Departments

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Cliopatria

  • Oct 1, 2007

    World History Association Podcasts

    by Cliopatria

    This past June's WHA meeting in Milwaukee was an especially good one, even by the WHA's increasingly high standards. Lots of great panels, lots of geat discussion, some first-rate receptions... and all too many of you missed it.

    But, fear not, because now a number of the presentations are available as podcasts. Yeah technology!

    The podcasts are fairly repr

  • Sep 28, 2007

    Week of Sept. 24, 2007

    by Cliopatria

  • Re: The Hyper Historian Advertisement for ICONICS new product: Hyper-Historian:

    ICONICS' Hyper-Historian is a high-speed, reliable and robust plant historian product designed to data log up to 50,000 tags per second from multiple data sources including OPC UA Servers, OPC DA Servers, OPC XML DA Servers, BACnet, SNMP, ICONICS TrendWorX32 Server, TrendWorX64 Server and third-party database and plant
  • Sep 27, 2007

    video games, culture, and addiction

    by Cliopatria

    This semester I'm a TA for a class on "Alcohol and Other Drugs in American Culture", and today we had a guest lecture on stimulants and the neurophysiology of addiction. I've only been close to a couple people whose lives were seriously disrupted by drugs or alcohol. But I know a number of people who have experienced all the standard consequences of drug addiction (loss of control, monomania, failed attempts to quit, neglect of professional/educational responsibilities and social lif
  • Sep 27, 2007

    Thursday Notes

    by Cliopatria

    Thomas Laqueur,"The Allure of the Whip," Slate, 26 September, reviews Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. It explores the history of the whip, as a means of pious self-discipline and sexual arousal. Laquer argues that in western Europe there is a transition from the former to the latter around 1700 CE, but any discussion of the whip as a means of secular punishment and the relationship of those three
  • Sep 27, 2007

    Educrats, assessment, and farming: a polemic

    by Cliopatria

    On Tuesday, my college held its twice-yearly faculty "in-service education" day. The theme: "improving student learning outcomes" as part of the transition from a "teaching institution" to a "learning community."

    For the last decade, the administration has been eager to impress upon the faculty that we are not merely teachers but "learning facilitators." Learning, we are told, is a collaborative process, more rich and democratic th
  • Sep 26, 2007

    Post-National Man

    by Cliopatria

    Groundskeepers hoist the flags of the German states, but forget the German flag itself.

    [Crossposted at Europe Endless]

    My first taste of German pride came when I visited a friend in deep in Baden-Württemberg: his father glowed as he described the perfection of the m
  • Sep 26, 2007

    Wednesday Notes

    by Cliopatria

    "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," The Nonist, 25 September, looks at Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). Published in 1686, Fontenelle's book was one of the earliest efforts to popularize science.

    In Errol Morris,"

  • Sep 26, 2007

    History Professors as Children of the Elite

    by Cliopatria

    This is a topic I will be blogging about in the next little while. I came across some data for the educational level of the fathers and mothers of history faculty in the 1980s and 1990s. You might be interested to hear whether history has been more or less elitist than other disciplines when it comes to the class background of its faculty. I will also be exploring the extent to which the class background of history faculty has changed over the last few decades. If there are other questions y