TISATAAFGC

What do you know?  There is such a thing as a free lunch, or at least a free golf cart.

Irony in Style Manuals

The  irony I previously noted is not confined to writing statements of faculties at small liberal arts colleges.  It is also found in professionally published style manuals.  On the one hand, I suppose this should be expected more often in a large document that is undoubtedly produced by many separate groups working in tandem, but on the other hand, this is their primary task, and they do not have to worry about classes, research, student questions, grading, and the endless meetings of a professor's life.

Reading

The hustle and bustle of the academic year mean that time is short, and I particularly bemoan that it cuts into my reading time.  I try to make time for it whenever and wherever I can, but this blog makes me wish I could read it a more leisurely manner.  (I also wish I could have a room in my house that looks like the Tattered Cover.)

http://nasblog.org/2009/10/19/where-read/

Hypocrisy in Leadership

I find it funny that a new department chair can criticize his predecessor for polling the department members individually (calling for more meetings as always a better way to discover what the department truly believes) and then in the next breath proclaim how important he found it to poll all the department members individually about previous decisions the department discussed in depth at a series of meetings.  Why do you need to poll them individually if meetings are always better?  We already had the meeting. Which is really the better way?

Another example is taking what used to be a routine task at the first department meeting of the year to assign various departmental duties where each member could ask for various tasks and turning it into a serious of individual conferences to ask people to do certain tasks.  If you truly think everything should be in the open, why don't we discuss the tasks together as we have done for years?

Irony in Writing Statements

I find it ironic when a task force of professors (including professors who specialize in teaching remedial composition) lead a college-wide effort to create a college writing statement, and the document they produce both says we value correct grammar and punctuation and also demonstrates that we cannot actually employ them.

Happy Birthday, US Constitution!

Today is Constitution Day in the United States.  Today marks the 222nd anniversary of 39 men signing the Constitution.  Few people recognize this day--far fewer than recognize Flag Day, even though the Constitution is much more vital to our nation than the stars and stripes.  However, perhaps it is fitting since so few people have any idea what the Constitution says--including many who have sworn to support and defend it, both in uniform and in Washington.

Demographic Information and Anonymity

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an interesting blog entry on how gender, zip code, and birth date are unique for approximately 87% of the US population.  That means that releasing medical records with just this demographic information is enough anybody to find out the medical records for the vast majority of people in the US.  So much for anonymity.  It's too bad policy makers don't understand mathematics.

More here at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/what-information-personally-identifiable.