Shared posts

21 Nov 15:24

South End phone store robbed at gunpoint; one suspect arrested, one sought

by adamg

Boston Police report two masked men the T-Mobile store, 1180 Washington St. at gunpoint Wednesday evening. Read more.

Wed, 11/20/2019 - 18:33
Neighborhoods: 
Topics: 
Free tagging: 
22 Oct 14:40

How a $1 purchase will keep a South End arts center going for a long time

by adamg

David Bates discusses the implications of the Boston Center for the Arts purchase of the Calderwood Pavilion from the BPDA, which had formerly leased it to the center.

30 Aug 12:14

That bloated administration: a look back at The Fall of the Faculty

by Bryan Alexander

In 2011 Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty, a passionate argument that American higher education was being taken over by a cadre of administrators (publisher; my book store).  These administrators, most especially deans and deanlets, were sapping the faculty’s roles, soaking up resources, and generally ruining academia.  I’m not sure if the book introduced the phrase “administrative bloat,” but if it didn’t, it certainly gave the term a big push into our discourse.

How does it stand up in 2018?

Ginsberg_FallI’ll begin with a quick overview of the book, then add some reflections.

The central conceit is that for several decades administrators have been running a campaign to take over colleges and universities.  This movement includes expanding the number and variety of administrators:

[U]niversities are filled with armies of functionaries – the vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants – who, more and more, direct the operations of every school. (2)

That population also arrogates a great deal of resources and local political power.  Ultimately the administrators exert control over faculty functions, beginning with governance, then advancing to curriculum and teaching, before compromising academic freedom.  Along the way some benign administrators try to minimize harm.  Otherwise these non-faculty campus denizens behave themselves badly, ranging from wasting time and money to destroying academic programs, and even committing a variety of white collar crimes.

I think today’s academic audience would find some points to support in this book.  The argument that senior administrators are too well compensated and the data on overall administrative numbers having grown more rapidly than those of the faculty will find many receptive readers. (23ff)  Administrative spending has continued to grow since the book appeared (for example), which might confirm its diagnosis. Additionally, Ginsberg’s focus on non-faculty staff gives a new context for complaints about money-losing student athletics (78).

There’s an interesting early sign of the queen sacrifice in the book. Ginsburg identifies an administrative tactic of using financial crises to redo the curriculum (9).  “For the most part, liberal arts programs were to be cut in favor of the business curriculum…”

At another level, The Fall is an appealing mix of personal reflection with extensive research.  It is clearly organized and its arguments easy to follow.  The author offers many very short narratives depicting administrative bad behavior, which neatly embody his ideas and data.  As Alan Scott notes, the authorial voice is that of a prosecutor.

On the negative side, there are some observations and arguments which 2018’s readers might deem problematic.  At one point Ginsberg slams the idea of learning outside the classroom by sneering that “students did not come to [Johns] Hopkins [University] to work with our dining services personnel, our counselors, or even our distinguished administrators…” (20) Advocates for student life would surely object to this.  Supporters of libraries, like myself, would argue that Ginsberg misses the way students learn from librarians.  The reader can add more examples.

Throughout the book Ginsberg comes close to committing a mistake I like to correct, which is conflating all non-faculty campus staff with senior administrators.  He does admit that there are other staff who aren’t as grandiose as deanlets (“information technology specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admission officers…”, 24), but they rarely appear in the book.   The Fall is mostly about middle managers and especially senior administrative leaders, not the numerous staff.

In fact, when the book recognizes those staff, it denigrates their professionalism in favor of deeming them senior administration spies:

These “other professionals”… work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.  Administrative staffers do not work for or, in many cases, even share information with the faculty. (25)

That those other professionals might work with faculty escapes notice.  That they might conduct their valuable work without being deanlet minions similarly fails to appear.  In fact, many of those professionals do work for faculty in the sense that they are, to various extents, supervised or otherwise influenced by faculty members.  Think of faculty governance in budgeting, or the role of faculty on library or technology committees.  Instead of seeing this broader complexity of staff roles and relationships, the author lumps all staff under the header of “management” (29).

administration_kersy83

Ginsberg goes still further in mocking administrators.  Archly, he writes that “[m]any administrators have neither the ability nor the inclination to develop their own ideas or write their own words.” (93-4)  “Generally speaking, a million-dollar president could be kidnapped by space aliens and it would be weeks or even months before his or her absence from campus was noticed.” (164)  “[T]oday’s senior administrators have no more institutional constancy or loyalty than the mercenary managers of other enterprises.” (169)

At every college and university there are excellent, talented, hard-working administrators.  But, there are too many administrators, and large numbers have little to do besides attend meetings and retreats and serve as agents of administrative imperialism. (218)

He even takes time to mock student athletes as “gangs of large dummies… [who] beat one another to a pulp” (171).  Ultimately the repeated viciousness of the book’s style seems designed to irk all academics but a core readership of some tenured faculty members.

