Out of the blue, our department chair just sent an email saying stipends will increase by 12.5% next year. That follows a 6% increase this year. I assume that our top rivals increased stipends significantly, and this is in response.
Sure, we still make less than the grad students in CS, but today I'm too pleased to care!
After years of being a Netflix member who rented what I'd estimate to be one DVD every two months, I recently started becoming a more active member. For the past three months or so, I'd been pushing my two-DVDs-at-a-time plan to the limit, probably cycling through 1.5 DVDs per week (my husband and I are catching up on the brilliant but not a little bit sexist "Rescue Me").
When I first started cranking out the rentals, I was astonished at how quickly they came. It was essentially a two-day turnaround: one day to get back to their facility, they shipped out my next flick that day, it arrived the day after.
After awhile, though, the pace slowed. It would take two or even three days to get a confirmation email that they'd received my returned disk, and the new one often wouldn't arrive the day after the email.
At first I thought I was imaging it. Had I just been misremembering the speed of my earlier rentals? But some poking around revealed that this slowing down is an intentional practice by Netflix that critics have labeled "throttling". Essentially, Netflix bumps frequent users to the back of the queue when it helps them to more quickly service infrequent customers; because those infrequent customers cost Netflix very little but pay their monthly fees anyway, it's important to Netflix to keep them happy.
I actually don't have a problem with this. It's not entirely a clear line: I'd raise holy hell if someone tried to rearrange customers waiting in line at, say, Panera, and I was strongly opposed to the proposal to allow people to buy their way into faster TSA lines at the airport, but for some reason this doesn't disturb me at all. Although if the service gets even slower, I might just cancel.
See, somebody agrees with me. And he has a PhD in econ and everything...
This is an interesting article on post-nuptial agreements, which are, as you'd expect, contracts about the assets made once a couple is already married.
Luckily A. and I are as close in financial outlooks as people can be, but if we weren't, I'd consider this in a heartbeat.
I would love to see a housing bailout bill that refinanced loans for primary homeowners who are in homes at high-rate ARMs that they could actually afford with a 30-year-fixed at, say, 5-6%. Cuts down on foreclosures, but doesn't waste money on hopeless cases or reward speculation.
But the Senate just stripped that out of their "housing relief package"! Luckily, "forty percent of the cost of the bill will fund a business tax break expected to help homebuilders." Yay! Anything in the name of preserving jobs.
Unbelievable.
I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.
So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.
This New York Times has an interesting series on athletic scholarships; my favorite article in the series is here.
My cousin currently has a baseball scholarship to a Div I university. I was shocked when my aunt once casually let it drop that the scholarship only covers half of his tuition. Because he's a state resident, it works out to $3500/year or so.
Which is fine -- I don't think that high school athletics, even at single-sport year round, very high level that both my cousin and I engaged in, should be seen as a financial investment one expects to recoup. Either the student is enjoying it or not, and if it's the latter they should (be allowed to) stop. In fact, I'd wager that my aunt and uncle easily spent $2000/year on travel alone traveling with my cousin's summer team from grades 8 - 12, not to mention league fees, uniforms and equipment, development camps, etc, so even a full tuition scholarship might not have covered the money they could have saved for college over the years if he hadn't been involved in baseball.
But even though I don't think profitability is the point, I still would have guessed that being a Division I college athlete in a mainstream sport would be more lucrative for the student and family.
I hope whatever you got for $5,000/hour was worth destroying what was the most promising political career in politics today.
No serious baggage, but not an empty suit either, wildly popular around the country -- a great rising Democrat, poof. Gone.
Why didn't anyone tell me how insanely good "Gossip Girl" is?!? I'm in campy TV heaven, and I will never make fun of the CW3PO network again...
For the past three years or so, my husband has worked on a side project with a friend of his on his own time, under the direction of a PI at the same institution where he works full-time (his boss knows about the project and approves, but this has nothing to do with his full-time job).
By most measures, this project has been very successful. The product has been licensed by the institution, taken on by several producer/distributors, and demand was high for it before it was even available. They've even earned a few consulting jobs in order to assess a company's needs and see how their product might help.
Obviously, my husband and his friend were awarded the right to royalties by the institution. The royalties are laughably small -- about $2/unit -- but it was always more about working on a cool project with his friend than any expectation of a giant windfall (and hey, it's some passive income that the pf blogosphere is so wild about!).
But it's been about nine months since the first unit was sold, and we haven't seen a dime! Because payments were to be quarterly, at the extreme end we could understand a six-month lag. But nine months? My concern is not that the institution will stiff him; I know that they will pay eventually. This is bureaucracy, not fraud. But I believe that this behavior will cost the institution money. Here's why:
This is not a niche project with a few applications: this is a very general product that could sell many, many units with the right support. (Also, the institution makes a lot more than my husband does; more like $20/unit.) But my husband and his friend are not under any sort of contract and they have no obligation to keep working on this project; in fact, my husband is losing interest. Now that we're thinking seriously about having kids, he's thinking hard about ways to bring in some additional income, and when brainstorming yesterday I suggested spending time seeking companies that might be interested in the product and proactively contacting them about its merits. He was not interested in this at all. Now admittedly, primarily this is because he's a tech person, not a business person, and I think he considers hustling a little unseemly. But I think he would have done this a year or two ago because his enthusiasm for the product was so strong. But in the absence of royalty checks to make him still feel connected to the project, he's ready to move on. Most likely he will move onto something that has no affiliation with the institution and will make no money for them. So instead getting his labor to help them sell more units which they profit from and getting their name out (the institution is obsessed with getting press and being thought of as a top institution), they'll get nothing.
Bureaucracy has its costs.
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