Best Jobs of 2008: Professor
U.S. News included "Professor" on its list of 31 best jobs for 2008. That's cool. They even provide an executive summary of why they like it so much. They're right that tenure is pretty sweet, if you can get it. They're not so right that being a woman helps you land a tenure-track job though. Beware the popular press. Well, all the press really. Just beware.
I don't mean to be a stampeding feminist, well, maybe I do. Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the gender gap in tenure-track hiring and tenure awarding is not closed, and women are most certainly not getting the advantage U.S. News claims.
Quick look at references about gender bias in tenure-track hiring:
Stenpreis, R., Anders, K.A., and Ritzke, D. (1999) The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study. Sex Roles. 41(7), 509-528.
von Anders, S.M. (2005) Why the Academic Pipeline Leaks: Fewer Men than Women Perceive Barriers to Becoming Professors. Sex Roles. 51(9-10), 511-521.
Chronicle of Higher Ed - 11/6/2006 - AAUP Report Blames Colleges for Gender Inequity Among Professors
Free filing my taxes
I'm a happy TurboTax customer and recommend them if you're looking for a free filing option. I was able to file my federal and state returns this morning for the low, low price of $0. My AGI is less than $54,000, and I am less than 30, so I had a lot of free file options. I also have a tiny bit of interest and dividend income, and sometimes that additional income means I can't use the free filing option that the big boys like CompleteTax, TurboTax, and H&R Block offer. Not so this year, TurboTax was easy-to-use and totally free. State returns aren't free in every state, but Michigan offers a free file option. Many of the federal free file options won't file your state return for free, but TurboTax will.
If E*Trade would send my 1099-DIV before January 31, I would file my taxes even earlier. I'm not interested in giving the government any extra time with the interest-free loan I provide them all year. Granted, that loan is teeny, but to me, it's a bunch of money. Someday my taxes will be complicated, and I may even want the extra couple of months to get together money to cover taxes I owe, but now while I'm broke and itching for that refund, I file ASAP. Good luck to you with your own taxes!
Swapping MacBook hard drives, including Boot Camp partition
Sigh. I use Parallels and Boot Camp because I like having options. Unfortunately, wanting options means that my life is quite complicated. Today's problem: swap out the failing hard drive in my MacBook for a new one without losing any of my Mac OS or Windows XP data. Well, it's actually this month's problem, but whatever. Judging by the amount of search results I get when looking for help online, lots of people want to move their Boot Camp partition to a new drive or to back it up. This should solve both those problems. Here's my setup:
- MacBook 2.0 GHz Core Duo
- 160GB internal drive (brand new; Leopard cloned my Mac OS disk partition from the old drive to the new one)
- 145GB Mac OS X partition (running fine)
- 15GB Boot Camp partition (formatted FAT32 by Boot Camp Assistant; empty)
- 160GB external drive (used to be internal, now in a case and attached via USB)
- 130GB Mac OS X partition
- 30GB Boot Camp partition (formatted FAT32 by BCA; runs fine)
- Parallels 3.0
- Winclone
- Windows XP SP2
And here's what I did:
Convert the external drive's Windows partition from FAT32 to NTFS:
- On the external Windows drive, go to Start - Run - and type
cmdto get the command line - At the prompt type
convert c: /fs:ntfswhere "c:" is the drive you want to convert to NTFS - Answer "No" to the first question - forcefully unmount the drive
- Answer "Yes" to the second question - convert on restart
- Restart your drive
I did all of that using Parallels so I could work on other stuff at the same time. When you restart, diskcheck will run a few times to convert the drive, and then it will restart in NTFS.
Once you've successfully converted your Windows drive to NTFS, you can clone it using Winclone. Winclone's site has good instructions, but here they are just in case:
- Make an image of the Windows partition you want to clone
- Store that image on your internal Mac OS partition (where you have Winclone installed)
- Restore the Winclone image to the empty Boot Camp partition
Questions
1. Why convert from FAT32 to NTFS?
I tried a number of ways of migrating my FAT32 drive (dd, Acronis True Image), and they all failed. Winclone works for NTFS drives and is a snap.
2. Won't converting from FAT32 to NTFS mean I can't write from my Mac to my Boot Camp drive or cause other problems?
Nope. The conversion happens without harming your data, so that's not a problem. As far as writing from Mac OS to NTFS, you can do so through Parallels. That's good enough for me, and NTFS adds protections and features that FAT32 can't offer. See Microsoft's site for more information about FAT32 vs. NTFS
3. How long does this take?
About two and a half hours from start to finish (18GB partition)
4. Winclone warned me about something happening to my partition; what should I do?
Winclone's just making sure you know that if you disconnect any of the partitions it's using while it's working, bad things will happen. As long as you leave everything connected while Winclone runs, you'll be fine.
5. Winclone thinks my Windows drive is FAT32, but I converted it to NTFS. What do I do?
Restart Winclone or click "Refresh" next to the Source drop down in the Backup tab. It should recognize your drive as NTFS then.
6. Will this work with Vista?
I have no idea. I bet, but I don't use Vista so can't be sure.
7. Where can I get a good deal on an external hard drive?
Try Amazon!
