Archive for September, 2005
September 14, 2005 at 7:21 am · Filed under Uncategorized
From “Here’s What Gets Me”:
I want him to have been consumed with grief and sorrow at the dying that was ongoing, and he wasn’t. I want him to have felt like a profound failure because an entire segment of the population of one of America’s greatest cities was suffering and was at risk of starving to death, but he didn’t. I want him to have been embarrassed when the FEMA director gave up the information that FEMA knew less about the convention center than CNN, but he wasn’t. I want him not to have smirked his way through the entire experience, and he did.
It’s a shrill essay. But this morning it seems that it suits.
(Via Frogs and Ravens.)
September 13, 2005 at 9:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Or, Garrison Keillor Unable to Tell Which One is the Hole in the Ground:
Me: “Listen, you really don’t want to do this. I highly suggest you tell your client to revoke this cease and desist.”
Him: “Why?”
Me: “First off, your client has no legal basis for this, and it’s clear you’re just trying to bully me. Secondly, this is going to make your client look extremely out of touch. I’ll even write the headline for you: ‘Liberal Comedian Sues Blogger.’ Do you really want that?”
Him: “Is that a threat, Mr. Sorgatz?”
(Via Warren Ellis.)
September 13, 2005 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Should you be chosen for this position, and accept the offer, at what point in your tenured career should you expect the notion of the University as it exists today to disappear, or at least cease being meaningful?
What plans do you have for that moment?
How will you help bring it about?
September 13, 2005 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I ride the bus to campus, most days. This entails standing in queues with undergraduate students, graduate students, and maybe some young faculty. [Old faculty appear only to ride their bicycles, or sleep in their offices. I hypothesize this because everybody I see driving a car is on the phone at that hour, and in my experience older faculty do not have phones with them. QED] If they’re not in the queue with me, then they’re striding past on their way from Hither Commons to Yon 1201 South.
Anyway, almost every one of these people [even the ones on phones] are carrying a satchel, rucksack, portfolio, briefcase, backpack, or steamer trunk on wheels. Except for those particularly efficient young persons who appear to be capable of making do with just rolled-up drugstore spiral notebook, a well-chewed Bic ball point and a baseball cap cocked at 48° from true — alternately a tiny fringed glistening purse containing the void left when the phone was removed, some sort of overwhelming Fragrant Source, and a small quantity of Lycra — everybody has one or more books.
For tractability’s sake, let us define four classes of pedestrians, identified by sight and differentiated by the number of schoolbooks they are probably carrying: no_books, few_books, some_books, and many_books. We will model the number of books carried by a member of a given class as a random variable defined by a triangular probability distribution with nodes (0,0,3), (0,3,6), (1,5,9) and (4,7,11) respectively. These numbers (which represent the min, mode and max of the distribution) are of course based on pure common sense, plus the detailed sampling I performed in the course of an afternoon (N=3. Plus me).
With overwhelmingly earnest diligence, I have compiled the following observations, collected primarily during the commuting periods of the last three school days, and also while I was drinking a smoothie of some sort (I’m about 30% sure it was mango):
- no_books: 42
- few_books: 71
- some_books: 55
- many_books: 39
Now if I know one thing, it’s books, and own many of just the sort being carried around by these people. Schoolbooks fall into two main categories: Dover literature, and clay-coated technical doorstop. The former weighs in at about 300 grams on average, while the latter is typically more like a kilogram or two at least. About 1/10 of the books on offer this semester at the University bookstore were paperback, and 9/10 doorstop.
Presuming that at this Large Midwestern University there are about 5000 people walking around on a given morning, and that all of them carry satchels filled with books according to the distribution implied by the data above, and that every person has to get from Hither Commons to Yon 1002 or vice versa, a distance of 500 meters on average: How much effort should we require faculty instructors to expend in trying to compile free, online courseware?
Lazy thoughtless slaves of the Intellectual-Publishing Complex. No, not you, the other faculty members. Surely not you. Think of all that stupid matter being packed around. Think of how many students are stupid enough to just highlight the hell out of it, making it useless for future students? How many will keep it, just in case. How many will throw it away, leaf by leaf, from the highest window in Blatz Hall the day of their final exam.
Is it so hard to type stuff? To say interesting things that the students write down? If you must force students to use a book in class, why not have a few copies on a shelf in the classroom so they don’t need to drag them around in circles all year? Aren’t they supposed to be listening to your crystalline orthoepy and gleaning dingleberries of wisdom from your mellifluous pronouncements?
Or do you just make them scared enough that they use the book as a fetish object to keep you at bay?
It’s not like you make money on these books yourselves, after all. Even if you wrote one. You are just their vector.
