Evolutionary psychologist (this is off to a bad start) and University of New Mexico professor, Geoffrey Miller gave some unsolicited advice to PhD applicants. He has since deleted the tweet and apologized, but the internet is forever and we all have the screen captures to prove it.
Is this how we represent ourselves in academia? Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident and academics are not immune from being ignorant assholes.
Follow the link to read more about the story.
Ha, if you haven’t gone through your account with a fine-tooth comb, go ahead and get that done before your name gets out there.
By PhD
Visualizing Punishment by Sarah Shannon and Chris Uggen
Four decades ago, the United States launched a grand policy experiment. The nation began locking up an unprecedented share of its citizens, increasing its rate of incarceration by more than 400% over the period.
I had a chance to see Sarah Shannon’s job talk at my university this past year. She did a great job, and this article gets to some of the points that she was forced to omit because of time restraints.
Check out the article for more graphic representations of incarceration rates.
Interesting game found at the Goodwill.
Can someone make an academic version of this, please?
Giant used book fair on campus the other day. This was my first stop.
Different life factors have different effects on different people. Some can be negative, and some can be positive.
Ugh.
When Criminologists do IT, the law has been broken.
Sociologists do IT in groups.
Psychologists do IT in their heads.
Seen on I Fucking Love Science.
What else ya got for our social sciences?
After walking into the first day of class an hour late, a student at NYU was dismissed by the professor with instructions to come back next class meeting. The student felt the need to email the professor, and received a nice response back.
As both a student and a lecturer, I can’t see any point in emailing the professor after you were an hour late. Shopping classes needs to be done far earlier than the first day of classes. I cut it out, but the student is an MBA candidate, and us graduate students don’t shop classes like that anymore. The student is also creating a negative relationship with that professor. While there is extremely little chance that the student may take a class from that professor ever again, he or she might come into contact them again in a professional manner, and people don’t forget things like this.
A lot of the comments to this story seem to side with the professor, however, there are many that go along the lines of students pay money to go to school and professors receive their paychecks from tuition. I would like to point out that professors also bring in a lot of funding through research grants and publication prestige.
There seems to be a sense of entitlement in students. Most are just fine, but there are many that feel entitled to walk into class late, not pay attention and talk amongst themselves, and constantly hound the professor through email about things that have been discussed in class. My best advice to students is to treat college like a job you aspire to obtain: never arrive late, act respectful, be humble, and outwork everyone.
My ideal response when students email me:
Time dynamics of the twitter conversation about the general strike of March 29 in Spain. Each node is a twitter account and each link is a RT between accounts. The discussion is polarized into two groups obtained using community finding algorithms on the twitter RT graph. Those groups correspond to the two major opinions: in favor and against the strike.
I get really excited about nerdy things like this amazing visual representation of data. All the cool kids are learning R to take advantage of features like this.
If you are interested, I also saw this video showing you how to represent temporal networks using graph and R.
