Rigid Systems

Health

I received a care package from home (yay Chex Mix!), but unfortunately it was intercepted by MedSafe and they confiscated some of the supplements inside because New Zealand's nanny-state health system requires a prescription for them. In the U.S., melatonin is a sleep aid and sold as a supplement. The letter gives you 30 days to get a legitimate prescription from a doctor (and if you have more than a 3-month supply, the doctor has to take anything over 3 months' worth and dole them out to you gradually) or they destroy them. The letter tries to convince you how bad it is to order drugs online because they could be harmful. I really don't like the health care system here. Also just found out that the junky student health insurance they sell us is really only intended as a travel insurance, so that's why it doesn't cover anything. The government discontinued students getting onto the good health insurance in 2011 apparently.

My Presentations

I had my one-year confirmation oral presentation with my supervisors, a moderator from the department, and a friend who wanted to come along. I'm glad she did because then I could complain about it afterward with someone who had been there. It wasn't too bad, but I get frustrated at constantly being told I haven't include this, that, and the other French theorist for some point, and how the paper won't pass if I don't include them. Research has gotten so bogged down in these theory fads; it used to be psychoanalysis, but of course that went out of vogue. Now it's poststructuralism, but that too will pass eventually. It seems to become more about pleasing others than making a good, original contribution to the field that is accessible to not just a minority.

One of my former students invited me to give a lecture to the public downtown for International Parking Day, where people buy a parking spot and protest cities being made for cars instead of people by setting up alternate things in the parking spot (like a living room set or a table with leaflets and hands-on activities). There weren't too many passers-by in the early afternoon, but I still got a chance to practice presenting and time myself on my Digital Humanities presentations. We had some good conversations before and after about education and travel, so it was a nice experience.

Got to meet the cutest white German Shepherd walking by!

 Others' Presentations

There continue to be interesting presentations that fill me up with all kinds of ideas. It's what I am enjoying most about being back in school. One of the Digital Humanities ones was on the shift from product-based capitalism to financial capitalism where people make money off of money and digital things like data. Basically, we're giving away our data for free when we use social media and other apps that harvest our data and sell it to advertisers. It's digital sharecropping and we should be cautious about further enriching the .0001% (Google, Facebook, etc.). Hard to disagree that we're being taken advantage of.

Peter Singer, who helped start the animal rights movement in the 70s, was in town speaking on effective altruism, utilitarianism, and rationalism. He believes that people should give their money away to charities and places where it will make the most impact, so like to African charities that provide very low-cost mosquito nets to combat malaria. He says saving more people is better than saving fewer, even if that means not helping people in your community because the money will make more of a difference to really impoverished people. He specifically called out things like walk-a-thons that require a lot of people's time that might be better spent working and earning money that could then be given away. But some people do things for the psychological benefit and so aren't being as altruistic as they could be. It was an intriguing talk with some good audience questions afterward.

An Emeritus Professor of Political Science gave a lecture on throwing out the political science canon (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) because it limits people's perspectives and the ability to make new connections. He said there is no reason we need to keep reading these men's works as if they are the only way of looking at political issues and motivations. I had to agree with him, more in the context of my own field (see above on my confirmation) where a handful of theorists now dominate the perspective one can take when critically examining literature. But the only reason he can say this is because he's retired and has the freedom to challenge the canon.

Diane Foreman is one of the most successful women in the Asia-Pacific region, and the university's entrepreneurship program invited her to give a talk on her successful business career. I had just read about her in a magazine my friend gave to me so some of the information was repeated, but it was cool to hear about some of her business experiences and how she thinks of herself as a capitalist feminist. She believes in treating her employees well and incentivizing them to do better, which has been missing in a lot of my former workplaces. She also talked about the issue with selling time, a point raised in the magazine article. Kids are encouraged to grow up and enter the professions: doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. But the problem with these pathways is that you can only make money by selling your time. You might bill out at $1,000 an hour, but you aren't making money without billable hours. As a business owner, though, you can make money without having to physically be at your business. You aren't at the mercy of needing others to pay you for your time. She said we should be encouraging kids who have the entrepreneurial spirit to become business owners. I would add that we should be teaching basic business and financial skills to everyone, so even those with Art and Science backgrounds can go into business if they desire. 

