One case of pseudonymous academic authorship is that of Carl Withers, who published as James West. He did an extensive anthropological study of a small rural town, which remained anonymous in his publication (Plainville, USA). In principle, one could regard his use of a pseudonym as a way of further protecting the anonymity of the town where he did his field work, but as I understand it he also used the pseudonym during the many months he lived there. Did he have to get a fake driver's license and everything, or was ID so rarely used in those days? What did he do when he needed money? I imagine that he was really protecting himself from possibly irate ``informants.'' (It was reported in a follow-up study that people of the town found the original book unflattering.)
In the usual case, one suspects that the academic (or probable academic, given the author's apparent familiarity with university faculty conditions) is hiding behind a pseudonym for protection from other academics. Here are some other examples:
Bruce Truscot: Red Brick University (1943). It was about a typical red brick university (that's a moderately well-defined category in England) which bore the pseudonymous name of Redbrick University. The 1951 edition (which included additional chapters first published in 1945) includes a preface. Here are its second and part of its third paragraphs:
Red Brick University was published under a pseudonym, and had no preface. That was not because there was no room for one, or no need for one, but because of the author's desire to sink his own personality and focus attention on his theme. The policy, however, was not entirely successful. Most Redbrick readers were less moved by the book to a healthy introspection than to excited speculation on the identity of the author. Frenzied fingerings of Who's Who and the Oxbridge University Calendar [calendar?] failed to reveal any mention of Bruce Truscot -- which was not entirely surprising, as that gentleman had carefully examined the same volumes a few months earlier in order to ascertain that he did not exist. Then began a search through the book itself for what is known in academic groves as internal evidence -- again with no great success, as the author had also anticipated these activities and had taken some little trouble to cover his tracks. ...
Bruce Truscot was the pseudonym of E. (Edgar) Allison Peers, 1891-1952.
Josef Martin: To Rise Above Principle: The Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean (Univ. Ill. Pr., 1988). As you can probably guess from the title, this is a fun read -- compared to your typical dean's memoir, anyway. There's a smidgen of internal evidence suggesting the author was a dean at ASU.
Rebekah Nathan: My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 2005). She enrolled as a student at ``AnyU,'' the state school where she is an anthropology professor. She was in her mid-50's, which isn't unusual for a ``returning student,'' but she lived in a campus dormitory, which is. Her dorm-mates guessed and propagated rumors of a tough divorce. As a disguise, she donned a back-pack and flip-flops, and I think she claims somewhere that her colleagues didn't recognize her. Nathan also wrote: ``The ultimate test of my analysis will be undergraduate students, who can decide for themselves if they recognize their lives and their world in this book.''
Funny thing, but one of the former students of ``Truscot'' wrote him from Burma during the closing months of WWII, where he was an officer... ``He had just been reading a book which had made him feel quite homesick, so vividly did it recall the old days at the University. `I should like you to read it too... I expect you can get hold of it somewhere. But I ought to warn you that it draws a very unflattering picture of a professor, and I shouldn't like you to think that was why I wanted you to read it. Don't worry: none of your old students would ever think that the author was drawing you'.''
That's all I can think of for now. Somewhat related are nonpseudonymous authors who write fiction based largely on a particular university whose identity they dissemble to some degree. There was, for example, a lot of speculation on the identity of the real ``Moo U.'' that was the basis of Jane Smiley's Moo (NY: A.A. Knopf, 1995). MSU and ISU were popular guesses, but the riddling is clearly vain: this dense novel is a creative work and not some thinly disguised roman à clef.
The Dupont University of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons (FSG, 2004) is well known to be modeled in part on Duke University. The man manages to be preternaturally timely. This time it seems he peaked a year early. (The sex scandal at Duke, false accusations of rape by a stripper against some members of the school's lacrosse team, broke in 2006.) I read somewhere that a movie based on Wolfe's book was supposed to be in development for release in 2007. As of 2011, a TV series based on the book was scheduled for 2011. Maybe someone merely bought the rights.
I ought to say something about blogs. There, I did it! Okay, some more: it is very common for bloggers to maintain, or try to maintain, anonymity. Hence, it is not noteworthy that many academic bloggers do too. But here's a noteworthy instance nonetheless. A friend of mine who teaches at a private high school maintains two blogs, one anonymous. The other one he sometimes refers his students to. The anonymous one does not contain opinions or material that would be obnoxious or inflammatory to an adult audience, but it occasionally has ``adult'' material. That's ``adult'' in two senses: it may be vulgar (in two senses as well: common and ``low'') and it is usually learned. Maybe one word would be clearer: it may contain poems of Catallus. Keeping that blog anonymous prevents uncomfortable situations that might arise when his students surf the Internet.
I finally remembered a pseudonymous nonfiction book not written by an academic! A friend of mine self-published a book about how to lose weight. (You'd figure that's a genre that really makes the shelves groan, but they say the market is huge. Her book at least went into a second printing.) The pseudonym she used is the patron saint (or something along those lines) of her native island. The personage and name is female, but still I wonder if this didn't make things awkward at the book-signings.
