Journeys of an Academic

Returning to the blogosphere

2010-03-11T08:44:00.002-05:00

Hello everyone. Wow, it's dusty around these parts; it's been quite a while!

I have taken several months away from the blogosphere, trying to think about why I would be engaging with it in the first place. When I started blogging here, I found a bit of a community that over time has shifted as people progress through different life stages. In my time away, I started working with Twitter (because posts of 140 characters are much easier to come up with and the platform allowed me to send reasonable text messages to international friends), I discovered I missed blogging, and I decided that it's probably best to close "Journeys of an Academic" in favor of a different blogging voice.

My new blog takes a markedly different angle on things, pulling strongly from some of the attitudes I cultivated here when discussing "Cultural Insanity" and incorporating more parts of how I see the world than really fit into this space.

If you want the new blog address to follow me there, you're welcome to email me at academiccrossroads at gmail dot com. The old blog will stay up unless I start getting spam comments through the roof.

So thanks for reading me here! And I am back in a different corner of the blogosphere. Let me know if you want to know where I can be found!

Not from this angle!

2009-10-10T09:25:00.002-04:00

In my email this morning, I found two articles that hit two issues where I have significant interest. I first read Joseph Ganem's article on A Math Paradox: The Widening Gap between High School and College Math, and then I read Randy Kennedy's piece called Capturing a Nation's Thirst for Energy. Ironically, both articles focus on the nature of perspective. Joseph Ganem writes from his perspective as a father of three and a physics professor; Randy Kennedy works as a NY Times arts columnist.

Joseph Ganem makes an observation that, in an increasing measure, high school mathematics instruction compounds "difficult" with "rigorous" riding high on the press for academic standards in mathematics. Given his background as a physics professor, his stories of how he sought to explain mathematical concepts to his children are eye-opening, particularly as he notes that his children saw problems in middle school that he would have not assigned until his upper-division physics students. From my own vantage point, I have met untold number of adults who are surprised to consider the thought that one can reason strategically around numerical relationships. If we do not teach middle-school students to do middle-school math, then why are we surprised when they struggle to employ concepts and foundations from this developmental stage of numerical reasoning?

In Randy Kennedy's article, we meet photographer Mitch Epstein. As an artist, Mitch works to capture the American culture. The images strike a chord with me as they convey a poignancy that communicate some of the deep grief I experience around themes explored. However, the resistance Mitch encountered to his photographs reflected a strong protectionist spirit, suggesting that the systems should be above critique. And I guess I am amazed that I am not remotely surprised. He takes pictures that reflect Americans' relationship with energy. However if we do not think critically about our relationship with energy, then why are we surprised when we struggle to find a new way forward?

And I guess what I would most like to see is a general broadening of these conversations where we consider what different, and perhaps unconventional, perspectives can help us see what we could do different.

31 Days of Awesome

2009-10-03T08:36:00.002-04:00

It's October regardless of that a few days have passed before I got this post authored. Things have been incredibly busy with just about everyone feeling overextended and over-committed. But it's October still the same, and thus, we have seen the opening of one of my favorite blogosphere events: the Donors Choose Social Media Challenge.

Last year I learned about Donors Choose through SciWo and Alice at Sciencewomen on ScienceBlogs. Donors Choose is an online charity that allows teachers to request supplies they deem absolutely essential to learning experiences. And some of the proposals really are about essentials like desks, pencils, and paper. Other proposals are about essentials like books, experimental supplies, and frogs. Some proposals involve a hot new idea that a teacher has to really make learning come alive for their students but require some more resources to make it happen. There's something at Donors Choose for everyone.

This year, SciWo and Alice have decided to fund projects that get science books into classrooms. Last year, I saw what was going on at Sciencewomen and sent an email to my favorite laboratory goddess Dr Isis. This year, Dr Isis seeks worshippers at Dr Isis's Sacred Temple of Giving.

But last year as I got engaged with the month long challenge, I stumbled across another blogger, Sarah D. Bunting, who challenged her readers to raise $100,000 with the alluring prize of a tall woman in a tomato suit going to see the sites in Washington, DC. This year, Tomato Nation is attempting to bet red and raise $210k (the Tomato will go to Atlantic City and play blackjack). But following the contest on Tomato Nation is incredible as they currently have 550 projects waiting to be funded... and a team of incredible readers that have already pitched in to reach over $21,000 in less than two and a half days (and fund 81 projects).

So it's awesome, it's a lot of fun, and it's a way to feel like maybe your $5, $10, $20 matters a bit more. I don't have much of a readership, but every little bit helps. Click around and see if any of the projects strike your fancy.

More Thoughts on Trash

2009-09-26T14:35:00.002-04:00

Lately I have been blogging about issues much closer to my scholarship rather than generalities and particularities of being a graduate student. As such, my posts have gotten longer, and my commentors seem to be scarce. If you're still reading and you want to weigh in on stuff you would like to see around here, then please feel free to visit the comment section and let me know. Thanks!

Like many of my comments, this post comes from a desire to do what I can to enact solutions in my own life rather than to extend the commentary to a point of national policy. But the relevant NY Times article sparking these thoughts articulates some of the challenges with current waste "disposal" systems in Europe. I put "disposal" in quotes because as far as I can see, you can actually never really get rid of something, you can only relocate it.

The more I learn about environmental practices, the more I see habits of "out of sight, out of mind" manifest in a way that particularly troubles me. With an increasingly connected world and increasing awareness of exceptionally poor people scraping by a living salvaging garbage, we have developed a tendency of unloading our junk on the developing (global South, third) world without consideration. The life cycle of consumer electronics carries an unreal level of disturbance in my mind. As an engineer, I cannot stand idly by while people practice disposal of consumer electronics practice by open-pit incineration. I freak out when people burn Subway cups in campfires for crying out loud because I know the toxicity of the emitted chemicals. As a kid growing up, I learned the practices of minimal impact camping and encountered national parks workers who gathered considerable litter out of leave no trace sites. For the unaware, tinfoil does not burn. I'm just saying.

I read about the cycle of electronics, and I then investigate my own practice. Do I acquire every latest and greatest gadget? How many things do I have that have to be plugged in? How do my electronics experience their end of life? Generally speaking, I try to start with absolute consumption reduction. I still have (and use I might add) the TI-85 calculator I purchased in 7th grade. When I receive something that replaces something still operable, I donate my still operable device to organizations like Goodwill or the Salvation Army. The computers I have owned have generally been gifted to friends. But it still bothers me that I struggle to think about what else I can do to be a part of the solution.

I struggle to understand why we live in a society that values absolutely trendy consumer electronics. I have never caught the gadget bug. But if we value absolutely trendy consumer electronics, then why do we not have greater salvage of existing materials? Must we design so everything is "disposal" or in the words of humane societies, in need of a forever home? Can we not do better?

And so I am irritated because I see widespread consequences of merely relocating our trash to communities too poor to have the political connectedness to cry out "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!" And I am left wondering what I can do to encourage people to design things that really can go from cradle to cradle.

Please look at the legend before you assume you know the scale

2009-09-25T18:15:00.002-04:00

Ugh, what. a. week. Lots of discussions, lots of frustrations, and lots of nodding and smiling so I did not say something I should not say.

To be clear, I have no problem describing myself as a moderate. On most issues, I simply do not have an opinion because I remain unconvinced of the design, whether my reservations lie in the general assumptions, the options proposed, or the structure of evaluation. Increasingly, I find myself less likely to have a decision I commit to absolutely and try to focus my efforts on thinking what I personally can do to bring my own life choices increasingly inline with my ideals.

However, I find that frustration bubbles up as people take something I say and assume that I have a strong ideological commitment to a particular solution proposed. For instance, the health care system in most countries baffles my mind. Horror stories abound alongside of some amazing feats of current medical practice. Many systems features two (or more) tiers of service depending on the independent wealth of the person trying to access the system. I could also make similar statements about the educational system, the industrial system, and probably just about everything else that can be described as a system. However, if I had one word to describe most systems, I would chose "complicated" as that word. Systems contain significant internal structures and interact with other systems.

For instance, currently we debate light bulbs owing to the nature of their energy consumption and market-ready design. I personally have found the amount of energy wasted by conventional light bulbs to be seriously impressive, independent of climate concerns. Yet, when I read articles like one discussing a 10 million dollar prize for generating a better light bulb, I have to wonder about the interconnected nature of innovation and national policy. This wondering does not mean that I think that national policy always drives innovation, but this wondering does suggest that I think it is at least possible for national policy to encourage innovation.

But more often than not, I speak concerning a scale small enough so that I can be an active participant. And generally, I do not see national politics as an appropriate scale. To be sure, I do what I can to cast an intelligent vote and occasionally write my representative around issues that I care about, but I do not do so because I expect that my voice will make a huge difference. So when I talk about the obligations of engineers to consider the poor, I speak to my own obligation. When I talk about the importance of being a good steward of one's resources, I speak to my own priorities. Generally, I do attempt to challenge people I am talking with to consider their own obligations and priorities, but please don't assume that I'm going to plaster my own priorities on a placard and taking a walk in front of the White House.

And now for something completely different...

2009-09-23T14:16:00.001-04:00

A friend forwarded me this YouTube video about attitudes around the H1N1 virus. It takes a great number of liberties, but it was far too funny not to share.

Thriving Beyond the Limit Point

2009-09-19T10:04:00.002-04:00

Living in today's world often means coming face-to-face with our uncertainty. We desire for things to be airtight, logical, rational, and above any sort of reasonable question. Our tendency to buy into a hegemonic narrative acts as one mediator that accents this challenge.

To an engineer, uncertainty means something different than it means to the general public. We accept uncertainty within design constraints and try to understand our models as best as we can to make a judgment. So many things that we encounter reflect design decisions; engineers can be a type of people who ask why certain design parameters came to dominate over other possibilities.

Our current questions around environmental sustainability reflect a cascade of decisions made within a critical operating paradigm. I do not claim to be a climate modeler or even an industrial analyst, but when you get into the narrative of how people constructed the dominant equations, you find many questions. For instance, much of our current environmental policy seems to revolve around the so-called IPAT equation where Impact can be represented as a functional relationship between population, affluence, and technology. Yet affluence seems to be constructed as a general GDP per capita because "everyone knows" that GDP correlates with quality of life. Generally, these models favor all forms of consumption-based economy without considering the impact of a mass production model. I have read around the blogosphere enough to know that I am not the only person trying to figure out how to consume much less. The race is on for "green" technologies, but in investigating how we determine environmental impact, do we really know what we're talking about?

The problem is not so much that we don't know what we're talking about; the problem is that everyone wants the "right" answer instead of a framework for thinking. Either climate change is happening or it's not; either we're on a crash course for impending doom or we're not; either current research is valuable or it's not. The "either/or" end all, be all style communication does not actually seem to prudent amid the uncertainties. The differences between being a naysayer, a constructive critic, and an advocate continually get muddied so we lose the voices of people who are trying to be constructive. A person who says "I don't think we should make hybrid cars with battery X technology because I think battery Y technology will make a much better product" should not be lumped together with another person who says "Hybrid cars do nothing for the environment."

We live in an age of open questions within the scientific community while those same questions are open within the broader human community. Truth be told, this nature of questioning seems embedded in the practice of doing science. Yet when we try to frame science and engineering within airtight philosophy of rational decision-making we do no one justice. But can we find out together? Can we ask the questions that will lead to constructive stewardship? Can we try to walk on this journey with one another?

Freeing ourselves from history

2009-09-18T20:09:00.002-04:00

Ironically, we have another article in the NY Times today about things becoming trash: incidentally the item in question is human heritage.

The article presents the tensions present in Bahrain as a reality owing to the intoxicating influence of globalization overcoming heritage and tradition. For my part, I have to wonder if globalization is really globalization or Westernization.