The second annual university Feminist Society day conference went well, and I learned some interesting things, including some scary facts about how radicalization is affecting kids and women in the Middle East. There are no easy answers.

 Education

My friend recommended a TV show where several Chinese teachers go to a British school and teach the kids in the "Chinese method" for 3 weeks and see if it is more effective than the British method of teaching. He thought I would be against the Chinese method because it is so rigid and involves 10-12 hours of school per day, but I told him that I had a similarly rigid method of teaching at some points in my education and am all for it. I didn't know how many hours Chinese kids go to school though. He said in junior high and onward, they are constantly at school or at home studying; they have very little free time. Everything is geared toward passing exams to get into a good college. [The BBC documentary was called Are Our Kids Tough Enough? I watched it on YouTube, but it has since been removed for copyright complaints from BBC. It might be available elsewhere.]

Speaking of education, the more I learn about the NCEA high school education system here, the more concerned I am for this country. I had to help a student who is constantly being marked down for his bad grammar and punctuation and said he has a tendency to write long sentences that are incorrect; when I asked him if he knew how sentences work (with a subject and verb and stuff like that), he gave me the saddest face and shook his head and said no, he didn't. Where do you even go with that? It's incredibly difficult to try to explain why something is grammatically incorrect if they don't know the parts of speech and how sentences fit together with punctuation. I learned from the Chinese vs. British show that the UK stopped teaching grammar in the 60s, so I assume that carried over to New Zealand as well. I know some schools still do it, but it's probably only the good ones. I'm hoping the U.S. hasn't given up on grammar; I know they were still teaching it when I went through.

When students here try to apply to PhD programs in the U.S., they are completely intimidated by the GRE tests since they don't have to take anything like the SAT or ACT to get into college. If they don't pass their high school classes here, they can wait until they turn 20 and get in without any requirement. And since there are a lot fewer requirements for what they take in high school, the last time they took a math class might have been junior high! I would venture the rate of doing well on those kinds of tests is not very high; they're hard enough for those of us who've been conditioned to the standardized test system!

Spring is finally coming!

At 1-Year Mark of Living in New Zealand

I've passed the 1-year mark of living in New Zealand. My, how time flies.

I have my confirmation presentation this week. Technically, you are not officially confirmed in your PhD studies until you have passed this oral and written report stage. Since I seem to be the first person in my department to go through the new process, they don't really know what's supposed to happen, so I don't know what to prepare and am not really worried about it. When it comes to New Zealand and international students, it needs us more than we need it!

The Arts Tutor Training class had been interesting the past couple weeks. We learned about issues around assessment and how often it doesn't match learning outcomes. Our teacher recommended "backward engineering" a course, where you look at what you want the students to get out of it by the end and put in content and assessment that will help them get there, rather than just stuffing as much content in as you can. I can see the temptation to try to impart a lot of information, especially if it's a subject you are passionate about, but the reality is you can only get across so much in a semester. Quality over quantity, pretty much. One of my friends missed class so I was filling him in afterward, and he had never considered why traditional essays might not be the best way to measure learning in a class, so I'm glad I was able to bring up something for him to think about. I know I have been pondering this for months since that Teaching Week session on the ineffectiveness of traditional lectures!

I experienced my first bad lecture here with the "What If Computers Could Save Lives" public lecture by the head of the supercomputer at the university. It was frustrating because on a campus that has been continually cutting funding to the Arts, he basically appropriated all kinds of philosophical questions about big data and technology and ended with scaremongering and warning us to be wary of robots taking over. He also used old science fiction (Isaac Asimov and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and never once mentioned the term nor gave credit to the fact that Arts people have been discussing these issues for quite some time, and maybe his poorly-researched talk would have benefited from some of their input, or perhaps he should have stuck to what he is an expert in and that actually would have been a lot more interesting than a scare session to a largely aging audience. (His actual research is on analyzing brain pathology using math and computer models.) I don't think it did the university any favors.

