[P2P-F] Fwd: Kitsune #4 – The Ronin Institute Newsletter – August 2016

Sat Aug 6 07:18:42 CEST 2016

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kitsune <kitsune at ronininstitute.org>
Date: Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 4:05 AM
Subject: Kitsune #4 – The Ronin Institute Newsletter – August 2016
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>

[image: The Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship]
<http://ronininstitute.org>
Issue #4 August 2016

Greetings!

Here's the latest issue of *Kitsune*, delivered straight to your inbox for
your reading pleasure! As always, you can find previous issues
<http://ronininstitute.org/newsletter/> on the Ronin Institute website. If
you would like to be added to the mailing list, just send us an e-mail at
kitsune at ronininstitute.org
<kitsune at ronininstitute.org?subject=Subscribe+Me!&body=Gotta+get+me+some+of+that+newsletter!>,
and we'll add you.

To the updates.

Scientiam Consecemus!

------------------------------

In this Issue

Ronin Institute Conference Scholarships
<#m_-4791019856304094596_field_scholarships> | The Roninterview: Evelyn
Ch'ien <#m_-4791019856304094596_field_interview>
Ronin on Social Media <#m_-4791019856304094596_field_social_media> | Reading
About Adjuncts <#m_-4791019856304094596_field_reading_list> | Publications
<#m_-4791019856304094596_field_publications> | About
<#m_-4791019856304094596_field_about>

------------------------------

*Ronin Institute Conference and Research Scholarships*

This spring, the Ronin Institute Board authorized the first two rounds of
scholarship funding to help support travel to academic conferences and to
help cover other research travel expenses. We were very pleased to be able
to provide financial support to nine Research Scholars. We offer a
heartfelt congratulations to John Laurence Busch (History of Technology),
Michael Clarage (Astrophysics), Michelle Coughlin (Early American History),
Ruth Duerr (Data Management), Marios Kyriazis (Aging), Kristina Markman
(Medieval History), Vicenta Salvador (Evolutionary Biology), Michael Walker
(Archaeology), and Eleanor Wynn (Anthropology).

Our scholarship program is aimed primarily at conference participation,
because an academic conference is where you learn about the latest
developments in your field -- often months or even years before those
developments get published. It is where you can share your own latest work
with a community of people who can both appreciate what you've done and
provide you with valuable feedback. It is where you reconnect with old
colleagues and where you discover future collaborations. In short,
conference attendance is a critical activity for anyone engaged in
scholarship, and a necessary component of any academic career.

Conferences are doubly important for independent and non-traditional
scholars, who are not embedded in a university department, and who don't
have contact with other scholars in their field on a day-to-day basis.
Unfortunately, conference attendance can be particularly challenging for
the independent scholar, who is often faced with having to pay for
registration fees and travel expenses out of their own pocket.

This situation convinced us that supporting conference participation is one
of the places where our dollars can have the greatest impact, and we are
committed to continuing -- and even expanding -- this program going
forward. To support the next round of scholarships, we are launching a
campaign to raise another $3000. The board members have committed to
contributing $1000 if we are able to reach the $3000 mark before the end of
2016.

So please join us and make a contribution to the conference scholarship
fund. You can donate online by visiting our website
<http://ronininstitute.org/donate/>, or go straight to our JustGive page
<https://npo.justgive.org/RoninInstitute>. Direct your donation by
selecting the Conference Scholarships option under "Program". Or, you can
give by check made out to the Ronin Institute and mailed to Ronin
Institute, 127 Haddon Pl, Montclair, NJ 07043. Indicate "Conference
Scholarships" on the memo line.

------------------------------

*The Roninterview: Evelyn Ch'ien*

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature, where you'll have the
opportunity to learn a bit more about some of the Research Scholars who are
working to build a new model of academic scholarship. First up is Evelyn
Ch'ien <http://ronininstitute.org/research-scholars/evelyn-chien/>.

*Kitsune: You had a tenured position at the University of Minnesota, but
you left that job to become an independent scholar. Why?*

EC: My choice arose from a combination of needing to be in a different
environment geographically and of wanting to drastically change the
direction of my research with the kind of speed that would defy
bureaucratic tolerance. Minnesota has an amazing department, and the
resources and support are copious, so it wasn’t the particular environment,
but the university network as a whole that I felt a need to detach myself
from for a while.

