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Something in the Way She Moves? by possibly noteworthy at 6:40 am EDT, Oct 9, 2007
In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.
A few thoughts:
Mad TV, 1997, "The XXX Files" (Broadcast TV, but PNSFW)
Scully: Don't you think 8 hours is enough research? Mulder: Oh, right, research.
Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.
For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.
A range of theories were offered on the extent of ideological imbalance. Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, said he was surprised and worried by the extent of ideological homogeneity and he focused on how graduate education may encourage and be hurt by this trend.
Menand said that when he was in graduate school in the ’70s, people could hope for a Ph.D. in five years and felt free to propose ideas that challenged conventional wisdom in the humanities. Today, with graduate students facing a decade or more for a humanities doctorate, which Menand called an “obscene” amount of time, graduate students enroll only in programs in which they agree with their professors’ take on the discipline. With that much time involved, and an iffy job market, “who would do this if they didn’t share our views?” Menand asked. And the graduate students who enroll tell professors that the professors’ views are just right, he added, instead of trying out new theories.
“The profession isn’t so much reproducing itself as cloning itself,” Menand said. “If it was easier and cheaper to get in and out, the discipline would have a chance to get oxygenated” by people with new ideas, he added.