The new Digital Humanities seminar series is really interesting. Last one was on the internationally-used program LaBB-CAT (Language, Brain, and Behavior Corpus Analysis Tool) designed by researchers here and how it can analyze and mark up audio files a lot faster than doing it by hand. What used to take a researcher years -- going through audio files and listening for language changes and patterns -- can be done by the program in a day. The current research is on the New Zealand English vowel shift, where the second-generation New Zealand settlers began pronouncing their vowels differently from what they heard from their British/Scottish parents. Fortunately for linguists, a group of people in the 1940s went around the country with a van and a microphone and recorded people talking about their early lives, and some of these people had been born around 1850 and were the first people to learn English here. Many visitors and expats know about the vowel shift, because it is sometimes difficult to understand people even when they are speaking clearly because the vowels are pronounced so differently.

Sample image of LaBB-CAT from the website

I've been continuing to learn a lot about all sorts of topics. I created two websites in WordPress over the weekend and remembered how much time web development takes. It didn't help that years ago Google had converted their old Google Sites to "legacy sites" so I didn't have Super Admin privileges to be able to make some changes on the site I was migrating. And it took a couple hours to figure out why things weren't working, because every time you try to Google something that Google no longer thinks is important, you end up wading through all of their new Help forums that don't answer your question. Thanks Google.

I found an awesome book on world-building in science fiction and fantasy called Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. It includes media beyond books and movies too, like radio and video games, and was so interesting, I ended up reading most of it and finding a ton of good quotes for my research. Lots of Star Wars in there, too, although it came out before Disney took over the franchise so some of the information on the canon is out of date. 

I learned about life in the Chinese countryside and how birthdays aren't usually celebrated in China, which made me sad. I told my Chinese friends that I would make them a cake next year so we can have a Western celebration. They find it interesting that we make such a big deal about them. It's really through these kinds of conversations that you realize how much you think is normal is a product of your culture and what other people have passed on to you. Also, apparently karaoke is really big in China and there's a place here near the university that some students go to, so that might be on the radar for me to visit in the next year. Another friend taught in Japan for a while and was telling us about the strict education system and the high suicide rates there, which I didn't know about.

At home, I got some kind of black scuff marks all over my down jacket which I wear every day, tried to get them out with soap, mostly succeeded, then made the mistake of hanging it out on the clothes line after it had rained, and it got green spots all over it from the moss/plant residue runoff from the roof over the clothes line. These are times I shake my fist at New Zealand. 

Although many things are expensive, I had to take a picture of the price per kg of peppers at the grocery store, because it just doesn't seem to make sense for things like this to have the price per kg -- it makes it look outrageously expensive. Spring is officially here, so once the weather warms up, it will be time to start up our pepper factory again so we don't have to pay so much for the bottled ones.

Returning to New and Old Things

I enjoyed flying back over the Southern Alps covered in snow. What a lovely view of New Zealand.

What's been happening in the month since I returned from Australia...

In the Neighborhood


Construction finished on the new Pak N Save store next to the old one. The good news is we spotted insulation, so hopefully it was actually used! (Rare sight to see insulation in New Zealand.) We went to the old store on the final weekend -- of course they didn't advertise this the previous week lest people wait for the sale -- and it was almost bare because they had a 20% off everything in the store to try to clear the stock. It definitely worked, and we bought a bunch of extra items in preparation for holiday parties.

On our street, a couple more houses were demolished. No idea if and when these will be replaced.

At Home

Our landlords were nice and got us a new dishwasher without us asking when we mentioned that the spring had broken on our door so it would slam down. They are easily the nicest landlords we've had, and they said they can put off doing earthquake repairs for a few years if we want to stay.

Our car failed its every-6-months Warrant of Fitness (WOF) because two of the rotors were going. Getting new rotors and an oil change set us back a bit, but that's cars for you.

It snowed in August! It wasn't enough to stay for long, but it was fun to see it falling. The heat pump struggled mightily to keep working (again, they are not designed to work in freezing temperatures!) and the electricity bill for that day was almost $20. You can see how people end up with massive energy bills in the winter here. 

Our cat is really happy we are home. He likes impeding work and setting a poor example by lounging on blankets.

Healthwise

I picked up some kind of cold at the last conference, but it wasn't too bad and I was on the mend by the time we got back to New Zealand. Everyone else seemed to be getting sick though with either colds or flus. It is strange being sick in July since that is winter here. D got sick once and now is sick again with something else.

