May 28, 2006

Don't Fuck With Geoffrey K. Pullum

I'm not sure what went on behind the scenes at One Language Log Plaza to provoke this devastating take-down, but Geoff Pullum completely fucks shit up:

Certainly, it is possible that the phrase dada kraut psych mindblowing conscience expanding sublime acid oriented arcana coelestia weirdness has roughly nine stacked attributive modifiers; but one cannot really tell, because it all depends on how it is parsed: doubtless "consciousness-expanding" (I add the helpful hyphen) is intended as a syntactic unit, but one doesn't know about "kraut psych" and so on. This is basically the problem one finds with quotes from chimpanzee language: chimps are occasionally reported as having signed things with transcriptions like BANANA BANANA HELP REFRIGERATOR GIMME OPEN BANANA GIMME, and syntactically one does not really know where or whether to begin.


Part of the problem here is that Eric is one of the younger staffers here at Language Log Plaza. They work with headsets on, they have X-men posters on their walls, they talk about whether Lara Croft's breasts in the new Crystal Dynamics video game release are as big as before. The average age in their part of the building is approximately 19. They typically list their hobbies as (i)~being wicked cool, (ii)~dancing to their iPods in public places, (iii)~shopping at American Eagle, and (iv)~staying out all night. One does not see them at EVOO; they dine at place where the menu is a series of brightly colored pictures on glass with lights behind them, and often there is a neon sign in the window saying "BURRITOS AS BIG AS YOUR HEAD". And their reading material does not fully meet the criteria for being called "language".

Which raises the question: how much would you pay to see Belle Waring and Geoffrey K. Pullum in a heavyweight title bout?

Posted by todd at 6:42 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2006

Comments, Laptops in Class

Apologies for the comments not working. I'm looking into it; I need to talk to Adam about getting access to the server.

Meanwhile, a link for Monica, because she's the only person I know who does this.

This school year, the University of Michigan Law School became the latest graduate school to block wireless Internet access to students in class, joining law schools at UCLA and the University of Virginia.

[...]

"When you focus primarily on transcribing everything said, you are not making good use of the class as a practice opportunity," she wrote in an e-mail to her law students, explaining her decision to ban laptops.

See. I knew it. This is why I never took notes as an undergraduate. Of course, Professor Hawks disagrees:

It seems to me there is an unrecognized selection effect here. Aren't the students who take notes using laptops in graduate schools very likely to be the same few who did so as undergraduates? Except now they are many because they got admitted?
Or they're not awesome enough to remember everything the first time. Law schools should only want awesome students.

Posted by todd at 9:44 PM | Comments (5)

Job Satisfaction

GrrlScientist reports that Money magazine rated the top jobs in the country, and that college professor came in second. Grrl takes the interesting stance that, while she does desire the job greatly, there's no way that it should be ranked that high, based on the criteria named in the article.

Unraveling the paradox, she says,

Don't get me wrong; I wish to be a university biology professor because, despite everything, I still think it is the best job for me, but I never have engaged in that particular fantastical belief that being a college professor is a truly wonderful job for most people out there, all things being equal.
From there, she goes on to make several good points about the odd choices the magazine made when deciding who counted as a professor.

My own reaction was, "Sweet, someone in the world thinks it might make sense to someday want to rejoin academia." Then I clicked through to the article, and I found out that the number one job is Software Engineer.

The best part is that they gave it the same "ease of entry" rating as for a college professor. Let's see, on the one hand we have a job which requires a minimum of five years of post-bachelor education, a PhD thesis, multiple publications, teaching experience, possibly multiple years spent in a post doc position, and a grueling interview process. On the other, a bachelor's degree from any school whatsoever, with a few courses in C++ along the way, and the ability to solve trivial logic puzzles during interviews. Yeah, that's definitely comparable.

Posted by todd at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2006

Everything Old is New Again

Last year, when Tongue, but No Door was lost for a while, most of our old posts had not yet made it into the Internet Archive. However, they seem to be creeping in, which is nice, because I have some updates for you.

First, you may remember my post about the unique sexual relationships of Bitch PhD. Nothing new to add to that discussion, but in case you missed it, I wanted to point out that Adrianne and Nick interviewed Dr. B for the third episode of Love & Radio.

Secondly, you almost certainly remember Monica's post about institutional sexism. Now (via Neurodudes) I bring you an interesting paper by Peter Lawrence on gender and academia.

The paper is the kind of thing that Lawrence Summers might have meant to say, if he weren't in all likelihood a douche. Discussion and extensive quoting from the paper follow, below the fold.

Tasty morsels include:

For example, among current student members of the British Psychological Society, there are 5,806 women to 945 men; and among graduate psychologists, 23,324 women to 8,592 men. Of those who practice as chartered psychologists, the ratio has fallen further (7,369 women to 4,402 men). Yet among Fellows of the Society, honoured largely for their research, there are 428 men to only 106 women!

The point being, there are jobs that women seem to choose more than men. However, they still don't have the positions of power within those fields. Lawrence argues that this not because of discrimination, but because the selection process for those positions favors the wrong traits.

There is good psychological evidence that aggression and lack of empathy are on average male characteristics, and we may agree with Baron-Cohen that for both sexes, “nastiness…. gets you higher socially, and gets you more control or power” [2,10,11]. Science should not be a military or a business operation, but nowadays it increasingly resembles one—for most, it is a vicious struggle to survive. In this struggle, men climb higher because they are on average more ruthless, and many women, as well as a gentle minority of men, shy away from competing with them [12]. And I think that our selection methods exacerbate this tendency.

He continues:

At present, in the competition for academic posts, we expect our candidates to go through a gruelling process of interview that demands self-confidence. We are impressed by bombast and self-advertising, especially if we don't know the field, and we may not notice annexation of credit from others, all of which on average are the preferred province of men. But we should also seek out able scientists who would care well for their groups, those who would mentor a distressed student and help her or him back into productive research. And if we did, we would choose more feminine women as well as more feminine men.

And, his conclusion:

I have argued that reducing the premium we give to aggression would, in several different ways, lead to more women in science and also to better science. Even so, in this Utopia, I think that far less than 50% of top physicists would be women (and far less than 50% of top professors of literature would be men). But I don't think that would matter—we would be making better use of the diverse qualities of people. Both women and men might accept that although there is much overlap in the two populations, we are constitutionally different—a diversity we should be able to celebrate and discuss openly. Both women and men should be leading such discussions with pride.

One thing that bothered me was the terse dismissal of discrimination as a factor in the discrepancy: "Regarding overt discrimination, in a lifetime in science, I have seen only little, and it has been both for and against women. Surely, gender discrimination cannot explain more than a tiny part of this trend." Well, gee, Pete, I wonder why you've seen so little discrimination? While we're at it, let's ask a bunch of middle class white people whether or not racism is a problem in America.

Nonetheless, this strikes me as a relatively constructive contribution to the discussion. Thoughts?

Posted by todd at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)