Today marks the third anniversary of the launch of All About Work. Writing and managing the blog has been a tremendous learning experience for me, as well as being a lot of fun.
In the blog’s three years of operation, its posts have received a total of nearly 95,000 hits. The most popular posts to date have been: (more…)
I’ve written a number of posts about media misreporting of scientific research, and here – sadly – is another example of the same problem, from blogger and oceanographer Dr. Craig McClain. His description of different news sources progressively misreporting his story about a jellyfish – and getting the facts more and more wrong – would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.
And to further contextualize his tale of woe, the Daily Mail website – which was responsible for some of the major errors as the story was circulated – is one of the most visited news websites in the world. So who knows how far this misinformation has spread, and who knows what else out there is so very, very wrong?
Sigh.
(Thanks to science writer Kathleen Raven for her Tweet that led me to Dr. McClain’s article.)
Jacquelyn Gill over at The Contemplative Mammoth blog has put forward a great idea for the month of May: a “Post-Ph.D. Blog Carnival”, for bloggers to tell their stories of what they did after finishing their Ph.D. degrees. As she notes, there are, and will be, a lot of stories of people leaving academia in disgust or disillusionment after completing a Ph.D.. But there are also stories of people who stayed, and there’s value in learning about wherever Ph.D. graduates end up. I’m one of those who stayed in academia, and this is my post-Ph.D. story.
To understand my post-Ph.D.story, you have to understand the context of the story. I’m proud to (more…)
Nicholas Kristof usually produces thoughtful and insightful commentary in his columns in the New York Times. However, his recent article entitled “Professors, We Need You!” was such a lazy piece of writing that I found myself wondering whether his byline had been stuck on the column by mistake. The article trotted out very broad and very tired stereotypes of academic disciplines being too isolated from reality, and academics themselves being too wrapped up in their own self-serving work to engage with society or with the public.
Other blogging academics such as the political scientists at The Monkey Cage, the administrator at Confessions of a Community College Dean, and the scientist at Doing Good Science have already dissected the errors in Kristof’s article, along with pointing out the article’s failure to mention the structural, occupational and institutional factors creating the kind of academic work that Kristof denigrates. However, what I want to discuss is (more…)
DN Lee received a request to write for a blog – for “exposure”, not compensation – and when she refused, the blog contact wrote back calling her an “urban whore”. Her video response is brilliant!! Kudos to her for standing up not only against blogs that expect contributors to work for free, but also against such inexcusably rude treatment.
And check out Isis The Scientist’s following post, in which she discovered that DN Lee’s post about her experience mysteriously disappeared from Scientific American‘s website after DN publicly told her story. Kudos to Isis as well for bringing this ridiculousness to our attention.
Whenever I go to a bookstore, I always take a look at the section with business books, and inevitably I walk away feeling discouraged or mad. I couldn’t really put my finger on why, until I read this article by political scientist Andrew Gelman and this response by his blogging colleague Henry Farrell. Gelman and Farrell have identified some of the things that really annoy me about popular-press business books, and I’m going to (more…)
Announcement of an excellent new blog from David Yamada, over at Minding the Workplace. Bravo, David!
Hello dear readers, just a quick note sharing some thoughts and news of a new personal blog that I started:
Learning from the testimony of others
My last post, Why targets of workplace bullying need our help: A rallying cry from the heart, reprinted a comment left by a reader, recounting her attempts to recover from a horrific, sustained campaign of bullying and mobbing. Her eloquent words inspired a lot of thoughtful comments, and I’d invite you to read them.
This exchange reinforced for me the value of social networking and this particular form of online communication as a way of sharing experiences and ideas. I know that it was especially validating for others who have experienced this form of abuse.
A new personal blog: Musings of a Gen Joneser
For some time I’ve wanted to write more about “my” generation, that group born roughly between 1954 and 1965 and dubbed by…
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New trends now start not from exhibitions or publications but from conferences. It was, after all, the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, attended by [Jacques] Derrida and other Parisian savants, that first put the ideas of poststructuralism into circulation in America, where they were developed, institutionalized, and ultimately re-exported to Europe and the rest of the academic world.
(David Lodge, “Through The ‘No Entry’ Sign: Deconstruction and Architecture”)
The start of May is usually the start of my academic conference season, and as my previous post indicated, I recently spent a few days in the Boston area. I went there to attend MiT8, the “Media in Transition” conference that happens every two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The conference is sponsored by MIT’s Communications Forum and the wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program.
You might wonder how or why someone who works in a school of business administration ended up at a conference that has presentations on topics like slash fiction, snark websites, Farmville, sexting, and reality television. (more…)
(credit: own photo)
Today marks the first birthday of All About Work. In one year, it’s received over 10,000 hits, and working on it has been a lot of fun for me.
The five posts that received the most hits during the year are: (more…)
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