Suppose someone asks "What's a rickroll?" and I respond with a link to that video. Have I just rickrolled them?
By virtue of the meaning of the question, I've answered it (demonstratively) if and only if I've provided an example of a rickroll.
But by the definition of rickrolling, a link to that video is a rickroll if and only if it does not answer the question.
Paradox! There may be some actual point here about terms that are defined by their relevance to the conversation or context.
...in any case it may not have been the smartest thing for an untenured professor to send the link to his entire department.
]]>[Mom wanted me to blog, so here it is.]
]]>Woo-hoo!
]]>[Actually I think the beginning of the published paper is "Are all conversational implicatures cancelable? Yes they are, and I am the queen of Romania. I mean it." Still Twitter-length, though. No online link, but I think the paper's been out long enough that I can probably put it back up now, when I get around to updating my page to for instance stop saying that I'm at Texas Tech.]
]]>In American, 'quite' is often an intensifier but not as strong as 'very'. (Thus, if you're improving you can go from good to quite good to very good.) In British it's almost exactly the opposite. It's close to 'rather' or 'pretty' (used as adverbs). So if you're improving you could go from quite good to good to very good.On both sides of the Atlantic, it can also mean 'completely' (as when you're not quite ready). How the 'completely' meaning is related to the others is something I've always wondered about.
I wonder if that last use of 'quite' is an NPI [NB: I do not necessarily endorse Ladusaw's account, mentioned at the end of that post]. NPIs are phrases like 'at all' or 'either' that can occur only in certain environments, like after a negation or in a question. e.g.
I'm not at all ready. Are you at all ready? *I'm at all ready
It seems to me that the most natural uses in the UK of 'quite' to mean 'completely' are in NPI-licensing environments, like "I'm not quite ready" or "Are you quite done?" This accords with something Tad Brennan (if I remember correctly) told me when I was at Cornell last week, which is that "not quite" means the same thing in the UK as it does in the US, even if "quite" doesn't. But I don't speak UK English, so I don't know.
I thought for a moment that the constant utterances of "Quate" by Tubby Vanringham's fiancée Prudence might indicate that quite-as-completely can occur in positive contexts, but it would make sense to utter "Rather" in the same contexts, so that doesn't show that this isn't quite-as-rather.
Apropos of "quite," when I read Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment I was bemused by the description of Rupert Stonebird as "quite good-looking." It was obvious from everything else in the novel that he was just a decent-looking fellow who wouldn't stand out in the crowd. It wasn't till sometime after Bill Clinton's "quite" flap that I realized that that's what "quite good-looking" means in the UK.
Checking the link, what Chris Bertram says about quite sure would seem to undermine the thesis of this whole post. Oh well. [And he elaborates here; my new theory is that speakers of UK English are mad.]
]]>Police officers rushed to hospital after a suspicious substance was thrown through a car window were released when it was identified as HP sauce.
I was completely and utterly garden-pathed by that sentence. It may not help that it's in journalistic shorthand; I think outside a newspaper "Police officers who had been rushed to hospital" would be more likely (though I don't say "to hopsital" either). Applying this to my previous ruminations about garden-path sentences will be left to the reader.
It's a shame; the sentence would've been deadpan funny if I hadn't had to spend so long figuring out what the main verb was.
]]>This was a pretty major undertaking for me, and I think the theory of knowledge it presents is pretty novel (though Stephen Schiffer has argued for something similar). I won't pretend that my arguments are knock-down, but one of the referees said something like "Even if I don't agree with the conclusion, I think it'd be good to have these arguments out there," and I'll happily accept that. Anyway, I do agree with the conclusion. In addition to all the acknowledgments in the paper, thanks to the Imprint for being a great online journal (and thus a good place to publish long papers like this) and also for being extremely patient with me on several occasions.
]]>I do frequently permit anonymous comments here, though, of course, I serve as the mediator and thus partial guarantor of their reliability and integrity. There are other contexts, too--for example, where fear of reprisal by the state is a real concern; or when feminists post about issues that are likely to excite the vicious misogynistic side of cyberspace--in which anonymity can be quite important. But as things stand now, anonymity is often abused on the Internet, so that individuals can behave irresponsibly with impunity, without incurring any of the social costs that would ordinarily accrue to those who behave that way.
Of course Leiter only gives examples rather than an exhaustive list; but it seems pretty clear that in most of the United States, the danger to pseudonymous speakers comes not from the state but from their employers and people in their profession. (Apologies to Leiter if he meant to include this category, but if he did it isn't clear from what he wrote.) Most people can be legally fired for almost any cause, including things they've written on their blog. There's even a word for getting fired because of your blog. Even if you don't get fired, your life might be made more difficult if your blog annoys prominent people in your profession; for instance it might make it harder to get a new job later. And these ill effects may not always be the appropriate ill effects of irresponsible behavior, because people may retaliate against speech that isn't particularly noxious. This means that almost everyone could have a legitimate fear of a quite substantial harm that might warrant keeping their online speech pseudonymous. For example, as I understand it Duncan Black originally blogged pseudonymously as "Atrios" partly because he was an academic without a tenure-track job who didn't want his blogging associated with his employer, so if he had been prevented from blogging pseudonymously (and there was in fact a frivolous libel lawsuit aimed at exposing his identity) we wouldn't have had one of the important early liberal blogs. I think that's a harm, though others may have different opinions.
