a thaumaturgical compendium

Ye always hope when you sign on with a new crew that you’ll become part of the legend of the ship, that they’ll carve yer name in the mast and speak of you in hushed tones on nights when the sea is flat and the air is warm. When I got Shanghaied by Quinnipiac, one note touched me, by the first mate of the Buffalo program, Frank Tutzauer. He promised me that the Communication Department would faithfully celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day in my honor. I only hope they have been true to that oath. Or I’ll have to keelhaul the lot of ‘em. Yarrrr.

In case you haven’t already seen it. Oh, and this is student work I can really dig.

Are you diggin it?

See, I said I would post soon!

Add this to the AOL leak: Someone ran across a collection of MySpace passwords, badly hidden on a phishing server. Again, a really interesting dataset (and no, he isn’t making the data available!), but tinged by the absolutely unethical and illegal method of collection. Of course, you could reasonably ask whether the passwords collected by a phishing attempt represent the average MySpace password. I seriously doubt that is the case.

If this becomes common, the difficulty is manifest. Researchers who follow even a small degree of ethical behavior will be left in the dust by “amateurs” (in the kindest sense of the word) and professionals (in the least kind sense) who do not recognize the ethical problems of making use of data that has been taken against the wishes of its owners. We’ve already seen this: I’ve posted about issues of scraping social network sites and the AOL data. But is this the future of online research: a sea of questionable datasets, traded on the black market, and unavailable to researchers who would most benefit from them?

Most difficult is that it is clear that the blogger posting above has arguably brought no harm to the individual users. He has analyzed the work in the aggregate and not revealed anything that directly impacts most users. Moreover, I don’t think he did much to violate their trust: the phishers did that, and then just left the data lying around. Nonetheless, I think this represents another case in which the researcher has to close her eyes to it and just say no. It’s not an easy thing to do, though.

It raises another issue. While professionally, we clearly would be bound from using the data in—say—a publishable paper, what about blogging it? On the AOL data, I decried its invasion of privacy, and then turned around and blogged about it. I think it’s also clear that distributing via blog is no less damaging than in a research journal. Does that make my earlier post ethically questionable? What a mess.

I just sent out a note on the Association of Internet Researchers list advertising our new faculty positions at Quinnipiac. I was a bit surprised to find, in Google Mail, a contextual ad linking to Shame on Quinnipiac. (I wonder, by the way, if use of the typeface is a trademark violation in this case.)

Why shame? Because the president had the faculty union decertified about the time I went for a campus interview. I was told by every person I interviewed that this was effectively a non-issue. They said that some of the faculty were a bit miffed at the way the president went about it, but most were not fans of the union, which they said really didn’t do anything of substance on the campus. The university has raised salaries in the wake of the changes, critics say in order to “buy off” the faculty. But it strikes me that the union was collecting dues without providing much in the way of collective bargaining. The faculty senate now has more control, and every faculty member I’ve talked to is happy about the change.

Clearly one group that is unhappy about the change is the librarians. Tenure will no longer be granted for librarians, though those who have tenure will, naturally, have it honored. Some see this as an omen of other changes to come.

But I think Quinnipiac is in the position of trying to attract excellent faculty in order to grow in terms of reputation and ranking. Yes, you may say, but every university is doing that. Well, every university says they are doing that, but I’ve been impressed by the ways in which Quinnipiac appears to be following through on that claim. As a result, it is to their benefit to create a good environment for faculty, both in terms of pay and benefits, and the broader conditions of employment. Naturally, unions are in less need in good times than they are in bad, but for now, it doesn’t feel like they are much missed.

The Shame on Quinnipiac site is registered to the Association of Federated Teachers, though they do not sign the site in any way. I find that to be misleading. If they want to organize, more power to them. An organizer stopped by my office and admitted that he was hitting a lot of resistance on the campus, but they are welcome to have a voice. But they should be clear about who they are when they establish a site that aims to bring shame on the university.

I’m fairly ambivalent about the union. I came from a unionized campus, and they did some good things, particularly for part-time faculty. But in the end, it seemed like faculty that were not part of the campus were far more upset about the decertification than the Quinnipiac faculty was.

Great trailer for The Best War Ever.

“Instead of listening to some of the best experts in their own government, they plugged their ears, closed their eyes, drank the Kool Aid, and marched the United States into a swamp.”

Lot’s of people are posting about 9/11 today. I’ve already posted my thoughts on other occasions. It’s sad, but there are plenty of sad things happening right now that deserve our attention.

So, rather than add my own voice, I’ll instead point you toward Torill Mortensen’s post on folding laundry, which concludes:

Today was interesting. I watched a group of people popularly assumed to be rude, brash, loud and forward carefully negotiate the lack of washing machines, driers and laundry baskets, politely assisting when the time-lags were evident, ignoring the intrusions on personal space with almost Scandinavian stoicism, and happily folding their clothes side by side; Spanish, Irani and Irish. It was beautiful. It made me believe in human cooperation, also in the United States. Outlaw private washing machines, fill the world with laundromates, and see people work those differences out in coordinated folding of intimate apparel.

I am going to be spending a good chunk of my evening on laundry, and pining for the days when we had our own machines. But I agree that New Yorkers are often at their best when doing laundry.