Posts Tagged ‘UNC’

I can haz tenure

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

And now, for your viewing pleasure, my tenure letter. This is, I would just like to point out, the culmination of thirteen, fourteen years of my life, since I started my Masters program in 1995… though it wasn’t until 1996 that I decided that I wanted the job of a faculty member and that I was going to go on to do the Ph.D.

And I would just like to point out this passage in the letter:

I look forward to your acceptance of this promotion and ask that you sign the enclosed copy of this letter and return it to me within three weeks for our records.

As if I’m going to say no? I suppose this is my opening to negotiate salary, though this is a pretty sucky economy for that kind of thing.

Iron what?

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Iron and Wine, apparently. I walk past Memorial Hall twice a day, every day when I come to campus: from the bus to Manning Hall, and from Manning to the bus. And today I saw the longest line for the box office I’ve ever seen. It went from almost the box office window (not yet open, apparently), down Cameron, to about 20 feet from the intersection of Cameron and Columbia. I asked some random student standing in line what it was all about, and he said “tickets for Iron mumble.” I asked him tickets for what? Thereby no doubt branding myself as woefully uncool, though I’m sure that’s hardly the first time that’s happened. Due to University Policy, camping out for tickets is not allowed for this event… so I wonder how early the line started forming? Some students must have been there a while, since there were camp chairs and blankets in evidence.

The grant funding situation at UNC

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

An announcement went out today that the Office of Sponsored Research recently released its 2006 Annual Report. Curious, I took a look. Some interesting data from the main report:

  • Total funding for FY 2006: $593,390,527, a 2.38% increase over FY05.
  • Unsurprisingly, the School of Medicine was by far the largest recipient of grant funding on campus, to the tune of 48.57% of all funding received at UNC-CH.
  • By comparison, SILS receives a whopping 0.33% all funding received at UNC-CH. (Hell, we can do better than that!)
  • The amount of funding to SILS was $1,978,533.45. (The 45¢ is very important.) Depressingly, this amount is down 17.26% from FY05.
  • There were 18 grant proposals submitted from SILS in FY06, again depressingly down 5.26% from FY05. This is approximately 0.5% of the total number of proposals submitted by all schools and departments on campus.

Piqued by all of those downticks, I looked at past OSR Annual Reports.

Year Amount of funding to SILS Percent of funding received at UNC-CH Number of grant proposals submitted from SILS
2006 $1,978,533 0.33% 18
2005 $2,391,369 0.41% 19
2004 $1,621,153 0.25% 16
2003 $1,762,108 ? 11
2002 $1,272,090 ? 11

Intentionality is a moral concept

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

Lessons From the Park, from The Chronicle

Joshua Knobe, a newly minted Ph.D. from Princeton University, has rocked the philosophical establishment and earned a place at the leading edge of the discipline in a new field called “experimental philosophy.” The field uses the empirical tools of psychology to address philosophical questions, designing experiments to test how ordinary people think.

A modern-day Socrates, this Knobe. Particularly interesting to me is this bit:

“Joshua went out and did these experiments, showing that at least one common-sense psychological concept — doing something intentionally — isn’t really a descriptive concept, it’s a moral concept,” says Mr. Stich. “Part of people’s judgments about whether you act intentionally is what they take to be the moral status of what you’ve done.”

But the best part:

And Mr. Knobe, 31, has barely started his first tenure-track job. He will begin teaching philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall.

How cool are we? And here’s Knobe’s site.

Superfine teaching

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

This guy has the coolest name: Professor Superfine. And he’s at UNC! It’s so gratifying when we get good press.

Bringing Life to Physics Class, from All Things Considered’s series on Popular College Courses.

This story makes me wish that information science lent itself more to dramatic demos. This would probably work for showing how packets move, but to show how search engines work? How databases are structured? Maybe not so much.