I wouldn't be surprised if just about everyone pictures "tradition" in the manner of the upbeat number from Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition reflects something seemingly quaint, outdated, outmoded, and irrelevant. In other words, tradition can be trashed. Yet, to Tevye, tradition means a balance point in an ever-changing world, a stabilizing influence, a guiding principle.

Tradition does not mean embracing something that can never change. To me, tradition involves connecting with the heartbeat of the past and allowing it to guide my dance in the present. In ballroom dancing, two parties work together, even as one leads. The character and shape of the dance requires full participation of both partners if the resulting dance will be of any quality.

Our yesterday informs our today. We cannot be exclusively future-minded, or we will miss the relevance of the question "Where did we come from?" Relegating the question of our past to a single disciplinary paradigm will never help us understand where we are going.

Also, with the choice of words, I have to admit intoxicating leaves me wondering about the legacy of globalization that advocates for a throwing away of everything that helps us be fully human in favor of that which celebrates only today's material desires.

I hope that Bahrain can manage to preserve its heritage.

And I also hope I do not forget how my 11th grade World Affairs teacher taught me how to care about the rest of the world. One of his eccentricities that I remember to this day is how his eyes bugged out of his head as he staccatoly emphasized the BAH of Bahrain.

Where So Many Things are Just Trash

2009-09-17T09:41:00.002-04:00

With a little inspiration coming to me today from the NY Times, I thought I would write about trash. Today, the Times reported on a rather innovative idea of trash-tracking with hopes of weeding out the inefficiencies of the system. I found the idea to be rather novel at first, but then found myself amused at the irony of installing tracking devices to trash as it creates more trash.

The issue seems to be that in an innovative society celebrating novel ideas and structures we appear to have fallen in love with trash. Our love affair with trash creates an awkward situation when we have a perverse relationship with scavenging and waste. We generate with the seeming intention to dispose. And this tendency comes back to bite us in more ways that I really can even imagine because we exult novelty to the image of all things progressive.

Presence of marketing reveals our love affair with trash. In our consumer-driven culture of attending to our materially-orientated needs through big-box stores and name brands that can be found just about anywhere in the world, we can see the relationship between consumers and trash. We defend our consumer-habits by saying things like we live in an information or service economy, operating efficiently by doling out particular responsibilities to "professionals" and trying to find our own professional place. Yet everything comes at a price, and the price is trash.

Living by myself as I do, I cannot begin to describe how horrified I am by the ease of generating trash. Either I buy too much and things get wasted, or I buy what's accepted sizing for one and get snowed under in packaging. I cook and eat in bulk, frequently eating the same thing for days, trying to not get sucked into the "eeeeeew leftovers" complex. Cleaning my office often can generate a ridiculous amount of trash. My apartment complex also lacks recycling so if I want to recycle something, then I generally have to bring it into school and deposit it in an appropriate container. But the point remains that we have no problem in generating trash. Even something as inconspicuous as a plastic bag can dominate my trash after a shopping trip even as I reuse intact bags to deal with my own trash.

Yet most people lack a scavenging sense, and we certainly don't have a scavenging sense at the social level. Looking at the reflexes around leftover foods and less-than-straight-forward recycling, we can see the lack of a scavenging sense. We celebrate being a people of affluence, and by and large, people who really have to pinch together to try to see if a seam on a pair of pants will continue to hold out over buying a new pair of pants get relegated to the margins of society. Moreover, leaving the processes of recycling and refabrication to the municipal and industrial professionals absolves us from any sort of direct responsibility.

And it's more than that: we are a society that accepts waste. When something is used up, throw it out. Invent anew. Piles of household garbage simply are a part of the reality of life.

We don't have to be a society dominated by waste. But we need to be less okay with the process of generating trash of all forms.

Living Without Elders in the Age of the Internet

2009-09-10T09:43:00.002-04:00

Somehow, someway, we permit the internet to permeate our lives. Each of us integrate the internet in a different way, yet I am confident that anyone who reads this has some experience with the internet entering into daily existence owing simply to the publication medium.

The fact that I have an internet presence with my ideas shows that anyone can gain access to the internet. So we have a myriad of people hanging their ideas out online to see who stops by, but the accessibility creates another problem. Namely, who are these people and what gives them authority to speak?

By and large, the internet connects me to my peers. As a young educated type, it is quite easy to find young educated types who share salient features with me. I have heard it commonly claimed that the internet can also connect me with teachers, mentors, and advisors; such a claim seems to be driving force of Web 2.0. But how valuable is the internet really?

I stopped and thought about this today as I visited some of my blog fare. While these particular blogs do not appear on my sidebar (and they likely will not), I know one author very personally and another author through assorted technologically mediated forms of one-way communication. The one author I know personally has an expressed and explicit goal and dream often shared as "to pastor secular America." The other author also seems to have a large educationally-orientated outreach to help guide people spiritually. But I wonder about the efficacy of these mechanisms to deliver this sort of guidance at a distance because the medium suggests something other than carefully considered wisdom.

In many communally-orientated societies, people recognized as elders contained this wisdom. Elders are not people who are simply older than we happen to be; elders have a way to embody wisdom. I have had the privilege of meeting a few people who can have a complete conversation in a single sentence. The wisdom present in the remark can stop me in my tracks and leave me reflecting for days, weeks, or months as I try to understand and incorporate this gift of wisdom. For me, it's not just a mental exercise of thinking through the logic someone says; it's about allowing the wisdom to work actual transformation in my life.

But I think, by and large, we lack elders in our society, particularly as we marginalize those who have gone before us and enforce a structure of wisdom that suggests that wisdom can only be true for me personally.

I look around me, and I see young people tasked with things beyond our comprehension, understanding, and abilities. I clearly identify as a young person; I am a young person with a lot of energy, ideas, passion, and determination, but that does not mean that I have the ability to discern wisdom. For me, I want to step up to the challenges of education, energy, engineering, and poverty. I am more than willing to concede that perhaps we do not have elders in a lot of these areas because the challenges we face are so significant that people just have given up. Our current practices represent the decisions of many generations, and perhaps we must rebuild our sense of collective wisdom from the ground up yet again.

But still I wonder and I hope about the true elders in our midst, who can challenge my youthfulness with a word and spur me towards constructive actions. And maybe the internet will still turn out to surprise me after all.

Scientiae: Genius is...

2009-09-06T21:53:00.004-04:00

1% inspiration,99% desperation or so it seems from this month's carnival submissions. With it being the least wonderful time of the year, I decided that it would be prudent to go on a bit of a drive to pick people up.

Alyssa from Apple Pie and the Universe (formerly Mrs. Comet Hunter) invited us to go down memory lane and think about when the first day of school was fun. Instead she finds that the first days of school mark the loss of quiet hallways, short lines at coffee shops, and all the good parking spots. After all, it's all about research. ScientistMother shares a similar sentiment about most semesters being fun, but this semester doesn't strike her as much. (As an aside, I can relate which transitioning through different program stages... for the graduate student readers, here's a pretty classic picture of motivation through time, courtesy of PhD comics... for the more senior readers, what should the appropriate motivation curve look like? Discuss amongst yourselves....)

S. at More than a Permanent Student recommends joining Team M-E for getting research done, finding inspiration in putting yourself first at thesis time... and if all else fails, she could always start an M-E franchise. (And I see the letters M-E and I think Mechanical Engineering...)

And speaking of engineers, I thought about the white knuckling experience about trying to pull off research in the fast lane. Sometimes you just need to floor it.

Sciencewoman, of Sciencewomen fame, joined the chorus about research in telling her tale of 2 grant proposals. The muse strikes as she frames the question "Inspiration or desperation?" where she proposes,

Maybe it all depends on perspective. .... Is the sense of inspiration or desperation merely a by-product of whether the project is finished or not?

Ms. PhD at YoungFemaleScientist scours amongst her movies to pull a perspective from Kill Bill asking if it's really relief or regret.

Dr Isis reminds us that it's not really all research all of the time. As a long time follower of the blog, I must say that she's pulled out some stops with this particular excursion into Photoshop.

Jennie at Just a Girl makes her Scientiae debut (woohoo!!!) and also thinks broadly about the nature of goal setting. She remarks,

I want to be inspired but should probably realize that inspiration doesn't come from some mystic box and it's not something that one finds deep within one's self during a walkabout. Inspiration is hard, inspiration is something someone finds when they work hard to get out of the desperation.

And then I found the office decorating folks! (I know I could recruit from Dr. Isis's Photoshop stash, but I think she would slap my hand.)

Pat at Fairer Science makes some strong recommendations for quotable quotes. My personal favorite? "One foot in front of the other, roadblocks are just time outs for thinking."

And then Bringido at Dirt and Rocks provides a fantastic image collection of women writers, who she notes "are all women and many are in their 'later years'". Talk about inspiration!

But I do have to say that, if I were a biologist, I would be all over the artwork (*gore warning, but you really want to click anyway because it's awesome) posted on Muddy Misadventures.

So thanks all for the carnival! Let me know if I missed anyone's posts in the carnival. I tried to be diligent.

Driving in Traffic, Academic Style

2009-09-05T20:06:00.002-04:00

This weekend I found myself driving in neighboring Really Big City. Typically I despise big city driving, but it fits the nature of "inspiration or desperation" quite nicely. You never know what you are going to get when you show up in a car in big cities. Really Big City drivers tend to accept a range of speed limits that spans a 40 mile an hour range, so driving sometimes can feel like playing Mario Kart with no lives to spare. Changing lanes gets interesting when you break hard to avoid rear-ending someone going to slow but you have someone coming up fast behind you so you have switch gears and floor it as soon as you get in the other lane. City driving requires a level of assertiveness that seems to be totally unique and can freak out passengers in the car.

So much of academic life seems to involve the similar decisions. You take an idea as far as you can, but occasionally the idea requires strong lateral moves to maintain its momentum. Sometimes watching a PI navigate the process can make anyone a bit scared, especially when a big grant serves as the main vehicle. Going to committee meetings can be encountering the "road construction" signs that delay everyone's progress.

I am glad that academics get a bit longer of a learner's permit before navigating the process. As I start to explore my own specialization, I detect that I am still getting a sense for my steering. Given the multitude of ideas, I find myself preferring to accelerate the new and shiny idea instead of learning how to drive reasonably. But I just may get the hang of it. And at least research involves knowing when to total an idea; it's not easy... but at least my car is still intact.

The Tryanny of Only

2009-09-02T22:36:00.002-04:00

I elected to take my classes outside of my primary department this semester as I work on building up my concentration electives. My research combines a lot of different areas, so I attend various classes in different departments for my concentration electives. Generally I consider the interdisciplinary nature of my home department as one of its largest strengths. So you never know what awaits when I leave my home department for the long-standing departments of Bridge University.

In every class, I confront the nature of the disciplinary silo. You have to wonder who talks to who because from the surface, I would say that a lot of people like hearing their voice bounce off classroom walls. The walls appear to have absolutely zero permeability. It seems to depend more on the people in the room.

I find myself talking a lot with engineers this semester. The engineers have a near monopoly on my courses. I am used to engineers; after all, if you catch me when the day is right, you'll hear me say "I'm an engineer." But the truncated series of acceptable motivations to do something boggles my mind. Only (indicator) justifies (goal-based intervention). Problem is, this formal logic construction blocks other indicators from being relevant. I much prefer something to the effect of (many indicators) justify (goal-based intervention). In my mind, you let more people in the door; it becomes less and less important to actually figure out which indicator actually justifies the intervention so people can get on and try some things. Measure effects. Rinse and repeat.

But for crying aloud, please do not assume that we all show up to work on challenges at hand for exactly. the. same. reason.

A Matter of Perspective

2009-08-30T13:17:00.002-04:00

An old joke goes, there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. Incidentally, this joke also divides the two camps of persons who invent numbers to stand for things (regardless of the assumptions embedded the model) and persons who strongly prefer that numbers be tied clearly to real world phenomena.

