Survey says sloppy

I received an e-mail more than three weeks ago asking me to complete a survey about my university and community. I stopped after the second question.

The first question asked if I’m a member of the campus or of the community. As a retired prof, what do I answer? I don’t get emergency text-alerts, because they’re not available to retired faculty, which makes me think that I’m not considered a member of the campus. Retired faculty who live at some distance would seem to be members of neither the campus nor the community. But since I’m a seven-minute walk from campus and have library privileges and free parking for life, I decided to say that I’m a member of the campus.

It was the second question that brought my survey to a stop:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

As written, this question makes no sense: the word with makes it gibberish. For a moment I thought that the question was asking whether I was aligned with the shared goals and concerns of the university and the community. I know of course that the question is supposed to be asking how closely the university and community are aligned. But it doesn’t ask that.

As I suspected, this question did not originate with an administrator in my university. It’s taken from a survey instrument called the Optimal College Town Assessment, a source credited, if obliquely, on my university’s survey form. But someone at my school screwed up the OCTA’s question, which should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community are CURRENTLY in terms of shared goals and concerns?

And I now see that someone also screwed up the survey question that follows:

Which picture best represents how closely aligned with [the university] and the community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

That question should read

Which picture best represents how closely aligned your campus and community would be IDEALLY at some future point in terms of shared goals and concerns?

After stopping at the second question, I wrote a polite e-mail to explain why I thought that the survey needed tweaking. IDEALLY, there would have been a correction. A follow-up e-mail to clarify retiree status and note the troublesome with would have done the trick. CURRENTLY, I’ve had no reply.

Yes, we all make mistakes. But we can correct them too.

Harvard student to her peers: read

Claire V. Miller is a first-year student at Harvard College. In an opinion piece for the The Harvard Crimson, she writes that her fellow students should read books:

Harvard students complain about readings constantly. They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than twenty-five pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.

Literature is worryingly absent from many Harvard students’ course of study. My proposal? The College should instate a new requirement: an English course.

By which she means a course in literature. And yes, she’s an English major.

See also Natalie Wexler’s recent commentary “Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers.” Wexler points out that the National Council of Teachers of English says that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Got memes? (Read the NCTE statement, and you’ll see that I’m not joking.)

See also Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major,” in which Stephen Greenblatt wonders whether literature departments should spend more time on television.

I recall on more than one occasion a student writing on an evaluation form that the upper-level gen-ed course I was teaching was the first in which they’d read a book in college — in other words, a whole book, from start to finish. Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Invisible Man, whatever. They were grateful.

Related posts
“AWOL from Academics” : “The End of the English Major”

“NO FOOD FINER”

[234 East 41st Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Not just a diner: the diner. I can imagine that the song “Dinah” — is there anyone finer? — might have had something to do with the jaunty slogan on this establishment’s sign.

[Click for a larger view.]

Today, there’s an entrance to a parking garage.

[From the 1940 Manhattan directory.]

Related reading
All OCA More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Raindrop.io)

[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

On Willa Cather’s birthday

Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873.

From a letter to William Lyon Phelps, critic and professor, May 29, 1943. Phelps has sent along a comment from J.M. Barrie about A Lost Lady. In her reply, Cather recalls that, through a friend, Barrie had used “gentle pressure” to secure an autographed copy of My Ántonia :

I did not take it seriously, for I don’t think writers often care about autographed copies. (After all, isn’t the one real and only autograph in the book itself, on every page of it?)

But Cather sent a signed copy.

Heber Taylor has also taken note of Cather’s birthday.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Raindrop.io) : All OCA posts from Cather’s letters

[A Lost Lady was published in 1923, and Barrie died in 1937. The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is, I believe, Kate Chin Park’s third Stumper. Her first prompted me to write “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” Her second prompted me to say, once again, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” And I’ll say it now again, “Please, more KCP Stumpers.” Today’s puzzle is a terrific challenge, filled with surprising, tricky stuff. I bounced around looking for a place to start and found one at 32-D, letters, “Obstetric eponym.” Ah, memories.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, eight letters, “Asset from the Greek for ‘favor.’” Good to know.

