You didn't have majors in medieval universities. You had the seven liberal arts (the trivium and the quadrivium) which underlay a church-centred curriculum. Think of it as the ultimate gen-ed degree! By the sixteenth century, you had clearly defined professorships in specific fields such as mathematics (think of the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge held by Isaac Newton). To study engineering, say, you didn't go to universities in the eighteenth century - they simply didn't teach a curriculum that covered such topics. Nineteenth century universities is where real specialization took hold to create the idea of majoring in a specific study or another.

Of course, you'd only know this if you studied history. I mean really studied history to learn how to find information as well as usefully analyze that data. For this, you have to go beyond glib and flawed recall. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

This is plagiarism both by my university's definition and the one that's included in my syllabus.

This kind of activity is also why I don't allow free-choice essays and require students to submit work in progress during the term as they "workshop" major projects. It's all about deterring plagiarism and trying to get the students to, you know!, actually complete the course requirements. Crazy ideas.

Had one of our old family PCs die a few months ago and needed to replace the machine (for school use) very quickly. There was little choice in desktop models at local retailers and most of these machines were priced at or above comparably equipped laptops. I'm used to being able to buy a decently-equipped tower cheaply. Those days seem to be gone, at least for the big-box and mall stores.

There, instead of the wall of towers and monitors you saw a few years ago, you'll see laptops, netbooks and monitors. My choice was pretty simple for this replacement machine, especially since I couldn't wait for parts to come in the mail. We now have a shiny new laptop in the house and one more empty desk!

As a prof, this is what I do. Files with the outline of the class and topic are available a few days beforehand and most students bring them to class as a print-out or just saved on their computers.

Some colleagues are aghast that I'm "encouraging students not to come to class" by circulating notes ahead of time. Balderdash! I let the students know that there's "value added" in the classroom session, quite literally. Neither the textbook (one of the best on the subject but with its own idiosyncrasies) nor the notes will give anyone the full picture. Nor would coming to class having not done the readings!

As long as students aren't annoying others around them in the crowded classroom by playing games or movie files with distracting animation effects, I don't really mind if they're "off topic" for a bit -- everyone is at some point, whether armed with clay and stylus, pen and paper or laptop and keyboard.

The update has been pushing this software for days -- my twelve-year old called me to the family PC last week to ask about the update install. If I hadn't trained her well, she would have assumed it was okay since she knows we have Apple's Quicktime installed (and the update cleverly bundles Quicktime with iTunes, which I don't want on any computer, especially one with a nearly-full HD).

I hadn't looked into the iPhone configuration part though, like the blogger mentioned, I was irked since there's never been anything like an iPhone in this house. Knowing now what was involved, I'm glad we dodged that bullet!

This whole experience goes to show that corporations can all fall into traps of not thinking or knowing what one part's doing and not really caring until someone makes enough noise to get their attention. I don't trust Apple anymore than I trust Microsoft. Nor should anyone blindly trust these corporations: they don't have your best interests at heart!

How many of the books that they're pulping are actually available out there with no additional cost? Not that many. This school will either be putting out a lot of money to license content in the digital format(s) that it previously owned in print or their students will learn the joy of researching from "snippet" view in Google Books.

Project Gutenberg and various free sources are good enough for accessing some pre-copyright books but, honestly, even as a researcher who specializes in 16th century books, it's hardly a drop in the bucket. Most of those 16th century books aren't freely available online but scanned as part of a wonderful but pricey subscription service (Early English Books Online). Not to mention that a lot of the freely-available Victorian editions are error-ridden or almost illegible.

And what of scholarship since the 1920s? Sure, there's the California Open Source Textbook Project and other similar endeavours. Haven't really gotten them all robustly off the ground and it doesn't help students who're looking for current scholarship on topic A when all we have are textbook-level summaries of B and C.

I know a lot of students like the idea of reading books online but very few of them are truly happy with what's out there so far. If there's no money for OCR conversion, you have a lot of scans in PDF or image format, sometimes dauntingly grainy. Even Google Books at its best has a hard time identifying the index properly in open-access books so have fun trying to look up your subjects in these multi-volume early twentieth century reference works which is what you have on hand. Or just give up and say that Wikipedia will be the default resource for everyone's research (but don't be surprised when your students complain that not all of their university professors agree with this approach!).

What's wrong with having a bit more of a learning commons feeling and some more carrels while still keeping most of the books? Do a shelf-read (your librarians do know what that practice is, I hope!), and cull out those "Personal Computing and You" volumes from 1998 (unless you're running a historical archive of the computing community). But, for the love of Pete!, don't get rid of all the books. The students won't be thanking you as they realize you still expect them to read and research but you're hamstringing them at the same time.

Note: I have one of my four Windows boxes running Vista at present.

I bought a new machine this spring and accepted Vista. The 64-bit version with updates works very well and I'm happy that I am running Vista as it now exists. A bit irked that I couldn't find a Vista driver for my old office HP printer (no problem -- I gave that printer to the kid who inherited the old XP machine and got a new one for myself which I'd been meaning to do for a while) but nothing horrid. Still, there wasn't a single compelling feature in Vista that would have made me install it on my previous PC.

Microsoft badly bumbled the release of Vista, bringing it out buggy and without much driver support. I remember when Vista rolled out on "Vista-ready" systems that were anything but! I remember the failure of many mission-critical software packages to run on the new OS. Microsoft has blown the "instant update your OS" goodwill that it enjoyed in the old Windows 95 day. I still see Apple users rush out to update their OS versions quickly but not so much with Microsoft users. And I can't blame them because I clung to XP for a good long while and my workplace, like many, remains an XP environment.

Sure, Windows users might appreciate some elements of the Vista OS but what we'll appreciate more in our memories of Vista was not having to upgrade right away when the OS made its debut.

Some colleges and universities are preferentially offering more admission spots to male candidates than otherwise they would. Why? In order to redress the gender imbalance that's seeing fewer men than women enroll. (See this article from 2007 in US News & World Report.)

Last month also saw the 2nd Conference on College Men which also dealt with some of these concerns.

As an academic and someone who advocates wide access to all sorts of education, I want to see everyone have a chance to study for what they want to and can manage, men and women.

And someone who took stats to a graduate level and read TFA will respond with this quotation from TFA:

Mertz and Hyde looked for evidence of this imbalance - more boys than girls at the extremes of math ability - in international data, too. Again, they found that in some countries as many girls as boys score above the 99th percentile, and in others more girls than boys are extreme math dunces or math geniuses. In both cases, countries with as many or more girls at the upper extreme tend to be those with the greatest gender equality, such as Germany and the Netherlands.

Furthermore, in T(Actual)FA about which TFA reports, I read the following:

Notable is the fact that numerous countries had a normalized SD difference that was insignificantly different from zero, with 3 even having a negative value, that is, greater female variability. (Hyde and Mertz, PNAS June 2, 2009 vol. 106 no. 22, 8803)

In other words, statistical measurement shows that what you're seeing in the performance differences between men and women in mathematics are not innate differences but culturally-mediated differences. Same goes for the ability in language, verbal expression or other acquired skills, I would argue. Women aren't innately better communicators or writers. We're just kind of herded that way, as a group. Young women are, from very early on, acculturated to those skill sets seen as appropriately feminine. Young men are supported to learn and behave in ways that are considered appropriately manly. This socialization begins very early and extends quite a ways into the life-cycle.

The article doesn't talk about the Kindle's other technological back doors at all, so colour me disappointed.

Still, as a parent of an autistic child, I know how valuable the TTS function can be in our computer programs. As an author, I'm saddened that Amazon's rolled over on this for the publishers' and Author's Guild panic. TTS is not the same as an audiobook performance, nor does it have that possibility any time soon.

I used that quote as the title of my farewell email when I was let go from a dotcom in 2001. Sadly, most of the people there were too culturally unenlightened to recognize the reference.