When it comes to faculty members, the book takes a very different tone and with a very narrow focus.  Most of its arguments involve tenure-track faculty, those with campus governance powers and a guarantee of academic freedom.  Only twice in Fall the most numerous segment of the professoriate appears: adjuncts, who lack both governance and academic freedom’s guarantee, not to mention benefits and others of support. Otherwise the book is primarily concerned not with faculty per se, but a shrinking minority of that population.

Curiously, Ginsberg largely blames senior administration for the adjunct crisis, describing the transformation of the professoriate as another instance of the (tenured) faculty’s decline (19, 163).  However, surely tenured faculty must shoulder blame for the adjunctification of the faculty, starting with those at the research-I universities which insist on overproducing PhDs.  Beyond those campuses department chairs hire adjuncts.  Division leaders help organize the allocation of resources towards teaching.  And faculty governance, which hasn’t fully disappeared, can’t evade some responsibility here.

Elsewhere, the book’s account of the academy sketches an odd view of its economics.  Ginsberg seems to criticize administrators for successfully fundraising (42) and for some attending professional meetings subsidized by corporations (47), but without seeming to recognize changes in higher education finance.  That states have dropped their public university support levels, that costs have escalated across the board, which necessitates greater fundraising, doesn’t really register.  The corrupting influence of companies is hinted at, although it seems mostly to be a description of unduly lavish junkets; the major changes in privatization and compensation sweeping the American economy surely merit some mention.  Along these lines John Holmwood criticizes the book for not naming neoliberalism as a cause, then goes further:

Ginsberg’s… concern is to assert the autonomy of faculty, with that, in turn, associated with the autonomy of the university. He seems unaware that the latter has been transfigured. It is no longer an autonomy that serves academic freedom, curiosity and the capacity to produce alternative visions of society that he endorses, but a wish to be free of government control and regulation. This kind of autonomy is no different from that claimed by any chief executive of any other corporation.

Returning to the administration, the author mocks planning in ways many academics would recognize.  Strategic planning can be secretive, take too much time, generate identical mission statements, and be ignored once published (47ff).  Yet The Fall of the Faculty doesn’t offer much of an alternative to strategic planning beyond a nostalgic look back at a time one (or two) generation(s) past when faculty members could somehow manage a modern and complex university as a kind of genteel sideline to their real work.  How this could work after a generation wherein campuses expanded their population, accrued more regulatory burdens, and have to cope with escalating financial crises is undescribed.

Perhaps most problematic for readers in 2018 is Ginsberg’s description of gender, race, and ethnic studies programs as largely created and maintained for administrative purposes (97ff).  In this key chapter we see campus leaders taking advantage of progressive student movements to build social justice centers.  Otherwise deanlets arrange for tenure lines out of proportion to the number of students taking classes or majoring in the topic (104). The goal is the aggregation of power and outflanking faculty.

Put simply, university administrators will often package proposals designed mainly to enhance their own power on campus as altruistic and public-spirited efforts to promote social and political goals, such as equality and diversity, that the faculty cannot oppose. (101)

[U]nder the rubric of diversity, administrators are seeking and finding ways to enhance their power vis-a-vis the faculty. (116)

This description surely does a disservice to many players, including student activists, not to mention administrators who may honestly agree with these politics.  Indeed, Ginsberg’s account leaves open the idea of a campus with senior leaders more progressive than their faculty; would the other prefer to see gender, racial, and ethnic centers not appear as a result?  On a related note, the same campus leaders promulgate speech codes – not to protect students, but to control the speech of faculty members. (116ff)

Borg_dockingstationMany reviewers have complained that the book’s proposed solutions are too weak, and they are right.  The author concludes with nearly a sigh of resignation, comparing the administrative movement to the Borg (219). The most useful attempt at a fix is to get more faculty on boards of trustees (210).  Ginsberg also calls for the reduction in size of PhD programs (215), something I support.

There are other problems which I don’t have the time to get into.  For one, Ginsberg repeats the widely discredited Bennett Hypothesis (that federal support for higher ed drives tuition higher) without attribution or sourcing, which might help explain his views about college financing. (54)

Fall of the Faculty remains a touchstone for criticism of the modern academic administration.  It is less an analysis than a jeremiad, a fierce cry to arms and bitter denunciation of the present day.  Its flaws and shortfalls stem from that nature.  In particular the attacks on professional staff are offensive to many hard-working academics.

