Friday, May 01, 2009

"Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky ..."

I'm guessing this press release was translated into English:
“Samsung is surrounded by the most primitive members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving cheeky to introduce the most innovative robot mobile phone,” understood JK Shin, Executive associate President and supervisor of movable Communication department in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industriousness and our consistent stratagem to support all obtainable in service system, I believe with the intention of Samsung provides the better choices and remuneration to our consumers” he added.
The release also informs us that the phone will give us access to the "gorged" Google Apps.

"An unpopular position"

Jeff Rice weighs in on the controversy of adjuncts being valued less in humanities departments than tenure-line professors. He takes a pragmatic view of adjuncts' choices and concludes with a piece of advice: "Don't take these jobs." And furthermore, he says:

And before you get to the stage where economic realities force you to take a job you don’t want: Pay attention to market forces when you go to graduate school so that you are preparing for a career that exists.

If Jeff's stance is unpopular, I suppose I will be taking an unpopular position by agreeing with it. Adjuncts, he argues, are tasked primarily with teaching, while tenure-line professors also shoulder research and service responsibilities - especially research, which is a critical part of the mission of a research university and is just as much the university's "real work" as teaching. Jeff lays this out quite well, and I would only add that we who train the next generation of PhDs need to be really conscious about emphasizing the choices these grad students will have as they prepare for their careers. Those choices are far more varied than adjunct/tenure line.