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Author Archives: Timothy Burke
How to Succeed in Regulation Without Really Trying
That government regulation makes as well as hurts businesses is not news to economists and political scientists. Nor is it to politicians, whatever their declared ideology, however dumb they pretend to be in public. Is it news to the American … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
4 Comments
Welcome to Academia! Now Get Out!
No aimless wandering in this entry: institutions that invite applications for tenure-track assistant professorships and specify that they only want candidates with very recently minted Ph.Ds (2009, 2010) are behaving abominably. Yeah, you, Colorado State University and you, Harvard. It’s … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
Do Liberals and Elites Hate Teachers?
Corey Robin thinks so , and explains liberal disdain towards the Chicago strike as a spill-over of elite belief that teachers are socioeconomic losers doing a job that anyone could do. I think he’s on to something, though in many … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
11 Comments
Bad Research and Informational Heresies (Draft Syllabus)
Still polishing this a bit, but I think it’s at the point where we can share it and get comments. I’m co-teaching this with my totally awesome colleague Rachel Buurma in the Department of English at Swarthmore. I’m really excited … Continue reading
Our Mamluks
I’ve been in an interesting conversation at Facebook about steadily rising suicide rates in the US military. Thirty-eight Army soldiers killed themselves in July 2012, the highest monthly rate that the Army has ever recorded. 2012’s grim statistics are just … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
4 Comments
Grading on the Curve Is Always a Bad Idea
Via Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a smart overview and response to an upcoming recent Vanity Fair article about Microsoft’s “lost decade”. The main culprit, according to the article, was apparently the rigid use of “stack ranking” in assessing the work of … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
10 Comments
A Scholar, An Expert, An Intellectual
…walk into a bar and…. More seriously, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the minimum qualifying attributes of these three roles. There’s a big Venn diagram overlap of all three in the labor they perform and the sensibilities that … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics
14 Comments
The Independent’s Daydreams
For a portion of my voting life, I was registered as an independent. (I’m presently registered as a Democrat, having switched my registration in 2007.) I’ve never been a “typical” independent, if you go by what the political analysts say, … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
2 Comments
Journalism, Framing and Value
I’ve long been skeptical about the strongest claims made about the consequences of framing effects in public media and discourse. Not claims about the phenomenon itself, which is very real, but about arguments by George Lakoff and others who hold … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Comments Off on Journalism, Framing and Value
Social Networks Then and Now
Reading through the old notes and papers that I’ve stuck in a closet and not touched for almost a decade, compiled from the decade of professional work before that (so the 1990s), is a sobering experience. On one hand, I’m … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Swarthmore
1 Comment