On balance, the book is important and useful, but needs not only a large grain of salt from the reader, but the addition of supplemental works for anyone interested in a fuller picture of American colleges and universities.  Ginsberg may have sketched out some ways tensions can unfold between the professoriate and all other campus staff.

(administration photo by kersy83; Borg photo by Marcin Wichary – originally posted to Flickr as [1], CC BY 2.0, Link)

 

13 Jul 01:08

Apple updates the MacBook Pro in big and small ways

by Jason Snell

The current generation of MacBook Pro models has been controversial since it was introduced in late 2016. The Touch Bar, the abandonment of MagSafe, a 16GB RAM limit, a reduction in ports, the move to USB-C (requiring dongles to connect old devices), and the low-travel keyboard from the MacBook… people were frustrated by a lot of Apple’s choices on these computers.

Another frustration pro Mac users have been having recently is that the product cycle has seemed to keep stretching, with Apple taking increasingly long between product updates. With its recommitment to pro users at a special media event in the spring of 2017, it seemed like Apple had gotten the message, but it would need to walk the walk. A quick MacBook Pro update last spring suggested the company was recommitting to relatively quick product updates; the grumbling began again when the year anniversary of that update passed with no sign of a 2018 revision.

On Thursday that revision arrived. And while it’s not a wholesale reinvention of this generation of MacBook Pro—Apple stuck with the previous body design for four years—it does address a few of the top complaints of MacBook Pro users. The 2018 MacBook Pros support up to 32GB of RAM, and they’re running Intel eighth-generation Core processors. It took Apple 13 months between updates this time, but it seems clear now that Apple is committed to an annual update cycle for the MacBook Pro that takes into account the latest high-performance laptop chips from Intel.

As you might expect from a mid-generation spec bump update, most of the changes on these models are modest. The MacBook Pro now contains the same Apple-designed T2 processor as the iMac Pro, replacing the T1 processor in previous models that drove the Touch Bar. The T2 does a lot more, most notably providing on-the-fly storage encryption and providing a secure boot process.

For the first time, a Mac gains a True Tone display, previously seen only on iOS devices. True Tone is a nice feature that matches the color temperature of your display to the color temperature of your surroundings, thanks to an embedded light sensor. Of course, a lot of the professional users who will be buying the MacBook Pro will demand color output fidelity from their new laptop display, and will therefore need to turn this feature off some or all of the time.

The low-travel butterfly keyboard has apparently also been tweaked, making this the third generation model (after the one in the original MacBook and the updated version that shipped on the 2016 MacBook Pros and every successive MacBook). The second revision of the keyboard was meant to add more tactile feel, but also really increased the volume of noise—I always describe those keyboards as sounding “crunchy.” According to Apple, this new generation of keyboard is quieter, but presumably the company didn’t just revert to the first-generation design and has retained some of the added feel that makes you forget you’re typing on keys with extremely short travel.

It’s also unclear if the new keyboard design will prove less prone to failure than the previous models. Apple continues to insist that only a very small percentage of keyboards fail due to small bits of grit and dust getting stuck in keys (though it made a repair warranty extension program all the same), and I know many people who have run into just this problem with their keyboards. Apple is never going to declare that its old keyboard design was terrible; we’re just going to have to wait and see if perhaps this new design turns out to be more resilient.

In the end, if you’re a MacBook Pro user who wanted access to the latest generation of Intel processors (including a six-core model!) and 32GB of RAM, this update will be welcome. If, on the other hand, you’re someone who thinks Apple made some poor choices in its design of this generation of MacBook Pro… this is still fundamentally the 2016 MacBook Pro design. A redesign will undoubtedly come along eventually—they always do. But this update isn’t that.

For hands-on looks at these new models (based on a media event held in New York City on Wednesday), check out Laptop Mag, The Verge, Macworld, and iMore.

20 Dec 13:16

Grandma Got Run Over by Consumer Choice Masquerading as Democracy

by Dorothy

Comic

04 May 19:30

"How do you build a world-class team? First, you have to find the right people."

“How do you build a world-class team? First, you have to find the right people.”

-

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/03/ivanka-trump-book-quotes-237946

She’s so WISE.

20 Oct 02:09

A conflicted city council to begin looking at how to regulate Airbnb

by adamg

The Boston City Council today approved looking into how to regulate rental services like Airbnb from laying waste to neighborhoods and harming local hotels and workers while also protecting poor homeowners who increasingly rely on the services to make ends meet and stay in the city.