*Kitsune: How has being independent affected your research? What has become
harder? Easier?*

EC: It’s simply easier to think and do what I like in terms of reading and
writing, while access to certain materials and some of the social capital
in academic networks is less serendipitously obtained.

*Kitsune: How has being independent affected the types of questions you ask
in your research?*

EC: I’m experiencing a whole new level of accountability. I feel more like
an artist, less like a critic. I’m not just answering questions, but being
answerable to my own standards of what’s worth researching. I approached
academic pursuits with this attitude, but it was often interrupted by
administrative responsibilities or questions about whether what I was doing
was publishable.

*Kitsune: What do you miss most about being at a university? What do you
miss least?*

EC: What I miss: Interesting people that just knocked on your door several
times a day. What I don’t miss: Committees.

*Kitsune: You successfully raised the funds for publication of a book of
more than 600 poems by Liao Entao, a Chinese diplomat and prominent figure
in both the 1911 revolution and the Republican government of Sun Yat Sen.
Why did you take on that project?*

EC: It’s original work, the insight of the poems is moving and historically
important, and it has personal resonance for me as Liao Entao is my
great-grandfather. I met a terrific co-editor, Puk Wing Kin, who had
already done work on Liao. Liao Entao was a hilarious, zany writer as well
as a unique case of longevity and cosmopolitan experience during the
Republican period. His voice is valuable for history but also he’s also
very entertaining.

*Kitsune: In the course of putting that book together, were there any
surprises? New perspectives on historical events?*

EC: Liao Entao’s irreverence to government inauthenticity was quite
illuminating. On the editing side, we lost an annotator who passed away
during the project.

*Kitsune: Did the fact that Liao Entao is a relative of yours affect the
way that you approached the project?*

EC: Yes: you’re accountable to the family if you get it wrong. That can be
scarier than academic colleagues.

*Kitsune: When you were still at the University of Minnesota, you published
a book called Weird English and taught courses in hip-hop composition. How
do those topics relate to the work you’ve done as an independent scholar?*

EC: I’ve always sustained an interest in the evolution of language (macro-
and micro-). Hip hop is an extension of poetry and street language. Liao
was often writing street vernacular to communicate local ambience.

*Kitsune: What is the thing you’re most excited about, research-wise, right
now?*

EC: I’m building a virtual archive of Republican descendants and have been
meeting so many fascinating people through its construction. It’s been an
amazing journey and I’ll send you the site link when it’s up.

------------------------------

*Ronin on Social Media*

The Ronin Institute now has its own twitter account: @RoninInstitute
<https://twitter.com/RoninInstitute>, so come join us! Also, remember, you
can find all your favorite Ronin on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/Ronin-Institute-305791116124209/>, LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/company/ronin-institute>, ResearchGate
<https://www.researchgate.net/institution/Ronin_Institute>, & Academia.edu
<https://ronininstitute.academia.edu/>. Even Google Plus
<https://plus.google.com/b/104760039078505343323/+RonininstituteOrg/posts>,
if you believe that.

------------------------------

*Reading About Adjuncts*

Colleges and universities increasingly rely on poorly paid adjunct faculty
to teach their courses. You've probably heard something about this, or even
experienced it firsthand. But, if you're interested in understanding the
scope of the crisis resulting from the concerted deprofessionalization of
the professoriate, here is a collection of writing from the past couple of
years on the exploitation of adjunct labor. Whether you're an aspiring
academic worried about your financial future, a student or parent watching
tuition skyrocket while quality of instruction plummets, or simply a
thinking person who recognizes that society is *not necessarily* best
served by universities that are motivated solely by profit, this is an
important issue.

Gawker recently wrapped up an eight-part series
<http://gawker.com/tag/the-educated-underclass> featuring adjunct faculty
sharing their stories. They are well worth a read if you have a strong
stomach. If not, it boils down to this: adjuncts typically work for
terrible pay -- often amounting to less than minimum wage -- and typically
without benefits. This is disastrous for the people working these jobs,
some of whom live in poverty, and many of whom are at constant risk of
financial ruin. But it is also disastrous for the students, who are
increasingly being taught by people who simply do not have the time to
provide them with a quality education.

