PhD Blues

I was trying to take care of some paperwork for school today so I was browsing around the Wayne State webpage. I ended up on their PhD students webpage. This page contains forms and information that all PhD students at Wayne State will need. There are timelines of what needs to be done when, forms you will need to fill out, oh and what is that there at the bottom?

Feeling Blue? I wonder what is behind that link.

Oh yes, depression counselling. So included with all the other forms and stuff you need to know, a helpful link to the school counselor and what looks like a dedicated support group for PhD students. It is nice to know that depression is a an inevitable consequence of getting a PhD. My only question, is this limited to getting the PhD or does this extend to having a PhD also?

The Real Wikipedia

I was poking around on wikipedia today, trying to see what the traffic was like to some of the MRI pages. I found this page that has the most visited wikipedia pages broken down by month. The top few are obvious, the front page and a few different search pages, after that some current events, swine flu, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, etc. If you keep reading it quickly becomes a mix or random pages but you start noticing that many of the top pages form a common theme: sex, list of sex positions, human penis size, I could keep listing them but I think you get the picture. Looking at previous months the articles about current events changed but the sex articles were always on the list.

Wikipedia is supposed to be this fount of human knowledge. A huge encyclopedia were you can learn about nearly anything. After all of this effort to create it we find out that people would have been 90% happy with a few pages about human reproduction and some current events.

(By the way I later found this site which lists traffic for individual pages and found out the SWI page gets 400-500 hits a month.)