papers, and they seemed to get the audience (me included) fired up about the topics and about our own work. Although I always dread going (expense, the stress of travel, and having to talk to people being the top three reasons), conferences do energize you. (Question: How many conference-going cliches can you find in this bullet point? They're true, anyway.)

Why does a hotel in a relatively warm climate (50-70 degrees this time of year) feel the need to have (1) windows that don't open, (2) a thermostat that only can be turned down to 64 degrees at night, and (3) a big pouffy down comforter on the bed? So that my eyes will look big and pouffy like the down comforter all day long? If you love the cold and don't do well in heat, though, there was some consolation in that the conference rooms, which felt perfect to me, caused everyone to come in and complain about the low temperatures.

Even at a conference at which many of the panels address class and injustice, and at which grassroots organizing is seen as important, no one seems to notice the class hierarchy of institutions represented at the conference (Elite institutions and R1s = many panels; smaller institutions and community colleges = very few panels.) If community colleges and smaller state and private institutions constitute the place where many working adults or first-generation college students receive an education, why aren't there more panels accepted from these institutions?

Running through Jello

You know those nightmarish dreams where you're running through Jello or mud trying to get away from something and can't make any progress?

Today I thought I'd put down some estimates for how long tasks should take and compare it to how long the tasks actually took:

Creating two questions for graduate exam when I'd already read the student's bibliographies and supporting materials. . . Estimated: 45 minutes; Actual: 60 minutes. (This isn't bad; it's down from 45 minutes per question.)

Writing a 700-word newsletter article and sending it (with supporting pictures) . . .
Estimated: 45 minutes; Actual: 2 hours, 24 minutes.

Updating a study guide . . .Estimated: 20 minutes; Actual: 45 minutes

Collecting & editing & sending some handouts to be printed. . . Estimated: 15 minutes; Actual: about 45 minutes.

Academic jello. I definitely need to run faster.

Dead week

At the end of the semester, a lot of campuses, including ours, have "dead week." For us, this means that you can't have papers due, can't give exams, and generally must go easy on the students.

This was a different kind of "dead week," in that they were so quiet that signs of life were few and far between. Mild provocation didn't work ("Did you want her to kill Annoying Character?"). Softball questions didn't work very well ("What do you think the author meant by calling Character X 'Obviously Symbolic Character Name'?"). Humor worked a little, but not for long.

I couldn't get mad, somehow; it's midterm week, and they're tired. They look tired, anyway. They need a day off, and they'll get one because I'll be away at a conference. They may not need a midterm, but they're getting one of those, too.

OT: The Wal-Mart Way

From today's New York Times,:

Wal-Mart executives say they have embraced new policies for a large number of their 1.3 million workers to better serve their customers, especially at busy shopping times — and point out that competitors like Sears and Target have made some of these moves, too.

But some Wal-Mart workers say the changes are further reducing their already modest incomes and putting a serious strain on their child-rearing and personal lives. Current and former Wal-Mart workers say some managers have insisted that they make themselves available around the clock, and assert that the company is making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make way for lower-wage part-time employees.
. . . . . . .
“They need to be doing some of this,” said Charles Grom, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Chase who covers Wal-Mart. It lets the company schedule employees “when they are generating most of their sales — at lunch, in the evening on the weekends.”

I wonder if Charles Grom works for minimum wage part time, with no health benefits except as he is "encouraged" to use Medicaid as Wal-Mart workers are. I wonder if he is called into work at varying times of the day or night, disrupting family life and sleep schedules.

Human resources experts have long said that companies benefit most from having experienced workers. Yet Wal-Mart officials say the efficiencies they gain will outweigh the effects of having what labor experts say would be a less experienced, less stable, lower-paid work force.

Sarah Clark, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company viewed the changes as “a productivity improvement through which we will improve the shopping experience for our customers and make Wal-Mart a better place to work for our associates,” as Wal-Mart refers to its employees.
. . .
Tracie Sandin, who worked in the Yakima store’s over-the-counter drug department until last February, said, “They said, if you don’t have open availability, you’re put on the bottom of the list for hours.”

The view varies, apparently, if you're being paid the big bucks to abuse the noble art of rhetoric by spinning self-justifying lies, as Sarah Clark does, or whether you actually have to, you know, work under these "productivity improvements."

The article also goes on to say that since Wal-Mart began its plan to exterminate fire its older and disabled employees, it has removed stools and other items that allowed people with back and hip problems to work comfortably at checkout counters. Last year, an executive also favored making all employees go out and get carts, lift heavy boxes, etc., to get rid of those who might even possibly need health care. What's next? Races in which the first 10 employees getting to the finish line can keep their jobs and the rest are fired?

In addition to the obvious inequities of the Wal-Mart way for the company's employees, what troubles me is that the Wal-Mart way creeps into the academy, especially in the exploitation of part-time faculty (been there!), despite all the noble resolutions passed at MLA every year. It isn't news that there's an increasing pressure to treat students as customers by being available around the clock, teaching only that which is entertaining, and so forth. The comparison isn't fair--Wal-Mart employees don't have any options, and academics presumably do--but it's an uncomfortable reminder of where things could be headed.