I am treating myself to a morning of unrepentant surfing. Here's what I've found:
Jessica Valenti writes about PTSD after the permature birth of her daughter.
I loved the New York Times magazine article about a dog who helps a kid with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. FAS is a huge worldwide problem. Within in the US, Alaska has the most problems with FAS and has some excellent legislation to help those kids and work on education. Hmmm. Maybe I should write about that next.
Long work hours cause depression.
The gifts of dyslexia.
Factoid of the Day: Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue.
Michael Bérubé is the hero of all adjuncts. Last week, he published an essay on the MLA website with salary recommendations for adjuncts. He wrote, "…the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011–12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. " See more at Copy & Paste.
Very sad about Susan Niebur, WhyMommy.
Apt. 11d 
If you do an article on FAS, can you include something around Fetal Alcohol Effects? It isn’t the full blown FAS but has symptoms that are similar. I have often wondered how much of middle class/upper class learning challenges MAY be due to FA effects. And diagnosed as something different because of the class differences.
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There’s an incipient theory out there that PTSD could be a maladaptive brain response to a traumatic experience, that the trauma allows the normal learning process to be super-amped to the point that the experience becomes stored in a way that we don’t want experiences to be stored in the brain (any experience, but traumatic one’s even more so). A possible treatment is to give certain neurotransmitter blockers that can inhibit learning (I think they’re normally some form of tranquilizer). It isn’t usually useful, because it has to be given before the experience occurs, so, it doesn’t work for a violent crime (which you would prevent if you could predict it).
But, if it’s really true that PTSD often follows traumatic births, I wonder if treatment might actually be useful. All the medical needs might prohibit usefulness (i.e. baby, mother, anesthetics), but it’s an idea worth thinking of for a pharma.
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Urgh, sorry for the “its”;
The theory isn’t usually practical, because the drug intervention has to occur before the traumatic experience occurs (and, if you knew when the trauma would occur, you would prevent it). But, in the case of premature deliveries, one might be able to predict a traumatic event that one cannot prevent and use the drug.
(The exercise of finding antecedents is good for me, though probably annoying for all of you)
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I don’t know very much about adjuncts, but I confess those articles didn’t make me very sympathetic. Nobody ever promised, or even suggested, that a Master’s degree leads to a good academic job: you can either consider the year or two you invested as a life enrichment experience, before going off to law school, or you can become a schoolteacher. And to say that the market doesn’t produce fair results in a situation involving employees with advanced degrees and non-profit employers is to say that the market doesn’t work ever, which is the counsel of despair, since we know no better mechanism.
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I kind of agree with y81, though I’m not sure that not-for-profits + advanced degrees is the situation that the problem should be the in which the market operates the best.
There is often a lot of wailing in these discussions because things don’t work out the way particular people wanted them to, and that doesn’t constitute a market failure. The adjunct market will change when people stop being willing to adjunct, and, unlike the mcdonald’s worker. Adjuncts need to find other things to do. Tenured professors need to decide that hiring the adjunct to teach so that they can write their book is exploitation.
And, in related matters, scientist need to stop providing free labor to Elsevier so that it can then use the profit on their labor to prevent access to their work (by lobbying congress).
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