I can say with certainty that several engineers that I've met in my life have been some of the most sanctimonious assholes I've ever met.
Like, not engineers that work with bridges and plane engines or actual life saving shit, but with a heating and cooling company pretending like they save lives on the regular and that's why they command the big paychecks.
I realize that's still a generalization and a lot of them are wonderful people and down to earth and awesome to be around and talk shop with too, but, it seems like there's a tendency for them to lean towards being jerks and stuck up.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Pfff. Any librarian that doesn't know that demonology is 133 in Dewey off the top of their head is bush leauge.
Unless they use Library of Congress then it is some bullshit like BF1501 or something.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
@tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
(all you engineers that post here are wonderful people and do great work and I am amazed to even get a chance to see parts of it, y'all are good people and absolutely not the three jerks I am referring to)
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
Pfff. Any librarian that doesn't know that demonology is 133 in Dewey off the top of their head is bush leauge.
Unless they use Library of Congress then it is some bullshit like BF1501 or something.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
Dewey was invented in the 1870s so not only has it been massively hacked together to still be relevant today it is inherently racist due to how it categorizes religions and cultures.
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
As a staff administrator at a public university, who has devoted 15+ year to making my institution better and my students succeed...
...yeah calling me and my work toxic slidge is pretty offensive.
One of the things every accredited institution managed by SACSCOC (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, essentially everything from Virginia to Texas) is required to have is a Quality Enhancement Plan, a quality control office to improve education and identify problems. How serious a school takes it can vary, by my work now is entirely focused upon quality control and fixing institutional problems (including things like Adjunct milling, GA and GTA benefit/pay/workload rates, and more). From the listservs and conferences I attend, this is something being improved and worked on by pretty much everything but Ivy League and for profit trap schools, both of which generally doesn't care if things suck (though for very different reasons).
Bowen is accurate in that administrative pay is out of control in a lot of the public systems, but I know in my location GTAs have mandatory maximums on hours, competitive pay to the local school districts (and generally are paid better than adjuncts), get full health and dental benefits while teaching.
As far as Academica falling apart in 50-100 years, that's highly doubtful. The problem we face isn't people getting degrees, more education is better for literally all sectors of the economy, but instead the amount of people expecting to get trained to go back into academia. Where the bottleneck and problems are stemming from are too many students wanting to be teachers rather than other forms of production. Because of this, and because of the boom in the ability to offer more and more graduate and PhD experiences, tenure is down to about 30% population and dropping, with less expensive and higher teaching load instructors on the rise. That's a problem which will come to head, but not dramatically. Plenty of schools already are hiring full time researchers with no teaching loads in high-demand fields. That will likely be the end result of tenure, with teaching and research becoming two separate things at most schools.
Pfff. Any librarian that doesn't know that demonology is 133 in Dewey off the top of their head is bush leauge.
Unless they use Library of Congress then it is some bullshit like BF1501 or something.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
Dewey was invented in the 1870s so not only has it been massively hacked together to still be relevant today it is inherently racist due to how it categorizes religions and cultures.
Are there viable alternatives? I'm not up on my library sciences, but he might get a kick out of a more structured system.
Academia is a toxic sludgepool filled with even more toxic people, with a few genuinely good folks trapped in there (but they tend to eventually get pushed out via backstabbing and politics). My wife and I both fled it as soon as we finished graduate school.
hmm.
I have no idea what this means.
Just a pretty obnoxious blanket statement that manages to target most people I know.
The last two months are the first time I haven't been woken up by sheer stress in two years (and I graduated in 12/16) and I'm currently watching a lot of friends and colleagues at different institutions struggle to stay happy and motivated or even find jobs; it's been almost uniformly negative for me and the people in my life. I'm sorry that I made an insensitive, glib remark about it.
Don't get me wrong, universities and academia in general have a huge number of systemic problems. I could honestly be here all week. And the grad-student mill varies from 'pretty shit' to 'totally inhumane', depending on institution/country/funding structure. The situation is fucked, and while in some ways it's getting better, in others it's getting worse. There's a crisis brewing.
