"Because what I hadn’t known—this is my first time grading this exam—was that it doesn’t matter how well you write, or what you think. Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer. That gives you full credit. You can compose a “Gettysburg Address” for the 21st century on the apportioned lines in your test booklet, but if you’ve provided only one fact from the text you read in preparation, then you will earn only half credit. In your constructed response—no matter how well written, correct, intelligent, noble, beautiful, and meaningful it is—if you’ve not collected any specific facts from the provided readings (even if you happen to know more information about the chosen topic than the readings provide), then you will get a zero."

"Two nebbish Representatives, one Republican and one Democrat, distinguished only by their lack of legislative or political importance, sponsored the bill on behalf of the big boys who fast-tracked it under the radar (they learned from the SOPA debacle). Forget ideology or boasts about carrying a copy of the Constitution in the breast pocket of their suit, whether you are in an archconservative Congressional district or an ultraliberal one, almost every member of Congress voted “aye” to trash multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights.

Almost every one.

This is an accelerating trend in recent years and in particular, a bipartisan theme of the 112th Congress, which views Constitutional rights of nobodies as an anachronistic hindrance to the interests (or convenience) of their powerful and wealthy political supporters. Our elected officials and their backers increasingly share an oligarchic class interest that in important matters, trumps the Kabuki partisanship of  FOXnews and MSNBC and inculcates a technocratic admiration for the “efficiency” of select police states."

"The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its concept of “social” seems to be based on what single twentysomethings do. “Social” in the sense of “families” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “sharing.” It’s happy to make recommendations for individual purchases social, but shared purchases are verboten.

It’s shortsighted. If the demise of the music industry has taught us anything, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blistering success of itunes showed that there’s a substantial market for aboveboard, legal ways to allow people to get what they want; this isn’t just about piracy. But piracy may have to happen to make the literary version of itunes acceptable to publishers.

Put differently, the industry needs to learn to lean into change, rather than resisting it. I foresee a monster market for e-textbooks as soon as they offer something analogous to re-selling your used copies. Until then, the value proposition mostly isn’t there. (Yes, there are issues with disability access, but those strike me as solvable if the will is there.) Students will continue, quite rationally, to buy paper textbooks and re-sell them. "

"Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It's a good observation, and in my opinion it's the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It's OK to remind yourself that you're not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved."

"Increasingly, this seems to be a war for survival.  I understand that traditional publishers are getting more and more desperate as the digital revolution proceeds and they continue to dither about how to address it.  But academic faculty members are the source of almost all the content these publishers publish, so this behavior is an extreme example of biting the hand that feeds them.  It is even more stupid, in my opinion, than the strategy of recording industry who is suing its own customers, because these publishers are attacking a group that is both their customers and those who supply them with a product in the first place."

"…Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay."

"In the middle east, we've seen the power of the Internet in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be limited to repressive governments, but to all large institutions that seek to control people and their free will. This is the cultural revolution that I referred to in my talk with Erick at Disrupt.

I think investors should be aware of what is coming and seek to invest in it where it is investable. I'm curious what the AVC community thinks of this investment thesis and where we should be looking for opportunities that fit into this thesis."

"As it becomes clear that the three publishers who have initiated the lawsuit in search of higher profits are willing to attack the very heart of the system by which scholars live, academic authors will rightly feel betrayed. The plaintiffs are, after all, asking the judge to fundamentally change the copyright rules for higher education. If the rules in the proposed injunction were widely accepted, fair use in this field of endeavor, supposedly favored, would actually be more restricted than in any other activity. Yet the works at issue in the lawsuit are mostly written by scholars for the use of other scholars and students. If those uses become impossible or exponentially more expensive, which today is the same thing, academic authors will need to reconsider whether they are receiving sufficient benefits for the free labor they contribute to scholarly publishing."

"That cyclical component accounts for a lot of the short-run variation in hiring, but if you’re estimating the response to a demand shock, longer-term supply trends matter too and often they matter a great deal.  If Ph.d. programs were stricter about enforcing standards of quality and relevance, rather than stringing along students to maintain the flow of revenue to the graduate program, the short run negative demand shocks would lead to a much less severe queuing problem.  That’s simple microeconomics, and it should be macroeconomics too."

"In practice, all that “the exchange rate is the purview of the Treasury” means is that no official other the Treasury secretary is supposed to talk about it (and even he isn’t supposed to say very much). That strikes me as a shame. Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions.

Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies."

"…For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."

Until any of this becomes commonplace, it is up to prospective graduate students to enter a science PhD with their eyes open to the opportunities — or lack of them — at the end. Not all mushrooms grow best in the dark.