Extra credit: How much bonus cash money should be given to a faculty member for developing a free, online course package for their class? Assume 100 students a year are taught, the average book (of either type) costs $50 [PDF link], the courseware can be used for 5 years, and the cost of books will increase by 10% per annum indefinitely. Hint: you may find it useful to consider the physical work done in transporting this weight of books over this period, and estimate the cost of labor at the present minimum wage.
Alternately, how much should the pay of thoughtless instructors, who merely pick three thick books from a catalog, be docked?
September 8, 2005 at 12:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Shopping for textbooks, I’ve stopped in at three bookstores on campus. Just for fun. No, really — I always like to stroll up and down the aisles and get a feel for what all the people in all the various colleges and their departments are assigning. Now and then I even pick up a neat-looking Machine Learning, Molecular Dynamics, or History of Science book. So sue me; I’m a pan-geek.
My wife was with me this last time. She pointed out, as she often does, something I missed entirely. There are, like, seventeen different “Introduction to Probability and Statistics” textbooks, scattered in the Biz School, Engineering, Medicine, Biology, Psychology, Social Sciences, Applied Math, and for all I know Art History shelves [I did see Guns, Germs and Steel as an assigned reading in one very interesting Art History class].
Many of these are, by implication, remedial Probability and Statistics — for graduate students, in many cases, but also for “advanced” undergraduates. And that is so wrong, it hurts. Practical, modern probability and statistics courses should be required at the entry level in all curricula. Period. I say quit futzing with calculus for anybody but mathematics majors, and get everybody tight with R.
Oh, and as I recall there was not one Probability and Stats books in the Elementary Education shelves.
September 8, 2005 at 11:08 am · Filed under Uncategorized
After enjoying this excellent essay on teaching composition by thoughtful collaborative editing, I’m afraid I’m left with one niggling earworm of a question: If there’s a clearly-defined inductive mode, and a deductive mode… what would the abductive mode be?
I wonder.
September 8, 2005 at 9:34 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Nota bene: Ivan Tribble made me write this. Just to see what happens.
So, like many readers, yesterday was my first day of school. My last first day.
I’ve been reading a lot of similar-sounding first sentences about “first day” among my closely-linked neighbors in the blogosphere. But they’re mainly attending to lecture preparation, what to wear (!?), and pedagogic style, and dealing with students.
I, on the other hand, had to buy the last few books, get my student email account activated, and find the right classrooms. And [here's where I really start to pay for non-anonymity] not fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon session.
Regular readers may be confused. See, what they might be confused about is that last year at about this time I had my penultimate first day of school: I started up as a brand new 40-year-old Nontraditional Graduate Student in the Ph.D. program in Industrial & Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Then in October I withdrew completely, because a number of family members and close friends were suddenly sick and dying. And life trumps school.
[Dyed-in-the-wool academic readers, whether graduate students or faculty, should be admonished always to remember that: life trumps school. They are and always should remain different things, and it to their credit that my department, its Chair and most of the faculty understand and emphasize this fact from new-student orientation onwards: the worst thing in the world to do is keep on diligently forging ahead, grit your teeth and show some guts, and let your life (which can always go more badly than it is now) drive your academic career into the ground. It's always easier and smarter to take time off from school to deal with life, than it is to take time off from life and stick to school. I made the wrong choice once before in my life, in the almost-Ph.D. in Biology that dangles like a withered limb from my antepenultimate first day of school; it really did not work out well for me, even though I expect the department is merrily chugging along much as it was fifty years ago.]
[And the same goes for "work" of other sorts, too, by the way. There's nothing special about the academy.]
At any rate, by mutual consent my department and I agreed that yesterday was actually also a first day, and we are all effectively amnesiac about last year. In this context, I see that this coming Patriot Day Sunday I turn 41. [Happy goddamned birthday to me]. As my little nod to midlife crisis, yesterday’s foray into Linear Programming, Discrete Event Simulation, and Decision Support Systems is unilaterally denoted the Last Try for Graduate Education. Excepting this Ph.D. in IOE, the only degrees I’m gonna get henceforth will be honorary.
Motivation for graduate school? Especially given the obvious chip on my shoulder?
Am I a straggler of the dotcom refugee wave of the Aughties, or the first harbinger of the Big Rusty Iron refugee wave of the Teens? In fact both of those, and neither: we started a great little dotcom, but aborted it by choice when we saw the writing on the funding wall. And I got loads of cash consulting for Big Iron companies, but have been telling them for more than a decade that they’d better learn their way around agile and adaptive machine-learning based management and design models, but to no avail. And so now I have decided to dance a little sidestep around my project champions in-company, and send my message roundabout… let’s just say via an “external source”.