But
- I'm also surrounded by a great many people trying their fucking best to make the world better, and getting paid pretty poorly for it.
- working in the private sector in robotics meant I got to hear a great deal of shit being flung at anyone with the arrogant temerity to get a PhD
- the specific problems you run into (if any) vary wildly by faculty, let alone institution, so condemning the entire not-for-profit research sector based on a singular experience rubs me the wrong way
Basically it all needs fixing. Calling everyone who works there toxic sludge doesn't go anywhere towards fixing it, it just lets governments write off the whole endeavour as an anti-capitalist waste of money, which then reinforces a lot of the issues that lead to the problems in the first place.
so. Hmm.
@tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
This is funny to me because a that professor has been the focus of my administrative problems this week, with him causing a major university-level hiring problem due to that sort of behavior.
@tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
A friend of mine was repeatedly told by multiple men in her department that she'd never be a good scientist because she'd have to take too much time off due to pregnancy (she was not pregnant, or contemplating having children).
After she got engaged other men asked her when she would be getting pregnant.
Oh also the university initially covered for this asshole, who had had previous allegations of sexual misconduct at Princeton, and went on to be asked to resign from UChicago following yet more allegations of sexual misconduct.
After he left UNC tried to save face by having open meetings to talk about it and offering counseling but like guys why was he allowed to be there so long in the first place.
@tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
fuckin what
I know a prof in the old department I was in decided that it would be a really great idea to reenact the blues brothers restaurant scene at a dinner at a conference, because he thought it was weird that one group at the conference was constituted mostly of women.
I've run across a few of those in the wild the last couple months and it always makes me think of Enc.
With the way I remember random stupid shit I'm sure when I'm 93 in a nursing home they'll use a sharpie pen to write down that i ate my soup and ill still try to tell them the story of Enc's pens.
(all you engineers that post here are wonderful people and do great work and I am amazed to even get a chance to see parts of it, y'all are good people and absolutely not the three jerks I am referring to)
I work for awful people doing something bad for the world you take this back right now
I ate an engineer
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
(all you engineers that post here are wonderful people and do great work and I am amazed to even get a chance to see parts of it, y'all are good people and absolutely not the three jerks I am referring to)
I work for awful people doing something bad for the world you take this back right now
alright everyone except milski and his coworkers
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Seriously, though. Bringing up the pens reminds me how I've been managing this new office for over a year now.
too many students wanting to be teachers rather than other forms of production.
Plenty of schools already are hiring full time researchers with no teaching loads in high-demand fields. That will likely be the end result of tenure, with teaching and research becoming two separate things at most schools.
Most people I know want to be researchers, and teaching is the price you pay to do that. I haven't run across many people who want to teach.
There's also no money for research, (research-only positions are the holy grail for post-docs) so I disagree that a double track will 'solve' the bottleneck problem. I do think separating things out so students get taught by people who actually want to be there is a good move. Unfortunately a lot of the time (largely due to my first sentence), teaching alone is extremely devalued, so you get the shitty US adjunct situation. Or even if you have a faculty position, if you're teaching-only you're often paid for only 9 months of the year.
Pfff. Any librarian that doesn't know that demonology is 133 in Dewey off the top of their head is bush leauge.
Unless they use Library of Congress then it is some bullshit like BF1501 or something.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
Dewey was invented in the 1870s so not only has it been massively hacked together to still be relevant today it is inherently racist due to how it categorizes religions and cultures.
Are there viable alternatives? I'm not up on my library sciences, but he might get a kick out of a more structured system.
There are enumeration, hierarchical, and faceted systems. The most common in the world is Dewey but there is also the Library of Congress and several other decimal systems. China and Japan have their own.
All have benefits but really Dewey is prevalent just because it has been around so long and takes effort for libraries to switch.
Some problems with Dewey are:
Originally 000 did not exist in Dewey but they needed a place to stick computers when they were invented and putting them in machinery didn't really fit. It is just slapped on.