"Is it any wonder that the value of a college education is now being questioned more than it used to be? Perhaps a basic education in personal finance would help more people make informed decisions about college and how to handle the financing of that endeavor."

"…What Lind leaves out is that each of his time periods ends with a great upheaval in the nation that forces social changes. For instance, version 1.0 ends with the Civil War. Sometimes, the result is a more responsible capitalist model, as with version 4.0, which came after the Great Depression, and, according to Lind, was, for all intents and purposes, a time of responsible capitalism. Then, post-1960s and 1970s rights movements and the Vietnam War, the increasing drive towards globalization saw an abandonment of regulation, starting with President Carter, and a greed virus released on the financial markets that has led us to our current endtimes. Lind concludes, "Capitalism 6.0 will be just as American as its predecessors, but it will be better than what we have today. It could not possibly be worse."

"I came to Harvard 7 years ago with a fairly romantic notion of what it meant to be a professor -- I imagined unstructured days spent mentoring students over long cups of coffee, strolling through the verdant campus, writing code, pondering the infinite. I never really considered doing anything else. At Berkeley, the reigning belief was that the best and brightest students went on to be professors, and the rest went to industry -- and I wanted to be one of those elite. Now that I have students that harbor their own rosy dreams of academic life, I thought it would be useful to reflect on what being a professor is really like. It is certainly not for everybody. It remains to be seen if it is even for me."

"As I emphasize out in a new book entitled “Saving State U,” the percentage of students taught by full-time, tenure-track faculty members per student at state universities has steadily declined in recent years. And it is likely to decline even further."

"NPR has a nice graphic for where job growth will occur in the next decade based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the NPR site is much cooler than the graphic above). Now, operations research is a little small to appear as a dot on its own, but if you look at that little dot far to the right, showing the most job growth? That is “Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services”. And what field is all of “management, scientific and technical”? Operations Research, of course! The projection is for 82.8% growth."

"In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized-- connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding. I will try to explain why.
It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.”"

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid."

"We know there are other film production software choices out there. We know because we've tried them all - the old ones and the new ones. Some companies have actually tried to "copy" Gorilla, offering an even cheaper, yet much inferior solution.

The best advice we can give you is try them all and make a decision for yourself depending on the scope of your project and what each individual piece of software can bring to your project. But, if you insist on seeing one, we’ve taken a stab at a basic feature & price comparison chart for your reference."

"To use the satellite, pirates typically take an ordinary ham radio transmitter, which operates in the 144- to 148-MHZ range, and add a frequency doubler cobbled from coils and a varactor diode. That lets the radio stretch into the lower end of FLTSATCOM's 292- to 317-MHz uplink range. All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100. Taught the ropes, even rough electricians can make Bolinha-ware.
"I saw it more than once in truck repair shops," says amateur radio operator Adinei Brochi (PY2ADN) "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.""

"On Monday, November 9, 2009, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in In re Bilski, and two CLE providers plan to offer same day or next day coverage of the proceedings."

"Justice Holmes once famously dissented that it’s a form of judicial activism to base our courts on “an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain.” It seems like the same should be said for our government and our regulatory bodies, especially as they try and figure out how to fix the mess that is the financial markets. And it’s worth noting that the founder of this economic theory, The Efficient Markets Hypothesis, doesn’t even believe that people actually in the financial markets entertain it."

"However, if this is not done immediately, my group of startup CEOs and angel investors will begin targeting specific groups for elimination.
We will launch competing, fee-free events directly opposite your events. We will encourage angels investors, service providers and startups to boycott your events. You may even find our street teams outside your events handing out flyers.

This isn’t a joke and this is a threat: stop charging startup companies to present or we will do everything we can to put you out of business with a competing, free option."

"Shockingly crazy worldview, I hereby name you “Abstinence-only Web Education”.
Adding this: there is always this resentment of people in the Academy toward the term “real world” — as in what we teach them “in here” has to pertain to the real world “out there”. I sympathize with that resentment, and even commiserated about the inappropriateness of the term with a coworker a couple nights ago.
But it’s things like abstinence-only web education that make that term relevant and, yes, often a legitimate critique. It’s not everybody, true, but the belief of even a percentage in higher education that what we really need to do is get back to printed books to solve the information filter problem is evidence enough that we are insulated from the world outside the campus, and to a stunning degree."

"[Update: I should have added that perhaps the Chamber fully understands the difference between free markets and competitive markets, and simply wants to preserve the "freedom" to take advantage of customers.]"

"The tenure system is based on the sole breadwinner with a stay-at-home wife. Tinkering around the edges -- "post-tenure review," stopping the clock, mentoring -- falls fatally short of addressing a fundamentally flawed structure. If we want the workload spread evenly, in the name of fairness, we need to be able to hold everybody accountable for their work. Until then, the good sports will suffer, and the narcissistic jerks will just keep on prospering."

