Goodbye, Google Reader

I just went to check my RSS feeds and learned that Google Reader will soon be shutting down:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

Now what? Feedly?

7:27 p.m.: Yes, I think it’ll be Feedly.

10:02 p.m.: 12,000+ Orange Crate Art subscribers use Google Reader. What’s next for you?

[Where did I go when I “went” to check my RSS feeds?]

Domestic comedy

Staring down the sink:

“Habemus dishes.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Adjunct teaching and health insurance

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has prompted the Internal Revenue Service to think about the hours of work that go into adjunct teaching. The IRS estimate: three hours for every credit-hour. Thus a three-credit class would count as nine hours of work per week. Four courses would put an instructor over the thirty-hour week that qualifies for health insurance:

Although the rules are still in the making, Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a national advocacy group for adjuncts, said what the IRS had proposed so far seems promising.

“I think the IRS is on the right track in recognizing that adjunct faculty constitute a unique category of worker in terms of how their work is currently recognized and compensated,” Ms. Maisto wrote in an e-mail. “It is helpful that the IRS is recognizing that there is a lack of uniformity in the way that adjunct work hours are currently calculated and how adjuncts are treated. This seems to be a huge step forward in the government's education about the true nature of contingent academic work.”

But even as the IRS is working to provide colleges with the guidelines they have sought from the agency, a few institutions have made pre-emptive moves by cutting back the number of hours adjuncts are allowed to work—among them, Youngstown State University, Stark State College, and the Community College of Allegheny County, where at least 200 adjuncts face a newly instituted cap on the number of courses they can teach.

IRS Says Colleges Must Be “Reasonable” When Calculating Adjuncts’ Work Hours (Chronicle of Higher Education)

What these schools and others are doing reminds me of the corporate strategy of giving employees thirty-nine hours a week to keep the work “part-time” (without health insurance). I’ll say it again: the exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education.

*

April 23, 2012: The Chronicle of Higher Education continues to follow the story: Colleges Are Slashing Adjuncts’ Hours to Skirt New Rules on Health-Insurance Eligibility.

A related post
The Adjunct Project

Naked Bronx

I was happy to see the Bronx appear as a minor character in “Murder Is a Face I Know,” an episode of Naked City that first aired January 4, 1961. (Gotta love those Naked City titles.) I recognized in an instant the fence to the left in the scene below: it encloses the green of Edwards Parade on the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University. A friend and I once sat just on the other side of that fence and split a bottle of white wine before a seminar. I was auditing; she was taking it for credit. To the right, Dealy Hall, home of the English Department and many other departments. We didn’t have far to walk. Joey Ross (Keir Dullea) though is running, and in another direction:



The same location in 2009:



Joey is running to meet his father Nicholas (Theodore Bikel), who works in a clothing store on Webster Avenue. Giovanni Famous Pizza now occupies the right section of Darnleys Sportswear & Slacks (or Slacks and Sportswear). Google Maps’ patented “This is your street on drugs” effect is visible in the split Giovanni sign:





Joey crosses Webster Avenue. If you squint, you can see the Third Avenue El in the background, to be torn down sometime after service ended in 1973:





In 2011, Sears still stands. The massive building to the east of Sears is 1 Fordham Plaza, an office and retail complex whose construction meant the end of the Eldorado Bar.

Joey meets his father, and together they cross Fordham Road:





Yes, Webster Avenue and Fordham Road both have many lanes for a pedestrian to get across, and I don’t think being stuck on the pedestrian island (in the 2011 image) would make me feel much safer. (A pedestrian island in the middle of a racetrack? No thanks.) In 2008, the Fordham-Webster intersection was deemed the most dangerous intersection in New York City. Plans are underway to make it safer. One detail: notice the two projecting signs for Surprise Ladies Wear, the same structures that served Kingsley (Kingsley what?) in the black-and-white world.

Late in the episode, we’re back on the (unnamed) Fordham campus, with a glimpse of the University Church and St. John’s Hall:



In 2009:



I know very little about what’s inside, but I do know that this church must be one of very few in which the word tappen has been spoken from the lectern.

