|
|
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
|
|
| |
Great essay...
"...Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it. For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum..."
7:31:22 PM 
|
|
" ...graduate school is not something you want to experiment with. Think heroin--this is your brain, this is your brain on graduate school. Think Al Pacino in "Godfather 3"--just when you think you are out, you will l be sucked back in again. Academia, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, is a total culture. It colonizes most aspects of your life. You are never not an academic--the little mental tape recorder is on all the time, or it had better be if you want to be good at this life. Anything is grist for my mill as a teacher and a scholar, and that is as it should be...
...academia is a total culture. It changes your standards for what is good and what is bad, what is smart and what is dumb..."
7:25:30 PM
|
|
"...I think that blogs will have a huge impact on journalism and news, but after reading Science in Action, I realize that blogs or something similar to blogs could have a HUGE impact on Science. Science is obviously more rigid and structured, but the ability to link quickly and amass support for your claim or idea should be great..."
7:10:13 PM
|
|
"...A lot of my friend George's work was in training people to open up the ladder of perception, to recognize the difference between what you are experiencing directly vs. through various levels of abstraction, to let go preconceived notions and let the world come in fresh.
George also argued that as human consciousness evolves, certain things that were once on the frontiers of awareness, and that were experienced with near-mystical force, become commonplaces as they are routinely abstracted into language. In my classics honors thesis at Harvard, I used this premise to assess certain of Plato's dialogues, arguing that the mystical overtones with which Socrates describes concepts like justice and truth were the result of the newness of his ideas. As we "rehearse" these now familiar ideas thousands of years later, we don't get that same rush. Most of us receive them at a level of abstraction, fitting them into our accepted system of facts, rather than taking them in through the entire ABCD perceptual cycle..."
7:05:44 PM
|
|
"Anyone who knows what I've been working on lately, knows that it has to do with changes in word frequency over time. I'm using this to analyze differences in newspaper coverage, to identify salient changes in hate speech sites, as well as to look at the "social weather" of blogs. It looks as though I am not alone:
Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents. While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg's approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases. (New Scientist)
Kara pointed this out to me on Slashdot, and my first reaction was a bit gut-wrenching. It is always awful to think someone has beat you out. Some of my ideas, of course, appear in papers presented at AEJMC and at the AIR conference last year, but I've been too slow to get them out the door. I guess I'd better before it is too late. And some of this, as this short blurb suggests, is evident from other approaches. I came to this as a way of categorizing text that seemed to work well..."
6:48:08 PM
|
|
"A curious set of posts from Alex Halavais (here) and Liz Lawley (here) remind me yet one more time why I must bless fate for steering me out of academia. I mean, these are two people with their heads on pretty straight. And yet the system has warped them such that they both get a twinge when somebody else comes out with a perfectly good idea, just because they didnâ019t come out with it first..."
6:46:43 PM
|
|
"...My argument is that most academic knowledge is tied to both the interests of the academics themselves and also the interests associated with social structures including the state, capitalism, the professions and patriarchy. Furthermore, these structures strongly influence the nature of academic hierarchy, the division of knowledge and the organisation into disciplines, and the domination of staff over students..."
6:40:52 PM
|
|
"Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods. "
12:50:24 PM
|
|
|
|
© Copyright
2003
Jon Phipps.
Last update:
6/10/2003; 8:51:34 PM.
|
|
|
