Friday Quick Hits and Varia

The countdown to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is official on, so we'll spend today running errands and making final preparations for a Monday departure.  In the meantime, you can enjoy a little bevy of quick hits:

• I love reports and statistics, so I was pretty excited when the 2010 University of North Dakota Sophomore Satisfaction Survey was released by our Office of Institutional Research.
• If you share my worry about the state of graduate education in the U.S., the you certainly need to read the latest report of from the Council of Graduate Schools.  And, for more info on Graduate Education, you should certainly bookmark, the other blog in our household: The UND Graduate School Blog.  It's curious that the Chronicle of Higher Education does not feature a blog on Graduate Education in the US.
• Teaching Thursday begins its summer semi-slumber this next week.  We'll keep posting throughout the summer (perhaps not with the same regularity), but our readers move on to more summer related tasks like mowing the lawn, family vacations, and neglected research projects.  Before you go, be sure to read the last installment in our series of First Year Teaching Reflections.
• Ghosts of North Dakota continue to update their growing catalogue of photographs of abandoned North Dakota towns. Their most recent trip through the "abandoned" landscape of North Dakota produced some pretty brilliant results.
• While the PKAP blogosphere is about to return to bloom, it is now joined by some new Mediterranean fieldwork blogs.  I'm keeping an interested eye on my old buddy Rangar Cline's Under the Umbrian Sun blog which will document their work at the excavations at Vicus ad Martis Tudertium.
• In recent weeks, the Penn State student run blog Onward State has attracted a good bit of media attention.  Being involved in re-imagining the University of North Dakota's web presence, I am not sure that the imperiously named "Web Oversight Council" fully understands the potential power of a site like Onward State and its ability to influence the image of the university on the internets. 

Off to run errands!