"Crowd-sourcing as a form of financing can range from syndicating many micro-investments to commissioning films by pitching the public in an online forum.

Here are a few companies RWW profiles in its article:"

"This is a very long explanation, but the punch line is that as these large institutions adjust their portfolios and potentially abandon these more aggressive strategies, the amount of overall capital committed to alternative assets will undoubtedly shrink. As this happens, the VC industry will shrink in kind. How much will it go down? It is very hard to say. It would not be surprising for many of these funds to cut their allocation in the category in half, and as a result, it shouldn’t be surprising for the VC industry to get cut in half also."

"Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred. Where this category of users has become absolutely central to everything we do. So when we talk about newspapers, we have to think about the users who communicate with a commercial organization like TPM, the users who basically get together and make their own new party presses, like DailyKos or Townhall, like the users who make up YouTube, like the users who make up Wikipedia. Suddenly you have radically decentralized practical capacity to act. And what do people do? They act."

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

"If there is no signed written agreement, then the work isn’t for hire, and you start out with all the rights. If there is a written agreement, it should be entered into before you create the work. Beware of after-the-fact attempts to take away your rights by calling the work “for hire,” for example by sending you a check whose endorsement line says that your signature is your agreement that the work was for hire."

"Why work-for-hire is hurting the creative industry"

"The webizens, like me, will continue to follow the wisest voices, even if they are operating outside the brand of big city papers.

The news barons might think that they can restructure copyright and fair use laws to plug those niddling little holes in 'the pipeline that sends money back to where the content is created', to stop us from quoting Paul Krugman's op-ed piece, but it won't hold up.

So Sokolove's piece -- entitled "What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?" -- is incongruous to me. Might as well be "What’s A Fish Without A Bicycle?" or "What's An Opera Without A Volcano?"

I am a fan of local news, but that is not the sole focus of big city newspapers. They print car reviews, movie reviews, and stories about pirates in Somalia, none of which are local. They are a blur of things, and no one has ever tried to unblur them, really."

"Look for this stinker to be reversed on appeal. And if it isn’t--whoa, nelly. Strap on for a wild ride. Increasingly the Law says administrations have academic freedom--and you don’t.

Here’s your homework assignment for the day. Ask yourself what “academic freedom for administrators” means."

"You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform."

'"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)." The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."'

"Among the many inconvenient facts that Wilson leaves out is that present trends suggest that 40 to 50 percent of all persons with bachelor’s degrees in 2009 will eventually go on to graduate or professional school. Those debts can be enormous, and when one acknowledges the real chances that any individual with a B.A. will go on to grad school the “lifetime of debt” is indeed more “likely.”"

"Google is beginning to fail to scale: there are now so many things on the internet and my memory for unique key words is so foggy that I can no longer find things I know exist."

"In my mind, people don’t earn lawsuits. They win them. When I decided to publicly speak out against the Hearst Corporation in no way shape or form did I ever consider winning an individual lawsuit as any kind of victory. I am interested in being part of a movement that brings respectability, dignity and accountability back to the newspaper journalism profession.
I believe that the battle to do so must begin in the newsroom and not the courtroom. It must be first fought with our minds and with our integrity. This is not as difficult as some might think. We all know that newspaper publishers and owners lost both their minds and their integrity long ago."

"Now tell me again: Why do we submit papers to, referee papers for, and buy journals from these people? Some sort of misplaced sense of loyalty? Or some sad combination of apathy and inertia? What will it take for the research community to cut Elsevier loose?"

"But, now more than ever, OCLC must end its attempts to restrict and monopolize library data. It was ugly and unfair for OCLC to claim ownership over what is largely public data. It is obscene to leverage that data monopoly into a software monopoly."

"In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

[Compare with aforementioned Bob Martin's Craftsmanship post...]

"As of today, there's no Craigslist busily destroying the financial foundations of the modern university. Teaching is a lot more complicated than advertising, and universities have the advantage of sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees."

"Trade associations and professional associations are business leagues. Chambers of commerce and boards of trades are of the same class as business leagues, but rather than promoting one or more lines of business, their efforts are directed to promoting the common economic interests of all commercial enterprises in a given trade community. The requirements for exemption of these organizations are the same as for business leagues."

"Another common thread in the grad students’ stories was dissuasion, both passive and active, from engagement with the digital. From bureaucratic hassles to tepid advising to being actually barred from computing facilities built for faculty (think about that for a moment; it’s appalling on so very many levels), the message goes out loud and clear: technology is a toy, it’s a diversion, it’s fine for the classroom, but it’s not how you do your work."