I went to a dental hygienist that a friend recommended and got a cleaning (called a scraping and polishing) for $80. They weren't as good as places in the U.S. and didn't seem to realize that you have the patient wrap their mouth on the suction tube occasionally so the saliva and water don't pool at the back of their throat and cause choking. Just a thought. The cleaning took a half-hour and I was on my way. Possibly couldn't help stopping at the only Wendy's in town that happened to be across the street to get two value Frosties...

We decided to finally buy a parking pass to be able to park on-campus because it was getting too cold to walk all the way from off-campus in the freezing cold and wind tunnel by the library. I have been enjoying this luxury a lot this winter.

Learning

Several dozen of the Arts postgrad students are taking a no-fee 10-week "tutor training course" designed to help us improve our tutoring and teaching skills. Some of us wish that the instructor were actually from the Arts and not the Sciences, but this is whom the university offered. I found it interesting when we were given the children's story Goldilocks for an activity that the story is not universal; then I began wondering what sorts of stories and fairy tales kids learn outside of the Western context and what messages we actually absorb from all of our early reading.

The Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Arts gave a presentation entitled "What if Studying the Arts were the Best Thing for the Economy?" where he, a music guy, lamented having to give these kinds of talks defending the Arts instead of ones celebrating all the great things about them. The good news is that at least in New Zealand, earnings potential and employment rates are pretty much the same for most Arts and STEM graduates after a few years.

I'm learning more about Digital Humanities at the new weekly seminar series on campus. When one presenter asked the audience if they knew what OCR was, and a group of middle-aged lecturers all answered no, it really reminded me why I want to push for basic digital literacy as a requirement for university students everywhere! It’s what runs our world; we should have some say in it. I did some informal polling among some of the postgrads on our floor and none of them knew what OCR was even though they've all benefited from it. I just assumed everyone knew. It stands for Optical Character Recognition and is when the computer converts an image of text into text that can be read by a computer and manipulated in a lot more ways. This happens when items are digitized and then the text becomes keyword-searchable, able to be copied and pasted, etc. If you have a picture of a text (like the page of a book), you might be able to read it, but you can't do much else with it because the information is locked in the image. OCR isn't always perfect -- it's very difficult to do this accurately with handwritten things, old manuscripts, and anything not standardized. The presenter also mentioned scanning images into 300dpi TIFF color files, and though he didn't ask this time, I'm pretty sure a sizable portion of the audience didn't know what he meant.

How I got away with it for this long I don't know, but I finally read Edward Said's Orientalism and it was really good and surprisingly readable and accessible. He wrote it in the 70s but it could almost be written today, so much of what he discussed regarding stereotypes about the Middle East are still used. I'm using his perspective for the journal article I am writing and it is perfect since there are a lot of references to Islamic and Arabic culture and practices in my text. I think Orientalism should be required reading at university level and our education system should actually teach students about non-Western areas of the world in modern times, not just in ancient history where it's "safe".

Public Speaking

I participated in the university's Thesis in Three competition where you boil down your research and why it's important in three minutes. I also convinced several other Arts postgrads to do it and use it for presentation practice. Unfortunately there is a bias toward Linguistics students who win every year (didn't know this going in) so none of us made it into the finals. It was nice learning about other research going on though.

I had the opportunity to help plan for and co-teach a session at the skills center for students with English as a Second Language, and it went well. They are so appreciative of the chance to practice their English with native speakers.

Making Change

After I discovered that I hadn't been invited to be a representative at the postgrad focus group that was set up because of my complaining about the lack of culture last year, I was finally invited and am getting the chance to air my complaints and propose solutions, as well as meet some of the postgrads around campus. On my wishlist is to have a holiday party with hand-mailed invitations (because getting another email is so easy to ignore). We'll see if that happens.

I was also given the opportunity to sit down with the newly-hired International Student Experience Advisor (I think the university is finally realizing there's a problem) and tell her all of my issues with being an international student. She is lovely and really wants to improve things if she can get some resources. (She's also been outside New Zealand so knows how things are supposed to work!)

Some of us went to the New Zealand International Film Festival's screening of She's Beautiful When She's Angry about the birth of the women's movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. It was good, and fun to see older women being interviewed now about their past experiences and then have the scene jump to them back when they were in college and agitating for change. Putting faces and personalities to the big authors (Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, etc.) was cool.