Incidentally, I recently read an op-ed in the New York times called G.D.P. R.I.P which I found a bit enlightening. I might be an engineer who can understand some things about the way money operates on national and international levels, but I am certainly no economist. But increasingly, I grow skeptical of various metrics because every calculation carries a great deal of assumptions.

Some number-driven assumptions are classic, almost like dimensional analysis gone wrong. For instance, people try to model energy use through an equation that is energy = population * GDP per capita * energy per dollar. My favorite rationale for the "GDP per capita" term is that term correlates with quality of life.

So can we please rethink what goes into our black boxes that tell us all about how the world works around us? Maybe even to the point of questioning the utility of the black box to begin with? Yeah, I know, the second point will never happen.

Free the Feet!

2009-08-25T20:11:00.003-04:00

The beginning of a new semester affords many opportunities to reacquaint oneself with the mechanics of being back in school. One of the most challenging for me is getting back with the appropriate style of dress. I have a style definitely unique to yours truly. Typically things do not change much from season to season... but I like wearing my sandals in the summer. Professionalism of the Fall and Spring semesters requires more standard footwear. When I go to put my socks on, I feel my feet asking me, "Are you for real?" When the shoes go on, the feet concede the argument and at least cooperate for the length of the day. But the best part of getting home at the end of the day involves freeing the feet to take in the full array of textures.

And it's my turn to host Scientiae!

2009-08-24T22:50:00.002-04:00

YAY!!!!! Something to challenge me to dust the blog off....

Without further ado....
The theme this month: Inspiration or Desperation?

I have been thinking about office decorations as new people move into assorted spaces. Every office seems to be dominated by those people who put up cheesy positive slogans like "Teamwork: Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is a progress, working together is success - Henry Ford" which invariably seem to be balanced against the person posting a message designed to mock these things like "Teamwork: Share Victory, Share Defeat." Invariably, the semester start brings a time to reflect positively or sarcastically. Talk amongst yourselves and submit the posts in the usual fashion.

Update: RBOC Style

2009-07-09T16:46:00.002-04:00

So I've actually never written a post full of random updates but I have an odd assortment of things on the mind:

Getting away from the computer is easier said than done.
My camera viewfinder lenses are frightfully dirty.
Walking is infinitely more enjoyable along running water with great views. It also helps to be somewhere pedestrian friendly.
Many a cat find themselves to approve of my ability to serve as cat staff.
I found a perfect place to spend the night in a tent but it's less than commonly accessible.
A remarkable number of people have multiple personas dependent on the context.
You never know who you might run into on a train.
I need to get back into shape.
Watching a technophobe interact with a GPS system is amusing.
I am also missing getting comments on the blog. Don't know if I've lost the magic comment inducing elixir or what might be up.

Hope all are well!

An Open Letter to Engineering Professors

2009-07-06T19:23:00.002-04:00

Have you noticed the students in front of you to the point of seeing them? Do you see students catching onto material quicker than you expected? What about students who seem to be always ahead of you in your notes? Do you have students asking questions about applications, extensions, or unexpected combinations regarding the topics at hand? Are there students who ask such pointed questions that you hesitate to call on them in class? Do you have students argue intensely with you while at the same time catching the nuances of your jokes? Do you have students who pull in information from their other classes to make connections, independent of how relevant the other material seems at first glance? These students bring abilities, passions, skills and gifts that we should utilize. Moreover, teaching these students demands that we use different strategies in order to help these students become the catalysts of the future.

First, our teaching techniques should honor the tendency to seek the big picture. Beginning with the big picture allows students to move their readily held pieces of knowledge into place while simultaneously realizing the gaps in their existing knowledge base. Providing our students with a broader sense of the landscape encourages them to explore the terrain while looking for new possibilities. Showing the students the big picture of engineering early and often allows them to reflect critically and propose shifts in this big picture and actively shape how future generations see engineering. As engineers, we realize the unprecedented scale of the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges; as educators, we should support our students as they begin to propose solutions.

Second, our teaching techniques should match the diversity of today’s opportunities for engineers with the intrinsic interests of our students. Creative solutions come when people use strategies and techniques that allow for each individual to bring himself or herself into the process. Moreover, creative solutions leverage the resources of the context to produce tangible outcomes. People do the hard work involved in creative work primarily because they find the process fun. All students need opportunities to make real choices regarding tasks at hand. By inviting students to choose from an array of relevant open-ended tasks, we as educators may have the privilege of seeing our students come alive. When we as faculty learn to value the full array of complex questions that our students ask and answer, we construct an environment where everyone can contribute.

Third, our teaching techniques should accommodate students who learn quickly. Many of our students can master information quickly when given the chance. They arrive with strong skills because earlier teachers recognized these students’ strengths in math and science. Yet so often, we can fail to present information to students in a way that they can take it and run. Can we streamline the background information, work with students who need topics reinforced, and empower students who understand to demonstrate that knowledge through application?

We have students in our classrooms with sparks of insight that have the power to become creative flames of the future. Noting the presence of these students, we can empower them in a myriad of ways. Let us use teaching techniques that focus on the big picture, match the diversity of today’s opportunities for engineers with the intrinsic interests of our students, and accommodate students who learn quickly. Only when we let our students show us what they can do can we be amazed by their achievements.

Be kind to your four-footed friends!

2009-07-04T22:55:00.002-04:00

Happy Fourth of July everyone. I hope you had a good time doing whatever you were doing.

Today I hung out mostly indoors because it was raining. My friends and I are animal lovers so I got to see many animals weathering the holiday. One poor dog had to be tied to the door so he wouldn't get into anything that could hurt him because he was freaking out with all the fireworks. And the neighbors launched nothing but loud, loud, loud airborne fireworks in a condensed urban neighborhood for FOUR hours! Seriously people? I know the holiday is a big deal, but is it impossible to be sensitive to your neighbors?

Then I got home and felt bad because I've been terrorizing my cat with my vaccuum cleaner as I work to deep clean my house now that I have some time for this particular task.

And I've decided that driving home on 4 July feels infinitely safer than walking home.

The Stuff Dreams are Made Of

2009-06-29T09:08:00.002-04:00

Patchi at the Middle Years is hosting Scientiae this month. Her theme is "Mirror, mirror on the wall" which almost served as the title to this post, but I thought I might try for something original.

The last year or so has involved rediscovering my dreams. I have some dreams where people consistently told me that I had no business having them. These dreams are too directly personal to blog, but they shape what I do. These dreams shape my understanding of myself and my understanding of my work. In a word, my dreams are missional. And they're back.

It is interesting to watch in the mirror when people tell you have no business dreaming your dreams. The spark once in your eyes fades, and you collapse into a sea of dullness, a sea of apathy. It is uncomfortable to be in your own skin as you think you're a freak for wanting the things that you want. The mirror becomes a painful place as you know that you're selling yourself out in the interest of keeping the peace with the important players around you.

But occasionally, major players in your life start asking you what you want. Sometimes these people even care about how you answer. And what is even rarer is when these people pledge their support. Perhaps you have gotten better at describing your dream to someone else, or perhaps the people looking at you see the spark return to your eyes when they ask their first question.

Going after one's dreams is different than simply following one's heart. A true dream provides an energy of its own and invites you to run, to run for all your worth and try to pursue the dream as closely as possible. A true dream gets you out of bed in the morning and invites you to live your life just a little bit differently than everyone else. A true dream allows you to be yourself. A dream has a crazy power of its own. Connecting with a dream seems to connect you with the divine.

Dreaming dreams like these is hard work. All around us we find people who would rather we live according to the status quo. And a dream does not have to be wackily non-traditional in order to be a true dream. One of my best friends is living her dream right now as she raises her family (she had her first child in February). I know she is living her dream because I see the spark behind her eyes. And who am I to try to extinguish that spark?

When I look in the mirror and see the own spark in my eyes, I know I am on the right track.

scientiae-carnival

Can We Speak of Communities?

2009-06-27T16:16:00.002-04:00

A commenter asked me if we can speak of such thing as a community. It's a decent question because more than anything, we encounter boundaries. For instance, can we speak of the academic community? Of course we can because we do, but what assumptions do we make? At least from how I have caught the parlance, the academic community typically involves the PhD holders and pursuers doing research to add to the corporate body of knowledge. Yet, this statement reflects both a broad and narrow definition. For instance, this definition excludes undergraduate students, even if these students participate in undergraduate research. Moreover, this definition also excludes PhD holders working outside of research&development. However, these features of exclusion speak to the reality of the academic community; without such features, it would be difficult to theorize of the academic pipeline as leakage represents a key feature of this image.

On one level communities make sense, but something as broadly configured as the "academic community" does not offer enough description for significant utility. For instance, STEM communities differ from your humanities communities. Within STEM, you have science, technology, engineering and mathematics communities. The gradation continues to the point of sub-sub-sub-sub-fields to the point where individuals can make a difference. So while we can be in error to unilaterally ascribe features to an entire community, boundaries help us understand the rules of the game. Within several academic communities, one must hold an advanced degree in order to participate fully. While particulars vary within various sub-groupings, generalities help us help one another.

To be sure, much of human activity relates to categorizing and ascribing labels. We can debate the particulars of who can employ what labels to describe themselves and others.

Where is the Summer Going?

2009-06-26T09:03:00.002-04:00

I cannot believe that June ends next week. Like many other people, I made my list of what I want to accomplish in the summer, but now I realize how unrealistic the goals are. Granted, six projects are non-negotiable, but I only had one additional project of my own choosing. More than anything else this summer challenges me to streamline my processes. Currently I am one week in to a two week project where the two week project could very easily be a semester project. I need to work much more efficiently, but I thought I would share my exasperation with the blogosphere. Anyone else with me on these feelings?

There's More than One Way to be Something

2009-06-24T21:53:00.004-04:00

This post represents a departure from my typical schtick on the blog, but I do hope that my regular readers can see connections as I attempt to make them.

Today, 24 June, is New Directions' Synchroblog where authors from widely variant perspectives attempt to weigh in on the cultural divide between the gay community and the Christian community. Over the course of my entire blog here at Academic Crossroads, I have attempted to describe an academic's life course even through places of uncomfortable dissonance, whether that dissonance exists within a person, within a person's community, or within a person's wider social context (hence the large number of posts here tagged as "cultural insanity"). The gay-Christian debate represents another flashpoint in society that can be just as charged as the creation-evolution debate, the Republican-Democrat debate, or even the women-in-science debate. Culturally, we exist in a sea of flash points characterized by either/ors; and logically, the insistence of these absolute zones of no-overlap do not and cannot exist through looking at the lives of people who try to live in the non-existent middle ground.

You cannot be a scientist if you are a woman is just as repugnant as you cannot be a Christian if you are gay.

I always laugh when people ask me about my "gay lifestyle" because I wonder what everyone thinks I am doing. I'm quite happily single (intending on remaining that way too), and I cannot stand going to bars. I'm a graduate-level academic trying to understand what it means to write in such a fashion where I can publish, and I spend my time thinking big thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. I prioritize my Christian spirituality as it helps ground me in the midst of an incredibly crazy world and invites me to come and rest. When I look at the so-called "gay agenda" I am supposed to be propagating and recruiting, I see very limited overlap. With regard to GLBT issues, I tend not to be political with the exception of asking people to consider that GLBT persons exist.

To be sure, I am in no way, shape, or form perfect at what I do. But I am comfortable in my own skin...most of the time. I try to let my "Yes" be "Yes" and my "No" be "No" even when the hectic tenor of the academic world incites me to burn out because I tend to say "Yes" to too many projects. I struggle to live within my moral compass, but I think moral compasses tend to be a bit like the gimbal in the famous Apollo 13 burn: dancing around between idealism and pragmatism.

For me, being gay is more about the pragmatic consideration about how to get my family to back off about me finding "the perfect guy" and about realizing that I have to live in my own skin today. I do not consider this to be the "ideal" life configuration, but the perfect ideal situation does not exist in the world marked by tensions of all sort.

