I have been a little extra busy this semester, helping to care for my new born son. As such, I have been taking a blog break. After five months it is time to get back in the habit of making regular blog postings.
On the professional front I have announced that in July I will be leaving my position in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take a new job on the faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It will be sad to leave MIT where I have made a home for nearly five years. It also means that I will be leaving my position as Housemaster for MIT\’s Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence, a position that my wife and I shared and have greatly enjoyed over the past three years. I am extremely excited and honored to have the opportunity to join the faculty at UPenn. The Annenberg School is truly an exceptional place with wonderful students and faculty. The move to ASC opens up new and great professional opportunities and is the ideal place to continue my research and develop new courses on the relationship between, place, community, new media and sociology.
Just when I though that cybercafés were a thing of the past… Question: What do the governments of Orange County, LA and China all have in common? Answer: A belief that cybercafes are dangerous to youth and society. See the artcle in The Register.
Google has come out with a wonderful new search tool, Google Scholar. I have always lauded the importance of the Social Science Citation Index to my students, but it is very possible that Google has out done the SSCI. According to the About Google Scholars webpage, Google includes \”peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.\” On the surface it sounds far more complete than the SSCI.