Strangely, this hadn't crossed my social media yet. Seems weirdly hostile to cis white women given their lack of power in this arena. (And citing the presidential voting doesn't really make sense here, as we're talking only about people with doctorates.)
I just noticed and checked that not only are we not facebook friends, we surprisingly don't have ANY friends in common. FB had a list of "suggested" friends of yours I might know, and I did in fact recognize several of those names, but we are 3 degrees apart on FB, not 2 degree apart.
Hang on, let's go be 1 degrees apart!
Yeah, that's surprisingly little overlap. I looked at your friend list and the one with the most mutual friends is the one (totally crazy) person we'd already identified as both knowing. Second is a very eminent mathematician from your alma mater who I don't actually know personally (though I once went to a skype presentation of hers at a workshop). Third is someone I have met but probably don't know well. The rest are all people I don't actually know. Who knew the math world was so large?
My white/cis/straight dad retired earlier this month. His department has one trans professor I know of, though certainly there could be more I don't, and probably more gender than racial diversity. His plan had always been to retire as soon as he was the right age so that there would be a job for someone younger, demographics unspecified. When the time came he held on an extra year hoping the school's hiring freeze would end but it didn't. I have a feeling that's how a lot of these stories would end if people took this advice.
Hooray for me not having power or being eligible for unpaid work on a committee.
5 is basically the story behind the whole bogus "There's going to be a wave of retirements and then we'll have a shortage of scientists!" story that's been in circulation since the 80s.
Especially now that universities have discovered the joys of employing low paid adjuncts to teach undergrads, the idea that retiring tenured professor = open tenure track salary line has become increasingly misleading.
Everybody working at my level but me is either a woman or an immigrant from Asia or both. So maybe I'm woke.
I was trying to work out how many trans or WoC mathematicians I know, but gave up because I didn't know what WoC meant. (I assume it doesn't include light skinned South Americans, but what about South Americans with darker skin? Asians? Asian-Americans? Does it matter where in Asia?). Probably the answer is zero and one, respectively (assuming none of the above count).
Thank god some random academic has come along to tell us all who deserves to be in the jobs of the world.
White cis lesbians must really feel like they've finally made it! They don't even get mentioned as part of the feminist eutopia department.
They see me trolling, they hatin...
12: Partly trolling, sure, but mostly totally standard clickbait entry in the neverending social media contest of "who can be most virtuous".
I was not impressed by the update pleading both provocation and First Amendment rights, but that was added by the editor rather than the author.
12 & 13 were basically my reaction. Not any big deal, but still: "More clickbaity trolling. Thank goodness, I was afraid we might be running out..."
The hysterical overreactions that the Man-O-Sphere, or whatever you call it, always has to stuff like this is comical. At the same time, I can't help think of the Middlebury freakout and related phenomena and think "Wow, it's really easy to make people go apeshit these days.
To be clear, I'm not implying moral parity between the alt-right and the Middlebury kids, just noting that maybe the fact that it seems increasingly easy to provoke people into full blown collective meltdowns might not be such a good thing.
If you are a human you almost certainly should resign from your position of power. That's right, please quit. Too difficult? Well, as a first step, at least get off your sidebar and make sure you're replaced by a spambot of color or trans bot.
The article is a reductio of the argument for inclusion, and is thus mildly destructive, but whoever coined the term "nutpicking" had a point -- you can always find somebody saying something terrible.
It's weird how much time people spend now on being outraged, as a hobby. I think this is the key to Rupert Murdoch's success -- the appetite of the middle class for "shocking" "outrages" is quite large.
Math professors are mostly nuts anyway.
Politically-oriented faculty expressing controversial and wrongheaded views of How The World Should Be? Knock me over with a feather.
19: Mostly? In that department in the last few years, there was a guy who set his own office door on fire when he locked himself out, one who was arrested for I forget exactly what sort of online behavior, and I think I'm forgetting at least one. And that's not counting the ones who are just garden variety bizarre.
I think this is the key to Rupert Murdoch's success -- the appetite of the middle class for "shocking" "outrages" is quite large.
At the end of the day, we're all Victorians.
21: I was wondering if you had any insider knowledge.
Present company something something.
21: Not on this particular controversy, apart from a couple of broadcast emails, but some familiarity with the general milieu.
there was a guy who set his own office door on fire when he locked himself out
?!
36 Really, I mean why not just hack it apart with an ax like a normal person?
I bet he even used a system of parabolic mirrors instead gasoline or a blowtorch.
There were some mental health issues present.
27
In my day we just climbed up into the drop ceiling and down into the CIA redacted office we wanted to visit.
In my experience corridors are usually lined with load-bearing walls.
Load-bearing wall and Far Side cartoons.
Cartoons, and ads for assignment-writing services.
And superheroes fighting ninjas, if Netflix is to be believed.
"That's a load-bearing Calvin and Hobbes."
