Half of Hollywood has had a Marc Lapadula class at one point or another. I helped push Hopkins to bring him in when we were students and the 12 person seminar was so popular they had to add an extra section. I'm sure it'll be worthwhile, but you could also read any of the dozens of books out there on the subject as well. Good luck!

I've followed this process from before it's administrative beginning. It's nice to see that we've got a philosophy for what academic freedom is, though I honesty fail to see how it differs from a basic definition of what academic freedom means in the last century, so congratulations to the dozens of people who spent countless hours rewriting a basic definition. We've done the academic equivalent of writing the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident" while failing to create any actual rules or guidelines by which the administration can hold the faculty, staff, or students accountable or which actually serve to protect the faculty, staff, or students from overstepping of authority by the university.

Where is the following "Constitution"? Where is the process for "Amendments"? Is the University actually granting any real rights here, and how are they to actually be protected? Surely we've evolved past the level of even the rights available during the Carolingian Renaissance and the early days of the birth of the universitas?

In particular, I find it disconcerting to see even the scant guidelines that existed in the intermediate draft that was sent for approval before it got to the board level have been removed. For example, statements like:
"When one is speaking on matters of public interest, it should be made clear that personal views do not represent those of the institution." or
"Professors who express their personal views on a contested issue must make it clear that students may disagree with those views without penalty."
no longer appear in the statement at all.

It's lovely that we have this new "document", but when the rubber actually meets the road, what will we do? Will we trip, stumble, and fall down as we have occasionally in the past? Where are those general guidelines? No one will care what we've said in this document, but they will surely judge us more harshly in the realm of public opinion based on the future actions of the administration and this is where the real work will have to begin.

Ron Daniels has been doing some generally good things in guiding the direction of the university community, but it seems odd that, as one of the first presidents of the institution with an academic background in law and what I know to be his philosophy in social equity, that we've heard nothing of next steps. I hope that with books entitled "Rule of Law Reform and Development: Charting the Fragile Path of Progress" and "Responsibility and Responsiveness," that we will see much more.

Some of my additional thoughts on the practicality of these matters can be found at: "Reframing What Academic Freedom Means in the Digital Age" [http://boffosocko.com/2014/04/22/reframing-what-academic-freedom-means-in-the-ditigal-age/]

#AcademicFreedom #JohnsHopkins

This popped up a few weeks ago in my little free library, and expecting that it fell into a similar category as my friend P.M. Forni's works, I thought I'd give it a quick read. Given the title, it certainly wasn't being marketed to me directly, but I suspect the writer lost the battle with the publisher for giving it a more sophisticated subtitle.

In particular, it comes out in the category of books fashioned from tying together ideas from a commonplace book(s). It's well written and covers a broad variety of ideas and research, which most are unlikely to be aware.

It's a bit more prescriptive and accessible to most in comparison to [book:Thinking, Fast and Slow|11468377], though I prefer the later for its depth. I was somewhat disappointed that her references were primarily from writers living after the 1400's while I initially expected to see more material from 400 BCE to 500AD, but one can obtain many of these from the aforementioned [author:P.M. Forni|148299] references. I was disappointed that her one passing mention of <i>eudaimonia</i> was for its simple existence as a word rather than for its relation to the thesis of the overarching text.

Having read many of her references including having been a fan and proponent of Benjamin Franklin's system for several decades, I didn't learn too many ideas I wasn't previously aware of, though it did make for a relatively interesting biography, in great part because of a large overlap in my interests and the author's.

I ran across many poor reviews of the work which seemed to focus on the writer's privileged background and her choice to write on this particular topic. I find this generally disingenuous as I seriously doubt any of these critics would have leveled similar barbs at any of the better known philosophers from ancient Greece onward and every one of those authors also held positions of power, prestige, and/or wealth. The real difference between the groups of writers is that this is a meta-analysis and general recipe for a modern approach to happiness while prior efforts by the classical writers were generally of a more straightforward philosophical bent.

I wasn't a fan of the inserted comments from the author's blog as a general narrative construct, though they did serve to provide additional ideas outside of the direct sphere of the author's experience to give unimaginative readers ideas about how they could use the advice to structure their own program.

As very few are aware of and even fewer have tried to implement Franklin's system, I could easily recommend this to a variety of people, though given the title and the marketing viewpoint of the book, I'm not sure many would take the content as seriously as they ought. I would rarely read, much less recommend a "self-help" title, but though I wish the references to the science of happiness were more thorough here there is some great underlying scientific material, so I would recommend this to anyone who wants to contempalate how to live a happier life.

It actually looks like you're missing one of the biggest -- and now, according to the Supreme Court, legal -- new loopholes for cheap textbooks.

One of the most important changes in the textbook market that every buyer should be aware of: last year in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-697_d1o2.pdf] the US Supreme Court upheld the ability for US-based students to buy copies of textbooks printed in foreign countries (often at huge cut-rate prices) [see also Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/thai-student-protected-by-first-sale-supreme-court-rules/]. This means that searching online bookstores in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc. will often find the EXACT same textbooks (usually with slightly different ISBNs, and slightly cheaper paper) for HUGE discounts in the 60-95% range.

To stick with your math example: I recently bought an international edition of Walter Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis (Amazon $121 http://amzn.to/1U74CD7) for $5 (and it even happened to ship from within the US for $3). Not only was this 96% off of the cover price, but it was 78% off of Amazon's rental price! How amazing is it to spend almost as much to purchase a book as it is to ship it to yourself!? I'll also note here that the first edition of this book appeared in 1964 and this very popular third edition is from 1976, so it isn't an example of "edition creep", but it's still got a tremendous mark up in relation to other common analysis texts [http://amzn.to/1V3QVlm] which list on Amazon for $35-50.