And I thought the function of the point spread was to create a marketable bet on a contest that is not evenly matched. Heck, you learn something new every day.
If you look at airline ads from the late fifties and early sixties, you'll notice the prices listed look reasonable in today's dollars. In other words, they were way expensive then. The entire business model has changed. Airline travel has been considerably democratized, and now most seats on any plane are coach class. (In the fifties, it was not unusual for a plane to be mostly first class. Coach class was called by less euphonious names such as ``Economy'' and later ``Tourist.'')
See PSIA, PSID, PSIG. and PSIS.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
In other words, PSIG is the deviation of the measured pressure (PSID) from atmospheric. Local atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi at sea level and 12.2 psi at an altitude of one mile. This is still the most common type of pressure measurement and gauge.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
The Browns changed their name after the divorce, to Ravens. Ravens perch on bleached skulls in wizards' laboratories, eat carrion and like to collect shiny things that didn't originally belong to them, but perhaps the really positive feature is that they're black birds, and at the time of the move, black was the hot color for team uniforms.
It was one of the first socialist parties in Europe, founded clandestinely in Madrid the day after May Day 1879. The initial membership consisted of intellectuals and workers, mainly typesetters. Typesetters (tipógrafos or cajistas) are people who set type; I'm not sure what an intellectual (intelectual) is, but here it apparently means someone who doesn't work.
The party was headed by Pablo Iglesias Posse, and with a Republican-Socialist alliance in 1910, he became the first socialist deputy in the Spanish Parliament (Cortes). Iglesias was a typesetter and journalist. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf. It seems that at the beginning of the twentieth century, a lot of intellectuals got their hands dirty and published their own stuff. On a smaller scale, something like the beginning of the twenty-first, when so many clowns do their own web publishing.
Following the Russian Revolution, the Third Socialist International (the Leninist or Communist International) led to a split in the Spanish socialist movement, with partisans of Lenin leaving the PSOE to form a communist party (PCE).
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
In his `For A Rocker' (©1983 Night Kitchen Music ASCAP) in the album ``Lawyers In Love,'' Jackson Browne sings:
Don't have to change, don't have to be sweet
Gonna be too many people to possibly meet
Don't have to feed 'em, they don't eat
They've got their power supplies in the soles of their feet
They exist for one thing, and one thing only
To escape living the lives of the lonely
Related information at the USSR entry.
Jackson Browne's full name is Clyde Jackson Browne; he is the son of Clyde Jack Browne.
The lower-limb/power-supply nexus theme sounded by Jackson Browne was anticipated in the song ``You're The One That I Want'' from Grease:
I got shooooooes,
they're multiplyin',
And I'm looooooos-
in' contro-ol
Cause the power
you're supplyin'--
It's electrifyin'!
That's the way I heard her sing it, anyway. A girl can never have too many shoes, they say. Just ask Mrs. Marcos. Shoes are probably safer than little yellow pills, to say nothing of jagged little pills. For an alternate opinion about the lyrics, see the alternate power-supply initialism PS.
``Platinum records'' (1,000,000 units) and multi-platinum (multiple millions) are recognized by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
California's program is famous because it has spawned a proliferation of privately run driving education programs with creative gimmicks intended to keep students awake, on the theory that students remember lessons better if they're awake when taught.
An interesting thing about Indiana's PTD is that it's a kind of unadvertised special: you're not told about the program when your summons is issued, but only if you schedule and attend your initial court date. Of course, that suggests that you're one of those who has some sort of case. You can schedule a trial date at the initial hearing, but here's an interesting thing: the standard of proof is not ``beyond a reasonable doubt.'' That holds for misdemeanors and felonies. For mere infractions and violations, which are regarded as ``civil'' cases (as opposed to criminal), and which carry monetary penalties only, the standard is merely ``preponderance of the evidence.'' So you're at a big disadvantage: the officer's word alone trumps yours sufficiently to carry the case.
The usual advice in fighting a speeding or parking ticket is to look for even the smallest error in the ticket, like a streetname misspelled. I've never understood the legal theory behind this sort of technicality defense. I mean, the Supreme Court has gone so far as to sanction evidence obtained under an invalidly issued warrant, so long as the police claim that their motives were pure. Of course, that ruling was handed down by the evil Rhenquist court, which probably regrets the exclusionary rule almost as much as the man in the suburban street. Maybe the theory runs that any small error calls into question the officer's alertness at the time of the citation.
