Bonus songs

In the news:

As the music industry adapts to a changed marketplace, the album is no longer simply a discrete collection of songs but a package that changes size, shape and price depending on how it is sold. And promotion, once the relatively straightforward process of making a video and visiting radio stations, has also been transformed, as labyrinthine exclusive deals are struck with an array of retail and media companies — from Amazon.com and iTunes to Rhapsody, Wal-Mart and Verizon Wireless — eager to make an association with top talent.

For Bands, Bonus Songs Become New Norm (New York Times)

I find it odd that this article makes no mention of how such marketing undercuts independent record stores (they're not dead yet). Nor does the article consider that such marketing might encourage illegal downloading as an alternative to buying one album two or three times.

I first became aware of the absurdity of bonuses with Brian Wilson's That Lucky Old Sun, which appeared in at least five versions: Best Buy, Borders, extra mayo, iTunes, and plain. The Best Buy and iTunes versions had extra songs; the Borders version, stamps.

The cost of college

How much work might be needed to work your way through college?

According to one observer, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing, and housing could be had by working a minimum-wage job an average of twenty-two hours a week throughout the year. (This might mean working fifteen hours a week while studying and forty hours a week during summers.) Today, the same expenses from a low-wage job require fifty-five hours a week fifty-two weeks a year.

At a private university, those figures in 1964 were thirty-six minimum-wage hours a week, which was relatively manageable for a married couple or a family of modest means and would have been possible even for a single person working the lowest possible wage for twenty hours a week during the school year and some overtime on vacations. Today, it would cost 136 hours per week for fifty-two weeks a year to "work your way through" at a private university. In 2006, each year of private education amounted to the annual after-tax earnings of nearly four lowest-wage workers working overtime.

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008), 152.

Bousquet goes on to note that faculty salaries are not the cause of rising tuition:

The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and student labor: over the past thirty years, the price of student and faculty labor has been driven downward massively at exactly the same time that costs have soared.

[Bousquet is relying on a spreadsheet by Tom Mortenson, "I Worked My Way through College. You Should, Too. 1964–65 to 2002–03," available to subscribers only at Postsecondary Education Opportunity.]

Jinx (children's game)

An e-mail from my friend Stefan Hagemann got me looking up the rules of the jinx. They are complicated and hilarious. Look and see:

Jinx (children's game) (Wikipedia)

(Stefan, do I owe you a Coke?)

Venetia Phair (1918-2009)

A 1930 telegram:

Naming new planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney for dark and gloomy planet.

Venetia Phair (née Burney), namer of Pluto, has died. Read more:

Venetia Phair Dies at 90 (New York Times)
Venetia Phair (Wikipedia)

Happy Mother's Day

It's the busiest telephone holiday of the year.

[From the comedy short Just Mother (1914). Photograph from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Via the NYPL Digital Gallery.]

Boening, Meehan, plagiarism

Plagiarism in the news: the Tuscaloosa News has available for download the University of Alabama dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan. Meehan's abstract includes this acknowledgement:

Using a case study and content analysis design, this study replicated at a regional comprehensive institution a study of sabbatical leave patterns that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama in 1996 by Carl Boening.

The phrasing — "a study . . . that had first been conducted" — is odd. It suggests not that Meehan is doing the same kind of thing but that he and Boening are doing the same thing, with Boening having gone first.

A glance at the almost identical tables of contents of the two dissertations makes clear that Meehan is indeed replicating. A couple of samples from Chapters Five:

Boening:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to explore the conclusions and recommendations for further study and practice that may be drawn from the analysis of the data. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Recommendations for Further Study, Recommendations for Practice, and Chapter Summary.

Meehan:

The current chapter was designed to provide a summary of the study and to offer conclusions and recommendations for further study. The chapter is divided into five sections: Summary of the Study, Conclusions, Discussion, Recommendations, and Chapter Summary.

Boening:

Six research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1:

What were the sabbatical approval patterns, by discipline, at the University of Alabama . . . ?

Research Question 2:

What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

Meehan:

Seven research questions were presented in the study for analysis:

Research Question 1: What were the sabbatical leave patterns, by discipline, at Jacksonville State University . . . ?

Research Question 2: What was the typical requested length of sabbatical period?

And so on.

And so on.

These samples make clear that Meehan is not doing the same kind of thing; he is borrowing without attribution the content of Boening's dissertation, with Jacksonville State's sabbatical data replacing data from the University of Alabama.

Is it possible to plagiarize even after acknowledging a source? Yes. Is it possible to plagiarize bland, everyday prose? Yes. Is it possible that a committee saw nothing wrong with replicating a dissertation, even down to its sentences? Yes, in which case Meehan's dissertation, like that of Southern Illinois president Glenn Poshard, raises questions about the standards of scholarship in education programs. But by any standard of academic integrity, William Meehan's dissertation involves plagiarism.

More:

Yes, its [sic] plagiarism (Tuscaloosa News)
Carl Boening dissertation (PDF download, 3.8 MB)
William Meehan dissertation (PDF download, 3.5 MB)

Today's Hi and Lois

Today's Hi and Lois features the ol' switcheroo, as the whiteboard jumps from wall to wall when the mirror returns from break. Or perhaps all the wall items are shifting places (think volleyball rotation). Go ahead and click — seeing is believing.

Going backward

Watching The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967) with some of my students recently, I had a thought about the film's opening credits, which play as Benjamin Braddock stands on an automated walkway at LAX, moving without moving. A simple choice: should Ben be facing right, or left?



Yes, left. Forward movement typically goes from left to right, as when reading text in English. Ben's going backward, going home.

Between watching The Graduate and writing this post, I happened to read Bill Madison's recent interview with Betty Aberlin of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Talking about Fred Rogers' care with every detail of production, Lady Aberlin notes that

Things happened left to right on the screen, because a child learns to read with his eyes being trained left to right.

This post has moved from right to left, from a movie about a college graduate to a television show for pre-schoolers. Now it's time for my snack.

The flag of equal marriage

Behold the flag of equal marriage. Inspired by the flag of women's suffrage, this flag presents equal marriage as an American idea — flag-ready, so to speak. And it depicts in an instantly recognizable way the gradual but decisive work of cultural change, as the field begins to fill with stars.

I can mark the moment when I changed my thinking on the subject of equal marriage, several years ago, after long supporting the idea of civil unions for all. Elaine and I were driving back from a restaurant with friends, same-sex partners who've been together about as long as we have. It occurred to me to wonder: why should we two have all the benefits afforded married couples while our friends did not? "Because we're heterosexual" hardly seemed a reasonable answer. Indeed, that answer seemed too similar to other claims of supposedly self-evident privilege, whatever elements of identity — color, gender, religion — those claims might involve.

Andrew Sullivan's 2004 essay "Why The M Word Matters To Me" speaks eloquently of marriage's necessity:

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

One day the flag of marriage equality will have fifty stars. It will look exactly like the American flag. I hope to be around when it becomes impossible to tell the one flag from the other.

[Flag of equal marriage by Carl Tashian, licensed under a Creative Commons License.]

I dream of Strunk and White

I dozed for a moment reading The Elements of Style yesterday afternoon and dreamed the following pair of sentences, in two columns, like the sample sentences in the book:

When I woke, I wrote down my dream sentences but soon grew unsure as to which was the original and which the revision. My daughter Rachel pointed out that they must go in the above order, since the second sentence is so much better than the first. Yes, she was kidding.