We’ve reached the point in the semester where we’ve just gotten a grip on the reading for each week, and now the paper deadlines are beginning to come down the pike. Yikes. If this is to be our last semester in which we carry a full slate of classes, our schedules seem designed to ensure that we don’t move on without a few stripes to show for it. Keep us in your thoughts as we plough (crawl? wade? muddle? waltz? ha!) through to the end.
Erin
Although I’m currently swamped with reading (and grading, and writing . . .), I thought I’d take a look at my department’s “Procedural Guide” to get a firmer handle on what happens when the semester ends. Apparently the transition from busy semesters full of classes to long days of work on one’s own toward some project far in the future is a rough one, and I (Scheduling Maven that I am) want to get my mind wrapped around this change as much as possible – preferably before I waste a few months wandering aimlessly around the library!
I’ve had a couple of meetings with my advisor, and am slooowly working toward the next step: if nothing else, I have some idea where I should start looking for trouble when my current work load lightens up! But as I was reading through the Procedural Guide, skimming the instructions for the parts of the program I’ve already passed, I suddenly realized the instructions bear almost no resemblance to my own experience of classes and my first exam. My first exam was not a slow and careful preparation toward a test of my knowledge of large swaths of the English canon. Instead, my three guys and I plopped down last August, I gave them a reading of a short poem that I particularly liked, and we wrangled over details of that for about an hour, until my conscience-stricken Chair called a halt and made his colleagues grill me about some other book so that we could claim we had “covered” a number of things. Two slightly sweaty hours in August and I had “advanced” to the next stage of my program.
When the authors of the guide caution, “All elements are subject to the consideration and preferences of the student’s Committee,” they mean it. Basically, a committee of three advisors shapes my time here and sets the bar. So I guess I’d better give up on the idea of finding answers in any manual!
Erin
Although it would be better if I could go on someone else’s money . . .
Erin
I need some serious help. Sydney has two paper deadlines bearing down on him, coinciding nicely with decent temperatures and a day full of sunshine. Sydney thinks it’s spring. Apparently “spring” means for him that books are distasteful and academia needs to be abandoned entirely to allow for time outside (gardening, bird-watching, walking, you name it). It’s like having a bear in the house! And you can just imagine how much I love being the wicked witch, reminding him (as gently as possible) that he really does need to do some school work. I myself have been craving a hike for the last six months, so I’m not the strongest of opponents. Sigh.
Erin
It’s long been a commonplace that in the television era who gets to be president is going to be determined in good part by the physical appearance of the candidates. Given how close most American elections are, you only need a small fraction of the people to vote for one candidate because he looks more attractive to ensure that he’ll win.
That fact strikes me as enough to show that democracy, in the United States at least, is pretty much meaningless. But the situation turns out to be even worse than I thought.
To quote: “Anthony C. Little, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and colleagues decided to use computerized ‘morphing’ techniques to examine the question.
“In research published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, they used the faces of candidates from eight real elections in the U.S., New Zealand, and Great Britain, including candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry from the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
“Then they used a computer-imaging technique to combine each face with a nondescript male face that had been created by averaging the faces of 10 university students.
“The result was a pair of faces that was not recognizable as either candidate, but nevertheless bore a sort of family resemblance to the originals – young, unblemished, they could have been the candidates’ college-age nephews. The altered Bush has narrow-set eyes and a slightly heavy brow, the altered Kerry wide-set eyes and a long face.
“Then the researchers asked people to look at the faces and say who they would vote for.
“In all eight races, the votes based on composite faces gave the same results as the actual elections.
“That bears emphasizing. Sitting at a computer screen, with nothing to go on but a face, a majority of the hundred or so volunteers consistently chose the same candidates as did the millions of voters who had been exposed to newspaper articles, television reports, and intense campaigning.
“‘We actually beat quite a lot of polls in accuracy,’ Little says.
“Although the percentages weren’t exactly the same for each race, the volunteers always chose the same candidate who ended up winning the popular vote in the actual election” (see here for more of the story).
There used to be debates about whether you would get the best leaders by a vote from the people or whether there was an identifiable class of experts who could make better, more informed choices. And shouldn’t we want the best leaders for the country? Well, it seems by now we have precious little reason to think that giving the people a vote is a good way of identifying the best leaders. Presidential elections seem to amount to beauty pageants for (so far) men, with a tiny candidate pool. There is virtue in the tinyness of the pool, of course. While it explains why we haven’t had any presidents yet that were that attractive, it also explains why we haven’t had any that knew absolutely nothing about politics (though some might think that we’ve come depressingly close to absolute incompetence).
So here’s my suggestion (the making of which is utterly vain, of course). If people are still stuck on democracy after all these years, the least we could do is to ensure some sort of connection between the people voting and the people being voted for. Here’s how. Let people vote for a representative from their neighbourhood. Then let those representatives vote for a regional representative from their midst, … and so on up until the top level of representatives votes for a president. That is, never have one level vote for anybody more than one level above them. This would ensure that people would choose from candidates that they actually knew something about, which, one hopes, would in turn ensure that they would vote on something slightly more rationally significant than the appearance of a face on TV.
Sydney
See here for a report on the first Clericus Cup. If only they played in clerical robes … I might almost be willing to spectate for once.
Sydney
After a long afternoon of dutiful reading, the cooking began. Sydney was inspired by the tamarind flavor of our Thai dinner on Friday, so he combined about 30 recipes online into a curry recipe of his own (yes to the tamarind, veggies, and rice, no to the fish oil and other such undesirables). Plus we needed to make bread for packed lunches and dinners this week. Oh yes, and we wanted to make a sweet-potato-and-black-bean-burrito dish so that we’d have dinners to come home to this week. So the onions were sizzling, the compost pile was growing, and we emptied out half the jars in the fridge as we cooked.
Now, it’s about time we got back to that reading of ours . . .
Erin
I stepped outside to chase away squirrels from our birdfeeder this morning and slipped on the ice-covered steps attached to our house. Scared the squirrel (yeah!), scared myself (aaaugh!), and scared Sydney out of bed (what happened? who died?). What a nice way to wake up and prepare for church 😛
After only a few hours of creaking around, trying to take some weight off my right hip and such, I have to say this is getting old – fast. I’ll bet that even elderly ladies with strollers are more sprightly than I am today. But if this is anything like getting old, if it can conceivably take five minutes just to cross the street, well, I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.
But perhaps I should take this as an indication that I should spend more time sitting still, reading (you know, doing my “real” work), rather than flitting about running errands.
Erin
Sydney felt wiped out by this week, and (after spending eight hours on the couch yesterday polishing off a book) I thought it would be nice to get out a bit. So I proposed going out to eat (for the first time in many, many months), and he took me up on it. So what are we doing? Sitting in front of our computers, researching places to eat. What spontaneous modes of relaxation and adventure we have around here!
Erin
I’ve made this recipe twice now, with great success. I admit to deviating quite a bit from the original, but it seems to withstand even my alterations! If you don’t have leeks, no problem. If you want to double the amount of potatoes, fine. If you double the spices, perfectly okay. If, like me, you scoff at the idea of paying a tremendous amount of money for saffron threads, no worries. It’s very accomodating 🙂 For those of you into cooking with spices and lots of fairly common veggies (and for those who need a recipe that you can live off of for an entire week), this is a great dish: Autumn Harvest Couscous.
Erin
Alan Schmierer