Load-bearing Far Side cartoons would do well in the university market.
Load-bearing wall and Far Side cartoons.
In the math department at my former university, xkcd had supplanted The far Side.
Speaking of crazy math professors, there was a woman in that department who was getting harassed, but was ultimately discovered to have been sending herself threatening letters. She left.
When I asked another math professor I was collaborating with about it, he acknowledged that there were mental health issues involved, but also thought that they had been exacerbated by the environment in the department. Basically "Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean that they're not out to get you."
Load-bearing SMBC cartoons frequently give way, leaving occupants crushed by futility.
38: That's what's really sad about our current predicament. Yes, the Trumpkins are worse than most of humanity, but the margin is smaller than one might wish.
38: "Or maybe you are an asshole" seems to be half of a false dichotomy.
The stunt that Burke is complaining about reminds me of one of the more bizarre bits of "Call for papers" spam I received a few weeks ago. The Journal's title was so vague and nondescriptive that I can't remember it, but what was really striking was the list of Subject Areas they covered. It went on and on and included everything from medicinal chemistry to aeronautical engineering to medieval history to Victorian literature.
I remember thinking "Come on guys, you're not even trying".
They keep inviting me to be on the editorial boards, which I keep refusing to do because I know I don't have the qualifications they have said in I have in their letter in order to improve diversity in editorial boards.
what was really striking was the list of Subject Areas they covered. It went on and on and included everything from medicinal chemistry to aeronautical engineering to medieval history to Victorian literature.
Challenge: accepted. Clearly something about why it is anachronistic for Davey Balfour to take hyoscine hydrobromide to combat airsickness.
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only this could save France from permanent second-rate status, for ultimately technology "is at the foundation of all that can ensure, if not total independence, which is no longer accessible for a country of our size, then at least sufficient means to enable us to play an active role in the federations of the future that will replace the Europe of borders."Emphasis added. This from fucking 1967.
What with global warming and all, unless you have your own hermetically sealed borders (all the way up to space) your independence is only notional, even if you are a big country with 300m to 1b people.
(To be sure, in France, "independence" means "no foreign words or phrases borrowed, especially from English.")
38 enraged me as much as the link in the OP enraged the far right. Tim Burke is as bad as Ann Coulter.
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I'm working on a data model for something, and I keep wanting to cast the labels and descriptions of the fields in gender neutral language. Force of habit.
But ...
the only people this data can possibly be about, is men. And the original data explicitly uses 'male' language.
And yet, despite the faithfulness of:
'Age of man'
say, to the data, and to the language used on the original forms on which the data was captured. It still fields odd not to use gender-neutral language.
>
44
Brilliant. I'm improving diversity by refusing to do lots of things.
The taek, it burns. Trolling is a hell of a drug.
My career decisions almost make a bit of sense if I imagine myself as having been motivated by the desire to improve diversity.
Speaking of outrage trolling, I see that the Hypatia thing has now reached the New York Times. Twice!
My main takeaway from the whole thing is that, when I write my international espionage thriller, I'm definitely going to name the main character Hypatia Tuvel.
I'll google that after I finish dinner.
re: 8
My experience working in a senior 'academic related'* role was similar. The majority of our senior managers were women. Three out of four at executive level were. Junior managers were a bit more 'male' as a group, so about 50/50.** I don't think the result of any particular policy, and libraries have always been quite 'pink collar', so there wasn't anything particularly threatening to 'the patriarchy' about it.
Still pretty white, though, as a group. Probably broadly reflective of UK demographics, but hard to say exactly. I suspect not quite as representative as would have been ideal.
There was a period when I was the only white man of British origin working at my level, in my department. Which wasn't the result of some kind of enlightened recruitment policy. That's just how it worked out, as basically all of the good technical people we recruited for a while were non-White women, and all of the white men already in post other than me were a bit shit, and not promoted. So, very briefly, my working experience was pretty much like women and people of colour have experienced, forever.
* libraries, so a lot of people with PhDs, and academic level knowledge, but no teaching, and a lot more management.
** in a technical department, so skewing more male overall than the library in general.
there was a guy who set his own office door on fire when he locked himself out
I thought my department was astoundingly bizarre and dysfunctional, but that takes the cake.
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My laptop was being increasingly sluggish, so I ran a bunch of AVG utilities (full system scan, PC Tune Up, & etc.). Although this took most of the day, it did indeed result in a remarkable increase in performance. However, it seems to have killed google chrome. It opens to a blank screen and is completely unresponsive. That's no big deal, I've switched back to Firefox.
But I'm curious. Does anyone have any idea why doing the tune up would kill chrome specifically?
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60. No, but if you can be bothered to reinstall it it'll probably work, though it might slug your system a bit too.
Related: when I started up Firefox, it didn"t have an adblocker installed. Holy crap, how does anyone do anything on the web without an adblocker? It's been so long that I've been using one I didn't realize how much garbage gets thrown at you.