4-D, nine letters, “Insurance for fair play.” Something to do with poker and antes? No.

9-A, six letters, “Descriptor for some couples.” This one had me fooled at first.

9-D, eleven letters, “Reflection of a skeptic.” Fun to see.

14-D, four letters, “Base pay?” It’s a wonderful thing when a constructor can render the most familiar words strange.

18-A, six letters, “Back up.” A nice example of this puzzle’s trickiness.

23-D, eleven letters, “Documentary procedure.” Parse every word of the clue.

37-D, nine letters, “Beat it.” I wrote in an answer, no crosses, but sure it was right. It was.

38-A, fifteen letters, “Solving skill.” Especially apt in a crossword.

42-A, three letters, “Digest, say.” See 18-A.

57-D, four letters, “New Looney Tune ____ Go Bugs.” A fun (loony) way to clue a familiar crossword answer.

61-A, eight letters, “Much-anticipated global decline?” Yes, but so what? I’ve never understood the fascination.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, four letters, “Folkie from Charlotte.” Because I only understood the answer several hours after finishing the puzzle. Oh! — that’s what it means.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Raindrop.io

I’m trying out Raindrop.io, a bookmarking service that looks very promising.

Here’s a public page for Orange Crate Art. And here, for demonstration purposes, is a page with all posts tagged squirrels. Not as compact as a Pinboard page, but it’s a page, right there, available to anyone, no subscription needed.

Lead Belly and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”

From Dust-to-Digital, a post about Lead Belly on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. With the songs that were the origin of “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” Not new news, but news to me.

A related post
Lead Belly at the MLA

I just adore a penthouse view

[Click for a larger view.]

I don’t know what’s up (sorry) with that tree, but it’s been like that for years, though not always with a penthouse atop.

See also yesterday’s tree.

[Post title with apologies to Green Acres.]

Pinboard tags again

The behavior of Pinboard tags has puzzled me. I use a Pinboard account to create public tags for Orange Crate Art posts. The tags are supposed to work for everyone, taking an OCA reader to a Pinboard page with an index — okay, a list — of all posts with that tag.

In July 2021 I found that tags were working that way only if the reader was logged into a Pinboard account. As I’m always logged in, I thought that I must have dumbly missed something obvious — that tags always only worked for someone logged into a Pinboard account. (Two e-mails about that to Maciej Cegłowski, Pinboard’s developer, went unanswered.) In September 2021 tags were once again working for everyone, Pinboard account or no. Now tags are again working only for someone logged into Pinboard. I found a workaround:

pinboard.in/search/u:M.Leddy/?query=

And now the workaround no longer works for anyone not logged into a Pinboard account.

I found — finally — an explanation from Maciej Cegłowski in a Google Group, pinboard-dev:

The intent is for all public Pinboard pages to be visible without a login. However, user+tag pages in particular are somewhat expensive to generate on the fly, so a crawler that iterates through them can quickly bog down the site.

In the past, it was fairly easy to block or throttle this kind of crawling. But in recent months, I've seen a rise in distributed crawling from China+Singapore IP addresses, with no patterns that would make the traffic easy to block. So I’m forced to either put pages behind a login, or have the site become unusably slow for everyone.

If I have to I’ll block the entire PRC address range, though I’m looking for alternate solutions that are less drastic. But I just want people to know the reason for the back-and-forth behavior on public pages.

Ugh. I hope there’s a fix. Incidentally, there’s never been an acknowledgement on the Pinboard website of the problem with public tags. The website now announces a “big code cleanup underway.”

[And as you may have noticed, I’ve removed the widget with links to the top twenty OCA tags from the OCA sidebar.]

Towne Branch subdivision

[Click for a larger tree.]

I photographed this tree — I call it the Towne Branch subdivision — in fall 2020 and 2022 and again in fall 2023. In 2024 Towne Branch continues to be popular with established families and first-time homebuyers. Close to schools, shopping, and public transportation (power lines). This fall I counted six squirrel nests, five visible from this angle.