And also I’m a theorist trapped in the body of a Highly Paid Consultant: I want the institutions I’m supposedly helping to think and learn, not just react and write stuff down. I want to express the fundamental structure of search spaces, and predict the graph transforms imposed by subtle modifications of search methods’ parameters. There’s no suitable ontology to date for describing the intricate interplay of an engineering problem, the representation we select, the search method we apply, and the performance measures we invoke to gauge success. And basically there’s not enough people thinking about metaheuristics, about what they actually are. And there are not enough Philosophers of Engineering. And it’s time to talk freely and openly about biological design. None of which I can do as a Suit, even in the lala-land of corporate research. (Well, OK, maybe at Google or Microsoft).
And also I’m an old fart who got in really, really deep optimism-cooking hot water for talking out of context (because there was no context) about “biological engineering” and “applications of search and optimization in synthetic biomedical systems” in a Biology department (of all places) the early 90s, who now finds he can sign up for goddamned classes in the exact same stuff we used to suggest in grant proposals as things that might eventually maybe be interesting and feasible. Hell, I bet I proofread or reviewed some of the papers in the bibliography of the readings in this class….
And also because it’s time to put my money — which is today reduced to my time and attention — where my mouth has been for a decade.
And also because being a graduate student, or an underfunded junior professor, or a research-loving fresh-tenured prof who’s unknowingly next in line for a chairmanship, or a committee-burdened department chairman, or a director of a Center sucks so very much. No, really. It really, in context, sucks. I am friend to all these people, and they all wrestle with organizational and institutional issues that should and can be fixed. And the fact that something you love sucks, but may, with ambition and skill and lots of luck, be fixed, is enough to make it worth the attempt.
So. “Nontraditional student”. Yeah. I’m sure we all know what that phrase means. It’s a handy descriptor for people like me: coming back to the academic fold, after having been subjected to a family or a job or some other Nontraditional obstruction to the right and proper expected course of education. Delayed along the way, having as a result a terribly reduced bibliography and very bad attitudes about how many hours a student should be expected to work, or how much they should be paid, or what to expect from an instructor.
Yup. I’m definitely firmly flying under the flag of Nontraditional. Because, after all, it gives one excellent cover.
September 6, 2005 at 7:16 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Radagast has compiled a list of offers of aid turned away by those with responsibility and power in managing homeland security, emergencies, and the like. You should scroll through it and read, I think.
I’ve wondered for some time how institutions make decisions. On the one hand, there is almost always somebody in charge in most modern institutions: a leader with a plan, or a committee empowered with oversight, and the vast majority of the decision-making power of the institution rests ultimately with those few. By the other argument, any institution of sufficient complexity must be e collective, and as such can be thought of as possessing a kind of unique and separate consciousness from that of any nominal leaders, and of “doing” things autonomously that are not explicit parts of any component person’s plans.
So on the one hand, a CEO or chief of some other sort sets the course of the institution and directs it, driving it towards explicit goals which are defined by committees and boards and constituents, but which in general that Big Boss person keeps in mind and uses to flavor every decision. In this sense, even very complex institutions are directed by individual will and choice, and while not driven as explicitly as a more straightforward and simple machine might be, an institution is nonetheless much like a complicated machine with a very difficult set of controls, with one responsible (a thoughtful planner) sitting before them twiddling the knobs.
On the other hand, institutions are real collectives of many people and overlapping component groups, undertaking projects and addressing concerns locally as each individual participant does some balanced combination of what they’re told and what their experience says is best to get their part of the work done. In this context, what we see as a collective “consciousness” of the institution emerges from the aggregate behavior of the people involved, and in a truly complex organization can be said to differ from and exceed the understanding of any one person’s actual vision or plan — including the nominal director or an outside observer. Organizations modeled in this way can present us with purposive-seeming behavior that does not sound like any part of the explicit plans of the individuals nominally in charge, but which rather sound like part of the “plan” of the institution itself. In this framework, institutions have intentions of their own, as well as desires and beliefs and all those other attributes of agents proper.
And you know what? Seen in either framework, FEMA and the current administration in the larger sense scare the hell out of me. There are three choices, I think: (1) They have planned or are now planning to act and respond in exactly this way, and so far everything is going according to plan or is a response to correct the plan of some central person in charge; (2) there is nobody in charge in any real sense, and this bureaucratic nightmare government that increasingly smacks of fascism is in fact driving itself, with us in its clutches, somewhere it wants to go; or (3) the institution is dead or somnolent, broken into pieces by neglect or intention, having been cut up or loose into to less-effectual independent components who do what they can with what they have, but are uncoordinated on all sides and levels.
Did I miss one?
September 5, 2005 at 7:56 am · Filed under Uncategorized
AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth:
Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.
September 3, 2005 at 10:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES quotes the Red Cross’s statement on why they are not in New Orleans, including:
* The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.
September 3, 2005 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Leiter Reports: The Right is not Coping with Bush’s Failure on the Hurricane Disaster…and Why Now is the Perfect Time to Assign Blame and Responsibility:
When there are no consequences for gross dereliction of public responsibilities, we are likely to see such dereliction again and again.
Read it
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