Year in Review

July has started and so the last academic year is officially in the past. A few weeks ago I completed my annual workload report, and I thought it might be interesting to use some of the data I gathered while preparing it to make a year-in-review post. Some bloggers I know do this at the end of the calendar year, but it seems that the end of the academic year is also a good time.

• Courses Taught: Calculus I, Theory and Application of Complex Networks, Introduction to Chaos and Fractals, and Calculus II. In a usual year I teach five courses. I only taught four this year because I had a one-trimester sabbatical this spring.
  
  
• Average Class Size: 20. This is small for most schools, but very high for COA. In most years there are only one or two faculty with a larger average class size.
  
  
• Number of Advisees: 14, although I lost a few and gained a few over the year.
  
  
• Independent Studies, Tutorials, Senior Projects: I taught one (very fun) tutorial this year and supervised one senior project. I also assisted on two other senior projects.
  
  
• Committee Work: Anthropology Search Committee (Search Canceled), Admission Committee, Academic Priorities Group of the Academic Program Review. I also coordinated the Maine Space Grant Consortium Student Research Fellowships and am COA's liaison to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellowship.
  
  
• Scholarly Presentations. 2, although one of the two is a series of five lectures that I gave in China.
  
  
• Peer-Reviewed Publications. 1. Feldman, McTague, and Crutchfield, The organization of intrinsic computation: Complexity-entropy diagrams and the diversity of natural information processing. Chaos. 18:043106. 2008.
  
  
• Book Review: 1. Review of Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems: A Primer by Claudius Gros. Physics Today. July 2009.
  
  
• Book in Progress: My proposal for an introductory textbook on Chaos and Fractals was accepted by Oxford University Press. Deadline is October 15. Current draft is around 275 and I expect the final version to be around 375. Most of the draft was written a few years ago. This year I've written around 75 pages. I have a lot of work to do the next few months.
  
  
• Papers in Progress: 1. Hopefully it will be submitted in a few weeks.
  
  
• Papers and Proposals Refereed: 7.
  
  
• Grants Written: 3. One has been funded ($5000), two are pending ($956,000) and ($150,000).
  
  
• Countries Traveled to: 5. (China, Germany, Poland, The Netherlands, Canada)
  
  
• Letters of Recommendation: 47 total letters for 16 different students.
  
  
• Emails Sent: At least 2418. A little under seven a day. This is just the email from my coa.edu account. This doesn't include email from any of my other accounts.
  
  
• Emails Received and Saved: At least 2016. I don't know an easy way of figuring out how many emails I received and deleted. I'd guess I only end up saving 1 in 10 emails. If so, then I received around 20,000 emails, or an average of around 55 a day. Again this is only for my coa.edu account.
  
  
• Tweets Tweeted: 363.
  
  
• Blog Entries: 35. This is a lot less than the last few years. Twitter has been distracting me from blogging. My interest in blogging has waned somewhat.
  
  

All in all, I guess it's been a pretty productive year. It doesn't quite feel that way, but looking back, it wasn't that bad. I had hoped to have one more paper submitted by now and be a little farther along on the textbook.