The Art of Science

Princeton is having an art show based on some of the images and artful artifacts coming out of the labs. The spectacular imagery associated with Science and the attempts to persuade audiences of its worth should be explored in greater depth in humanities departments.

In-Laws are Gone

Now, I'm back to my *mounting* scholarship issues. Right now, I'm busy working on an article about an aircraft startup. Looking a bit down the road, I would like to create a "City Blog" like the Duke City Fix here in Northwest Ohio (except with more of a decided business flair).

What Do These Have in Common?

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American Cities That Best Fit You:

70% Honolulu

65% Chicago

65% Philadelphia

55% Los Angeles

55% Washington, DC

Which American Cities Best Fit You?

The Chronicle Embraces the Blogosphere

Instead of just discussing blogs as a fascinating new web genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to be getting over its shyness. A recent column by Alexandra Lord details her efforts to help history PhDs get jobs outside of academe.

Training to Train

Ran seven miles today. I'm noBrent Faber, but I'm training for my second marathon.

I take it back, Mr. Lucas

I take it all back, Mr. Lucas. Your recent movies are EVERY BIT as good as the original Star Wars.

Now, please can I come and work for you here?




Read about Lucas' new studio built at the old San Francisco Presidio here. Suh-wheat!

Marketing to the Extreme

Neilson (the folks who do television ratings) are claiming that they will spend $100 million on what they call Project Apollo. Massive efforts to figure out what really works and what doesn't in marketing. I'm guessing they are going to find that people are both dumber and more clever than they imagine. Read about it here.

Science vs. Politics

Interesting twist on the "Morning After" Pill. Studies out demonstrate that "Plan B" is not an abortificant. Still, groups that benefit financially and politically by conflating ovulation prevention and implantation prevention have no tests that verify their position. No evidence beyond "we say so." From the story:

"It's science versus politics once again in the widening fight over the "morning after" pill known as Plan B, with medical researchers this week citing studies showing the drug does not induce abortions, as is commonly thought."

Now, I could easily point to the Kansas vs. evolution debate (actually, it's a weird mish-mash of things that the Kansas conservative texbook-hawks object to, but I digress), and just label the Pharmicists for Life as a bunch of liars and Luddites (something that has a bit of credibility, frankly), but that would miss an important Larger point--namely, that "truth" is constituted by the grounds of argumentation. Pharmicists don't need studies. Pharmicists don't even really care about the scientific process. They are bureaucrats that are bucking for greater status via women's bodies. The logic goes "If I can set up the velvet rope in a moment of terror, that would make me really powerful! I can go to church with a clean conscience, make a truckload of money, and even claim I'm in charge." Sounds really petty of me to say this, but the refusal of these political pressure groups to acknowledge real experimental evidence (and the even more damning refusal for represented Pharmacists to muzzle their attack dogs when they are proven wrong) shows that Pharmacists are not really scientists. They depend more upon the terror of pain, death and impregnation, than they do on clinical, chemical, and biological evidence. Of course, the dirty secret is that most professionals accrue this mysterious magical power we call "affect" by these political and bureaucratic velvet ropes. Still, I think that Plan B will be made over the counter. It is only a matter of time before Pharmicists who care about their status will trump the ones who think it is just a naked game. The social capital is just too valuable.

Cinco de Mayo

Go out and celebrate. At least go rent Frida

"Memeflow"

An InfoWorld blog entry on the ACLU pizza meme describes how one might measure the effectiveness of a "meme" (complete with bar graph). It is pretty unsatisfying (one step removed from web counters), but helps to illustrate how "memes" flow through blog space.

Food as argument

This Silicon Valley.com story on the gourmet tech company grub illustrates a point that I try to make in my scholarship--namely, that the issues that theoria tries to foreground often fail to account for the "things that count." That is one of the strengths I see in cultural studies theory (especially the concept of "articulation"). I'm not always comfortable "stuffing" details into an article willy-nilly from a thick description, but most of the classic rhetorical theory is far to unweildy to fit into the standard 25-35 page article. Spending your time detailing the difference between a Ciceronian, Aristotilian, and Platonic notion of syllogistic reasoning doesn't leave much space for the "cafeteria food argumentation."

Branding of Academia

CNNfn has a good article about how universities game the rankings. Seems that "marketing" is taking the perjorative sting off of the word "rhetoric."

Risk Analysis Meets Mr. Media

Space Shuttle crashes and the subsequent Document Analyses have been a staple in Technical Communication. The last Shuttle breakup (and I would contend, the gradualness of the breakup and the horrific possibilities) has bent the typical Shuttle risk analysis. Seems that the pressures are starting to wear on the engineers:

"Schedule matters," he said. "It shouldn't matter to the point of causing people to do dumb things or to take ill-advised actions.... We want to launch Discovery when we can because the completion of the international space station depends upon an expeditious launch schedule. We don't want to launch it sooner than we can."

Tech Comm teachers often take the "look at the moment it went wrong in slow motion" approach, which distorts the "rock-and-hard-place-in-real-time" reality that makes ethics and representation so much more challenging. I would like to see our community create Wiki case-studies that integrate these newer iterations into the narrative. See the strand chronologically would change the way that we teach this stuff--at least in my opinion.