Socially

The Alumni office invited me to go schmooze with alumni and donors at a party and I got a little peak into how the university positions itself to them. I met a couple interesting people and had a long discussion about what's wrong with New Zealand politics. It was great!

There's a new young lady from China in our postgrad room so I'm excited to learn more about her country from a female perspective. She seems really nice and not as shy as other international students. I also met my first person from Kazakhstan, and I'm having to put aside all the stereotypes from the movie Borat which is probably the only encounter most Americans have had with that country's name. It shows you the power of popular culture in shaping our perspectives.

Digital Humanities Conference

My Digital Humanities conference at the University of Western Sydney went well and I met a lot of people and learned a lot. The chance to participate in the new scholars pre-conference was a great opportunity and gave me access to a lot of the up-and-coming minds I may well work with someday. I learned about all of the anonymous women involved in the early days of computing and punchcards before men took over the field and coding. Apparently, one woman went down to Italy to interview some of these women who worked with famous computer guy Father Roberto Busa and had to use a translator, and the male translator was cutting off the women when they started talking about negative things Busa did. A loss to history, for sure. 

The welcome night ceremony was held at the State Library of New South Wales, and it had a gorgeous reading room.

Things were off to a tumultuous start the first day at the opening ceremony and keynote presentation when there was a continuous string of men on-stage giving all of the introductions as well as the keynote speech. I had finally joined Twitter just before the conference, and it was exciting following along with the backchannel of people tweeting #whereareallthewomen and complaining about the representation of Digital Humanities as a white, male sphere (except for one Aboriginal man who gave the welcome to country speech).

The evening poster session had some quite interesting digital projects, including:

•  DigitalDemocracy.org which creates a searchable database of videotaped California legislative sessions (lots of people think there are transcripts available of these sessions, but there aren’t, making it difficult to know who said what)
• Using Google Ngram Viewer to track word usage in books over time
• Chinese-characters.org which is a study of Chinese characters and their historical evolution using a computer program.

The second day saw one of the conference organizers get on-stage and openly call out the men and ask them to exit the stage so that women could have a voice and participate equally. Then, the keynote speaker after her (Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and VP at Intel) gave an extraordinarily good speech on the history of technology and where we are at with robots today and what kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves. It was so relevant to my study of science fiction and literature, it has now set my expectations for a keynote speech very high! If I could give a speech like that one day, I would be very lucky. She even used one of the same images on her slide that I had in my presentation for my next conference, and I came up afterward to tell her that and she wished me luck. I met a man who looked just like Spock in a lunch session on global data infrastructure in the humanities (sciences are already on their way to having standards and clear articulation of needs). I found interesting presentations in the afternoon on video games in India featuring female characters and using programs to generate more realistic stock video game characters that come from particular universes for game developers to be able to buy off the shelf (Game of Thrones used as the example). I took the river ferry home to get some beautiful nighttime views of Darling Harbor.

The third and final day made me worried about all of the data our devices are sending to the cloud and companies without our knowing or thinking about it. A presentation on ebook data where they were studying how long a reader spent on particular pages of a book and how many chapters they read raised issues of publishers using this data to make decisions about not financing new authors, or limiting creative output to more of the same that readers spend more time on, potentially stifling creativity and new ideas. I’ve heard that Amazon may now be using this kind of data to determine royalties to authors (based on per page, rather than per book). I know some people really like ebooks, but I still prefer the feel of real and ability to notate my books, as well as the anonymity they afford (and ability to lend out). Another presentation examined GoodReads reviews and found a lot of errors in plot summaries, with people mentioning characters or events that never happened in books as if they were true (example: Bilbo described as slaying the dragon in The Hobbit).

I agreed to give a brief statement on my experience attending the pre-conference and ended up having to speak on-stage in front of dozens of people at one of the annual meetings of an organization that helped sponsor it. It was my first time on that big a stage in front of a microphone so I wrote everything out the night before and just read my statement. It went okay and I didn’t mess up so that was good! Definitely need more practice on the public speaking front.

