CIA student records

there is info in the CIA classified documents released in the past couple of days about radical student groups. one of the "security advisors" who requested that the CIA study student unrest was named walt rostow and later taught at UT. was he the husband of elspeth? here's the chronicle article.

mountaintop removal in appalachia

this is an older article from grist/orion, but it does one of the best jobs i've seen of explaining the issue that has been pretty much consuming my thoughts for the past couple of days.

new library catalog

What are other people's thoughts on the new UT library catalog online search format?

My initial reaction is that it has too many fancy features which make it unnecessarily clunky, and I don't really need to see pictures of book covers, as I don't need my library catalog to feel like Amazon.

Is it weird...

that I'm so into this concept? It's a book about how long it would take the earth to undo humanity's work, if humanity suddenly disappeared...

About Time

The NYTimes has a great piece of news about a number of small liberal arts colleges dropping out of the U.S. News World and Report ranking system. While I'm bummed my alma mater is not one of the colleges, I think it's about time these schools fought against the Reports quantitative rankings. I'll admit that I, as a middle class suburban high schooler, totally bought into this, but now as an adult I have to wonder why people would trust a subpar publication to guide this important and oftentimes very expensive decision.

Grrrrr

So, just another reminder on top of Danny's reminder - save your work. Save it on webpages and save it frequently. My laptop just crashed for the second time in two months for no apparent reason. A pox on HP. I'm breaking down and getting an apple. Please tell me I'll have better luck.

Operation First Casualty

My friend's doing a documentary on Iraq Veterans against the War. This is a short rough cut showing some street theatre they did in NYC.

Ransom's man

Long-ass article in the NYer about the head of the Ransom Center.

ROWE

I was perusing the NYTimes this morning and started reading an article about procrastination ( a meta-procrastination if you will). And the article mentioned Best Buy's new corporate philosophy Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), which you can more about here.
It got me thinking about this push in our department to get through our work faster. From reading the description academia is a natural ROWE model; work at your own pace,work when you feel like it, work where you're comfortable. However, our department is trying to put these seemingly artificial time frames on our work, without any additional support. Of course there are required deadlines at a corporation, but it seems to me that in a field where you can have almost total autonomous freedom (at least while you're a student) we should embrace that.
I don't know I just got up and I'm not even through my first cup of coffee, so this could be nonsense. I just think the process of higher education is totally fascinating.