Read more >>

Weirdness in Holding Pattern

Yesterday, we had a "freak" snowstorm (I put freak in scare quotes because all of the natives insisted during last week's 80 degree weather that we *would* get hit by another storm). Well, a low front parked over Lake Erie and the "finger of god" poked straight south from Canada and made it cold enough to snow all day. I just hope that it the blossoms don't croak, since it really didn't get below freezing.

*sigh*

Analytic-Symbolic Worker goes "Real World"

CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Magazine has a story on managing knowledge.

"In the late 1990s, consultants and academics began talking incessantly about the ascent of the "knowledge economy." This invisible system, they posited, encompassed the collective set of ideas and innovations generated by a global workforce. As the competition for customers grew more intense—fueled, in part, by the rise of electronic commerce—companies that mined the collective intelligence of their employees would come out on top. In this gray-matter economy, originality and fresh thinking would be king, and a company's most valuable assets would be those located in the body electric.

Back in the real economy, however, a stifling recession dashed most talk of a knowledge economy, as companies went into survival mode, paring costs and shoring up balance sheets. But with the recent surge in the U.S. economy, the concept of knowledge management is staging something of a comeback. This go-round, though, companies seem more concerned with what they don't have, rather than what they do have"

So, tech writers, the 90s weren't a bust. Let's go out there and keep turning the wheel...er, arranging the grid (or something like that).

Sunny here in Northwest Ohio

Gone fishin! (or something like that). Get outside and enjoy this weather.

The Diminishing Pyramid of Professor Privilege

Over at the Chronicle, a humanities professor has written a beautiful description of what many of our colleagues countenance to teach their students. Go over and read the entire essay (you won't regret it). It reminds me of the fact that I shared a desk with 7 other people in the corner of a basement cubicle farm (no joke) when I started at Penn State. The really lucky grad students got their own desks. When I went to work in Corporate U.S.A., I actually shared my office with only one other person (much luckier than my Wendy's days of standing in the back room next to the potato oven and resting against garbage containers to catch breathers). Now I actually get my own office. This essay describes holding class in a Quonset hut and meeting students for office hours in a car while putting coins in the meter. Here is my favorite part:

"I once had an office -- a cubicle really -- in the physical-plant building of a major university. Gigantic machines rumbled all around me. My coffee mug sometimes vibrated off my desk. I used to pretend that I was an oiler in the engine room of the Lusitania. The room was well below ground level, and, during the rainy season, the entire floor would flood, sometimes to a depth of 18 inches. There were high water marks on the cinder-block walls from previous inundations. Mold ascended the fabric sides of my cubicle until, finally, it looked and smelled like a forest floor in the Pacific Northwest.

After a couple of months -- and conversations with the other workers -- I learned that I could reach various points on the campus through underground steam tunnels. On my way back from teaching a class, I could pretend that I was Jean Valjean evading Inspector Javert in the sewers of Paris. My cubicle was so far from the center of campus that students rarely found me. Once, shortly after teaching Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I asked one of my advisees "Are you an assassin?" And he said, without missing a beat, "No, I'm an errand boy sent by grocery clerks." We laughed for two minutes. It was the high point of my semester."

Dr. Berube on the Power of Theory

Last night, I dusted off my copy of Wild Orchids and Trotsky that I bought and was supposed to read in the "Research Methods, Disciplinary Issues, and Other Myriad Wonderings Omnibus" Course in my first semester in the Penn State Grad Program (I must confess, I did not read any of the essays, and Dr. Berube was nowhere near enough to smack me upside the head). My wife and I read his entire essay out loud and nearly cried upon meeting another group of people that tries to live the difficult-to-pin-down-yet-indespensible lessons that one learns from taking theory and learning and community and caring seriously (the group being his family). The detail about Papa Berube's learning that Home Despot doesn't have kiddie seats unlike grocery stores (thus demonstrating a gendering fungo bat at work in the social text) made me wish that I had somehow picked up this book as a new graduate student (alas, our entire class glossed over class material trying to get through A.S. Byatt's Possession). It is in these small stories of lessons learned and taking the care to share your growth that demonstrates how these scary things like "theory" and "antifoundationalism" not only matter--they can get us to that "moral center" that so many want to impose by gun.

Read his post if you want to see just how down to earth and righteous a theory head can be.

Culture in the Ohio Wasteland

Last Friday I went out to toast a colleague's birthday and returned to one of my favorite restaurants in this part of Northwest Ohio (scratch that--make that my favorite)--Cohen and Cooke (Please excuse the atrocious spelling in the linked-to review--"pablano," "civiche," and "gonache" [!]--apparently the copyeditor died that evening). For a pretty respectable price, I shared a diver scallop with mustard slaw and grilled apple appetizer, a grouper with black rice and papaya appetizer (big enough to be an entree), and a cheese plate. Unbelievably good, and I know the money is going to support people who do good work and not just lining some foreign crony's pockets. Eating sabayon with wine-soaked figs in a historic, beautiful, and funky place AND you're keeping the money local...

The owners have scratched out a mini-empire here in Bowling Green since I arrived about two years ago. They occupy parts of what used to be a hotel. First they built a restaurant that serves prix fixe and heartbreakingly fresh fish and fine food in the evening. Soon, they bought the adjoining hotel lobby and made it into a lounge (the "stage" is the old grand staircase and landing--too cool). Soon after, they bought a neighboring coffeehouse. Now, they are building what I think is a taqueria. Although their fine eating restaurant serves a really good lunch, I can't wait for the new addition.