Getting that article you need right this second
I will save a rant about my frustrations with end-user library systems for a future post. For now, I'll stick with staying positive. This post describes the process my lovely reference librarian friends have helped me establish for identifying, locating, and downloading electronic versions of articles I really want to read. It's cold and snowy in Michigan, parking near central campus is a nightmare, and I just don't want to wait for physical copies to come to north campus. I want my articles now!
Ok, anyway, here's what you'll need:
- A Google Scholar window
- A UM SearchTools window
- (if you're off campus) A CoSign session so you can access the library's UM-only resources. Login at http://weblogin.umich.edu
And here's what you do:
- Use Google Scholar to search for an article on a specific topic (ex. social capital)
- Click on an article title to get the details page; make sure you can tell from the details where it was published and when
- In SearchTools, click "Find e-Journals"
- Search for the publication that published the article you want (ex. Academy of Management Review)
- Click on the journal in your search results
- Use one of the online databases to "browse" for your article using the volume, number, date, pages, etc. information from the Google Scholar results (I use Proquest ABI/INFORM if it's available; it's the easiest one to browse and offers HTML text and PDF view options.)
Tada! You can have that article right now. Well, unless you, like I was, are looking for an Academy of Management article from 2002. We don't have those online apparently. Argh. I'll have to go out in the cold.
Poll miscalls redux
Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center, thinks race is to blame for the pollsters problems in New Hampshire. Well, not race really, but "the difficulties race and class present to survey methodology." Basically, he thinks that less well-educated, poorer white people are less likely to respond to pollsters' questions, and the ways pollsters account for those refusals gets the numbers wrong. Interesting.
Why do I care? Because I really wish I could be following these campaigns with all my energy. It's a strange and wonderful time for America when the race is wide open and people besides old white guys have a shot at the Oval Office. But alas, I must dissertate.
Gloria Steinem's op-ed piece in the Times was great too. Thanks for the link, Naomi. Ms Steinem points out that "gender is probably the most restricting force in American life." I remember ranting to family in December about race and gender in regards to the Democrats running, and I think I ranted prematurely. They'll know what I mean.
New (to me) and Useful: Mint.com
Ah, finances. What a pain. I just started using Mint.com to keep track of mine. I tried using Quicken, but that was too complicated for me. I really hated getting my bank account balances right - why won't Quicken make it easier to start using it in the middle of a month? Who starts at $0 anyway? Enough about Quicken. Mint automatically logs in to my bank accounts (including credit cards), categorizes my spending (I adjusted about 10 transactions), and then shows me where my money goes. It also shows me how much I owe relative to how much I make, where I might be able to save money, and how I'm doing according to my budget. Rock! Check it out.
I found out about Mint on the BusinessWeek.com 101 Best Web Freebies slideshow.
New (to me) and Useful: Remember the Milk
I, like many of you, have a lot to do. Not all of it needs to be done right now, and not every item on the list is mission-critical. I often find that I have a small amount of time to work - maybe an hour or two - before something like a meeting comes up. I try to keep a To Do list up to date so that I can make the most of those short bits of time - I'll know what I need to work on and can probably find something on the list that takes the amount of time I have available. The trouble is, I haven't found a good way to keep track of that To Do list. I've tried iCal, my email Inbox, a couple of To Do widgets for Google Homepage, paper, and Jott. None of them allowed me to keep track of the relative importance and order of tasks - at least not at the granularity I'd like.
As I was reminded this weekend when Naomi was working on something I promised long ago to streamline for her, those tasks that aren't mission-critical often get lost. That same incident reminded me that leaving things to do in my Inbox wasn't all that effective; that thing is pretty crowded, so tasks get lost easily (mission-critical or not). Today's surprise reminder that iConference reviews are due was more evidence that my current task management process is just not working. So, a number of problems are happening here - I don't have one place to look for things to do when I need to maximize my efficiency, and I lose track of tasks that aren't mission-critical or that are due far in the future.
What's my solution? Today it's Remember the Milk. RTM is one of many (see this guy's blog for more) To Do list software apps out there, and I started using it yesterday. I like that it lets me assign tasks all kinds of metadata (including tags, due dates, estimated completion times) and to group tasks into various lists. I have lists for my dissertation, the KNOW SI project, other research, and personal stuff. RTM lets you email in (or Jott) new tasks, has Google Homepage and Mac widgets, and is generally a friendly application. I downloaded Google Gears too, but I haven't had to use RTM offline yet.
Hopefully Remember the Milk will help me stay productive and keep better track of those low priority (but necessary) and future tasks.
Creative Commons and Flickr hit paydirt again
This time, someone wanted to accompany a news story with a picture I took. Have you heard of this NowPublic thing? Apparently it's citizen-written news. My picture is of 3 very tasty desserts from an apparently sketchy restaurant. Read all about it.
This reminds me of that time in high school that my whole German trip flew on an airline that was closed about 2 days after we got home for violating several FAA safety regulations. I'm pretty sure that airline never flew again, but I'd have to check with Bess.
Good question, Dan
A reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the NSF Symposium about which I complained in Argh. Again., and you can read his story online - What's So Super About Supercomputers, Anyway?
His story doesn't answer the question, but it does get some computer scientists on record saying essentially that CS isn't the be-all end-all some might have us think. "Computing is a means to an end." Well said, Clas Jacobsen. Well, to many ends, maybe.