the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties. “Your thesis,” Eco foretells, “is like your first love: it will be difficult to forget.” By mastering the demands and protocols of the fusty old thesis, Eco passionately demonstrates, we become equipped for a world outside ourselves—a world of ideas, philosophies, and debates.
..“A more just society,” Eco writes at the book’s outset, would be one where anyone with “true aspirations” would be supported by the state, regardless of their background or resources.
.. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation.”
.. Ultimately, it’s the process and struggle that make a thesis a formative experience. When everything else you learned in college is marooned in the past—when you happen upon an old notebook and wonder what you spent all your time doing, since you have no recollection whatsoever of a senior-year postmodernism seminar—it is the thesis that remains, providing the once-mastered scholarly foundation that continues to authorize, decades-later, barroom observations about the late-career works of William Faulker or the Hotelling effect.
.. Even from the perspective of the collegiate bureaucracy, the thesis is useful primarily as another mode of assessment, a benchmark of student achievement that’s legible and quantifiable. It’s also a great parting reminder to parents that your senior learned and achieved something.
Umberto Eco, 84, Best-Selling Academic Who Navigated Two Worlds, Dies
De Burgos and his accomplices carry out their killings to prevent the disclosure of a supposedly lost Aristotle tome exalting the role of humor.
What is the point of listing 1000 authors for a single scientific paper?
The “point” of 1000 authors is to recognize that 1000 people contributed to the paper at a level sufficient to be considered authors, according to the standards of that particular field.
In some fields (including high-energy physics), large numbers of authors are not unusual. See e.g. the 2015 paper estimating the mass of the Higgs boson with 5,154 authors. This kind of research often involves very large teams spanning multiple institutions. Typically papers published as a result of a collaboration are credited to all members of the team.
Livin’ Bernie Sanders’s Danish Dream
It would create, as in Germany, a legion of eternal students who have little incentive to leave school because the costs are so low. It would give Washington officials greater control over state universities, determining what sort of faculty they could hire and what sort of programs they could run. It would threaten hundreds of private colleges, which could no longer compete against the completely subsidized state system. It would reduce the pressures universities now feel to reform themselves because it would cushion them with federal largess. Slowly, American universities would look more like their European counterparts. They’d be less good.
.. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sanders would add $18 trillion to the federal budget over the next 10 years. Currently, total government spending is about 36 percent of G.D.P. Under Sanders it would rise to about 47.5 percent of G.D.P., putting us comfortably in the European range.
.. Third, Sanders would change the incentive structure for the country’s most successful people. He proposes raising the top tax rate to 52 percent. As Josh Barro noted in The Times, when you add in state, local and other taxes, top earners would be paying a combined tax rate over 73 percent. In high-tax locales like New York City and California, it would be even more.