Major religions like Christianity have a major number while other religions have a post decimal number making them seem less important.
Same with literature. British and American literature is a major number while lots of other cultures are buried down below.
Plus there are tons of numbers that don't even exist anymore because they were expunged for being out right super racist. Tons of gaps are in the number ranges with nothing to fill it without a complete rewrite, which at that point just switch to a different system.
It really a bit fascinating to read about and study.
tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
Was just curious, because you said every department/faculty/institution was different (or something like that, too lazy to scroll up and double-check), and I'm thinking that that professor may be a constant in every department of reasonable size.
tynic I don't know how connected you are with your department as a post-doc, but do you guys have a that professor? We have a that professor and all the senior female undergraduate students know about him.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
Was just curious, because you said every department/faculty/institution was different (or something like that, too lazy to scroll up and double-check), and I'm thinking that that professor may be a constant in every department of reasonable size.
Pfff. Any librarian that doesn't know that demonology is 133 in Dewey off the top of their head is bush leauge.
Unless they use Library of Congress then it is some bullshit like BF1501 or something.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
Dewey was invented in the 1870s so not only has it been massively hacked together to still be relevant today it is inherently racist due to how it categorizes religions and cultures.
Are there viable alternatives? I'm not up on my library sciences, but he might get a kick out of a more structured system.
There are enumeration, hierarchical, and faceted systems. The most common in the world is Dewey but there is also the Library of Congress and several other decimal systems. China and Japan have their own.
All have benefits but really Dewey is prevalent just because it has been around so long and takes effort for libraries to switch.
Some problems with Dewey are:
Originally 000 did not exist in Dewey but they needed a place to stick computers when they were invented and putting them in machinery didn't really fit. It is just slapped on.
Major religions like Christianity have a major number while other religions have a post decimal number making them seem less important.
Same with literature. British and American literature is a major number while lots of other cultures are buried down below.
Plus there are tons of numbers that don't even exist anymore because they were expunged for being out right super racist. Tons of gaps are in the number ranges with nothing to fill it without a complete rewrite, which at that point just switch to a different system.
It really a bit fascinating to read about and study.
We got to keep Dewey around long enough so that we can catalog some books in 999 - General History of Extraterrestrial Worlds.
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
too many students wanting to be teachers rather than other forms of production.
Plenty of schools already are hiring full time researchers with no teaching loads in high-demand fields. That will likely be the end result of tenure, with teaching and research becoming two separate things at most schools.
Most people I know want to be researchers, and teaching is the price you pay to do that. I haven't run across many people who want to teach.
There's also no money for research, (research-only positions are the holy grail for post-docs) so I disagree that a double track will 'solve' the bottleneck problem. I do think separating things out so students get taught by people who actually want to be there is a good move. Unfortunately a lot of the time (largely due to my first sentence), teaching alone is extremely devalued, so you get the shitty US adjunct situation. Or even if you have a faculty position, if you're teaching-only you're often paid for only 9 months of the year.
I want to teach! But I'm a special snowflake. (Also, a dumb snowflake.)
I agree that double tracking won't fix shit. Just look at the math: most universities/faculties/departments spit out more PhD students than they themselves hire, by a wide factor. Some of those excess PhDs are going to get absorbed by industry/burnout, but not even close to enough.
The cause is probably multi-factor. Professors are living longer now. Governments have pushed to produce more PhDs without really know where to put them. (See the similar glut of Bachelor's degrees, which has taken on a life of its own.) Governments are also establishing more universities, because more education -> more prestige -> more votes. Faculty want more PhD students because more students -> more publications -> more prestige -> more money. Institutions want more to produce more PhDs because more students -> more publications -> more prestige -> more money. And industry, other than Silicon Valley, still doesn't know what to do with all these PhDs, who are specially trained to do things that most companies don't care about.
hippofant on
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I was told earlier by a bunch of students that I was their favorite substitute because, "You're just such a nice guy!"
