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Sunday, March 07, 2004 |
SJ Mercury: This Is Your Life. Microsoft researchers are working on technology that captures and organizes daily life with the same compulsive orderliness they apply to office documents. It begins with the SenseCam, a device Microsoft researcher Lyndsay Williams calls `"a black box recorder for the human body." [Tomalak's Realm]
8:06:47 PM 
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Philosophical Gourmet Report doings, from Brian Leiter: PGR Bashing Again...or Public Choice Theory and the Capture of the APA Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession. Back in 2001, Keith DeRose (Yale University) and Graeme Forbes (Tulane University) wrote to the American Philosophical Association to protest its statement opposing rankings, a statement that had been drafted in 1994 (before the PGR appeared on the Internet)....
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Although I marvel at the ingenuity of the PGR opponents--they have taken a process prompted by a call for the APA to retract its statement on rankings and turned it, instead, in to an opportunity for an even more aggressive attack on the PGR- -the truth is that none of this matters. All professional organizations are opposed to rankings for reasons that everyone understands and for reasons wholly unrelated to the quality or merit of the rankings. No organization that must represent idiosyncratic and marginalized departments--indeed, no organization that must represent strong and weak departments--can possibly acknowledge, publically and officially, that some of its membership is idiosyncratic, marginalized, or weak--and especially not when its Committees are subject to capture by precisely that constituency, as has happened here.
The facts about this letter, described above, will soon be widely known, so that even if the APA adopts it, it will arrive stillborn in the world. And the simple fact is that no advice of the form, "Avert your eyes!" is ever very effective. Students will turn to the PGR, because the PGR provides lots of good information, that helps students and their advisors. It's that simple, I'm afraid.
I'd say that our students thinking about graduate study in philosophy have found the Philosophical Gourmet Report helpful. This is not because they think it tells them everything they need to know, but because -- since its "biases" are manifest -- it is one among few useful sources of information about (one kind of) quality of departments. Students who have only a vague sense of overall college or university reputation are in a hopelessly bad position to make even adequate choices about where to apply for grad school. The Report is not sufficient (duh); it helps.
4:54:02 PM
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