I have been involved in all sides of the gay-Christian conversation. For a while, I thought people could change because I knew some people who would describe themselves that way; for a while, I thought being gay meant pursuing gay relationships apart from any sort of Christian community; and for a while I thought one could pursue gay relationships in a Christian community. But now I rest in the tension between my pragmatism and my idealism, wishing that people did not force the issue through mouthpieces that suggest that people like me are out to destroy the fabric of society as we know it.

Yes, there is more than one way to be gay just as there is more than one way to be straight. You can be single, you can be married. You can live by yourself, you can live with a roommate. You can have a rich community, you can isolate yourself from everyone around save a few choice people you let close. You can investigate your own life and see what fits within the identity matrix you choose to accept. As people we have so many choices that extend into every reach of our personhood. And the only thing we have to do is live within the consequences of our choices.

Free to Run

2009-06-20T20:18:00.002-04:00

I just discovered this fantastic article about what it means to be gifted in the sense of a global intellectual capability. The article, by Stephanie S. Tolan, makes an analogy to cheetahs.

Is it a Cheetah?

It's a tough time to raise, teach or be a highly gifted child. As the term "gifted" and the unusual intellectual capacity to which that term refers become more and more politically incorrect, the educational establishment changes terminology and focus.

Giftedness, a global, integrative mental capacity, may be dismissed, replaced by fragmented "talents" which seem less threatening and theoretically easier for schools to deal with. Instead of an internal developmental reality that affects every aspect of a child's life, "intellectual talent" is more and more perceived as synonymous with (and limited to) academic achievement.

The child who does well in school, gets good grades, wins awards, and "performs" beyond the norms for his or her age, is considered talented. The child who does not, no matter what his innate intellectual capacities or developmental level, is less and less likely to be identified, less and less likely to be served.

A cheetah metaphor can help us see the problem with achievement-oriented thinking. The cheetah is the fastest animal on earth. When we think of cheetahs we are likely to think first of their speed. It's flashy. It is impressive. It's unique. And it makes identification incredibly easy. Since cheetahs are the only animals that can run 70 mph, if you clock an animal running 70 mph, IT'S A CHEETAH!

But cheetahs are not always running. In fact, they are able to maintain top speed only for a limited time, after which they need a considerable period of rest.

It's not difficult to identify a cheetah when it isn't running, provided we know its other characteristics. It is gold with black spots, like a leopard, but it also has unique black "tear marks" beneath its eyes. Its head is small, its body lean, its legs unusually long -- all bodily characteristics critical to a runner. And the cheetah is the only member of the cat family that has non-retractable claws. Other cats retract their claws to keep them sharp, like carving knives kept in a sheath --the cheetah's claws are designed not for cutting but for traction. This is an animal biologically designed to run.

Its chief food is the antelope, itself a prodigious runner. The antelope is not large or heavy, so the cheetah does not need strength and bulk to overpower it. Only speed. On the open plains of its natural habitat the cheetah is capable of catching an antelope simply by running it down.

While body design in nature is utilitarian, it also creates a powerful internal drive. The cheetah needs to run!

Despite design and need however, certain conditions are necessary if it is to attain its famous 70 mph top speed. It must be fully grown. It must be healthy, fit and rested. It must have plenty of room to run. Besides that, it is best motivated to run all out when it is hungry and there are antelope to chase.

If a cheetah is confined to a 10 X 12 foot cage, though it may pace or fling itself against the bars in restless frustration, it won't run 70 mph.

IS IT STILL A CHEETAH?

If a cheetah has only 20 mph rabbits to chase for food, it won't run 70 mph while hunting. If it did, it would flash past its prey and go hungry! Though it might well run on its own for exercise, recreation, fulfillment of its internal drive, when given only rabbits to eat the hunting cheetah will run only fast enough to catch a rabbit.

IS IT STILL A CHEETAH?

If a cheetah is fed Zoo Chow it may not run at all.

IS IT STILL A CHEETAH?

If a cheetah is sick or if its legs have been broken, it won't even walk.

IS IT STILL A CHEETAH?

And finally, if the cheetah is only six weeks old, it can't yet run 70 mph.

IS IT, THEN, ONLY A *POTENTIAL* CHEETAH?

A school system that defines giftedness (or talent) as behavior, achievement and performance is as compromised in its ability to recognize its highly gifted students and to give them what they need as a zoo would be to recognize and provide for its cheetahs if it looked only for speed. When a cheetah does run 70 mph it isn't a particularly "achieving" cheetah. Though it is doing what no other cat can do, it is behaving normally for a cheetah.

To lions, tigers, leopards -- to any of the other big cats -- the cheetah's biological attributes would seem to be deformities. Far from the "best cat," the cheetah would seem to be barely a cat at all. It is not heavy enough to bring down a wildebeest; its non-retractable claws cannot be kept sharp enough to tear the wildebeest's thick hide. Given the cheetah's tendency to activity, cats who spend most of their time sleeping in the sun might well label the cheetah hyperactive.

Like cheetahs, highly gifted children can be easy to identify. If a child teaches herself Greek at age five, reads at the eighth grade level at age six or does algebra in second grade we can safely assume that child is a highly gifted child. Though the world may see these activities as "achievements," she is not an "achieving" child so much as a child who is operating normally according to her own biological design, her innate mental capacity. Such a child has clearly been given room to "run" and something to run for. She is healthy and fit and has not had her capacities crippled. It doesn't take great knowledge about the characteristics of highly gifted children to recognize this child.

However, schools are to extraordinarily intelligent children what zoos are to cheetahs. Many schools provide a 10 x 12 foot cage, giving the unusual mind no room to get up to speed. Many highly gifted children sit in the classroom the way big cats sit in their cages, dull-eyed and silent. Some, unable to resist the urge from inside even though they can't exercise it, pace the bars, snarl and lash out at their keepers, or throw themselves against the bars until they do themselves damage.

Even open and enlightened schools are likely to create an environment that, like the cheetah enclosures in enlightened zoos, allow some moderate running, but no room for the growing cheetah to develop the necessary muscles and stamina to become a 70 mph runner. Children in cages or enclosures, no matter how bright, are unlikely to appear highly gifted; kept from exercising their minds for too long, these children may never be able to reach the level of mental functioning they were designed for.

A zoo, however much room it provides for its cheetahs, does not feed them antelope, challenging them either to run full out or go hungry. Schools similarly provide too little challenge for the development of extraordinary minds. Even a gifted program may provide only the intellectual equivalent of 20 mph rabbits (while sometimes labeling children suspected of extreme intelligence "underachievers" for NOT putting on top speed to catch those rabbits!) Without special programming, schools provide the academic equivalent of Zoo Chow, food that requires no effort whatsoever. Some children refuse to take in such uninteresting, dead nourishment at all.

To develop not just the physical ability but also the strategy to catch antelope in the wild, a cheetah must have antelopes to chase, room to chase them and a cheetah role model to show them how to do it. Without instruction and practice they are unlikely to be able to learn essential survival skills.

A recent nature documentary about cheetahs in lion country showed a curious fact of life in the wild. Lions kill cheetah cubs. They don't eat them, they just kill them. In fact, they appear to work rather hard to find them in order to kill them (though cheetahs can't possibly threaten the continued survival of lions). Is this maliciousness? Recreation? No one knows. We only know that lions do it. Cheetah mothers must hide their dens and go to great efforts to protect their cubs, coming and going from the den under deep cover or only in the dead of night or when lions are far away. Highly gifted children and their families often feel like cheetahs in lion country.

In some schools brilliant children are asked to do what they were never designed to do (like cheetahs asked to tear open a wildebeest hide with their claws -- after all, the lions can do it!) while the attributes that are a natural aspect of unusual mental capacity -- intensity, passion, high energy, independence, moral reasoning, curiosity, humor, unusual interests and insistence on truth and accuracy -- are considered problems that need fixing.

Brilliant children may feel surrounded by lions who make fun of or shun them for their differences, who may even break their legs or drug them to keep them moving more slowly, in time with the lions' pace. Is it any wonder they would try to escape; would put on a lion suit to keep from being noticed; would fight back?

This metaphor, like any metaphor, eventually breaks down. Highly gifted children don't have body markings and non-retractable claws by which to be identified when not performing. Furthermore, the cheetah's ability to run 70 mph is a single trait readily measured. Highly gifted children are very different from each other so there is no single ability to look for even when they are performing; besides that, a child's greatest gifts could be outside the academic world's definition of achievement and so go unrecognized altogether. While this truth can save some children from being wantonly killed by marauding lions, it also keeps them from being recognized for what they are -- children with deep and powerful innate differences as all-encompassing as the differences between cheetahs and other big cats.

That they may not be instantly recognizable does not mean that there is no means of identifying them. It means that more time and effort are required to do it. Educators can learn the attributes of unusual intelligence and observe closely enough to see those attributes in individual children. They can recognize not only that highly gifted children can do many things other children cannot, but that there are tasks other children can do that the highly gifted cannot.

Every organism has an internal drive to fulfill its biological design. The same is true for unusually bright children. From time to time the bars need be removed, the enclosures broadened. Zoo Chow, easy and cheap as it is, must give way, at least some of the time, to lively, challenging mental prey.

More than this, schools need to believe that it is important to make the effort, that these children not only have the needs of all other children to be protected and properly cared for, but that they have as much RIGHT as others to have their needs met.

Biodiversity is a fundamental principle of life on our planet. It allows life to adapt to change. In our culture highly gifted children, like cheetahs, are endangered. Like cheetahs, they are here for a reason; they fill a particular niche in the design of life. Zoos, whatever their limitations, may be critical to the continued survival of cheetahs; many are doing their best to offer their captives what they will need eventually to survive in the wild. Schools can do the same for their highly gifted children.

Unless we make a commitment to saving these children, we will continue to lose them and whatever unique benefit their existence might provide for the human species of which they are an essential part.

1 Pinch, 1 Chance

2009-06-13T11:55:00.003-04:00

Increasingly, I see things that speak to cultural insanity. Yet, one form of cultural insanity transcends national boundaries: the entrance exam as a mark of prestige. Today, the New York Times relayed a story about the Gao Kao, the SAT of China.'

More broadly speaking, we tend to value the expedient nature of single identification. If someone can do X (and really, only X), then that qualifies them to do alpha, beta, gamma and 7. Not only do these claims fly in the face of causal formal logic, single gateways deny equitable opportunity. When I speak of single gateways, I speak of admissions procedures that have only 1 form of evidence. By evaluating people only on one or two snapshots does not serve either the person being evaluated nor the entity doing the evaluating.

I find it unfortunate that the need for quick identification stems from the magnitude of the evaluative task. Any form of evaluation for entrance stems from making a judgment call regarding perceived trajectory after gathering a collection of some sort of snapshots taken over time. But people will always defy any sort of predictive power, especially when we ask them to be creative.

But how can evaluative behavior service creative individuals?

An Open Letter to Republicans...

2009-06-01T08:41:00.002-04:00

Dear Sir or Madam (but mostly Sir from what I can tell),

There are times that I want to like you. I even tend towards agreeing with you on a lot of things. I think that government is best accomplished on local levels where people can have a say in the various programs, needs, and activities that they live with on a day-to-day basis. Large federally-sponsored programs tend to be full of red tape and conditions that can block getting various jobs done. The national deficit is a huge issue, and it's unfortunate that our current economy demands war-zone style management owing to the financial instability of the government. If General Motors can't hack it as a company, I'm more than willing to see the giant fall and hope that more agile small businesses wind up in its place.

I can understand concerns about various pieces of legislation getting railroaded through Congress on the wings of the Democratic majority. I would like to see considerable more line crossings on behalf of both parties that would suggest you're casting the vote on the issues at hand and not merely voting with the party. Certain things, while arguably imperfect, are truly better than nothing and are called for at this time.

