I can haz tenure

And now, for your viewing pleasure, my tenure letter. This is, I would just like to point out, the culmination of thirteen, fourteen years of my life, since I started my Masters program in 1995… though it wasn’t until 1996 that I decided that I wanted the job of a faculty member and that I was going to go on to do the Ph.D. And I would just like to.. Read More

Iron what?

Iron and Wine, apparently. I walk past Memorial Hall twice a day, every day when I come to campus: from the bus to Manning Hall, and from Manning to the bus. And today I saw the longest line for the box office I’ve ever seen. It went from almost the box office window (not yet open, apparently), down Cameron, to about 20 feet from the intersection of Cameron and Columbia… Read More

The grant funding situation at UNC

An announcement went out today that the Office of Sponsored Research recently released its 2006 Annual Report. Curious, I took a look. Some interesting data from the main report: Total funding for FY 2006: $593,390,527, a 2.38% increase over FY05. Unsurprisingly, the School of Medicine was by far the largest recipient of grant funding on campus, to the tune of 48.57% of all funding received at UNC-CH. By comparison, SILS.. Read More

Intentionality is a moral concept

Lessons From the Park, from The Chronicle Joshua Knobe, a newly minted Ph.D. from Princeton University, has rocked the philosophical establishment and earned a place at the leading edge of the discipline in a new field called “experimental philosophy.” The field uses the empirical tools of psychology to address philosophical questions, designing experiments to test how ordinary people think. A modern-day Socrates, this Knobe. Particularly interesting to me is this.. Read More

Superfine teaching

This guy has the coolest name: Professor Superfine. And he’s at UNC! It’s so gratifying when we get good press. Bringing Life to Physics Class, from All Things Considered’s series on Popular College Courses. This story makes me wish that information science lent itself more to dramatic demos. This would probably work for showing how packets move, but to show how search engines work? How databases are structured? Maybe not.. Read More