Links for 2010-07-21

"For the rest of this week I'll be blogging from the madness that is sure to be ComicCon 2010. APS will be the first professional society to bring a comic book, so us public outreach folks are excited to be rolling in with 2.5 tons of Spectra comics. For you unaquanited, the convention combines all things nerd under one massive roof for a week every year. All those people in Princess Leah or Batman or Wolverine or extra #554 from scene 3 on Tatooine in A New Hope comtumes? This is their summer sanctuary. I'm not knocking... okay maybe I'm knocking a little, but only to make myself feel better about the costume I'll be wearing all week. I'm positive a certain amount of fear and loathing is in store for us (google image search comiccon), but with 125,000 people in attendance we should be able to bring our laser superhero comic to a willing audience."

"A report released today by the Council of Independent Colleges analyzes data from 358 CIC members about their chief academic officers' job satisfaction, demographics and aspirations to become presidents. The CIC includes small and mid-sized private nonprofit colleges and universities, and the report compares responses from its members' chief academic officers with those of 782 peers from public baccalaureate- and master's-level institutions, private and public doctoral universities, and public two-year colleges. The CIC report uses data from a 2009 study by the American Council on Education, which looked at CAO trends at 1,700 colleges and universities.
Among the CIC report's key findings are statistics suggesting that the chief academic officer position is not really a stepping stone to the presidency. Though 96 percent of CIC CAOs are satisfied with their jobs, only 24 percent plan to seek a college presidency. "

"The rich, complex experience of being you is impossible to see. Your subjective experience is wholly unobservable to anyone but yourself.

Yet, much of the time, you assume this isn't so, that what you think and feel must be apparent."

"Although it doesn't happen as often now as it once did, we do still occasionally hire full-time, tenure-track faculty. And when we do, we have a pretty well established search process.

But some parts of the process are as much art as science. One of those is picking the members of the search committee in the first place."

Cool video in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talks about his fan mail and his paranormal experiences.

"People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people "no." Saying "no" is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials--words, sounds, images--mill them to approved tolerances, and ship. No one wrote a book called Editors: Get Real and Ship or suggested that publishers use agile; they don't live in a "culture" of shipping, any more than we live in a culture of breathing. It's just that not shipping would kill the organism. This is not to imply that you hit every sub-deadline, that certain projects don't fail, that things don't suck. I failed plenty, myself. It just means that you ship. If it's too hard to ship or you don't want to deal with it, you quit or get fired. "

A calm and reasonable perspective from somebody who left a while ago.