Archive for July, 2007

Leading journals reject Word 2007 files - ZDNet UK

Monday, July 16th, 2007

If you were happy to find that the new Office 2007 equation editor is a lot more like LaTeX, and that equations didn’t look as bad in Word as before, think again.

Microsoft is pushing a proprietary markup language (OOXML) that clashes with what Nature and Science own typesetters use, so they will simply reject the paper. This might be a good time to read Dario’s own ode to the beauty of LaTeX.

Technorati tags: typesetting, latex, math, markup, OOXML

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Posted in Announcements, Writing | 1 Comment »

Academics salaries lower than automobile industry worker salary?

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

From Mark J. Perry’s blog, I just learned that the average UAW worker with a high school degree earns 57.6% more compensation than the average university professor with a Ph.D. Considering that there are plenty of academic positions that do not enjoy the average salary mentioned in the blog post, this is something to worry about. Average Postdoc salaries according to the NSF are nowhere closer to this figure, and you have to add the uncertainty of these positions (they are always short-term) and mobility demands (expect to move to a different university sooner or later). And of course, academic work longer hours and suffer a lot more psychological stress than car factory workers.

Where did things go this wrong? Do our markets demand cars, and not knowledge? Is education so unimportant in our current economy? These statistics are borderline insulting, no matter how you try to justify them.

 

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Posted in Announcements, Resources, Socializing | 8 Comments »