I slaved as a graduate student instructor and teaching assistant at a reputable California university for 7 years, and was involved in organizing a pretty gnarly union recognition drive (with strike) for non-faculty teachers, like the one at Yale in recent years. Sixty-five percent of the contact an undergrad would have with a warm body at said U (let's call it "San Narciso State") would be with a starving, overworked person like me. For this parents and various funders are laying out the big bucks for tuition, which is outrunning cost-of-living and inflation like Jesse Owens racing Strom Thurmond? Not that I sucked at it, mind you, it's just that after putting in 30+ hours a week on my teaching and the gazillion hours needed to keep up with four grad seminars, not to mention my moonlighting (tutoring football players, among other things, yechh) I just didn't have the energy to do the complete opposite of suck, which my professional pride would have preferred. "Oh, but you are professional apprentices, not workers," was the university's line. Right: it's not a job, it's a holy crusade. We're intellectuals, not plumbers! So I'm supposed to live on honey and locusts? So many of my colleagues have wound up as itinerant adjuncts in the intervening years, living on year-to-year contracts with little or no health benefits ...

Nanochick wrote:
] ] They enroll in institutions of higher education seeking
] ] wisdom, intellectual stimulation, and a degree that they
] ] hope will be their passport to self-reliance in the "real
] ] world." But in universities across the country, thousands
] ] of graduate and undergraduate students find themselves
] ] performing tasks that are on the ethical borderline of
] ] what is expected of them as students, research assistants
] ] and fellows.
] ]
] ]
] ] With a growing number of universities facing budget cuts
] ] and under increasing pressure to find new ways of making
] ] profits, student labor is grinding the wheels of
] ] America's academic machinery. They man phones,
] ] photocopiers, teach undergrad courses, grade papers,
] ] conduct research, analyze data

RE: ABCNEWS.com : Are Students Slaves for Their Professors?

] There's a new form of spam. Many blogs allow people
] to add comments. Spammers have begun to add "comment
] spam". These are comments that have nothing to do
] with the blog. The comments are the usual set of spam
] porn, various drugs, and so on.

[IP] Spam attacks on blogs

My interest in the anti-spam legislation's effect on anonymous business transactions has gotten me reading cypherpunks again. Although I guess its a poor idea to recommend other blogging tools, this one is cool enough to be worth a look. Its set up so that you post to it via mixmaster.

Cypherpunk Weblog System

] Among other things, the documents indicate that for
] internal IBM accounting purposes, a programmer in China
] with three to five years experience would cost about
] $12.50 an hour, including salary and benefits. A person
] familiar with IBM's internal billing rates says that's
] less than one-fourth of the $56-an-hour cost of a
] comparable U.S. employee, which also includes salary and
] benefits.

IBM Data Give Rare Look at Sensitive 'Offshoring' Plans - Jan. 19, 2004

ryan is the supernicety wrote:
] ] Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of
] ] books and spends more time engaged in social activities
] ] than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is
] ] down among some Internet users by as much as five hours
] ] per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.

damn right.

RE: CNN.com - New study shatters Internet 'geek' image - Jan. 14, 2004

Demographic data on the Livejournal user community. Welcome to Castle Anthrax...

Livejournal demographics

Rattle's comments:

For several months now, work has been underway building the next version of MemeStreams. It has been necessary to recode most of the site from scratch, so its taking awhile. At any given time the trials of life, lack of funding, bad timing, hardware failure, and general bad luck is screwing up the works. However, we _are_ making progress.

Just before the new year, I hit the point in the development process where new capabilities of mining and graphing social network data were becoming available. I decided to go off on a little tangent, embrace the milestone, and do something to show our technology's progress. The result is the Year in Graphs 2003. Over the course of putting this together I've wound up fixing all kinds of problems with our database conversion code and wrote much of what will become the new graphing engine. I even had a really good "eureka" moment in relation to some of our network theory.. Its been time usefully spent.

That being said, this is all very kludgy. I did not spend that much time crossing I's and dotting T's.. The fonts in the nodes are hard to read, some of the graphs look "squished", its missing the "Show Links" feature the current Social Network portion of the sites has, etc.. There is much room for improvement with our graphing. I look forward to additional feedback.. :)

While these graphs may be fun to look at, the data they are built with is what's really exciting.. The same thing that allowed me to make these graphs is what's going to lead to improvements in the capabilities of the Reputation Agent.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy browsing through this review of the past year!

MemeStreams - The Year in Graphs 2003