But I'm actually writing this letter with one request: stop pretending as though you own Jesus. Over a hundred years ago, we established that it is socially and morally unacceptable to own a person. Let Jesus do His own thing and be who He is. It's arguably the biggest turn-off to see social conservatives assert that Jesus would be a Republican. Such a mantra stops conversations about the real issues because I see people getting all riled up about things that, in my opinion, the government should never be involved with from the get-go. You also turn this rhetoric in a way that erects an ideological barrier for a lot of people to attend churches near them because you define a lot of "us/them" where it is much easier to be a "them" than an "us." I'm tired of seeing my friends hurt by such political posturing and unholy alliances so knock it off.

Sincerely,
Academic

Sometimes I do not want to pick up a newspaper

2009-05-28T09:16:00.003-04:00

I do not enjoy reading the newspapers when a big story exists regarding a negative assessment of one's race, class, or gender. Recently conservative pundits decry Judge Sotomayor as nothing more than an exercise of so-called "identity politics." The New York Times ran a pretty decent piece about the process today. But it is amazing to consider how the rhetoric changes when it looks as though a woman from an ethnic minority might be promoted.

President Obama indicated that diversity constituted an important criterion; he defined diversity to include experience, character, judgment, and points of view. He generated a short list of candidates that came from a wide range of professional backgrounds. From a list of 9, who passed through a process of a 10-page review and then a 60-70-page review, he interviewed 4.

What's rather amazing to me is that people are citing that he didn't interview any men in the in-person stage as evidence that the process reflects inherent bias. I have read so many results of search processes that insist that the reason why no women were invited to an interview was that no qualified woman could be found. Usually such rationale of only inviting the qualified to an interview withstands scrutiny. Granting 4 of 9 candidates on the short list an interview after vetting them through 70-80 pages of paper with conversations amongst a wide array of people seems like a pretty fair ratio to me.

I do not understand why people resort to language like "(Person) only got an interview because of diversity issues around race and gender." Such language, at best, is an act of bullying; at worst, it is an act of violence.

An Open Letter to My Friends

2009-05-25T12:00:00.003-04:00

To my friends,

May peace and tranquility surround you even amid the darkness many of you find yourselves.

I think about you all daily, wondering about how you are doing, where you are, and if you are safe. The last week has sharpened my remembrance as I have seen the flags go up, the makeshift memorials, and heard rumors of the three-day weekend. Driving around Bridge City, I saw a display of human-sized flags, standing upright at attention, in nearly perfect formation. You all taught me what various formations look like so I know that things were not quite right. With all the conflicts that have happened since we met, I know that one of these flags may be standing watch over you as you gave the ultimate sacrifice. I have rejoiced to find so many of you on Facebook in the past year, if for no other reason but to have a way of knowing that you are still alive.

You are the people who taught me so much about attention to detail, about getting things done, about knowing what matters first, second, and last. You decided to get involved and stay involved even though you knew you were headed into harms way. To be sure, some of you used the system to get ahead, putting only in what was required and no more. But so many more of you remain. I see your pictures, and I know you have traveled to more places in a wider array of circumstances than I could ever imagine. I see your face and still can separate your work from your play. The somber seriousness that marks your job requires a game face indeed.

So thank you my friends. Thank you for being willing to discipline yourselves to be at the front lines. Thank you for the courage to go after your dreams. Thank you for instilling in me the gravity of a bravo foxtrot. Thank you for calling me to be a person aware of the domino effect of my own actions. Thank you for your service.

May the memories of all of the fallen be eternal +
Academic

Bouncing Back

2009-05-23T23:09:00.002-04:00

Academic life can be brutal. Exploring new ideas in front of a community inevitably causes the ideas to be at risk of catastrophic failure and rejection.

Yet as someone just getting started, "peer review" scarcely seems fair. For some reason, I have an easier time parsing harsh criticisms when it comes to taking it from a journal audience as opposed to someone located within my in-person community. I know I should expect (and perhaps even demand) to have papers ripped to shreds, but I do not like being left to fall flat on my face when I actively seek assistance.

So, Internet friends, how do you do it? How do you build a network of people who can help you with exploring brand-new (to you) topics? More importantly, how do you bounce back from a particularly shredding feedback session?

What are degrees good for anyway?

2009-05-20T18:51:00.002-04:00

It's commencement; lots of people I know are commencing. It's been a busy week of attending, supporting, and cheering...and charting my own course. As the first round of senior graduate students move towards their post-PhD existences, I have been thinking about what I would like to accomplish with my years that remain as a PhD student. Spending this much time in reflective thought can be a decidedly mixed blessing, but every once in a while, a little navel inspection is in order.

I have been working on my Plan of Study. Well, more like I have been working on a plan that lets me plan to complete my Plan of Study...yeah, the planning stage twice-removed which sounds about as exciting as attending your third-cousin's wedding out of family obligation. The advanced planning comes from being in an interdisciplinary space, working with new research methods that I have never seen before, and pulling together a Plan of Study from the thin air of the course offerings list. Most of what I want to do has never been done before so I get to play my own guinea pig and navigate my way around experimental course numbers and far too many course offerings that strike me as either a) interesting, b) relevant, c) accessible with my current knowledge, or d) a combination of the above. I have spent some time scrounging around in the various department policies, trying to make heads or tails of things that just do not seem to be well-suited to my needs. And as I type this, I'm realizing that trying to figure out what fits is kind of like bra shopping...I'm never going to find one that really meets all of my needs. And I just stumbled across the quintessential engineering challenge knowing that my requirements exist as definite trade-offs. So, in the span of a couple of paragraphs, I have gone from talking about graduation, to course planning, to awkward family functions, to politics, to bra shopping, and wound up at engineering. Either I'm in a very strange head space that's okay or I should be concerned; I'm going with the latter.

But I'm on a mission at the moment to figure out how to get the most out of my time here at Bridge University and get the biggest bang from my efforts. Because I look at so many classes across so many different departments, I have been toying with figuring out what is expected to earn a Master's Degree in my various fields of interest. So, the question becomes, why would anyone want a Master's Degree, or any other degree for that matter?

As I see it, each degree serves its own purpose. I'm definitely coming at this from an engineer's perspective so I think my comments below will be a little confined to STEM disciplines, but if anyone regards themselves as more of a humanities type, I would love to see how you parse it.

The first degree is the Bachelor's Degree. This degree is an orientation to the profession, a chance to try some ideas on and see what fits. Experiences help you target your life goal in some general direction, but a lot of uncertainty remains, particularly if you head off to graduate school.

The next degree is the Master's Degree. Here the degree seems all about gaining the tools to do research in the thing that you find to be interesting and fascinating, and in the words of Dr. Isis, way hot science. Course plans seem to be dominated by research methods and statistics required to make sense of whatever sort of messy data your science produces. You have an opportunity for a bit of a tease into a focus, but the Master's Degree is more about learning how to do research.

And then, as it would seem, the PhD is about doing that research. Inevitably, you realize that you still need some more theoretical help to do the things that you want to do so you could take a class or muck about in the literature and hope for the best. But what you are there to do, first and foremost, is taste the first-fruits of an incredibly publish-or-perish sort of life while actually having some people around you take a vested interest in what you are attempting to do.

I do have to say that I'm a little disappointed that Master's Degrees aren't more like "Course Catalog Roulette." If I am seeing 5-8 courses in a department that I want to take, then it seems like I would have a Master's Degree argument. But, alas and alack, most departments appear to be rather picky about what counts.

Why I find "Just Do Your Job" Rhetoric Repugnant

2009-05-19T10:03:00.003-04:00

Yes, a rant is coming, but it's worth ranting about so I'm going to go there.

With his speech at the University of Notre Dame, President Obama hit a flash point regarding the abortion rhetoric. I actually read his speech, and while I could not disagree more fully on his approach towards abortion, I found his speech to be well-tempered, even, and well-placed for changing the conversation regarding abortion to the issues that truly matter. Someone on a corner screaming "My body, my choice!" and another person screaming "You baby-killer!" are equally ill-positioned for thoughtful dialogue.

Yet, I know people who are incredibly conscious-bound to never participate in an abortion. I also know people who are incredibly conscious-bound to never participate in armed conflict. We have clauses that allow persons to be a conscientuous objector to armed conflict, but the only avenue people generally ascribe towards health-care providers that if someone is conscious-bound to never participate in an abortion, then they ought to find another job. After all, abortion is a part of a health-care providers job, so just do your job.

Just do your job.

These words make me wonder if someone has read the transcripts of the Numerburg trials. After all, they were soliders, following orders, just doing their job.

But more than that: implicitly within this rhetoric, we find a critical mass of assumptions. Two phrases come to mind that encapuslate these assumptions: "The customer is alway right" and "Father knows best."

So here we have our consumer-society shaping and calling the shots. If I want something in America, then I should be able to have it. That is, after all, the American way and look out world if I do not get what I want. As an engineer, I have to cry bullshit. Some things cannot be done sustainably, safely, or ethically.

And then we also have our politics, industry, or government calling the shots. If the government says something should be permitted or defensible, who am I to question it? Way to go Nancy Pelosi. If my industry is creating something, then who am I not to assist? Anyone want the latest in missile guidance technology?

People who stand within the gap with an ethically-attuned compass are professionals. To tell a professional "Just do your job." is to rob them of the very core about what it means to be a professional. When people refuse to "just do their job" and stand up for what is right, we applaud them. Now we can get into the grey area about what is right, and we do it all of the time, but for the love of every person and their humanity, "Just do your job." has to go.

Wisdom in a Comic Strip

2009-05-16T11:12:00.005-04:00

Over at PhD Comics, the humanities are on trial. Reading around higher education news, humanities appear to be getting even a shorter end of the stick than usual with the latest round of budget cuts. In today's strip, Gerard raises a good question.

All too often, I think we miss the philosophical, moral, and ethical implications of what we say and do. Within my work, I strive to consider these implications as it relates to understand what is required in order to be a socially-relevant engineer. I do not have illusions of grandeur or greatness that engineers represent the only needed profession (and yes, I know some people who think engineers make the best everything), but I do hope to improve on my corner of the world.

Yet it is amazing to me what happens within the construct and context of scientific inquiry as it subverts the role of philosophy. Just yesterday, I read that "It is not surprising that as we ride the crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator" (Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 1996). What we do, how we think, and what we value have an incredible power to restrict and confine us to ourselves.

A wise elder once told me, "Banish 'I, me, and my' from your vocabulary. When you use words like these, you become an individual, an atom standing alone. But when you ask another, 'How can I serve you today?' then you become a person."

Oh the challenges to become fully human. And as a person once penned in the second century, "The glory of God is a human fully alive." Really living and flourishing as a human being demands a struggle with all of the things that confront us.

Rather impressive

2009-05-15T23:26:00.004-04:00

So Alice over at ScienceWomen just posted this video. I have to say that I, too, want to be this kind of engineer.

Like many universities, we're in the Commencement mode at Bridge U. I've been thinking big thoughts even as I try to find the good in my last semester. This year, more than ever, I realize that we find commencement even when we're not looking for it. We retire projects that aren't going anywhere, we begin with new ideas, and we try to push everything to the next level.

But we like our class privilege!

2009-05-03T14:11:00.002-04:00

With that sort of blog title, you know a rant is coming.

Today, I am seriously thinking about how 4-year universities consider their role in society. Generally, I have accepted the common wisdom that it is challenging to get a job without a 4-year degree as "a politically reasonable talking point" as such talking points have been advanced to create a nation of young people geared towards college. "Politically reasonable" does not mean that such a view carries my endorsement; my own position sees the necessity of some sort of post-secondary training for most jobs.

So, this morning, I scanned the headlines from the NY Times and stumbled across an article entitled "Community Colleges Challenge Hierarchy with 4-Year Degrees" and proceeded to have my senses of social justice extremely irked.

In the interest of a bit of disclosure, I went to a Public School with some pretty progressive arrangements with Local Community College and Local University. I earned credits at both institutions of higher learning as a high school student. Because of the socioeconomic breakdowns in my town, several of my friends began study at Local Community College with various degrees of knowledge about how to concoct a plan of study that involved several transfer points.