Hint: Abe Books (a subsidiary of Amazon http://affiliates.abebooks.com/c/133691/77416/2029?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.abebooks.com%2Fbooks%2FTextbooks%2Finternational-editions.shtml) is better than most at finding/sourcing international editions of textbooks.

The same Calculus textbook you mentioned as a Sixth Edition can be easily found in paperback for $55.44 (I only did one search to find it, but I'm sure a little elbow grease might cut the price further) and ships within the US for less than $10. And because many students are apt to take the multi-variable calculus course as a follow up, this textbook also includes that material as an added bonus as well. http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=14224082117&searchurl=sts%3Dt%26sortby%3D20%26kn%3D%22International+Edition%22%26an%3DDeborah+Hughes-Hallett

The other option you leave out is purchasing the fifth edition, which isn't substantially different from the 6th edition and which can be easily found for less than $6 in good condition and including shipping.

Of course all this belies the true discussion of the how's and why's for why the textbook market is overpriced in the first place. For some of those ideas and suggestions of how we can fix them, I've written a short essay: "To Purchase, Rent, or Pirate? The Broken Economics of Textbooks in the Digital Age" http://boffosocko.com/2015/08/24/to-purchase-rent-or-pirate-the-broken-economics-of-textbooks-in-the-digital-age/

Far better than some of these band-aid solutions is to focus on the underlying economics of the problem and remedy those. Giving the end purchasers (aka students) and not the professors (aka middle-men) the power to choose books will drastically help to level the playing field. I've written some more specific thoughts and hints here: "To Purchase, Rent, or Pirate? The Broken Economics of Textbooks in the Digital Age" http://boffosocko.com/2015/08/24/to-purchase-rent-or-pirate-the-broken-economics-of-textbooks-in-the-digital-age/

Great quote in the Telegraph:
"The economics of college textbooks is very different from anything else," says Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. "Professors select the books, and students have to pay for them, so the normal market mechanisms aren't at play here. Publishing companies charge whatever they can get away with, which is unsustainable."

I'm supposing it's a simple CSS display issue that's been baked in from the start, but I've noticed that when hovering over the individual output links indicating where a particular post has been syndicated to, the icon and the word (eg, the Facebook icon and the world "Facebook") shift over a few pixels, I'm supposing in part to indicate they're being hovered over. In general this isn't horrible, but there are some examples where it make the functionality difficult or nearly impossible to use and at best simply wonky.

As an example, try hovering over the Facebook link at http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/12/todays-books-august-12-2015/ and it shifts things enough that one block of text at the end of the line shifts to the next line.

Even worse, on that same page it becomes nearly impossible to click on the "adamshillca" synidcated link because it shifts incessantly from it's initial position to the following line.

Perhaps it's my particular CSS, but, that I'm aware of, I haven't handcoded any of the relevant CSS, and have the same issue on two separate sites with different themes/CSS. I'm also supposing it's done purposefully as it occurs on https://david.shanske.com/ as well, though it's not as obvious there as you're just outputting the social media icons only.

I'm presuming they won't let him bring the book home? I'll bet that if you can wait a few weeks into the school year you'll find a handful of used copies begin to hit the market, but I HIGHLY doubt that the 6th edition is substantively different from the 4th or 5th edition which you can probably get for pennies on the dollar. (Outside of David Christian's Big History concept (https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive), educational approach and new material hasn't drastically changed world history textbooks in decades.) If you read through the linked article above, there are a few more ideas you might use to cut the price a bit.

For an AP class, you may be better off buying some supplementary popular non-fiction books (eg. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World; Cleopatra: A Life; Guns, Germs & Steel; The Landmark Thucydides, anything written by Simon Winchester) which are likely to be more interesting, entertaining, and informative than the "assigned" textbook. They'll help reinforce not only material, but reading skills, and critical thinking. You could also check to see if international editions exist yet and buy one of those at a steep discount (see the link in the article).

Digging around in free online MOOC's can also reveal some excellent non-textbooks and references (like Jeremy Edelman's History of the World Since 1300 https://www.coursera.org/course/wh1300). Try edX, Coursera, MITOCW, and the like for more possibilities.

You can also find some additional ideas via: http://boffosocko.com/.../30/on-choosing-your-own-textbooks/

I'm still attempting to understand the larger world of indieweb code for WP, but I'm relatively sure that the issue I'm seeing is potentially coming out of the WP Semantic-Linkbacks plugin.

The issue:
Likes from Facebook as well as likes and RT's from Facebook are feeding into the the WP comments dashboard from brid.gy properly, but once being approved, aren't actually showing up in the comments section of the related WP post.
I've done a quick test with a comment with text on the same Facebook post and don't seem to be seeing the same issue and it seems to show up fine in the comments on the post once approved.

Example:
WP post: <a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/">http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/</a>;
Associated facebook post: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ChrisAldrich/posts/10100846770831315">https://www.facebook.com/ChrisAldrich/posts/10100846770831315</a>;

As this is a relatively new site, perhaps there's some small thing that I'm missing or forgetting? I set it all up with the WP IndieWeb plugin (v2.2.0) and everything within it is current and installed/configured (except Hum and Micropub).

Its possible that it's something similar to a related issue I'd had before on a different WP install (see: https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-webmention-for-comments/issues/1) though that seemed to be fixed (by itself?) shortly thereafter.

Within the WP admin interface, (http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=25)
in the editable comment section, I'm seeing something similar to the following:

<code><a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015" rel="nofollow"></a>
<a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/" rel="nofollow"></a></code>

So there is data there, it's just not being parsed/rendered properly somewhere.

Since I've got another WP set up that seems to be operating properly with the same general set up, has anyone got any ideas?