This MTA map shows the Fordham-Webster intersection, with the two streets bounding the campus on the south and west. Staring at the tangle gives a good sense of the density of life at this intersection:



More Bronx tales
Elvis pretzels
Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado

[Naked City’s Horace McMahon (Lieutenant Mike Parker) attended Fordham Law School. In the Bronx, or in Manhattan? I don’t know. All color photographs from Google Maps. Click any Naked City or Google Maps image for a larger view.]

Nearly plotzing

My partner in Naked City-viewing nearly plotzed the other night.

Word of the day: loggerhead

From an Atlantic piece by Wayne Curtis about flaming cocktails:

At Booker and Dax, part of the Momofuku empire in Manhattan, “red-hot poker” drinks are made with electrically charged rods modeled after the colonial-era loggerhead, a tool used to keep tar pliable. The modern version heats up to 1,500 degrees, and when it’s plunged into a drink, it caramelizes the sugars, giving the beverage a slightly butterscotchy flavor and a toasted top note.

I’ve known the word loggerhead only as part of the idiom at loggerheads, which describes two parties or sides stubbornly disagreeing. The idiom makes me think of two logs butting heads, so to speak, and of a logjam, an impasse.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest meaning of the word: “A thick-headed or stupid person; a blockhead” (1595). And shortly thereafter: “A head out of proportion to the body; a large or ‘thick’ head” (1598). So my folk etymology seems (to me anyway) plausible. But here is “sense 3”: “An iron instrument with a long handle and a ball or bulb at the end used, when heated in the fire, for melting pitch and for heating liquids” (1687).

The OED ’s speculation about the idiom has nothing to do with blockheads: “The use is of obscure origin; perhaps the instrument described in sense 3, or something similar, may have been used as a weapon.” And now I’m confused, as the idiom (dated to 1671) predates “sense 3” (1687). But I’m not at loggerheads with the OED. Perhaps the tool was known as a loggerhead for some time before the word entered the written record.

Check Wikipedia for loggerhead and you’ll find a photograph of Wayne Curtis himself, in colonial regalia, standing before a table that holds a pineapple, a pitcher, a propane torch, several bottles, and a loggerhead. Try a Google Image search for a loggerhead though, and it's turtles all the way down, at least since 1657.

A tenuously related post
Little Baby Turtle (pehaps a loggerhead)

Nick Bilton on digital etiquette

Nick Bilton doesn’t like it when people e-mail him to say thanks. He thinks you should use Google Maps to find the way to someone’s house rather than ask the person for directions. Bilton and his mother communicate “mostly through Twitter.” And last year, his father learned a “lesson” about leaving voice mails for his son: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette (New York Times).

After reading this column, I see no reason to change the advice I offer in How to e-mail a professor: “When you get a reply, say thanks.” For students e-mailing a professor, this small courtesy is a good choice. And it closes the loop. A professor who prefers not to receive such replies can let students know.

I will go further and suggest that everyone say please and thank you and and hello and see you soon and so on in e-mail. So many inefficiencies? No, they are ways of being human together. They are what we need to make time for.

One of my earliest learning experiences online happened when someone on a fountain-pen mailing list offered a lengthy and helpful answer to a question I asked. I e-mailed him backchannel (remember backchannel?) to say thanks and acknowledged that I didn’t know whether it was standard practice to do so. His reply: “A thank-you is always welcome.” That made and makes sense to me. My correspondent later proved a great source of advice on all things Pelikan.

Related posts
E-mail etiquette
How to e-mail a student

[I’d hate to be Nick Bilton’s parents. Who, by the way, would know the best route to their house.]

Dreyfus online

Of possible interest to readers of Proust: the New York Times reports that the contents of the secret file used to convict Alfred Dreyfus are now online. Ou, en ligne.

Thanks, Stefan, for passing on the news.

Signage repair

The legalization of homosexuality what ? Daughter Number Three makes things right.

Lost in machine translation

From the Google Translate version of a drop-down menu at the Japanese stationery site Bundoki:



I think that translators, the human kind, will be in business for many years to come.