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Political Party Affiliation

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Martin Niemöller . Keep that name in mind as you read. More about him later. You can look up anyone’s political party registration at O.U. if you have their name and town (Norman for example) or county (Cleveland County) here: https://voterrecords.com/voters/ok/1 I think we are holistic and cannot be fully understood without systemic appraisal and context. So, for instance, it is good that it is public information about which political party a person is registered to. I do not think that political values can be separated from life choices or even academic interpretations of phenomena such as war, peace, the economy generally, gender issues, environmental policies, immigration, poverty, religion, education, the family, healthcare, law enforcement, judicial appointments… What people decide to study is itself a clear indication of interest (not disinterested objectivity). Of course, we scholars (I hope) try to find reliable truth about issues, even inconvenient truths. Unfortunately,
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 Even the worst dog is more honest than the best person.
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Not the Smartest on the Planet Anymore

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Checkmate: We Ain’t the Smartest Thing on the Planet Anymore: What Does that Mean? The Rapidly Diverging Mind on the Planet More than a quarter of a century ago (at this writing, Spring, 2023) the reigning world chess champion fell to a computer. Since then, A.I. has only gotten a lot "smarter."   This is a pic of IBM’s Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov in 1997. This was the first time a reigning world chess champion had been defeated by a computer under tournament conditions. Checkmate.    Typical confusion.  I read and taught Ray Kurzweil’s book  The Singularity is Near  (2005) in a grad seminar long ago. Now I see people claim that “the singularity” is upon us.  They say this as a description of Artificial Intelligence surpassing humanity. But that’s not what Kurzweil was talking about. Rather he was talking about humans achieving immortality by fusing with machines and leaving their biological bodies to rot. So that’s one thing. Forget about “the singularity.” As I arg
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GRE costs

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 I was part of a discussion some months ago about helping foreign students with the costs of taking a GRE test and application fees for graduate college.  Because of the costs, some argued that the GRE requirement for application and admissions should be either optional or completely eliminated.  I argued that the GRE, though limited as a predictor of graduate school success was still useful and that it is perhaps the only measure that would be common across all applicants, and is, therefore, valuable for comparing applicants who are competing for a finite number of full-ride tuition scholarships and assistantships.  One person (a very nice and well-intentioned individual) argued that the GRE requirement was unfair because some of us did not understand how poor other countries are and that, for instance, the cost of taking the GRE in her country was the equivalent of one month of her father's professorship salary.  Impressive rhetoric.  But then I thought about this.  I have travel
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Here are a couple of papers that should enlighten you more than most. One is hard to find... on purpose. Some folks you have to watch like a hawk. Especially those who fancy themselves to be messiahs. Fabulists. Here’s an article placed “strategically” in a fourth-rate predatory “journal” that publishes garbage literally 10 days after being received (can you say, review?) for a few hundred dollars. No way a decent journal would be willing to publish such an atheoretical diary. I also noticed the author did not put this one on his vitae. Hmm.  In it, it comes close to slandering colleagues in the name of “organizational communication” scholarship. IRB? The victims probably will not see it. That’s why it is placed in a backwater venue. So why bother? So they can get a little tingle every time they meet the unsuspecting victim, thinking “I fucked you good, and you don’t even know it.” Reminds me of Bill Cosby. It’s a double insult.  I’ve got a few blades in my back too. Beware of treacher
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