Giving those affiliate links a workout lately. $3.99 (today only) for an album is a sweet spot, as far as I’m concerned. I think the single, Wrong, is significantly better than the rest of the album, but it’s still worth a listen.
Pretty People Prefer Pur
As an early Earth Day review…
If you don’t have one of these, you should. There are plenty of people who will tell you to just drink from the tap, but I think they are usually undiscerning in their taste. On the other had, having water shipped from Fiji, no matter what good it is doing for the Fijian economy in the short run, is ruining that corner of the earth, and all the other corners as well.
Besides, there is something very cool about doing basically what you are paying the bottled water company to do: pulling water from the tap and filtering it. We’ve lived only in rental apartments and houses, and installation is simple. It leaks, but so what. Replacement filters are expensive, but way less than buying bottled water. How often you have to replace depends on where you are–we’ve had to do replacements far more frequently in New York City, despite having the cleanest water in the world. I suspect that this is because we are in a pre-War building, with pre-War plumbing, and the particulate matter is plentiful and filter-clogging.
We switched to a Pur filter when we lived in Seattle, about a decade ago. We got three glasses and marked them: bottled (which we were drinking), tap, and Pur. The idea was that if the Pur didn’t hold up, we would return the filter to Costco and keep getting bottled. My partner and I both chose the Pur filtered water as the best tasting in a blind taste-test. We didn’t care much about other people’s taste tests, it tastes better to us.
Now, we still bought bottled water, either San Pelligrino or Poland Springs, because I like fizzy water (con gas!), and have since I was a kid. Luckily, thanks to Santa Clause, I now get to make bubbly water at home too. This not only saves money, and saves the environment, it saves my back. I no longer have to carry bubbly water from the grocery store to my flat.
The pictured SodaStream (the Penguin) is more expensive than their other models, and not necessarily better, just fancier looking. But even with the less expensive version, the economic model isn’t as favorable as with filtering your water. I still think it winds up being significantly cheaper for us. There is a nice discussion on this over in the comments at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, which has always been one of my favorite blogs. (They are actually hiring a part-time editor, right now, and I’d be tempted, if I weren’t so busy!)
So, that should mean we never buy bottled water, right? Well, it should. I’m still lazy, and buy flats of water for work, as does my partner. I think we need to buy some bottles that will hold up to repeated filling (Fiji?), and be more proactive about packing them out to recycle at home. Wash them out with high-proof rum. Or I could get a flat from Tap’d.
Eventually, I’ll have to design my own label, and sell my hand-crafted filtered water to the gullible masses.
Help? Dead Computer
OK, my main computer is dead, at the worst possible time, although, isn’t it always the worst possible time?
It died in a way that felt very much like 2001 and was unfamiliar for me. It started out by periodically blanking the screen and Vista (yes.) giving me an error regarding the Nvidia drivers. This is a very common error, and I spent a lot of time running all over the web trying to figure out a solution. At first, I was OK in Safe Mode, but then I started getting artifacts even when it was generating text on the startup screen. So, having spent several hours on this, I now figure that was wasted time: it’s a dead graphics card. Eventually, it’s not putting out any signal to the monitor.
The card was an XFX 8600GT. (No making fun–I’m not a gamer and this was overkill for what I use the computer for.) I dig out of the closet a “someday this will be a project” computer and pull its old MSI 7300 card. I put this in the newer machine, and nothing: blank screen. OK… So maybe that’s not the problem.
I stick the 8600 in the old machine, and it comes up with nasty artifacts on the boot screen. OK–so that problem is solved (I guess), the 8600 is toast. I’ve never had a video card fail on me, but I’m sure it happens. But what’s with the MSI card?
I pull it out of the newer computer and throw it back whence it came. Blank screen on startup. Now, I never tried starting it up after I pulled it out of the closet, but I have to assume that it was working when I mothballed it. It was going in the closet to be a headless file and print server (never got done), but I know I must have had it plugged into a monitor before it went into the closet.
So… My first impulse is to go out and buy a new video card ASAP, and put it in the new machine. But now I am wondering if the new machine is somehow killing video cards. That seems to me to be be extraordinarily unlikely, but I am uneasy about betting a new video card on that unlikelihood. I suppose it could be baking the things–it’s a pretty crowded case–but when I put the 7300 in it, I left the case open. I suppose I could have somehow killed it with my static touch: though I took precautions, and I have never killed a board this way before, so that seems like a strange coincidence in timing. In any case, I am befuddled.
Needless to say, this is putting a crimp in an already overstuffed schedule. If you have ideas, let me know. Otherwise, I’m off to some retail shop to pay too much for a video card so that I can have it in hand right now.
What do my colleagues know?
This morning at MiT6 Kathleen Fitzpatrick presented a chapter from her upcoming book (linked here, that examines the role of peer review in new networked publishing, and argues that it may be getting in the way. While it may be getting in the way, I worry that the perception that online publishing, and particularly open publishing, is not peer reviewed has already slowed its adoption. When I suggested adding to our tenure guidelines that we give special preference to open access materials, the first thing voiced by a colleague was “but that wouldn’t be peer reviewed!” The idea is a bit silly–and I was lucky enough to be able to name a small number of open journals that were considered of high quality *and* were peer reviewed–but it is also pervasive. So, while I agree that reform is desirable, to say the least, I think it is a necessary evil if we are to make any progress on opening access, which I think is a first gateway. Once that beachhead is established, then we can make more progress on peer review. (That’s not to say we shouldn’t be experimenting now, just that I think we can get more traction by focusing on open access with peer review at this stage.)
But I was particularly struck by one of her points, reiterated after her presentation. She suggested that tenure review committees would have to actually read materials, rather than rely on publication in high-impact journals, and that letters of support from others in the field would carry more weight.
In an ideal world, I would love for that to happen. In practice, I’m in a program that has traditionally been a film program. The “interactive” piece is litterally tagged on the end (“Film, Video, and Interactive Media”). If anything, this near equal billing poorly reflects our influence, at least for now, on the undergraduate curriculum, for example. But more importantly, I don’t trust my own expertise enough to determine whether a colleague’s documentary film is of high quality. I can say whether I think it is good, but that opinion would have to be taken with a huge chunk of salt.
Now, that it was chosen to be broadcast on public television suggests that it is probably pretty good. That it won an Emmy suggests the same. That it appears in a juried show does as well. These are not “traditional” article peer review, but they are modeled on it, and were written into the tenure guidelines for that reason. Likewise, although I am happy when my film colleagues read my stuff, it isn’t really in their field, and I would be appalled if a journal reviewer picked them to review an article.
Now, maybe this says something about the nature of my own Frankendepartment(s), rather than something about tenure committees’ relience on peer review and impact factors as a proxy for quality. (Impact factors can have pernicious effects, but I think they are an improvement over simply “count up the peer reviewed articles.”) In any case, I suspect the case of my department is far from unique. And it may not be a good thing for colleagues to be the primary judges.
In the long term, this would be the narrowing of focus of departments. At Buffalo, there was an effort–and perhaps still is–to value the “mathematical” study of communication, as some of the faculty called it. That is, not just pushing toward empiricism, but toward quantitative and pure modeling (e.g., game theory). Under those conditions, there would be no way I would get tenure–and perhaps that is a good thing! That sort of focus, however, would mean that you hired more of your own graduates, since they were the ones who knew what they were doing. Group think in the department.
Again, there are real advantages to this. I would love a department that was made up of people who were immersed in social media. And frankly, departments that strategically hire in narrow areas can use this to their advantage in many cases. But systematically, I wonder what it does to ideas of fields and disciplines, and whether that is a good or a bad thing.
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