Financially, community colleges make a lot of sense for a lot of people, particularly if they are first-generation college students, non-traditional students, women and/or people of color. Typically, if someone completes all of their education at a community college, one can expect to have a very career-based training. Community colleges generally offer solid preparation for jobs that both pay well and are hard to find a 4-year degree to complete (law enforcement, paralegal services, nursing, early childhood education, nursing, drafting and assorted engineering technologies all come to mind).

But what happens if a community college decides to offer a 4 year degree in something like teaching, nursing, or public safety management? The traditional system blows up in outrage.

Seriously people, what in the world is your problem? If someone has a baccalaureate degree in applied science of nursing, then it becomes much easier to navigate through the systems of promotion on the job. It helps educational programs differentiate between various nursing careers such as LPN and RN, where the RNs can gain an extra year. Moving to a 4-year model embeds some flexibility in a jam-packed pipeline. Granting baccalaureates increases the ability to recruit nurse educators as they are more likely to see the program as "authentic" over a program that can only grant an associate's degree. It allows current 3-year nursing programs with pre-requisite schooling to become a 4-year track for students.

Yet, you get accusations of "mission creep" and tell community colleges to "stick with the important work they do extremely well." Way to go political speech to say, "You aren't a real college of any weight to provide people needed education in the 21st century."

Continuation rates between community colleges and their 4-year counterparts are abysmal. Many 4-year programs refuse to identify the work that students have completed in community colleges, particularly if those 4-year programs have any status. Courses will count in a general credit sense, but not in terms of major fulfillment. To that, I have to say "Major FAIL" in the direction of 4-year programs.

Seriously, consider the nature of the degrees being offered at the community college. If they start going to the general scholarly model of offering programs indistinct from 4-year colleges, then I think the 4-year colleges may have a point. But that's not what we're seeing. The programs that are advancing through a 4-year degree model are high-need, high-skilled careers and professions that strive to meet the needs of the local community that surrounds the community college.

Telling someone that they can start in a 2-year environment at one cost, and then have that cost increase by at least one order of magnitude before they can finish their 4-year program does not serve many people all that well. By identifying critical career areas in their community, the community colleges can live into their mission of providing exceptional education for the local needs of local people.

Miami Dade College, keep up the good work. Way to strive to keep your doors open to the underfunded overachievers.

ACHOO! It's dusty around here!

2009-05-01T16:13:00.003-04:00

Sorry all for falling off the face of the blogosphere. I've had a fair share of things come across the realm of activity that have been completely unbloggable. It's also the end of the semester, so it's been crazy.

I finally got up the courage to log into my account today, and discovered an email telling me that I had been named one of the Top 50 Engineering Professor blogs. *falls over in shock* I'm in company with the likes of Candid Engineer, ScienceWomen, Zuska, and Dr. Isis among 45 other amazing blogs. Go check it out!

It seems like the end of the semester invites unbloggable activities. And the end of the semester always invites resolutions about how to avoid repeat at the end of the semester.

Some of my resolutions (in no particular order):

Place short books and edited volumes at the top of my reading list. I like feeling like I'm finishing reading something that's not for class. Putting a 700-pager on top can make one feel like an epic fail.
Itemize priority around areas of one's health (physical, mental, spiritual, relational, financial). Try to combine around things that you can. For instance, cooking for one's self instead of always eating out can help out both the physical and financial health.
Learn to say no and step back from things that are ballooning to fill way too much space in life.
Trust the people you find yourself around often; try to extend positive thoughts in their general direction as much as possible.
Carve out a space to do something intellectually different, but still interesting. When you work in a highly interdisciplinary field, you don't know what sort of combinations may present themselves.
And for the students...leverage your research credits.

So, hopefully I'll find some more time to be around these parts. I have a lot of things that I thought "OooooOOOoooooo, I should blog about that" even though I obviously did not.

Payback is Sweet

2009-04-06T19:31:00.002-04:00

So, today, I get an email from one of my professional friends asking me the name of my last place of work. Turns out that a friend of hers recently got offered a job at this school. She thought the name sounded familiar, and what do you know? She was right; my old place of employment. I quite enjoyed sumbitting a list of true experiences to argue against working there. Oddly enough, I could not think of one positive feature about this workplace, which says a lot about the situation.

I really hope to hear that the guy turns down the job offer.

Another plug for building an honest professional network. Speaking of professional networks, Alice at ScienceWomen has some great thoughts about building a peer network.

I Want to Crawl Under a Rock...

2009-03-31T11:34:00.003-04:00

...or at the very least start this week with a do-over.

Really, it is only possible to work with a subset of divergent information. Things do not go so well when the places that historically garner quite stable information go way awry. I am finding it even more challenging when source of stable information is quite important to me personally. Moreover, experience suggests resolution exists, but I do not have time to consider the full magnitude of competing claims. The claims center on a decision from 1923 that probably has a long trail of social, cultural, and political implications; moreover, the said decision occurred much later than I had previously thought. Not to mention, said decision requires considerable analysis because it spirals into my understanding of current practices because of the social, cultural, and political implications. Taken by itself, the decision seems quite arbitrary; embedded in its historical context, the decision seems much more connected than I previously realized. At least I understand some of the controversy around this decision much more, but it seems sometimes ignorance is bliss.

And I really am not a fan that a rather random historical discrepancy has distracted otherwise brain cells that really need to be thinking good academic writing thoughts when my academic writing does not consider historical discrepancies of this type.

Bad timing for new things to enter my intellectual sphere as the end of the semester is rapidly approaching. Thinking the light at the end of the tunnel is a train.

For the comments, don't ask the nature of the historical event in 1923. Suffice it to say, it's exceptionally random and crowding out consideration of other more urgent academic thought.

Crackle Crackle

2009-03-22T20:55:00.001-04:00

Hey all,

I'm back from break but struggling to get the navigation system back online. I'll be in and out as I tumble through the challenges of getting back into the school mode; but I will not forget to tell you about the minivan named Bill.

Now Entering Radio Blackout

2009-03-12T16:49:00.002-04:00

One of the things that has always impressed me about lunar missions is the radio blackout when orbiting the moon. The astronauts on Apollo 8 took an amazing picture of Earthrise when crossing through the threshold of the first ever radio blackout.

Radio blackout owing to the assorted gravitational pulls of Spring Break will commence tomorrow; upon my return I hope to see a photogenic "attitude"rise. At the very least I'll fill you in on one of my favorite breaks from school where I got to meet a bunch of sheep and drive through the mountains of Colorado in a minivan named "Bill" with a colleague.

Hitting a Shifting Target

2009-03-11T16:11:00.003-04:00

Is it just me or do papers carry this amorphous quality where every time you sit to write them, you come out with a completely different paper? I have one of these exceptionally difficult to characterize buggers flying around my head right now. I went somewhere to talk about this paper for 30 minutes with someone who knows more about writing than I do only to discover that I have 3 potential papers within this idea. As I attempted to write the introduction, I found yet a fourth manifestation of said paper. I also realized that the fourth manifestation has a short form (10-12 page-ish) and a long form (25-45 page-ish). I'm hoping to hit the short form so I can submit to an upcoming CFP.

Speaking of CFPs, I submitted my first paper to a journal ever in January. And now I'm counting down the days until 3 months after the submit date to inquire about its status.

Apparently academic life is not for those folks who value instant gratification.

The Challenges of Being a Female Engineer

2009-03-09T08:40:00.002-04:00

So I have been putting off writing this entry a bit recently, but now two articles have crossed my internet searching about the challenges assorted to being a female engineer. One study is called Lifestyle choices steer women away from STEM careers and the other article is Despite academic draws, engineering turns girls off more than ever. Both of these studies leave me feeling a bit like we're singing the same old songs despite evidence that both of the articles point to different problems.

To begin with, the first article makes a claim that women do not enter STEM careers because they are math-intensive. Yet, the main point of the article that rests within a sea of discussion about sex-based differences is that STEM careers require maximum productivity at exactly the same time as the available window for child-rearing. Essentially the argument of the article is that STEM careers lack flexibility that undermine persons that cannot commit to the standard work pace of STEM careers full-time without any break.

The second article makes a claim that women do not become engineers because they want to help people. For my part, this claim makes it hard for any engineers who are trying to change the messages of engineering and continues to marginalize engineers who do work to help people. Also, the formal logic that underlies this sort of article is "IF you want to help people, THEN engineering is not an appropriate profession for you" and similarly "IF you are an engineer who wants to help people, THEN you are a woman."

Reading articles like these two hides important ideas affecting all people in engineering: STEM careers generally lack flexibility and an epistemological challenge within engineering that defines what problems count as engineering. Moreover, although women's experiences with child-bearing and socialization to be caring individuals bring these issues to the forefront, these issues affect all engineers. Instead of talking about what effect these issues have on the profession as a whole, these important professional issues become "women's" issues as if they are somehow ancillary.

/rant

The State of the Blog

2009-03-04T17:04:00.000-05:00

Greetings my fair readers!

It is hard to believe that I started blogging a year ago today. When doing some web searching, I stumbled across the women scientist blogosphere and thought I would add my voice. I got started because I felt like I was at a new crossroads of my career, returning to graduate school in a different area. I thought I would wind up sharing about my academic journey and talk a lot about things that were happening to me. To some extent, that has happened. When things with school hit me square between the eyes, I tend to blog about them. I've told you about my heroes, my move to Bridge City, and the antics of my cat and a few others. When I have tips for surviving academic life, I offer them. I love love love the Scientiae carnival and contribute frequently. With the carnival I see some of my biggest spikes in traffic as people read my posts.

It did not take me too long until I started to take up political questions. A favorite post of mine is the 1943 Guide to Hiring Women with commentary. I do what I can to share my experiences with diversity, thoughts on energy and the economy, and general observations of political conversations. A favorite tag of mine has become "cultural insanity" which apparently debued because I was talking about parents who give full on spa treatments to 8-year-olds. I also frequently rant about standardized tests and college admissions. Sometimes I even go after upper level academic concerns. (Yes, even the fun of trying to publish papers!)

Lately, the blog has also seen a fair bit on the nature of science. I think I got started by posting about articles I had read in various news outlets.

Blogging is also fun because it connects me with so many interesting people in many ways. Looking through my posts to create this one, I found meme after meme. Although, I think one of the highlights of the blogging community year was FSP's Statement of Purpose contest. Another highlight involved meeting some bloggers in person over the summer.

So my fair readers, that's been my take on the blog this year. For the comments: why have you started reading me this year?

On Spiritual Practices

2009-03-01T20:33:00.002-05:00

Generally speaking, I have avoided talking about my personal experiences with faith on my blog. I avoid talking about them because a) I do not want to start a flame war, b) I do not want to be falsely characterized as a hyper-right-wing political conservative fundamentalist, and c) I would like to stay anonymous on my blog.

But today is a day that means so much to me that I do not think I could not talk about it. Today the Eastern Orthodox Church began its observance of Lent with Forgiveness Sunday. I find it to be one of the most moving services in the church because it captures the essence of what it means to be human while providing an enormous amount of hope.

The main event of Forgiveness Sunday occurs in our evening prayer service called Vespers. For the most part, Vespers follows its standard structure which some extended canons (hymns) throughout the latter half of the service. However, the dismissal of the service differs significantly than the conventional dismissal. The dismissal starts when the priest asks forgiveness from the assembled congregants; I have seen some priests get rather specific during this time because the Divine Liturgy always incorporates a request from the serving clergy that the assembled congregation to forgive them. On Forgiveness Vespers, the dismissal is structured by the priest asking forgiveness from every parishioner in attendance personally. Then the parishioner asks for forgiveness from the priest. Finally the exchange closes with the exchange of the kiss of peace in the Orthodox fashion (2 or 3 times cheek to cheek). THEN the parishioners move counterclockwise and stand next to the priest. Effectively this action creates a circle with everyone in the parish in attendance asking for forgiveness from everyone else.