I made the mistake of reading my student evaluations for my tutoring during the middle of the day and there was one disgruntled student who did not appreciate being challenged to think critically about the world and wrote a long paragraph on how worthless some of the sessions were. It was hard to read, but I will have to face this (and worse) in the future if I end up teaching, and it really shows that there is work to do even in students who you’d think would be more open-minded. Plus, I know it’s not my fault that they didn’t do the reading and weren’t prepared. However, the rest of the few received were positive and nice to read.

Proposals Accepted and International Antarctic Centre

Academic Proposals Accepted

I have some good academic news: I have been fortunate to have three proposals accepted in the last few weeks! I will explain how the process works for those not in academia. Usually, journal editors and conference organizers put out a "call for proposals" or "call for papers" (CFP) several months in advance of the publication or conference date. This CFP gives the specifications of what they are looking for and what they want submitted. The standard is to ask for a brief abstract and bio. The interested scholar then submits an abstract which addresses the topic and shows their particular analysis of it. This saves them from having to write a full-length paper which then might not get accepted. A blind peer-review panel (blind means they don't receive your name or bio attached to the abstract so they can be impartial) then reads all of the submissions and chooses which ones it wants to accept.

So, my best news is that I submitted an abstract for a special issue of a U.S. academic journal issue on science fiction and fantasy and was accepted! I also was given the comments from the blind peer-review panel and they were very positive and said my proposal was well-written and sounded very interesting. Now I have a few months to take the short abstract that I wrote and turn it into an actual, full-length article of academic quality good enough for publication. It will be reviewed again by the editors and if they have any corrections or changes they want made, I will have a chance to fix them and resubmit. Publishing is the name of the game in academia, especially nowadays with so much competition for jobs, so having my first proposal accepted is really exciting! And it is on my research topic too, which is even better.

Of the other two proposals accepted, one was for a feminist conference being held in Dunedin, New Zealand, at the end of the year. I will be presenting on the gender imbalance of Wikipedia editors (mostly high-school-age white males) and how various groups are trying to encourage other women to edit and contribute to Wikipedia through events like Storming Wikipedia. Considering how many of us use Wikipedia as a go-to reference, it is a pressing issue.

My other proposal was for an exclusive new-scholars conference for postgrads and early career researchers before the main Digital Humanities Conference we are going to in Sydney in a couple months. We aren't presenting papers, but we will be brainstorming before the conference on our digital humanities projects and what we want to work on together. It is designed to be an opportunity for a small group of us to network and share ideas and resources. It also comes with a small chunk of funding which will help cover my expenses getting to Australia. Double win!

Tutoring Adventures Continue

With only two tutoring weeks left, the number of students is dwindling fast. Assuming they wouldn't have read or finished Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I prepared for more general discussion topics. This last week we discussed single-sex education and some of the essentialist arguments for it (girls and boys have different learning styles and needs). Single-sex education is a lot more common in NZ, coming from the British system, than I am used to, and one young man in each class had actually gone to a single-sex school. One liked it and the other didn't. The students had quite strong feelings against single-sex education, and I hope I helped them think a little more critically about education and the decisions they might face if they end up in charge of sending a child to school.

In my tutoring at the tutoring center, I had to be observed by one of my bosses to see how I was doing (all of my peers did too). I don't remember the last time I was observed in a job situation, and it was a bit uncomfortable. She said I did fine but still had some things that I could do better. You definitely are a lot more aware of what you are saying when someone is taking notes.

We also had additional training on the differences between the students at the Education campus and the main campus (the School of Education only recently merged with the University for budget reasons, but their student demographics are noticeably different), as well as the different philosophies. The Education lecturers emphasize the bicultural aspects of New Zealand and use Maori words quite often in their assignments and lectures. Apparently, the government has a goal of a bicultural, bilingual country by 2040. I think the South Island will have more difficulty reaching this goal since there are significantly fewer Maori present.

International Antarctic Centre

Since our buy-one-get-one-free coupon to the famous International Antarctic Centre was about to expire, we finally visited it. It had a lot of interactive things and quite interesting information on all of the research going on down there, as well as the harsh living conditions. I froze in the simulated Antarctic storm, enjoyed the penguin feeding, rode on a Hagglunds all-terrain vehicle up hills at 26 degrees and through water that went halfway up my door, watched some of the HD film of the beautiful landscapes, and got splashed a lot in the 4-D movie experience.