I went to school at Shi-Lin before I came to United State. To read your writing makes me feel good.
Have a great stay at Taiwan.

I’m going to blog about it in a few minutes

Believe it or not I am in the process of applying to finish my PhD in the US and have been told that the states is the place to be in terms of money and research. Of course this depends on the job you are to receive and how ambitious you are in terms of research/publications. As my field is in Art Education there is a lot more money in the US than in Canada.

You note that in the U.S:
“By rank, the average was $91,548 for professors, $65,113 for associate professors, $54,571 for assistant professors, $39,899 for instructors, and $45,647 for lecturers”

In Canada, the average assistant professor makes $62 000 (if you teach at an actual university and not a “university college”). The average full professor makes about 90-95 K.Check out this link from Statistics Canada:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-595-m/81-595-m2004019-eng.pd

And in Canada your benefits are benefit and you will never have to go bankrupt paying your medical bills (since we have socialized health care).

I know many people who have worked as assistant professors (tenure track) in the states and started with salaries of about $35,000 (before taxes).

Of course there is also the issue that academic jobs are drying up much more in the states than in Canada because of the economic crisis. I know someone who was on the hiring committee for a Maritime university. The hire was last year and they were inundated with applications from the U.S. (far outnumbering Canadians). The job went to a Canadian however.

When I read your blog about your former friend using your photo, it reminded me somewhat about the struggle I had with 3 websites who will remain unnamed and their refusal to delete information that I had posted under my full name about 5 or 6 years ago.

The information I posted was not damning or insulting to any individual or any company, but as an author about to be published, I felt it necessary to remove any unwanted information from the internet that I had posted previously.

This was a lot tougher than what I had first thought! Without wanting to go into details about all this, 2 websites eventually complied with me after a lot of persuasion and the 3rd of these websites and I were very close to court action over the whole drama.

The experience I went through did get particularly nasty even though I was dealing with long established professional websites. The battle raged for just under 6 months with the third site, that was until I decided that I had lost enough patience and sleep over the whole thing. I bluffed that I had an appointment with a team of solicitors about another matter the next day and even gave them the name of a law firm, fake appointment time etc. I said if the information in question was not removed before the scheduled appointment that I saw it fit to add the greivance to my existing legal battle over another privacy matter.

When I got up the following morning to go to work, I checked the website in question and the information that we had been arguing over had vanished! I was so shocked at the fact that they had been able to erase it all along even though they kept fobbing me off with things like ‘we do not have an IT representative to handle your querie’ etc etc.

Even though your web experience concerns your photography, to me it is just the same thing… Websites using your stuff, purely because they can.

My advice is to be very careful over what you put on the internet. Be very careful especially if your name is attached to it. You just never know when it will come back and haunt you!

Anonymous! See I have learned my lesson!