>From Chronicle Vitae, a summary
<https://chroniclevitae.com/news/292-an-alarming-snapshot-of-adjunct-labor>
of a congressional report
<http://democrats-edworkforce.house.gov/imo/media/doc/documents/1.24.14-AdjunctEforumReport.pdf>
on adjunct labor, stemming from a forum convened by the House Committee on
Education and the Workforce at the end of 2013.

This article
<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adjunct-professor-crisis/361336/>,
from the Atlantic, describes attempts at developing an adjunct labor
movement, although it has been pointed out
<http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/05/adjunctification-again-and-how-not-to-fix-it-again.html>
that the solutions being floated focus primarily on improving wages,
neglecting the lack of security and loss of scholarly output resulting from
the abandonment of tenure. A recent article
<https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2016/03/24/adjunct-professors-unionize-revealing-deeper-malaise-higher/NjqqU5YIToqhm8ZBjsK4yI/story.html>
from the Boston Globe provides an update on unionization efforts.

Sarah Kendzior has written a number of excellent articles on this topic,
some of which can be found here
<https://chroniclevitae.com/people/243-sarah-kendzior/articles>. The most
recent of these, from this May, focuses specifically on the issue of
retirement, situating the retirement insecurity faced by adjuncts within
larger economic and societal trends.

A recent survey
<https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-2016/beyond-roads-scholars-perspectives-from-the-aha-committee-on-non-tenure-track-faculty>
focused specifically on history faculty provides a somewhat less bleak
outlook, at least from a certain perspective. It suggests that most
non-tenure-track faculty are doing a good job, and that many successful
academics spent some time in non-tenure-track positions in the past.
However, it is not clear that this means that non-tenure-track faculty have
bright futures ahead of them.

Three other, more recent articles from the Atlantic have focused on the
economic treatment of adjuncts. One
<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/income-inequality-in-higher-education-the-college-president-to-adjunct-pay-ratio/407029/>
focuses on adjunct pay, comparing it with the salaries of university
presidents. Another
<http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-cost-of-an-adjunct/394091/>
details the impact that the poor treatment of adjunct faculty has on the
quality of education provided to students. The third
<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/higher-education-college-adjunct-professor-salary/404461/>
explicitly notes the disconnect between the skyrocketing tuition paid by
students and the plummeting wages paid to the people educating them.

A recent article
<http://www.salon.com/2016/06/30/adjunct_professorships_are_gutting_higher_education_is_it_time_to_abandon_tenure_partner/>
in Salon argues that the solution is to rethink tenure, reducing the focus
on research and emphasizing teaching quality. Of course, that requires
developing a way to incentivize universities to care about the quality of
education they are providing more than the quantity of research funding
coming in the door.

------------------------------

*Publications*

Here's a sampling of some of the recent work by the independent scholars of
the Ronin Institute:

      *Articles & Chapters*

Baguskas, S. A., Still, C. J., Fischer, D. T., D'Antonio, C. M., & King, J.
Y. (2016) Coastal fog during summer drought improves the water status of
sapling trees more than adult trees in a California pine forest.
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-016-3556-y> *Oecologia*
181:1-12.

Banerjee, S. (2016) A Biologically Inspired Model of Distributed Online
Communication Supporting Efficient Search and Diffusion of Innovation.
<http://hrcak.srce.hr/152013> *Interdisciplinary Description of Complex
Systems* 14: 10-22.

Banerjee, S. (2015) Optimal Strategies for Virus Propagation.
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00844> *arXiv* 1512.00844.

Kahya, E. O. & Desai, S. (2016) Constraints on frequency-dependent
violations of Shapiro delay from GW150914.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269316300041> *Physics
Letters B* 756: 265-267.

Haas, A. F., Fairoz, M. F. M., Kelly, L. W., Nelson, C. E., Dinsdale, E.
A., Edwards, R. A., Giles, S., Hatay, M., Hisakawa, N., Knowles, B., Lim,
Y. W., Maughan, H., Roach, T. N. F., Sanchez, S. E., Silveira, C. B.,
Sandin, S., Smith, J. E., & Rohwer, F. (2016) Global microbialization of
coral reefs. <http://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201642> *Nature
Microbiology* 16042.