This doesn't provide a decisive argument that the benefits of pseudonymous speech outweigh the harms. (The harms being discussed aren't the usual silly trolls on comment threads -- I don't even know if that's more common among pseudonymous posters -- but people posting harassing and defamatory things on, say, bulletin boards about college campuses.) But it does provide a bigger weight on any decisions people might want to make about the merits of pseudonymous speech in general, and in particular whether it is a good idea to expose pseudonymous bloggers. Leiter says "That someone chooses to blog anonymously creates no moral or legal obligation for anyone else to honor that choice," and while he's surely right about the legal aspects (and I have no idea what the legal impacts of the factors I've cited are), the justified fear of retaliation by private actors might give us pause about the moral propriety of exposing a pseudonymous blogger in many cases.
I should say that I literally don't know anything about the cases Leiter mentions in which he learned the identity of commenters or bloggers, other than what I read in his post.
]]>[Another thing I think is that it would be good if we had a lot more MA students; it would let students do graduate work without devoting the rest of their youth to the field, PhD programs would have better information if they were admitting MAs instead of undergrads, and it would mean that departments still had graduate students for their teaching needs.]
I also thought that Brian Leiter might wish to have the comments return to the topic of the original post; in case he does, I'd be happy to host more discussion on the topic.
]]>In part because of the success of the Math Emporium, the cost of providing math instruction at Virginia Tech has declined dramatically—as much as 75 percent for some courses. But the university’s tuition increased nearly 11 percent this year alone, and Virginia Tech math students are paying twice what they did eleven years ago, when the first Emporium course was offered. If Michael Williams is saving Virginia Tech hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and other colleges are realizing similar savings, why aren’t their students seeing a dime of that money?
For the most part, colleges would just rather spend it elsewhere. The nonprofit Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs recently found that tuition and fee revenue per student at public research universities increased by 34 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from 2000 to 2005. At the same time, spending per student on instruction and academic support declined. This is nothing new—overcharging for introductory courses is standard operating procedure in higher education, and has been for a long time. Colleges routinely use the excess revenues generated by huge, inexpensive lecture hall classes to support other, money-losing activities. Freshmen have always been cash cows—technology just made them more so.
Where did all the money generated by cost savings and price hikes go? In some states, back to the public treasury. Legislatures have a tendency to use public universities as a piggy bank during hard fiscal times, cutting appropriations to higher education with the tacit understanding that colleges can raise prices to make up the difference—a backdoor tax increase on consumers of higher education. [italics in original, boldface added]
First of all, this all tells us nothing without better numbers. If the cost of math instruction has declined up to 75% for some courses, what does that tell us about Virginia Tech's overall cost of instruction. Nothing. And it's a neat bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand to talk about what Virginia Tech math students are paying as the cost of teaching math drops, when presumably Virginia Tech students pay the same no matter what courses they take. (If colleges started pricing courses differently based on how much it cost to teach them, my guess is science majors would not be happy; scientists with labs are expensive to support, though possibly their grants make up for that.)
But more galling is Carey's suggestion that the colleges and universities would rather send money back to the public treasury than keep tuition lower. The last paragraph I quoted could be rephrased: "Legislatures tend to slash university's budgets in hard fiscal times, forcing them to increase their tuition even if they can lower the cost of educating students by innovative use of technology (or, more likely, brute increases in class size)." I don't think any college administrator anywhere (let alone faculty) wants to raise tuition in exchange for losing state support. This is all on the legislatures, and indirectly on the voters.
Carey goes on to criticize spending on athletic departments, new construction, financial aid for rich kids (though he points out this is a net revenue generator), and research. I have some sympathy with some of these criticisms -- athletics more than research, unsurprisingly -- but again, they're pretty worthless without some actual numbers. How does revenue lost to state cutbacks compare to increased spending on construction? For that matter, how much of that construction spending is on luxury stuff and how much is necessary, say because new dorms are needed for the additional students admitted to make up the revenue shortfalls? Carey doesn't say.
(Carey goes on to make an argument about how these forms of spending increase the wrong sort of prestige for the university, because it's difficult to measure the right sort of prestige. I think he's inconsistent about research spending here -- it is part of the university's core mission -- and arguably new construction does improve the educational product, but his points about prestige are worth considering. Admittedly I have kind of a grump on the Washington Monthly on this subject because, after making the signal point that the U.S. News college rankings are ridiculous and pernicious, they decided to come up with a set of rankings that were an arbitrary joke themselves.
But Carey's previous article about measuring student outcomes is more congenial to me, not least because the measures of student outcomes he discusses are college-wide and harder to turn into clubs to be used to beat individual faculty with. A risk in student learning outcomes is that the administration will settle on some somewhat arbitrary measures and then use them as part of tenure/promotion/raise decisions, the way student evaluations are used now; which would pretty much force faculty to teach to the test, whatever the test was. Evaluating colleges by how they improve critical thinking skills would actually seem to prevent that, which I like.)
Carey's article via Steve Benen. Elsewhere at the Washington Monthly blog, Hilzoy makes an excellent point: Free school breakfasts could help learning a lot. This year I was teaching while fasting on Yom Kippur, and I was already pretty distracted at 12:30, when I had basically only skipped breakfast. And I'm a grownup. Hard to imagine how hunger would influence a kid trying to learn. Also, Hilzoy says this pretty quickly, but the universality is critical, because of the cruelty of means testing. (Which the Rawlsian Hilzoy certainly knows and no doubt decided not to make a big deal of here.)
]]>