I think I am not alone in saying that it is frustrating to be young academic at a university in a third world. Thanks to the Internet, we know that there are so many exciting studies and researches being done elsewhere. The reality that we are lagging behind has just become even clearer.
Even in the humanities, institutions elsewhere are factoring in technologies in their studies, even acknowledging the convergence, intersections and overlaps with the other fields. They have long employed trans-disciplinary researches.
But here are, continuing to dwell in Ivory Towers. We continue to claim exclusivity and authority while the rest of the world is thriving in collaboration. Some of us still even justify our pursuance of the field with our personal abhorrence for numbers and formulas.
It is 2010. And it is a damn shame if we still stick to 20th century thinking.
Check out Bennington president Liz Coleman on her call for a cross-disciplinary approach and the reinvention of liberal arts education.
It really is a hard thing to come up with something original these days. That proverbial bucket in the sea of knowledge is a constant bitching reminder that no matter how much you read and learn, you won’t be able to match the billions of Google’s indexed pages.
Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.
And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)
That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.
Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.
One career drawback of working from home is that it takes its toll on the social aspect of one’s life and career. As for career advancement, who knows when the recession will end or, God forbid, another dotcom bubble bursts? Not that I’m saying that working online is a dead-end path (since there are huge opportunities that can be had) but it can cause one to get really comfortable or stagnate. That, I don’t want to happen.
The past week and at least the coming have been and will be quite the busy weeks for me. I figured that aside from concentrating solely on my money-making efforts (which are mostly writing jobs), I should also start re-establishing a public face.
My work with the university is quite limited since I’m basically just in when I have classes but otherwise, I’m working elsewhere (at home, actually) and it’s difficult to make an impact when you’re not there. I have had quite the experience in in my former industry (education technology) both in the development side and the business side. If I can only find an opportunity to to converge the two so that I’d be able to weasel my way into two fields with a single effort.
Bryan (who happens to have finally launched Constant Random Change) and I have been discussing all sorts of things from technology to business. One points of our discussion was this observation on management and the technology business by former Ruby on Rails hacker Zed Shaw. Here’s his CUSEC speech where he raised these points.
A bit of tech discussions in the middle but the juicier points on management and business can be had after. This is a real treat for any graduate of tech who plans to make money using related skills.
I have formally concluded a semester of academic work after informing the department that I don’t plan on taking any more academic work. I’ve deferred my thesis work for next academic year to clear enough space in my calendar to sniff out some moneymaking opportunities.
My blogging work will be my first priority. I’m handling quite a number of blogs right now and I can think of no better way to spend most of my workday than writing for these blogs. If you have time, check them out. (Shameless plug but what the heck! :p)
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