And just now I impressed some students when they saw I was wearing a Casio calculator watch.
THIS DAY IS GREAT!
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
too many students wanting to be teachers rather than other forms of production.
Plenty of schools already are hiring full time researchers with no teaching loads in high-demand fields. That will likely be the end result of tenure, with teaching and research becoming two separate things at most schools.
Most people I know want to be researchers, and teaching is the price you pay to do that. I haven't run across many people who want to teach.
There's also no money for research, (research-only positions are the holy grail for post-docs) so I disagree that a double track will 'solve' the bottleneck problem. I do think separating things out so students get taught by people who actually want to be there is a good move. Unfortunately a lot of the time (largely due to my first sentence), teaching alone is extremely devalued, so you get the shitty US adjunct situation. Or even if you have a faculty position, if you're teaching-only you're often paid for only 9 months of the year.
9 month appointments are usually misleading though.
Like, most of our instructors here make over their 9 month assignments what our local community colleges pay for 12 month assignments (or more). Then they also get bonus pay if they choose to go into the pot for a summer stipend.
9 month pay means you make your entire salary in 9 months, leaving you the remaining 3 as essentially paid leave (if you manage your funds right). I'd kill for a 9 month appointment at my current pay rate (which is lower than most 9 month assignments).
Most schools offer the ability to stretch your 9 month over the full year if you want and are bad with money, also.
Nowhere to really put this, but after noticing the entire apartment was rumbling/shaking, and accompanied by what sounded like the loudest helicopter ever (which I could hear over my headphones), I ran over to the front windows and noticed five other people on their porches looking skyward. An older guy across the street actually got outside in time to see what it was. Apparently it was one of these beasts:
A Boeing V-22 Osprey. The second he said "it's the kind that can tilt its rotors" I knew exactly what he was talking about, because it's a damn cool looking aircraft. A younger guy and I both laughed about how intense the sound/rumbling was, and how we both had assumed it had to be something military. So yeah, that was an interesting work interruption today! :P
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
edited January 2018
Oh I didn't even know those were really used outside of movies and games, what an incredibly cool aircraft.
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
Yeah, the program was a total boondoggle and the initial models crashed pretty often.
I got to hook up a data recorder inside of one for an old job, that was fun.
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
Yeah, they're really unstable when switching the rotors between vertical and horizontal or something like that.
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
Yeah, they're really unstable when switching the rotors between vertical and horizontal or something like that.
Moving parts in general are prone to failure.
VTOL stuff in general always is problematic.
You'd probably be better off using a helicopter when you need VTOL and stick with a jet for plane-like duties. I imagine vectored thrust aircraft probably are far less prone to failure than planes that physically rotate their engines that provide lift. That just seems dangerous even though it works most of the time.
They're still cool though.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
The entire education system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up
Jesus it's just so unsustainable and broken and we're doing an immense disservice to the public by not caring enough about it
This sort of thinking is really why its so broken. It doesn't need to be rebuilt from the ground up, because that will never happen and certainly not with as many resources as we currently have, much less the considerably more we need for a nation of our size.
What we need is for sustainable, permanent funding to be federally and state protected, attached to population and GDP, and connect school funding not to performance metrics but proportional to population totals of their region. Fix the broken funding model, and most of the rest will sort itself out in a decade.
Nowhere to really put this, but after noticing the entire apartment was rumbling/shaking, and accompanied by what sounded like the loudest helicopter ever (which I could hear over my headphones), I ran over to the front windows and noticed five other people on their porches looking skyward. An older guy across the street actually got outside in time to see what it was. Apparently it was one of these beasts:
A Boeing V-22 Osprey. The second he said "it's the kind that can tilt its rotors" I knew exactly what he was talking about, because it's a damn cool looking aircraft. A younger guy and I both laughed about how intense the sound/rumbling was, and how we both had assumed it had to be something military. So yeah, that was an interesting work interruption today! :P
I live in San Diego and my friend/roommate works basically across the street from the nearby Air Force base. He's a huge airplane nut, so every time one of these (or F-18s or Blackhawks or whatever else) flies over, he's compelled to call it out, run to the window and watch it go. This happens multiple times a day. Also, he's got a PhD and works in a medical research center. He miiight be the biggest nerd ever, and I miiight be just a little bit jealous.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
Yeah, they're really unstable when switching the rotors between vertical and horizontal or something like that.
My understanding was they solved that after the first few years and now there is a small fleet in operation with a pretty solid safety rating.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
They're rarely used I think. Mostly because it was something forced on the military by politicians because some dude's district makes the things and he wanted jobs. Also they kill a lot of people in accidents.
nope!
1) the project originated from within the Department of Defense. after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, it was determined by the DoD, and mainly the Army, that there was a need for a vehicle which could fly quickly and land vertically. the myth that it was forced on the DoD by politicians comes from the fact that the Navy was largely against it, because it was perceived as an encroachment upon their role, at which point Congress intervened and pushed the project through. infighting at the DoD has a long and storied history and has resulted both in worthwhile projects having to fight for survival and stupid projects being politically bulletproof; the V-22 is an example of the former and the F-35 Lightning II is an example of the latter.
2) the USMC uses them fairly extensively, though right now they're the only branch of service which does. this is largely because of their role in the US military; the USMC is the only branch of service which has routine need for a vehicle which can carry combat troops at high speed and perform vertical landing and take-off maneuvers.
3) the V-22 accident record wasn't especially worse than any equivalently-complex aircraft while it was in development. helicopters are dangerous! now that it's out of development, their incident record is lower than any legacy helicopter, and their average operating cost per hour is half that of the most comparable helicopter.
tldr the V-22 is a good vehicle that fills a necessary role and does it well provided it has good maintenance
Posts
Like, not engineers that work with bridges and plane engines or actual life saving shit, but with a heating and cooling company pretending like they save lives on the regular and that's why they command the big paychecks.
I realize that's still a generalization and a lot of them are wonderful people and down to earth and awesome to be around and talk shop with too, but, it seems like there's a tendency for them to lean towards being jerks and stuck up.
One of my friends/colleagues has his home bookshelves sorted by Dewey.
It's a source of endless frustration for him that his collections of fairytales have to go in Sociology rather than fiction.
oh man I just remembered a story my sister has about basically being pimped out by her masters supervisor. Not really exaggerating.
Dewey was invented in the 1870s so not only has it been massively hacked together to still be relevant today it is inherently racist due to how it categorizes religions and cultures.
...yeah calling me and my work toxic slidge is pretty offensive.
One of the things every accredited institution managed by SACSCOC (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, essentially everything from Virginia to Texas) is required to have is a Quality Enhancement Plan, a quality control office to improve education and identify problems. How serious a school takes it can vary, by my work now is entirely focused upon quality control and fixing institutional problems (including things like Adjunct milling, GA and GTA benefit/pay/workload rates, and more). From the listservs and conferences I attend, this is something being improved and worked on by pretty much everything but Ivy League and for profit trap schools, both of which generally doesn't care if things suck (though for very different reasons).
Bowen is accurate in that administrative pay is out of control in a lot of the public systems, but I know in my location GTAs have mandatory maximums on hours, competitive pay to the local school districts (and generally are paid better than adjuncts), get full health and dental benefits while teaching.
As far as Academica falling apart in 50-100 years, that's highly doubtful. The problem we face isn't people getting degrees, more education is better for literally all sectors of the economy, but instead the amount of people expecting to get trained to go back into academia. Where the bottleneck and problems are stemming from are too many students wanting to be teachers rather than other forms of production. Because of this, and because of the boom in the ability to offer more and more graduate and PhD experiences, tenure is down to about 30% population and dropping, with less expensive and higher teaching load instructors on the rise. That's a problem which will come to head, but not dramatically. Plenty of schools already are hiring full time researchers with no teaching loads in high-demand fields. That will likely be the end result of tenure, with teaching and research becoming two separate things at most schools.
