Nov 21, 2009

Scarcity and decision-making

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It is easy to be a leader in the times of abundance; it is less fun in the times of scarcity. For example, when we had few faculty members, ...
Nov 14, 2009

A week’s worth of life

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I looked through my calendar, and ransacked my memory, with a single question in mind – was it worth it? Which portion of the week did I spe...
Nov 6, 2009

Tired

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Sometime in the middle of this week, it suddenly became clear to me that I feel very tired. Not sure why this is the case; maybe because I d...
Oct 31, 2009

The structure of change

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The world around us is changing fast, faster than ever before. Just a few things: the State budget is heading to a cliff; a perfect storm fo...
Oct 16, 2009

Empowerment and discontent

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All democratic systems of governance share a paradox. If you hold strong beliefs, you will be surprised and upset when your particular view ...
1 comment:
Oct 10, 2009

The First Snow

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This morning, I woke up to the unmistakably different light that fills the room after a snowy night. You don't have to look down on the ...
1 comment:
Oct 1, 2009

How to save UNC

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We are less than two years away from the financial cliff, created by convergence of the Colorado TABOR law and the recession. While the Fed...
Sep 26, 2009

Solar flares and chicken soup

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I have absolutely no idea why this happens, and therefore choose to attribute it to solar flares. It maybe a particular influence of the pla...
Sep 18, 2009

La Comédie humaine

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La Comédie humaine is a collection of inter-related novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac , a 19 th century French novelist. It is ...
2 comments:
Sep 11, 2009

Evaluation Anxieties

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For some reason, whenever we talk about the annual evaluation process, some people get anxious. I am not exactly sure why; for me this is ju...
Sep 4, 2009

How to tell a good meeting from a bad one

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My calendar for this week shows 19 meetings, one of which I skipped, totaling about 17 hours. If we assume a 40 hour work week (mine is a...
Aug 28, 2009

Administrative pests

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In the last couple of weeks, I have been greatly irritated by various administrative pests we have in this Universities – forms, practices, ...
2 comments:
Aug 23, 2009

Doomsday scenarios

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Chinghiz Aitmatov once made fun of Muscovites' obsession with weather forecasts. Considering that Moscow's climate is really mild, ...
Aug 12, 2009

The swine flu semester

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There is a small chance that the swine flu will come back in the Fall, and we will have to close campus for some time. It would be great to ...
Jul 30, 2009

The joy of planning

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This week, I was able to do some preparations for the next year, which included scheduling, planning, thinking over our priorities and objec...
Jul 24, 2009

The other kind of writing

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In the last three weeks or so, Carolyn and I spent much of our time writing a grant application. It turned out to be for about 2.5 million i...
1 comment:
Jul 17, 2009

The ethics of reporting

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Because of certain events in our University, I was asked what is the responsibility of faculty to report? For example, if you hear a rumor, ...
Jul 8, 2009

The fine art of teaching

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Mean What you see here is distribution of mean student evaluations for our School faculty in the Spring of 2009. Each line is one faculty me...
Jul 5, 2009

About blogs

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OK, I have been doing it for three years. My first blog was published on July 2, 2006; I have 123 entries since then. Did not keep track fro...
4 comments:
Jun 26, 2009

Cataloging trouble

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The Catalog working group, of which I was a member, just finished its tasks of redesigning the University catalogs. The group was great to w...
Jun 19, 2009

The Spreadsheet fallacy

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Perhaps people don't remember it, but VisiCalc , which was Excel's forefather, was one of the crucial forces to unleash the personal...
Jun 12, 2009

The limitations of grapevine

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We all rely on informal information exchanges; I have written about it before . Here is another story that shows what are the strengths an...
Jun 5, 2009

Pushing back

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Here is a story from last week that really made me feel good. I noticed that when we get graduates licensure applications, we make a hard co...
May 29, 2009

The Russian trip

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OK, we did it. A group of 17 Americans went to Moscow, then to Novosibirsk, and Saint Petersburg. We did have a conference, of course, and a...
2 comments: