Tribalism

I'm writing this on a cold morning in Tennessee, where I'm attending a conference. It being a fall weekend, there's a lot of buzz about today's football game. The flags are out, the signs are up. Supporters of the visiting team have invaded the town - I know because of their sweatshirts and other clothing.

What is it about college sports, football in particular, that engenders such passion, especially among 'highly educated' graduates and faculty of colleges?

I'm sure that this isn't a new observation (I should peruse the sociology literature to see what's been done on this), but we identify with our colleges like people identify with tribes. The human instinct for competition makes us want to compete with a dominate other tribes. How do we do this? Since these particular tribes are more intelectual and social than warlike, we do it through our sports teams. What other way is there for my tribe (college) to compete with yours? It engenders pride at belonging to the victorious group. I think that's why sports such as football are so important to a college's psyche, and are so important for getting alumni to contribute money to the school. For those two reasons, we put up with the various other crap that comes along with fielding a football team.

Of course, there is the US News & World Report rankings, but we won't go there now.

Vista

Some initial thoughts on my 'upgrade' to Vista:

I now have 3gigs of RAM, but my damned video card is the slow link now. Never thought that would happen.

If you can, don't 'upgrade,' do a clean install. Mine failed both times I selected the upgrade option. After 2.5 hours of installation each time.

When it was finally done:

I guess that most of the improvements are under the hood, because there aren't really a lot of obvious changes. The look and feel is improved - I think this is where the need for the new graphics card comes in. Of course, they are once again copying the Mac OS here.

The sidebar is interesting, and long overdue. Again, a cue from Macs.

They've gone to putting all your personal files in a reasonably placed directory! C:\Users\Name
Wow! It's been since what, Windows 95 that I've been cursing the idiot who decided to hide the path to your personal files. In this regard, they're copying Unix.

I know that security is supposed to be better, but do I really have to go through two pop up confirmations each time I want to delete a file or access a control panel? I need to see if I can turn that off.

So in conclusion, yeah, it looks better, and probably works better, but most of the tangible improvements are just Microsoft catching up to Mac and Linux. But since I'm stuck with Windows, I'll take it.

The Terror

I must admit that my memory of the history of the French Revolution has gotten a bit vague. A lot of my specific memories of studies that I used to be able to call up instantly have gone that way. I shall indeed have to go back and refresh my memory - I had never made the link in my head between today and the Reign of Terror:

Bush's Dangerous Liaisons - NYTimes

I do though, have to wonder if the author made that title, or was it by an editor whose only knowledge of French history is the movie with John Malkovic? It makes no sense to me in the context of the article.

The origin of the word terrorist is indeed interesting...

Ah...(good) beer...

Nothing better than cask-conditioned ale!

“Bush lies” doesn’t cut it anymore.

Why does no one seem to care?

The "Good Germans" Among Us - Frank Rich, NYTimes

If you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention

I find it hard to believe that anyone is surprised by this. Maybe they're surprised that she actually came out and said it publicly, but everyone should know that this is what fundamentalists think of Jews...

Coulter: Christians as ‘Perfected Jews’ - NYTimes

Should I rejoice or weep?

After Years of Being Out, the Necktie Is In - NYTimes

Now I understand the airlines...

Just like the airlines, I try to pack as much into as little time as possible. They produce efficiency with their hub networks and their down to the minute scheduling. When it works, it's amazingly efficient. Of course the problem is, when one problem arises, it creates a series of cascading effects that propagates delays through the system.

Similarly, I try to pack so much into a day, that if one little thing goes wrong with the schedule...

Do you want half, or nothing?

It's the eternal risk/reward question: Do you go for the lesser prize which is the sure thing, or the ultimate prize which is a lot less certain? In this case, it seems a no brainer - the ultimate prize has no chance of happening:

Liberal Base Proves Trying to Democrats - NYTimes


An that brings up another topic - why is it so much easier for me to talk to people with whom I agree on nothing, than with people with whom I agree on much? I think it's because the people on "my" side, expect me to agree with them 100% of the time, which ain't going to happen, and the people on the "other" side know that we've got to talk about our disagreements civilly? I've given up talking to certain liberal friends of mine, because my nuanced disagreement on some issues infuriates them...