At its regular meeting today, councilors took different positions of the impacts of the rental services.

In East Boston, Charlestown and the North End, City Councilor Sal LaMattina said, investors are buying up units right and left and turning them into permanent "virtual hotel rooms," locking out poor and middle-class residents.

He said there are now 270 units in his district listed on Airbnb, charging between $150 and $270 a night. "How can working families afford that?" he asked, adding that the transient nature of Airbnb rental units helps breakdown the connections between neighbors that make neighborhoods work.

And the online services has an unfair advantage over local hotels, he said. "You don't have to get an inspection, not from ISD, not from the Fire Department, because there are no regulations in place."

In Hyde Park, Roslindale and Mattapan, Councilor Tim McCarthy said, residents with sheds and detached garages are gutting them and turning them into Airbnb rentals, leading to residents wondering about the strange people now walking around their neighborhoods.

But in Roxbury and South Boston, poor homeowners and the elderly with rapidly rising property taxes are increasingly relying on Airbnb and its competitors to stay in Boston, councilors Tito Jackson (Roxbury) and Bill Linehan (South Boston) said.

Jackson said that had Airbnb been around during the 2008 recession, fewer people in areas such as Dorchester and Roxbury might have lost their homes to foreclosure, because the Airbnb income might have been enough to tide them over.

Linehan said some of his senior constituents have come to rely on Airbnb renters as a way of staving off the isolation they might otherwise feel as their families move out.

Jackson said Boston should do everything it can to encourage the young tech-savvy types who are inventing the future - and he noted that Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk went to Boston Latin Academy.

"We should proceed with utter caution," he said.

04 Jul 22:14

Home Itch Remedies

In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.
30 Dec 15:54

Police: Man arrested last year for breaking into Cambridge apartments arrested this week for breaking into a Back Bay apartment

by adamg

Boston Police report arresting a man they say broke into an apartment on Beacon Street in the Back Bay, about 18 months after he was arrested for breaking into apartments in Cambridge.

Police say a witness spotted Danavian Daniel, 23, trying doors of apartments at 505 Beacon St. shortly before 11 a.m. on Monday - and that officers spotted him on the Mass. Ave. bridge as they were arriving to investigate.

While inspecting the apartment building at 505 Beacon Street, officers observed damage to the front door of the location consistent with damage caused by a prying tool or crow bar. Specifically, officers observed splintered wood around the door's locking/latching mechanism along with white paint chips and flakes on the floor in and around the door. A search of the suspect and his backpack enabled officers to see and seize a 15 inch pry bar, assorted jewelry, a woman’s watch and several jewelry boxes.

Police say they are now looking at his possible connection to other recent break-ins in the area.

In the Cambridge case, Daniel and an accomplice were charged with using a flathead screwdriver to pry open doors.

Innocent, etc.

05 Apr 20:20

Good-looking reporter sought for area drone beat

by adamg

DronesX, a startup seeking to become the authoritative source on the burgeoning drone industry, is seeking a reporter to cover droney things in the Boston/Cambridge area. "Actors who look good on camera" eagerly sought, but they have to have reporting chops, too, and not be a human drone.

10 Sep 14:56

September 10, 2014


BAHFest tickets are now on sale! We are holding one in San Francisco and one in Boston.
10 Jul 15:25

Environmental Make Good

by noreply@blogger.com (Larry Kelley)
Representative from W.D. Cowls and Landmark Properties appear before ConComm

Amherst Conservation Commission

A half dozen employees representing the interests of the current landowner, W.D. Cowls, and the buyer/developer, Landmark Properties, who wish to build a student housing project on 147 acres of woodland in North Amherst came before the  Conservation Commission again to explain how damage occurred to wetlands and how they will ensure it does not happen again.

W.D. Cowls, the largest private landowner in the state, has always allowed the general public to use the property for recreation.  And mountain bikes, all terrain vehicles and jeeps can leave behind ruts which the commission considers unacceptable in protected wetlands.

Cowls may reconsider keeping the property open to the general public and could install gates or cables at the three main entry points to keep out motorized vehicles.

Conservation members site visit to damaged area 6/25

But much of the (self reported) damage was caused by a contractor doing geo-technical drilling for the proposed buyer of the property, Landmark Properties.  Commission member Christiane Healey said, "I'm perplexed.  Don't you have experience with this?"

"We don't do this very often," responded the contractor, Mike Talbot.  "In my 30 years this if the first time doing work around wetlands on such a large tract of property.  We crossed wetlands to get to drilling sites.  We thought using logging roads was okay."

