Saturday, October 10, 2015

Scheduling a meeting with me

As of September 16, I am the Director of the Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, as well as Director of TREC, PSU's transportation research and education center. This has made my schedule and inbox crazier than ever. People often want to meet with me. They convey that in an email. That email can generate several other emails trying to identify a day and time. This phenomenon is discussed in this great post about scheduling meetings. Here are the three best ways to try to schedule a meeting with me:

1. Sign up for office hours.
If you are a current PSU student, I have some blocks of time on my calendar set aside for office hours. Click here to find them. If they work for you, grab one. It's yours.

2. Make an appointment by looking at my google calendar.
If you are a student or employee at PSU (i.e. you have a pdx.edu email address), go your your pdx.edu google calendar (cal.pdx.edu). Make sure you're logged on with your pdx.edu address and not a gmail address. The systems are separate. Go to the bottom left area where it says "Other Calendars." There is a box below to "Add a coworker's calendar." If you don't see it, click the arrow to make it show up. Type in jdill@pdx.edu. You'll see my calendar and all the times I already have meetings (labeled as "busy"). Find a time that works for you and that I am not busy. Add a calendar item to your calendar and invite me as a guest. You could explain the meeting in the description box or in an invitation email. Make the appointment title descriptive, e.g. "Jane Smith and J. Dill meet about draft dissertation." If the day and time doesn't work for me, even though my calendar indicates it might, I'll decline and send a message with other options. Otherwise, I'll accept and we're all set.

3. Send an email, but with some suggested days and times.
If you are not a PSU student or employee, you can't see my google calendar. Sorry, it's just the way the PSU system is set up. Send me an email explaining what you want to meet about and three possible days and times. Please make them at least a week out.

Unless you or I specify otherwise, we'll meet in my USP faculty office -- room 370P of the Urban Center on the PSU campus. Enter through the main office for the School, room 350.

Friday, August 21, 2015

#ILookLikeAPlanningProfessor update

Well, that was short-lived. The image of planning professors is now nearly all male. This may reveal that Google's image search takes recent hits/clicks/activity into account, but if that activity is not sustained, those images drop down. 


Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Maybe I do #LookLikeAPlanningProfessor

After I tweeted the photo of the Google image search results for planning professor (an all male result), it also got shared and discussed on an email list of planning faculty. That must have prompted several people to do the search themselves and, I assume, click on the women they found in the results. Today, two days later, the results are very different.


Monday, August 10, 2015

#DoILookLikeAPlanningProfessor?

Earlier today I read about the #ILookLikeAProfessor activity on Twitter and elsewhere bringing light to diversity in my profession. When I looked at the tweets with the hashtag, there were a couple that included Google image searches of English Professor and History Professor. The results were all white men. That prompted me to do a Google image search on Planning Professor. I didn't think my field would be as bad as those, but it wasn't much better. The screen was filled with men, though not all white.

Embedded image permalink

I realize that my Google search will get different images than yours. And, in full disclosure I will note that when I scrolled down to row 5 (below my screen shot), two women appeared. But as I kept scrolling, the gender balance didn't improve very much. I don't believe that it reflects the make-up of planning faculty in the U.S. I even noted that about six of my Portland State colleagues showed up, all men. That's despite the fact that we have 9 women and 13 men listed on our website, all with the same profile pages from where those images came.

Obviously underlying this is Google's search engine that produces these results. I don't know enough about how that works to hypothesize why the results are turning out this way. But, I may try to explore it more. In particular, I want to make sure that there is not something PSU is doing with their website that skews the results in a unintentional, but problematic way.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Seven quick things I learned about bicycling nationally

I recently completed a national poll of people living in urban areas in conjunction with the National Association of Realtors® on Community and Transportation Preferences. The overall results are posted here. The survey included 3,000 adults living in the 50 largest urban areas in the U.S. (That includes suburban areas, as well as denser urban cores.)