It's about time

I think about 8 years of an administration that lets the science go wherever it leads, be that in agreement with the politics or not, would be amazing. Maybe after that, subsequent administrations may find it more difficult to play fast and loose with the data. Pie in the sky? Maybe, but anything is better than the current situation.

The past eight years has just highlighted the fact that scientific freedom and objectivity is something that we scientists have taken or granted - something that I don't think we apppreciated nearly as much as we should have, until it was taken away.

If I can say one thing for the Bush administration, it's that they often did not even pretend to be evenhanded - and when things would blow up in their face, there was no way to deny what had been done. (Not that it stopped them.)

Protecting Science from the Government - NYTimes

Path not taken

Had I been born 20 years later, this is what I would have majored in:

Digital Forensics - NYTimes

New Highway typeface

Clearview Slideshow

A different view

Maybe this is how we should think about Iraq:

How a Revolution Saved an Empire

Damned mosquitos.

Another case of our not being able to accurately judge risk?

"To Spray or Not to Spray"
John Tierney's Blog - NYTimes

I'm going out to fog the backyard now, thank you...

What if we had a party, and no one came?

Large numbers of scientists (a small fraction of the world's population) will be waiting impatiently for the results when the new collider at Cern starts up. What they will see will be guaranteed to be incredible. Whatever comes out is going to set the direction for basic atomic research for the foreseeable future. I am not one who is confident of finding answers to 'life, the universe and everything,' though. My best guess is that the answers they find will spawn more questions at an even more fundamental level.

But what happens if there turns out to be nothing?

That would be, to me, by far the most interesting outcome. That would mean we've been thinking about these things in a completely wrong way for a very long time.

Of course, try and explain the excitement of a null result to a politician who has sunk millions into this....

New York Times:
A Giant Takes on Physics’ Biggest Questions

Well, of course...

If you don't have a good plan for how to use them, they won't work!

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
New York Times

"A handful of schools are abandoning one-to-one computing programs as educationally empty — and worse."

Technology is not a panacea. It is a tool. If you don't know how to use it well, it's pretty damned expensive and useless...

I wish I was this good with visualizations!

The topic is interesting by itself, by itself, but it's this guy's use of visual aids - animated graphs in particular, that make this amazing.

Is it worse to be right, or to be wrong?

I'm of two minds here. And I really don't want to be of either.

Scientists Detail Climate Changes

So, for years I've been one of the only people around here who studies things that are related to climate change. Peripherally, but still - I had a lot of schooling in that field, keep up with most of the research, etc.

The problem? All of a sudden, we go from a majority of people not caring, to this seeming tsunami of public opinion that we need to do something. (Is Al Gore the cause or just the lucky effectee of the change? Who knows?) In my gut, that's a problem, because I get really uncomfortable when mass public opinion swings my way - because I know the track record of mass public opinion.

So should that color my view of global climate change? No - it shouldn't. But it does.

I know exactly how complex the problem is. How non-linear. I always take such research with a healthy dose of skepticism. Not disbelief, but good, old-fashioned scientific "prove it to me" skepticism. Even as I weigh the evidence and decide that on the balance, humans are very likely the cause of the recent observed changes in climate, there's always that doubt, that realization that we may not be right. The remembering that it's dangerous to get on a bandwagon - you stop looking at the underlying premises and go blithely along.

What if we're wrong? Or what if we're just not right enough - that the earth's climate changes, but not enough to affect people enough for them (in the USA) to really care? What happens to the scientists who cried wolf?

So - do I hope that we're right - that humans are adversely affecting the earth's climate? Or that we're wrong - that the variations we're seeing are somehow natural and will swing back soon? Damned by public opinion in one case, damned by nature in the other.

Damn.

D'oh!

Too much going on lately, but this is a classic:

The Evolution of Homer

Don't blink, you might miss it...

Here is probably the one news story you'll ever see about space weather, from the Washington Post.

It's an article about how a new NASA satellite is able to monitor the sun and predict the arrival of high energy particles from solar eruptions. Of course, had the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory malfunctioned or didn't make it into space, you'd be hearing for weeks about how incompetent NASA is.

So - three silent cheers for NASA!

Environmental Heresies

OK, so how is it that I'd never heard of Stewart Brand?