I find this liturgical practice so moving because you ask for forgiveness from EVERYONE; from the 3 year old who doesn't quite get what we're doing to the person you barely know because they just happened to show up today to a significant friend where you realize the past wrongs present in the relationship. As everything in Liturgy, the words matter because the request is "Forgive me, a sinner" and the response is "I forgive you. God forgives." This language reflects a practical active fashion of the petition of the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." In some ways it can feel coerced because failure to extend forgiveness invites a lack of forgiveness towards you; yet this action represents one of the first callings to mind of the needed practice that you need to forgive someone. It's also extremely humbling to ask for the forgiveness of a 5 year old, but it's worth it.

So why do I bring this up at all on a blog where I mostly talk about graduate school and the nature of science? Well, I think that forgiveness and humility are two features that do not see much validation in academia, even though I would offer that they are two great medicinal attributes. Without these attributes, I think we are left in a world that does not know how to cope with diversity or how to treat human beings as human beings. We get caught in the rat race trying to do more to somehow prove ourselves. It's not safe to be in a place where we are not absolutely sure of ourselves and what we're doing. Yet I think the mutual and active practice of forgiveness and humility go a long way in helping us live in community.

In closing - Forgive me, a sinner. I forgive you. God forgives.

Today is ROCKING on the email front

2009-02-28T21:18:00.002-05:00

So all, I send out some really quirky emails. But I get some really great replies from people who've been doing this thing longer than I have.

Here's another spectacular email (albeit from a different person):

think what it was like for me as a dentist to go to theology grad school with my engineering epistemology. Those %$%*& artsies drove me crazy.

I have NEVER seen an email from a professor with %$%*& contained in the body of the message. I just about had a coronary, so of course I had to share it with all of you.

And I got this one from what amounted to an effective cold-call from online CV to a department chair in a very different discipline:

Hi, Academic,

Sounds like you have a great problem to research! I think it would be a good idea to meet and discuss this further. Would you like to come over to my office sometime?

I do have to go through the more traditional channels for that one, but hey, did you all see the positioning of the exclamation point? AND, I got to use a pointer from an academic too old to care anymore in order to do a good job in formatting my cold-call email. Exciting indeed!

Today's a very exciting day. Will have this post when the emotional stress that is graduate school rolls over me like a steamroller on steroids.

When I am an old academic

2009-02-28T14:32:00.003-05:00

...I shall wear purple.

And send emails to students that read like this:

i suggest we meet informally asap. ... my office is (fancy office location), and the BEST way of connecting is by NOT making an appointment, that we'd both have to remember. rather, call (my phone number) whenever you think you could be near (fancy building), and if i'm in, the chances are good that i can stay that way so you could drop in. i am seldom in my office before 10 AM, so afternoons are best bet.

Seriously, this email made my day. It's from someone old enough not to care anymore, who is not apparently jaded and cynical, who believes in what they are doing is worthwhile and interesting, who challenges the status quo of what's acceptable in academic life to carve out a new way forward.

I also love the class of academics who say "Yeah, that's the academic fluff introduction that is generally acceptable in these circles, but what you really need to know about me is that I have a collection of cats and I love to (garden, scrapbook, snowboard, fence, collect random pieces of hard to get art)."

I want to be someone who's known for my ideals, even if they are quirky as all get out. I want to have fun with what I'm doing. I want to have a realistic picture of myself even if that means telling humorous stories at my own expense when I'm an invited speaker.

Yes, older academics who still love what they do. I think that will have to do for who I consider to be my role models this month because it's certainly true.

scientiae-carnival

Awesome Carnival!

2009-02-24T18:35:00.001-05:00

DLee at Urban Science Adventures just posted the inaugural Diversity in Science carnival. Go read it! So many awesome posts!

Thanks D for putting all this together and I look forward to participating in this carnival in the future.

On Inquiry

2009-02-21T09:45:00.003-05:00

So I was not planning on writing this post but I had an interesting comment thread going on my recent thoughts regarding cognitive dissonance.

This post is thinking about how people gather evidence to support claims and different tacks of inquiry. Different schema of inquiry carry different rules, but these different rules do not negate the rigor of each strand of inquiry. Moreover, I offer the below trying to develop some sense of comprehensive list, but I'm sure I'm going to miss out on something or improperly characterize the different strands so feel free to chime in respectfully in the comments! So, here we go in no particular order.

The processes of scientific inquiry depend on making critical and persistent observations of the material world with the intention of constructing a model of how the world works. Scientific inquiry involves a repeatable set of phenomena. Detailed record keeping of observations aids the construction of models to ensure that the model used accounts for the observed features of the phenomena.

The processes of historical inquiry depend on constructing explanations that account for various events. Generally speaking, events can be understood as discrete, chained, or concurrent. For instance, World War I (and some historians would get on my case for taking such an extensive period and calling it an event) can be studied as a discrete event, chained within the context of modern warfare or nation building, concurrent with the systems of industrialization, etc. Therefore, historical events tend to be nested within a broader system of social and cultural features. Within the realm of one's question, historians work from original documents, anthropological evidence, and assorted secondary interpretations through time to construct a story that accounts for the evidence they have.

The processes of philosophical inquiry depend on identifying various purposes and motivations behind different human activities. "What is the purpose of education?", "What is the ideal form of government?", "What is the nature of humanity?", and "What does it mean to be fully alive?" reflect questions that depend on philosophical inquiry. Generally, philosophical inquiry involves identifying central ideas and articulating an understanding of the human experience clearly. Different philosophical orientations lead to different action steps which produce tensions when people with various philosophical orientations get together to try to accomplish something. Realizations of the importance of philosophical inquiry in our current world have lead to practices such as vision statements, mission statements, core value summaries, etc.

I think I am going to leave my explanations of different strands of inquiry here at this point so that I can fill people in on why I wrote this particular post. All too often I think we in assorted Western cultures exalt scientific inquiry over all other forms of inquiry without realizing that all of our modes of inquiry constantly interact in concert with one another. While "reading the literature" reflects something that people would say is a part of science, it seems to have more in common with the features of historical inquiry. Also a statement that declares "we only need to understand the material world" reflects a strong feature of philosophical inquiry. I would also suggest that perhaps historical and philosophical inquiry allow for broader consideration of living that are critically important.

Getting to know Otis Boykin

2009-02-20T09:22:00.002-05:00

So I've been planning on responding to Danielle Lee's call for posts about African-Americans in science for the first Diversity in Science blog carnival. As an engineer, I wanted to find someone in the field of engineering that I did not already know about. In doing some standard google searching, I discovered Otis Boykin.

Otis Boykin (1920-1982) had some tremendous achievements in electric circuit design. On my first web search, I discovered that he invented the control unit for the pacemaker. But not much else in way of detailed scientific achievement. Even Wikipedia only had 11 sentences about him. Then I discovered that Dagan from Fairbanks, AL helped me out in my posting project because Dagan dedicated a school project site to the life of Otis Boykin.

I do not think the obscurity of Otis Boykin's childhood is all that unusual. We know Boykin was born in Texas, and we have some idea what his parents did for a living. Boykin attended both Fisk University and Illinois Institute of Technology, although the records I can find seem to conflict about whether he graduated or dropped out.

Here the patent record starts to pick up so it's possible to get a better sense as to what's going on. Most of the patents awarded to Boykin fall under circuit elements. Boykin worked to develop resistors, capacitors, and various ways of making these two elements. His patent record suggests that he was a man dedicated to improving a process and not satisfied with the status quo. Boykin died of heart failure in 1982; I'm left to question whether he benefitted from his pacemaking technology.

The quality of information available on the internet about the life and times of Otis Boykin carries significant gaps and holes that almost need original source documents to figure out what story line seems plausible. Otis Boykin seems to have fallen into a fair level of obscurity, but at least we can still find out something about his achievements. I am left to wonder about how many other great thinkers have been abandoned by the historical record. Largely I do not think that people mean to forget, yet we seem to do a much better job tracking the dominant political record. As science, technology, engineering and mathematics generally present themselves as being more about the idea and less about the face of the person who generated the idea, how can we keep the various people from fading into obscurity?

Education, Engineering, Science and Cognitive Dissonance

2009-02-19T07:59:00.002-05:00

So Dr. Isis has kicked off a storm of comments discussing her Catholic beliefs and how they interact in daily life. Commenter MH in comment #108 discusses that such a mutually contradictory belief system would be a recipe for cognitive dissonance. Yet I would like to take a different tack on the question and explore the role of cognitive dissonance as it relates to education, engineering, and science.

Education seems to be all about producing conceptual change through cognitive dissonance. It could be the experiment in your high school physics class that keeps you up at night puzzling about why you saw what you saw. You could hear about an event in history that you were previously unaware of and ask why you have never heard of it. Picking up the newspaper today may have you dusting off your old economics and policy books as you try to sort through what seems to be happening in the global economic system. Personally, we encounter events, people, and things all of the time that challenge our existing models about how the world works for better, for ilk, for general interest, for our edification, what have you.

The search for assorted "standardized curricula" that works everywhere for all people tries to move education away from a process that produces cognitive dissonance. It's exceptionally impossible to predict how the information and process of schooling will affect the assorted participants. Parker Palmer has a spectacular chapter in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life entitled "The Paradox of Wholeness" that illumines this idea. Moreover, the cognitive dissonance endured within the educational setting invites consideration of the existential idea that "being is becoming." Simply, life seems to have the tensions of paradox and cognitive dissonance at any time. Within these tensions, we find opportunities to recreate ourselves; often times, we benefit from self-recreation that does not choose one piece of the tension over another because we become comfortable within the ambiguity of paradox.

As an engineer, I can relate to this sense of paradox all of the time because I have an invitation to remake the physical world of objects. Generally making trade-offs between competing requirements characterizes engineering design. Within all of the models I can make, I live within the tension of trying to pursue the best option within the limited resources I have. For clarity, I chose to discuss the situation of engineering as a personal singular construction because I'm sure various engineers have different takes on the process of engineering design than I do. The tensions within engineering design manifest at the limit of one's resources. What would I do if I had better knowledge of the problem? More complete awareness of the context of use? Access to a different type of material? More time? Better models of the life cycle of the artifact? and the questions go on.

Doing science also seems to be a realm of cognitive dissonance. Einstein made the type of theoretical leaps he made by envisioning himself traveling next to a beam of light. I don't know how cosmologists handle the Big Bang as being the origin point to the entire universe where nothing existed before. A child confronted with a set of observations that do not match his or her predictions has a choice about what to do with that set of observations; to consider the observations fully, the child must make a choice to embrace cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance seems to be a feature about what it means to be human. Yes, it's challenging to live within this frame but to not embrace cognitive dissonance means that everything must make sense at all times and in every way at an individual level. Simply put, I do not think that's possible.

On seemingly fair practices

2009-02-17T12:06:00.002-05:00

When we start talking about diversity in science, ostensibly the conversation moves to the experiences of women and ethnic minorities. Considerable amounts of effort gets expended to try to illuminate the situation. Recently I heard an interesting talk about how practices that seem fair on the surface negatively impact women within ethnic minorities because these women experience the practices differently. As I have been in the literature myself, I did not find the outcomes of the study all that surprising. The approach of the study reflected a rather novel design; I benefitted enormously from considering how this study was conducted. So I talked with the person presenting the work a bit and reflected some more.

Later, I had a conversation with people witnessing the presentation from a wide array of backgrounds regarding another topic. Yet at one point, a very strong diversity advocate accused yours truly of "being brainwashed by the religious right." Our conversational topic was not about religion, and I was quite surprised that the religious right came up. Yet, the topic fits commonly in introductory courses so I thought I would engage because the word "brainwashed" has an absolutely negative connotation that applies the person who has been affected remained entirely passive and unthinking. Personally, I was quite offended by the accusation but decided to embark on a bit of guided inquiry. I asked "Have you ever thought about how a Christian student might respond to that remark if they heard it in class?" The diversity advocate basically responded "Well, yes, and I don't care because as a member of one of the most oppressed groups in society I don't think I should have to care." Found myself rather flabbergasted because the diversity advocate continued to classify yours truly a bit further after the above comment.

