华盛顿和小偷

~~华盛顿和小偷@Jason @杜燕桥     

只要发一半的传单--17岁男孩Jason的故事

去年放暑假的时候,我想筹钱买个新耳机,除了自己的积蓄之外还有一些钱要靠做临时工来挣.我找到了一份帮别人发传单的工作.听上去很简单,就是骑着自行车按照公司指定的路线去发,几个小时后再和别人换班.但我报到时还是吓了一跳--很厚的一沓传单,看起来两个人用一天时间也发不完,别说我一个新人了.走出办公室时我觉得心烦透了,再说天气很热,先前的积极性降了一大半.     

太多的密码，太少的记忆(英文)

密码,已经充斥了我们生活的各个方面,在保护了人们的财富的隐私的同时,它也给人们带来了无限的烦恼。     

Trends and transitions in the institutional environment for public and private science

The last quarter-century bore witness to a sea change in academic involvement with commerce. Widespread university-based efforts to identify, manage, and market intellectual property (IP) have accompanied broad shifts in the relationship between academic and proprietary approaches to the dissemination and use of science and engineering research. Such transformations are indicators of institutional changes at work in the environment faced by universities. This paper draws upon a fifteen-year panel (1981–1995) of university-level data for 87 research-intensive US campuses in order to document trends and transitions in relationships among multiple indicators of academic and commercial engagement. The institutional environment for public and private science is volatile, shifting in fits and starts from a situation conducive to organizational learning through high volume patenting to a more challenging arrangement that links indiscriminate pursuit of IP with declines in both the volume and impact of academic science. The pattern and timing of these transitions may support an enduring system of stratification that offers increasing returns to first-movers while limiting the opportunities available to universities that are later entrants to the commercial realm. Unpacking the systematic effects of university research commercialization requires focused attention on the sources and trajectories of profound institutional change.     

Redefining ‘early career’ in academia: a collective narrative approach

‘Early career’ in academia is typically defined in terms of research capability in the five years following PhD completion, with career progression from post-doctoral appointment to tenure, promotion and beyond. This ideal path assumes steady employment and continuous research development. With academic work increasingly casualised, experiences of ‘early career’ are changing and definitions in use by institutions and research bodies do not reflect the lived experiences of early career academics (ECAs). This paper presents five collective narratives and a thematic analysis of survey data from 522 ECAs in three Australian universities. The results offer insights into the diverse experiences of the early stages of academic careers and provide an opportunity to reconsider current definitions. We argue that the employment context in higher education makes it crucial to consider scholars’ self-definitions alongside existing objective indicators to redefine early career in academia.     

Thermodynamical Arguments Against Evolution

The argument that the second law of thermodynamics contradicts the theory of evolution has recently been revived by anti-evolutionists. In its basic form, the argument asserts that whereas evolution implies that there has been an increase in biological complexity over time, the second law, a fundamental principle of physics, shows this to be impossible. Scientists have responded primarily by noting that the second law does not rule out increases in complexity in open systems, and since the Earth receives energy from the Sun, it is an open system. This reply is correct as far as it goes, and it adequately rebuts the most crude versions of the second law argument. However, it is insufficient against more sophisticated versions, and it leaves many relevant aspects of thermodynamics unexplained. We shall consider the history of the argument, explain the nuances various anti-evolution writers have brought to it, and offer thorough explanations for why the argument is fallacious. We shall emphasize in particular that the second law is best viewed as a mathematical statement. Since anti-evolutionists never make use of the mathematical structure of thermodynamics, invocations of the second law never contribute anything substantive to their discourse.     

The role of signifier differences,associations, and combinations in creative digital video composing: making meaning with gestures,objects, actions,and speech

This article presents an analysis of a digital video created by a student (age 13) in a classroom setting. Since sign functioning is a key focus in theories of meaning making as it occurs through language and through other modes, my analysis focuses on the relations between signifiers as they are inscribed in her video. This analysis explores new ways to use a theory of signification as a lens for considering, interpreting, and conceptualizing student video creations. My analysis focuses on how the focal student’s video is constituted by signifiers (gestural, actional, object, and spoken) that are arranged into chains of signifiers. These signifiers come into relation, combination, and association with one another across varying degrees of difference and similarity, both delimiting and opening up their possible meaning potentials. This analysis provides a heuristic that offers a signifier-based method of interpreting student-created digital videos, conceptualizing them as composed of signifiers drawn from across modes. This study also offers ways to recognize how creative or novel uses of the medium involve complex semiotic association and dissociation processes occurring in multiple modes.