A flame by any other name...

From the NYTimes:
Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior

Apparently flaming is now called the "Online Disinhibition Effect." How long do you think before it's added to the APA's Manual of Mental Disorders? Sorry, it wasn't my fault, it was ODE.

No, I'm just being silly.

Really.

Please don't ODE me!

Whoa Phaeton...

Kerry Emmanuel, a climate researcher at MIT, has written an excellent piece on Global Climate Change in the Boston Review, entitled Phaeton's Reins, a reference to the Greek mythological character who had a slight accident, joyriding in Helios's Sun Chariot.

The article gives an overview of complexities of the science, along with a history of the research and political controversy. It's one of those articles where I'm saying:

"Yes!... Great point... Well said... Yes again... wait...WTF?"

At almost the end, after taking lots of people to task for ignoring or denying the problem, he turns his attention to us scientists:

"Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank."

Kerry boy, I was with ya right up until the end. I'm not exactly sure what this blanket statement is supposed to mean.

Is he talking about academic scientists? Probably not - he's already skewered those scientists on the left and right who would warp scientific facts to further their agenda, and he states "A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers."

I'm not sure why he threw this in: is our reputation for good science supposed to improve if more conservatives start taking jobs in academia?

He must be talking about the university faculty as a whole? Anecdotally, I'll agree that I've seen some of this, but not to the extent suggested by right-wing pundits. And the well-documented part is exagerated too. Yeah, most surveys show there's more Democratic faculty than Republican, but there's a sizable number of us independents who'd like to think we're exactly that. It's a bit ironic that a researcher who is so critical of people not taking the time to understand complex systems seems to do the same thing himself in that one part.

But it's still a good article.

Kansas comes in from the cold - requires teaching real science again.

From the NYTimes

Should they use pencil this time? I sure hope not. This is no way to run a school system.

I can see an editorial cartoon in my head: two groups of people fighting over the ctrl-z (undo/redo) key on a computer.

Does Lecturing need defending?

Just read this feature in Change magazine by Mary Burgan: In Defence of Lecturing.
I'm a bit stunned, not that I'm hearing that (I hear that from some colleagues frequently), but that I'm reading such an ill-reasoned piece in what's usually a good magazine.

Lecturing has its place in the classroom - as one of a variety of pedagogical methods to choose from, depending on the situation. Where it becomes a problem, and where many seem to become defensive, is when it is the only technique that is used.

The problem with Dr. Burgan's piece is not that it makes a case for the advantages of lecture in the classroom, but that it uses rhetorical devices more worthy of talk radio than an academic. The article creates 'straw-man' opponents - characterizing the views of active-learning proponents as extreme and silly. Yes, I would have a problem with any type of learning strategy where the student got no guidance at all from the instructor and there was no structure to the class. But is the only alternative to that full lecture? Most faculty who hold the middle ground would disagree.


She quotes Pinker, stating that constructivism is "a mixture of Piaget's psychology with counterculture and postmodernist ideology." If you can't produce a sound counter-argument, resort to name-calling.

She seems to feel that it is neccesary for students to be in lecture to get the experience of being in the presence of a master: "Even more fundamentally, I believe, students benefit from seeing education embodied in a master learner who teaches what she has learned." Did I miss something - is an instructor who uses techniques other than lecture not doing the same thing?


Blech. I'd better stop before I start using the same rhetorical techniques. (If I haven't already.)

Can you tell what I'm thinking?

I had forgotten that this was at Princeton.

Best line:

“If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”

That's right. After 28 years of proving that ESP is indistinguishable from random chance, we never will.

PhDs

So what does it mean to have a PhD?

What it means is that you're pretty damned good at school.

It means that you're an expert - at least in a small area of expertise.

It means that you wrote a dissertation, supposedly adding to the sum of human knowledge.

It doesn't mean that you know everything, though many of my colleagues (and I'm sure yours) seem to think so. Every been in a room full of PhDs? (I'm thinking about faculty senate or a department meeting) We all seem to think that we're experts in everything.

Of course, I am an expert in everything... ;-)

Testing...Testing...Is this thing on?

I'm supposed to be good at these things. We'll see.

Questions:

Will I stay at it this time?

Will anyone care?