Hisakawa, N., Quistad, S. D., Hester, E. R., Martynova, D., Maughan, H.,
Sala, E., Gavrilo, M. V., & Rohwer, F. (2015) Metagenomic and satellite
analyses of red snow in the Russian Arctic.
<https://peerj.com/articles/1491/> *PeerJ* 3: e1491.

Muirhead, C. A. & Presgraves, D. C. (2016) Hybrid Incompatibilities, Local
Adaptation, and the Genomic Distribution of Natural Introgression between
Species. <http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/684583> *The
American Naturalist* 187: 249-261.

Patterson, D., Mozzherin, D., Shorthouse, D., & Thessen, A. (2016) Challenges
with using names to link digital biodiversity information
<http://bdj.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=8080> *Biodiversity Data Journal*
4: e8080.

Rastogi, B., Williams, A. P., Fischer, D. T., Iacobellis, S. F., McEachern,
K., Carvalho, L., Jones, C., Baguskas, S. A., & Still, C. J. (2016) Spatial
and Temporal Patterns of Cloud Cover and Fog Inundation in Coastal
California: Ecological Implications
<http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/EI-D-15-0033.1> *Earth
Interactions* 20: 1-19.

Thessen, A. E. (2016) Adoption of machine learning techniques in Ecology
and Earth Science. <https://peerj.com/preprints/1720/> *PeerJ PrePrints*
e1720v1.

Thessen, A. E., Bunker, D. E., Buttigieg, P. L., Cooper, L. D., Dahdul, W.
M., et al. (2015) Emerging semantics to link phenotype and environment.
<https://peerj.com/articles/1470/> *PeerJ* 3: e1470.

Thessen, A. E., Fertig, B., Jarvis, J. C., & Rhodes, A. C. (2016) Data
Infrastructures for Estuarine and Coastal Ecological Syntheses.
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Benjamin_Fertig/publication/283856388_Data_Infrastructures_for_Estuarine_and_Coastal_Ecological_Syntheses/links/56afe59708ae9c1968b48d11.pdf>
*Estuaries
and Coasts* 39: 295-310.

Thessen, A. E., McGinnis, S., & North, E. W. (2016) Lessons learned while
building the Deepwater Horizon Database: Toward improved data sharing in
coastal science.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009830041530090X> *Computers
& Geosciences* 87:84-90.

Wilkins, J. F., McHale, P. T., Gervin, J., & Lander, A. D. (2016) Survival
of the Curviest: Noise-Driven Selection for Synergistic Epistasis.
<http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006003>
*PLoS
Genetics* 12: e1006003.

Wilkins, J. F., Úbeda, F., & Van Cleve, J. (2016) The evolving landscape of
imprinted genes in humans and mice: Conflict among alleles, genes, tissues,
and kin.
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201500198/abstract>
*BioEssays* 38:482-489.

      *Books*

Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz. (2016) The Origin and Nature of Life on
Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere.
<http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/physics/biological-physics-and-soft-matter-physics/origin-and-nature-life-earth-emergence-fourth-geosphere?format=HB>
Cambridge University Press.

      *Opinion and Reviews*

Callier, V., Greenbaum, S., & Vanderford, N. L. (2015) The traditional
training of PhDs threatens the technology transfer and entrepreneurship
pipeline while innovative programs provide unique recovery opportunities.
<https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.npacommunity.org/resource/resmgr/2015_AM/2015_AM_-_Workshop_-_SciHand.pdf>
*Technology
Transfer and Entrepreneurship* 2:51-58.

Callier, V. (2016) The bee whisperer. *Science* 352: 902.

------------------------------

*About the Ronin Institute*

The Ronin Institute is dedicated to building an alternative model of
academic scholarship outside of the traditional university system. To learn
more, visit us at http://ronininstitute.org or send us email
<info at ronininstitute.org>.

We depend on public support. If you are in a position to do so, please
consider making a donation <http://ronininstitute.org/donate/>. The Ronin
Institute is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, so your donation will be tax
deductible to the full extent allowed by law.

If you know someone who might be interested in the Ronin Institute, please
feel free to forward this newsletter on to them. If you want to stop
receiving this newsletter, click here
<kitsune at ronininstitute.org?subject=Unsubscribe&body=Please+remove+me+from+this+email+list>,
and we'll take care of it.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Contact *Kitsune* and Let us know
<kitsune at ronininstitute.org>.

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