Talbot said from now on "wetlands" had been added to their job sheet checklists for awareness and a wetlands expert or land engineer would be consulted before any work took place in sensitive areas.

The "Preliminary Restoration Plan" was pronounced "thorough" by town wetlands administrator Beth Willson, but she preferred all restoration work be done by hand rather than mechanized equipment -- especially considering it was mechanized equipment that caused the damage in the first place.

The commission agreed and made that a part of their requirements as well as a paragraph about maintaining communication with the Conservation Commission and obtaining permits anytime work is performed in and around wetlands.

 About 25 concerned neighbors show up

The environmental consultants will return to the  July 23rd meeting with a final Restoration Plan and begin the work (by hand) immediately after approval by the Conservation Commission.

 Vince O'Connor worried about Fire Department access in case of a forest fire


27 Apr 23:17

Daffodil Delight

by noreply@blogger.com (Larry Kelley)
And they're off!  11:30 a.m. Kendrick Park

Hundreds of runners and walkers of all ages, including a few dogs, turned out for the 4th annual Daffodil Fun Run Road Race to benefit Big Brother Big Sisters, a long-time iconic Amherst social service agency.

Back of the pack

Unlike yesterday, the rain held off for the pre-race festivities, sprinkled a bit as runners were lining up but then held off again for at least the time it takes for the average runner to complete the 3.1 mile course.

Last year 475 runners completed the course with the event raising a total of $40,000.



A site to see: 40,000 daffodils to bloom in Amherst this May http://t.co/iXd8TD139k @AmherstDowntown @MassHort pic.twitter.com/VtT0LdjgTr
— GazetteNET.com (@GazetteNET) April 25, 2014

27 Apr 23:17

That's one way to save on the cost of limos

by adamg

Or maybe there's a sentimental reason. Whatever, yes, that's a wedding party on the Red Line. Jason Robert got a snapshot of the lucky couple and their party this afternoon.

He reports they got on at Harvard and were still on the train when he got off at Park Street.

Paul MacMaster wondered:

Maybe Sob Story Guy will offer a toast...for the price of a train ticket to Worcester.

08 Mar 14:38

asunasan: jedi—kitten: spattergroit101: stop following me in...



asunasan:

jedi—kitten:

spattergroit101:

stop following me in front 

This is the best show ever

09 Feb 22:20

The Wolf Among Us Episode 2 Now on iOS

The iOS version of The Wolf Among Us now has episode 2 available, which can be purchased and downloaded inside of the application.

With this, most of the season's announced platforms are up to date. However, there's still no sign of when the PlayStation Vita version of episode 1 and 2 will be released.

03 Jan 11:51

Paleolicious

no one gets out of coffee alive.

WARNING: Tonight’s comic contains frank talk about how delicious ice cream is.

11 Dec 07:13

Phone Keypad

by xkcd

Phone Keypad

I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key?

Stewart Bishop

We can answer that question with the following headache-inducing shell command, which finds all words in a given list which use the same key a bunch of times in a row:

cat wordlist.txt | perl -pe 's/^(.*)\$/\L\$& \U\$&/g' | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' '2223334445556667777888999' | grep -P "(.)\1\1\1\1\1"

The winner, according to this script, is nonmonogamous, which requires you to type seven consecutive letters (nonmono) with the "6" key.[1]It's actually tied with nonmonotonic. These no doubt both lose to more obscure words which weren't in the wordlists I used.

Phone Keyboard Sentences

It's rare for a word to have all its letters on the same key; the longest common ones are only a few letters.[2]Like "tutu". Nevertheless, using only these words, we can write a high def MMO on TV, a phrase whose words use only one number key each.

There are plenty of other phrases like this, although some of them are a bit of a stretch:

Typing issues like this aren't limited to old phone keyboards. For any text input system, you can find phrases which are weird to type.

QWERTY Keyboards

It's a well-known piece of trivia among word geeks that "stewardesses" is the longest common word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand.

In fact, it's possible to write entire sentences with just the left hand. For example, try typing the words We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest. Weird, huh?

Let's take a look at a few more sentences—written with the help of some even messier shell commands and Python scripts[3]I constructed these sentences by searching text logs for sentence fragments that fit a particular constraint, then randomly connecting those groups together using a technique called Markov chaining. You can see the code I used here.—which follow various constraints:

Left hand only

Right hand only

Home row only

Top row only

And lastly, if anyone wants to know why you're not more active on social media, you only need the top row to explain that you're ...

01 Nov 01:18

gravesandghouls: Creepy Halloween Kids c. 1920s-1930s













gravesandghouls:

Creepy Halloween Kids c. 1920s-1930s