Academia

So last time we spoke I just arrived in college station during the spring semester. It has been a while! So I decided to come back after talking to my buddy tyler last night, I was reminded of the good times I had on unethical blogger (even though I only posted once). So I think I am going to start a weekly blog of things that scared the shit of of me this week. Many readers will laugh at this weeks, I did not find the situation funny.

WHAT SCARED ME?

RACCOONS?

As I was throwing out the trash, I hit a raccoon with a box and I jumped out of the dumpster and almost killed me. Luckily I have learned from Chuck Norris So that Raccoon was good as dead. Bust still they need to die.

I have also started a new thing with my buddy tyler, when I call tyler for tech support, I give him a dollar. So far he has earned 4. By the end of the year I would not be surprised if he has earned at least 50 from me.

Anywhoo my quesidillla is done so I gotsta jet.

As always I am your humble mexican friend,

The Roy

Apparently, predictably, and late to the party, research publishers are getting nervous about the push for Open Access. Hopefully this is just an idea for a push from the publishers that will quickly be dropped, but from an article on nature.com (found via slashdot of course):

Public access equals government censorship

I hesitate to even quote that because it's so far off-base.

Found an interesting article (through slashdot) on how we should be educating engineering students. The bird's eye view is that students should come out of school with the ability to continue learning rather than some specific skillset. The slashdot discussion and the article really cover mostly different ground on the subject, with the comments on /. debating the pros and cons of teaching engineers as thinkers or trades-people and the original article focusing more on how the education of thinkers can be done. Of course this isn't limited to engineering, any really good Comp. Sci. program runs the same give-and-take between teaching students to program and teaching them how to solve problems.

Interesting post on Groklaw about freely available "courseware". The OpenCourseWare Consortium seems like a fantastic idea to me. Academia is really all about sharing knowledge.

I've already bookmarked the MIT Mechanical Engineering page, though I can usually find comparable material in my own department.