A memoir of an American family's life in China

Arrington, Aminta (2012). Home is a roof over a pig: An American family's journey in China. New York, NY: The Overlook Press.

This is a memoir of an American family of five life experience in China. I was attracted by the book title, and had a high expectation of the book. Unfortunately, it turns out a disappointment to me.

First, the content contains Chinese translation does not serve any particularly purpose and some of the phrases, from my knowledge, are incorrect.

Second, I did not find the stories humorously, as Kay Bratt claimed and stated in the back cover.

Third, many chapters, as the author claims in the "note of sources" that need to perform extensive research. For instance, on page 78, the author states that "Confucianism is a religion without a deity." That is incorrect. Confucianism is NOT a religion. In Chinese culture, Confucius is an educator, an influential figure in Chinese traditional culture. Readers who do not pay attention to the ending chapter might have been misled.    

Education is becoming irrelevant

It seems to me that education is becoming irrelevant.

Three days ago, the academic dean came to the library and asked me for help. She is currently pursuing her doctoral in education leadership. She was about to finish one of her term papers and asked me to review the APA citation page for her. She sent me the Bibliography via email and brought the articles and sources to the library.

I just could not believe what I was given. None of the citations was cited correctly. The Dean even does not have the ability to recognize who is (are) the author(s) of the research article – the series titles are cited as the authors! What a shame! I was not given the entire research paper; yet I wonder how she did for the in-text citations!

The explanation of how she lands the position of Academic Dean at the university is very simple. She “knows and has very tight connections with university administrators. The implication is that you do not need a good education to be employed. What you need is the “connections,” especially in current economy climate.

Education is a service-based business, a corporation

In his book, The Shadow Scholar, Dave Tomar describes his negative learning experience at Rutgers. The most interesting thing for me is the so-called "RU Screw" (pp. 22-39).

In my view, Rutgers is just a typical example of the nowadays-higher education. In my view, many universities around the global are functioning in a very similar way. So to speak, it is not just the American failure higher education system failing. Universities are run as a business, a corporation, a moneymaker mill. What does the higher education administration really care? Frankly, it is not the student’s learning experience; instead, are the declining enrollment, the retention and dropping out rates, the imbalance of the fiscal budget, the reputation of the institution.

From my own work experience with colleges and universities, many students are accepted simply for the adding to the number of enrollment. I have seen nursing major student who does not even know the multiplication table yet passed the drug calculations class. I have known a few graduate students who do not know what APA and MLA stand for. It is not uncommon that students do not know the differentiation between databases and Internet search engine.

A shadow scholar income = Harvard non-tenure track lecturer?

It is said that the annual income of a shadow is similar to a non-tnure track lecture at Harvard. Oh boy, the world is changing. So is the value of higher education. Money CAN buy everything???

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578004570701056956.html

Book title: Dave Tomar (2012). The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat. Publisher: Bloomsbury USA.

The shadow scholar

Hire someone to write your dissertation?  It is possible.

I received this article from one of my library colleagues. It's sad. This is an article about college students (I am sure some of them are graduate students or even doctoral students) who hire someone to do their assignments or write their dissertations. The article is written by a "shadow scholars" in the east coast area and was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The truth is that it is hard to catch those "lazy" graduate students. With the current economy climate, it might be the only way for some well-educated scholars to earn a living.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

We discussed cyber security in one of my course. We studied the MANSIANT APT document. It is astonishing to learn that the overall APT undetection rate is 76%! (p. 7). It seems to me that it is almost impossible to prevent an APT threat in current digital era.

The case studies in the MANDIANT report are comprised of many cases in both public and private sectors. It unveils the "breach" of cyber information unviersally depends on IT personnel due to the fact that they have administrative authorization, full ability to access users' passwords and accounts within the networks. Thus, managment should take an aggressive and defensive approach within the organization in adition to collaborating with cyber-security professionals.

If you are interested, here is the entire report:
http://www.princeton.edu/~yctwo/files/readings/M-Trends.pdf

From data mining to big data

In the past few years, data mining has become a popular area in the field of information management. Now big data has shared the charm of data mining.  If you are interested in big data, the Harvard Business Review has very interesting discussion. Here are the examples:

McAfee, Andrew & Brynjolfsson, Erik (December, 2012). Big data: The management revolution (cover story). Harvard Business Review, 90(10), 60-68.

Davenport, Thomas & Patil, D.J. (October, 2012). Data scientist: The sexiest job of the 21st century. Harvard Business Review, 90(10), 70-76.

I won't be surprised to see that iSchool offers course on big data very soon!