A lot of well-known bits of legal knowledge could use a fuller public explanation. For example, everyone knows that criminal defendants reply to reporters' questions with something along the lines of ``I will refrain from commenting, on the advice of my attorney.'' The reason for this is very simple, and perhaps the reporters fail to explain it just to put pressure on defendants. (Or possibly they don't know. After all, they've only heard the comment a few thousand times.) The reason is simply this: it is very easy for a prosecutor to twist the public words of a criminal defendant into a threat or intimidation or related aspect of witness subornation. Thus, on top of the original crime(s), the defendant can be charged with obstruction of justice. Often those OJ charges are easier to prove than the original charges. It's interesting (though not illogical) that you can be found guilty of obstructing justice in the prosecution of charges of which the courts claim to have found you not guilty.
One of the favorite similes that law professors have for the law is that of an onion: the law is like an onion because there's always another, deeper layer. This demonstrates the towering selfishness of the legal establishment, that complacently and even happily accepts a make-work complexity that confounds justice. An alternative interpretation of the simile is this: the deeper you go into it, the more you want to cry. Another similarity is that the onion seems transparent, but through sheer multitude of layers it is opaque. For more on the leek group, see the garlic entry.
Of course, the opinions above, however heartfelt, should not be regarded as the opinions of the author.
I've seen this expanded as Private Trade Entity Limited. Since British practice now commonly omits the period from abbreviations as well as from acronyms, it's harder to distinguish them. The capitalization style argues against the acronym interpretation, however, and the variant expansion appeared in an intellectually weak, unscholarly publication (The Chronicle of Higher Education), so for now we'll mark this expansion as possible, but unlikely.
After Teflon ® became available on consumer cookware, Roy Plunket of Du Pont, the guy who discovered it, would insist on frying his eggs with no oil or butter. This is like the families of Wonder bread distributors: they have to eat that white sponge at home or risk insulting the family's livelihood. I had a relative who sold natural sausage casings for a living, and man you didn't ever suggest that the artificial kind could hold a candle to 'em. The guy lived past a hundred; he was probably preserved by all the sodium nitrite in his system.
PTFE is the classic teflon; du Pont also markets other polymers with similar properties -- FEP and PFA.
PTFE is obviously well-known to withstand high temperatures. Microelectronics fabrication processes are a lot like cooking, and there is a need for insulating materials that have low k and resistance to temperatures as high as 425°C. PTFE is not used in this application yet (as of 2001), but its k of 1.9 is in the ``ultralow-k'' regime, so it's being studied for future use. More on teflon at the razor's edge entry.
Found it! Edited by Cary Nelson, with a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, whose daughter was a student at Yale Law. The book was published in 1997. The first part of the book is eight essays about organizing graduate teaching assistants and trying to have the union officially recognized, etc. The second part is seven essays about the miserable life of non-tenure-track (i.e., nontenure-rut) faculty. It's not a scholarly book, although there are a few endnotes -- almost for the sake of appearances, it appears. It's a book of advocacy, so I was tempted to think it might be one of the most tendentious books ever published by the University of Minnesota Press. Then I noticed that it's volume 12 in the Cultural Politics series from the Social Text Collective.
Getting A Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers is a seminal study by Mark Granovetter (Chicago Univ. Pr., 1974) that studied PTM employees. It was based on the author's survey of suburban Boston men who held PTM occupations and had recently changed jobs. Granovetter found that those who had found new jobs through personal contacts had much higher job satisfaction than people who found jobs by other means (``formal'' [advertisements, agencies], ``direct contact'' [cold-calling], or ``other''). This demonstrates that people who are satisfied with their jobs were more likely to have sought jobs through personal contacts. It's not clear why people who don't like their jobs didn't, but there you are: statistics cannot identify cause and effect, only correlations.
Seventeen-year patents were the rule from March 1861 to June 8, 1995. but they now run on the Japanese model, 20 years from date of application.
Siemens intended the PTR as a kind of gift for, or an opportunity to deploy the gifts of, his friend Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz at that time was the most prominent physicist of Germany, and he served as the PTR's first president, from its founding in 1887 until his death in 1894.
SUBSCRIBE PTR Joe Blowunless your name is not Joe Blow, in which case you're on your own. If you have forgotten or are unsure of your name, then on a unix system you can type
finger jblowat the shell prompt. Again, if jblow is not your userid, you'll have to think hard and invent your own variant of this. The command
users could help, especially if you are the only user. Of
course, you could always subscribe under a pseudonym. That way, if your
university president reads the PTR mailing list, he won't know whom to
punish for your vicious attacks, unless he can find someone who knows
anything about computers.
There's a web resource resource called PTR resources on the web. The details of one PTR implementation are described by the Arizona State Board of Regents. Howard A. Levine, a math professor at Iowa State, has posted his letter criticizing the system proposed at ISU.
T
PTSD may be caused by various kinds of catastrophes: severe trauma from combat, major accidents or natural disasters, and also from severe abuse such as being deprived of Twinkies. (Okay, I'll have to double-check on the Twinkies thing, after I track down chapter and verse on the Menninger quote.) In WWII, PTSD fell under the category of ``battle fatigue.'' There was an odd euphemism for PTSD in WWI (to the extent that it was recognized as a legitimate pathology rather than as malingering): ``shell shock.''