Are there viable alternatives? I'm not up on my library sciences, but he might get a kick out of a more structured system.
This is funny to me because a that professor has been the focus of my administrative problems this week, with him causing a major university-level hiring problem due to that sort of behavior.
A friend of mine was repeatedly told by multiple men in her department that she'd never be a good scientist because she'd have to take too much time off due to pregnancy (she was not pregnant, or contemplating having children).
After she got engaged other men asked her when she would be getting pregnant.
Oh also the university initially covered for this asshole, who had had previous allegations of sexual misconduct at Princeton, and went on to be asked to resign from UChicago following yet more allegations of sexual misconduct.
After he left UNC tried to save face by having open meetings to talk about it and offering counseling but like guys why was he allowed to be there so long in the first place.
fuckin what
I know a prof in the old department I was in decided that it would be a really great idea to reenact the blues brothers restaurant scene at a dinner at a conference, because he thought it was weird that one group at the conference was constituted mostly of women.
for reference:
I'm more familiar with LoC. Couldn't tell you where demonology falls but I remember the Bible goes under BS.
I've run across a few of those in the wild the last couple months and it always makes me think of Enc.
With the way I remember random stupid shit I'm sure when I'm 93 in a nursing home they'll use a sharpie pen to write down that i ate my soup and ill still try to tell them the story of Enc's pens.
I stole it.
I figured it was a fair trade since they've stolen numerous amounts of my gel pens.
I work for awful people doing something bad for the world you take this back right now
I read this and, in a panic, looked in my desk drawer.
16 colors of sharpie pens remained, perfectly lined up by color gradient.
All is right in the world.
alright everyone except milski and his coworkers
What a difference it has made in my life.
Most people I know want to be researchers, and teaching is the price you pay to do that. I haven't run across many people who want to teach.
There's also no money for research, (research-only positions are the holy grail for post-docs) so I disagree that a double track will 'solve' the bottleneck problem. I do think separating things out so students get taught by people who actually want to be there is a good move. Unfortunately a lot of the time (largely due to my first sentence), teaching alone is extremely devalued, so you get the shitty US adjunct situation. Or even if you have a faculty position, if you're teaching-only you're often paid for only 9 months of the year.
There are enumeration, hierarchical, and faceted systems. The most common in the world is Dewey but there is also the Library of Congress and several other decimal systems. China and Japan have their own.
All have benefits but really Dewey is prevalent just because it has been around so long and takes effort for libraries to switch.
Some problems with Dewey are:
Originally 000 did not exist in Dewey but they needed a place to stick computers when they were invented and putting them in machinery didn't really fit. It is just slapped on.
Major religions like Christianity have a major number while other religions have a post decimal number making them seem less important.
Same with literature. British and American literature is a major number while lots of other cultures are buried down below.
Plus there are tons of numbers that don't even exist anymore because they were expunged for being out right super racist. Tons of gaps are in the number ranges with nothing to fill it without a complete rewrite, which at that point just switch to a different system.
It really a bit fascinating to read about and study.
Was just curious, because you said every department/faculty/institution was different (or something like that, too lazy to scroll up and double-check), and I'm thinking that that professor may be a constant in every department of reasonable size.
haha good point!
We got to keep Dewey around long enough so that we can catalog some books in 999 - General History of Extraterrestrial Worlds.
I dread the day when one of those dries up.
I want to teach! But I'm a special snowflake. (Also, a dumb snowflake.)
I agree that double tracking won't fix shit. Just look at the math: most universities/faculties/departments spit out more PhD students than they themselves hire, by a wide factor. Some of those excess PhDs are going to get absorbed by industry/burnout, but not even close to enough.
The cause is probably multi-factor. Professors are living longer now. Governments have pushed to produce more PhDs without really know where to put them. (See the similar glut of Bachelor's degrees, which has taken on a life of its own.) Governments are also establishing more universities, because more education -> more prestige -> more votes. Faculty want more PhD students because more students -> more publications -> more prestige -> more money. Institutions want more to produce more PhDs because more students -> more publications -> more prestige -> more money. And industry, other than Silicon Valley, still doesn't know what to do with all these PhDs, who are specially trained to do things that most companies don't care about.
And just now I impressed some students when they saw I was wearing a Casio calculator watch.
THIS DAY IS GREAT!
Still not entirely convinced that you haven't traveled back in time are at subing at a school in the 1950's.
I like the cut of your jib, go on...
9 month appointments are usually misleading though.
Like, most of our instructors here make over their 9 month assignments what our local community colleges pay for 12 month assignments (or more). Then they also get bonus pay if they choose to go into the pot for a summer stipend.
9 month pay means you make your entire salary in 9 months, leaving you the remaining 3 as essentially paid leave (if you manage your funds right). I'd kill for a 9 month appointment at my current pay rate (which is lower than most 9 month assignments).
Most schools offer the ability to stretch your 9 month over the full year if you want and are bad with money, also.
A Boeing V-22 Osprey. The second he said "it's the kind that can tilt its rotors" I knew exactly what he was talking about, because it's a damn cool looking aircraft. A younger guy and I both laughed about how intense the sound/rumbling was, and how we both had assumed it had to be something military. So yeah, that was an interesting work interruption today! :P
Jesus it's just so unsustainable and broken and we're doing an immense disservice to the public by not caring enough about it
Yeah, the program was a total boondoggle and the initial models crashed pretty often.
I got to hook up a data recorder inside of one for an old job, that was fun.
Yeah, they're really unstable when switching the rotors between vertical and horizontal or something like that.
Moving parts in general are prone to failure.
VTOL stuff in general always is problematic.
You'd probably be better off using a helicopter when you need VTOL and stick with a jet for plane-like duties. I imagine vectored thrust aircraft probably are far less prone to failure than planes that physically rotate their engines that provide lift. That just seems dangerous even though it works most of the time.
They're still cool though.
This sort of thinking is really why its so broken. It doesn't need to be rebuilt from the ground up, because that will never happen and certainly not with as many resources as we currently have, much less the considerably more we need for a nation of our size.
What we need is for sustainable, permanent funding to be federally and state protected, attached to population and GDP, and connect school funding not to performance metrics but proportional to population totals of their region. Fix the broken funding model, and most of the rest will sort itself out in a decade.
I live in San Diego and my friend/roommate works basically across the street from the nearby Air Force base. He's a huge airplane nut, so every time one of these (or F-18s or Blackhawks or whatever else) flies over, he's compelled to call it out, run to the window and watch it go. This happens multiple times a day. Also, he's got a PhD and works in a medical research center. He miiight be the biggest nerd ever, and I miiight be just a little bit jealous.
My understanding was they solved that after the first few years and now there is a small fleet in operation with a pretty solid safety rating.
nope!
1) the project originated from within the Department of Defense. after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, it was determined by the DoD, and mainly the Army, that there was a need for a vehicle which could fly quickly and land vertically. the myth that it was forced on the DoD by politicians comes from the fact that the Navy was largely against it, because it was perceived as an encroachment upon their role, at which point Congress intervened and pushed the project through. infighting at the DoD has a long and storied history and has resulted both in worthwhile projects having to fight for survival and stupid projects being politically bulletproof; the V-22 is an example of the former and the F-35 Lightning II is an example of the latter.
2) the USMC uses them fairly extensively, though right now they're the only branch of service which does. this is largely because of their role in the US military; the USMC is the only branch of service which has routine need for a vehicle which can carry combat troops at high speed and perform vertical landing and take-off maneuvers.
3) the V-22 accident record wasn't especially worse than any equivalently-complex aircraft while it was in development. helicopters are dangerous! now that it's out of development, their incident record is lower than any legacy helicopter, and their average operating cost per hour is half that of the most comparable helicopter.
tldr the V-22 is a good vehicle that fills a necessary role and does it well provided it has good maintenance