After this, the diversity advocate left and another person said, "Well, you don't have to worry about life at Bridge University because you fit in just fine." Again, I was amazed at the amount of stereotyping present because Bridge U has not been the easiest place for me. Yet the conversation turned to the purpose of high school science education is not to help students think scientifically but to preserve the status quo.

News flash: rampant assumption that you understand where another person is coming from is one of the largest reasons we need people working as diversity advocates. We should not set up situations in our classrooms at any level where people are needlessly silenced because of both visible and invisible differences.

When Ideologies Collide

2009-02-16T09:01:00.001-05:00

So I seem to be thinking about teaching and learning at levels that are above my pay grade, but reflecting on the ideological wars within the context of student learning have lead to a new realization. Learning is a complex process requiring time and repeated exposure. The process of changing one’s conceptual ideas does not happen overnight because an expert simply told you something about a happening. Even so-called experts can encounter difficulties when asked to generate explanations for their thinking; integrating the collective wisdom of humanity at varying rates of utility reflects a real constraint on being human. As individuals, we cannot know everything.

One consequence of being human and existing in the world is that we do our best to simplify the world through constructing various models of how the world works applied to various processes. These processes often differ depending on what we are trying to do. For instance, the models we use to model the world historically reflect a very different type of model than the models we use to model the world scientifically. Certain models become well worn through continual refinement through new experiences. For instance, the mental models I construct when I use the Microsoft Office Suite have been greatly challenged by the switch from Office 2003 to Office 2007. I have been a computer user for nearly all of my life so I have a sophisticated and well-worn model about what it means to be a computer user even as I shift operating platforms and computer habits. As an engineer, I have several mental models related to deployment of mathematics; yet the mental models I employ shift depending on their purposes.

Within realizing that different models are used for different purposes, I hit on a new insight regarding the ever-raging debate about how to teach high school science, particularly as it relates to instruction regarding evolution. Some of the difficulties I have with my present thinking involve an incomplete map of the functions of two different models. One model concerns how I interact with myself, other people, and the world at large. The other model concerns the mechanisms regarding the appearance of various living systems. Yet, truth be told, I have not had the opportunity to gather evidence to identify models that fit the second condition. Moreover, not having a clearly articulated model about the mechanisms of the appearance of various living systems is not something that keeps me up at night. After all, I am sure that I have many models that remain incredibly tacit while functioning reasonably well. However, the nature of these models being tacit and consequently invisible does not generally permit for an illumination of what other examples might be. On the other hand, models that exist in increasingly articulated and featured throughout my life experience, such as how I interact with myself, other people, and the world at large, reflect strongly developed models that accomplish any number of tasks for me cognitively.

The bottom line here is that learning takes time and repeated exposures so people can consider various models with their array of implications. Prior learning matters because often this learning integrates with an array of models working together towards a common end. Humans ask questions all of the time, some of which can be answered scientifically with a sizable fraction of these questions that cannot be answered scientifically. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that one thing that might be causing some of the pushback from people of faith as it relates to evolution could be that people feel pressured to change all of the models that have been informed by the idea that God created the heavens and earth to say that all these models now must be informed by evolution through natural selection. Yet, I think the scientific argument stems from an invitation that sounds something like this “Given that we see an array of living systems, what models could we use to explain the mechanisms behind the appearance of these living systems?” This question reflects an interesting “How” question yet exploring this question need not directly inform all of the other models, specifically in the spiritual and moral sense, because science reflects a system of thought driven by the observations possible of our material world. What I think may be happening in this very charged conversation is that the driving questions that lead a person to see need for all of these different models get lost somewhere in the shuffle.

On Questions and High School Science

2009-02-11T20:09:00.002-05:00

I firmly believe that questions are the fabric of science. The process of science is best described as "scientific inquiry" as opposed to the scientific method. Scientific inquiry demands asking questions and determining ways and means to go about answering those questions. Generally, having its grounds in repeatable action that can be tested time and time again, scientific questions focus on the "How"s of the world and on less of the "Why"s. "Why" questions seem to be best approximated by various models that have different strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, not all "Why" questions can be answered with scientific models.

Yet high school science seems less about the questions than it is about the answers. Pick up virtually any high school science textbook. I'm willing to bet that the book has between 30 and 40 chapters of information, designed to be covered at a rate of one chapter per week. Look at just about any scientific classroom, high school or early undergraduate, and it seems to be dominated by teacher-driven information transmission through lecture. From my vantage point, it seems more important in today's society to quote Newton's Third Law than to realize two objects are required for an interaction. It seems more important to compute numbers from the ideal gas laws than to realize the magnitude of approximations that exist to term a substance an ideal gas or what those numbers really mean anyway. It seems more important that students can identify the 4 bases of DNA without appreciation for how DNA structures the living world. It seems more important that students know the famous scientists that went before than the creation of new questions of relevance to our societies today.

Yet we're caught in an ideological battle over standards that have much less to do with the principles of scientific investigation and much more with preserving the sociopolitical ends of divergent camps. We turn students off of science before we give them insights about what does it mean to be a scientist. We make bold declarative statements about how Newton and Darwin are absolutely essential to understanding the field, opting for a system that values factual recall over asking questions that contain the first fruits of an exciting career experience in science. Both physics and biology seemingly undergo lots of political posturing before students' very eyes before they even get started: a) girls don't do physics because it's all about advanced math and b) people of faith keep your hands off biology. Questioning the place of math in the physics curriculum will get you thrown out on the street pretty quickly. And asking a question about some of the mechanisms of evolution seemingly promises a good, swift tongue-lashing.

I've taught physics. And I try to articulate to students that mathematics provides an amazing tool to model physical systems and quantities. I question the role of mathematics every day because I wonder if it functions the way it's supposed to in our curriculum. Are higher order mathematical concepts the only way to articulate some of these models or do we find extremely powerful models through algebra and geometry? Newton invented calculus to explain what he was seeing in physics, but he also lacked a lot of vector representations. How can geometric analysis of triangles help students visualize the components of motion and conduct sophisticated understandings of the motion of objects?

I appreciate the complexity of living systems. I enjoy thinking about human responsibility to the world around us, both animate and inanimate. Yet I've never once had a conversation with a biologist on these topics that went well. Currently I'm considering a specialization within my graduate program but it requires taking some courses within the biology department. And I find myself looking for alternate options because of experiences I had when I tried to ask questions of various biology teachers and people trained in biology over the last several years. I would love for a biologist to engage me in a respectful conversation about why evolution is so important in the field because I hear this claim made over and over again without much explanation. Having someone go "EVOLUTION IS ABSOLUTELY PIVOTAL IN UNDERSTANDING BIOLOGY!!!!!" and considering their duty done does not help me understand how biology depends on evolution.

I've literally had my students tell me that forces need to be equal and opposite "because Newton said so." They refused to engage in the lab activity. Moreover, once I finally banned the name of Newton from our discussion so that they would gather evidence about Newton's claim, the force sensors in my lab went haywire. Wound up pulling out spring scales to show the point and then tried to engage my students in a discussion about why our fancy technology force sensors gave us different results than our spring scales.

I really care about empowering people to use science to explore various phenomena in their world. I know that there is a lot of information out there about how things work and happen that a) is not able to be investigated, b) riddled with errors, c) unintentionally misleading, and d) out of date. Within the realm of plausible investigation, I think we have a lot to learn from various approaches. Diversity of thought in science helps us ask an array of questions that really flesh out different models of the how. Yet students always need assistance in separating the wheat from the chaff. They need to know how and why to discount pieces of "evidence" and "information."

So yeah, I'm an engineer who's spent some time teaching high school physics. I can tell you honestly that I took a lot of flack for trying to emphasize the questions. Yet I still firmly believe I was doing my best to teach science.

Forgive me while I go meta

2009-02-09T19:22:00.002-05:00

So I've been known to think deeper than my pay grade on more than one occasion to the point where I've honestly been given a nickname by a professor to that end. Yet today's topic resides in a very deep, philosophical space. What happened to the pursuit of wisdom?

I don't hear many people talk about wisdom. Most people talk about knowledge, and factual knowledge at that. Articles that stress how our educational system is failing talk about the inability of adults to answer questions that are presumed to be incredibly straight forward and recalled from schooling. Our current testing requirements evaluate compartmentalized knowledge. Knowledge, information, call it what you will, but we seem to be missing something: wisdom.

Our deficiency in wisdom seems to have even made it to the dictionary. In considering this post, I made use of the "define: " query on Google. Princeton's wordnet has this to say about wisdom:

accumulated knowledge, erudition, or enlightenment
the trait of utilizing knowledge and experience with common sense and insight
ability to apply knowledge or experience or understanding or common sense and insight
the quality of being prudent and sensible

Wisdom, it seems, has ceased to be a virtue worth striving after to the point where we ignore it all together. Moreover, increasing our focus on knowledge carries the apparent caveat that one cannot have all knowledge and so everything is relative. Knowledge begins to masquerade as truth and removes wisdom from consideration.

Yet so many questions about being human seem to find themselves in the space where only wisdom can posit an answer, not simply knowledge or information. In evaluating whether something should change or stay the same, we need wisdom. In anticipating possible outcomes of action, we need wisdom. In the paradoxical challenges of being and becoming fully human and fully alive, we need wisdom. In so many places and in so many different ways, we need wisdom.

But, the question remains: why is wisdom so hard to discuss, articulate, and find?

Citizens Against Over-Simplification

2009-02-08T11:51:00.002-05:00

Occasionally, reading Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times drives me bonkers, and today was no exception. The piece of commentary is Richard E. Nisbett's "Education is all in your mind." Richard Nisbett is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, with expertise in social psychology. And after reviewing his professional website, affliated personal website, and CV, I have to say that my disapproval of his op-ed piece mounts even more.

Basically, the central tenet of the Op-Ed piece is that the most sound educational intervention we can do is to give tests in situations that minimize the way stereotype threat impacts someone's educational performance. Any number of small interventions can "erase" the achievement gaps between blacks and whites. And then he discusses how larger interventions like the Perry Preschool in the 1960s and Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools seem to have a similar affect on test scores.

So basically, the point of the article says that you can do simple things, you can do big things, but don't spend the money on the big things unless they work. Yet, in all instances, the measure of how well something works is a standardized test. I'm seriously concerned with the way standardized tests have become the gold standard in evaluating everything in education. Standardized tests only consider an individual at one static moment at time and can only evaluate that individual on a limited array of question types and skills. Moreover, standardized tests seem to best measure how well one person can do on a standardized test.

We can do better with regard to assessment than standardized tests. Students deserve a much better education than a ridiculous battery of tests every year. I'm all for giving teachers information they need to better determine how to support student's growth and development. But an inane amount of tests tied oh-so-vaguely to the curriculum is not the way to do it.

The Limits of Scientific Civility

2009-01-28T07:49:00.002-05:00

In having an array of conversations with many different people, my observations suggest that scientists remain quite civil until someone breaches the subjects of politics or religion. For most scientists, such conversations do not happen on a regular basis with an exception granted for the political dimensions of grant funding. Yet I do not think it is accurate to suggest that science functions as an inherently different sphere than politics and religion with absolutely no overlap.

Western modern science tends to be a zone of transient facts. "We used to think x but then we did experiments, so now we think y." Western modern science seems to function as a way to get people to change their beliefs through experimental inquiry. As such, it seems that for some a particular canon of scientific thought becomes more important than the process of experimental inquiry. The writings of Sandra Harding are particularly interesting as she explores questions such as "Is Science Multicultural?" and "Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?"

And I've seen some very interesting things in the name of scientific orthodoxy. One of my favorite stories to this end occurred while proctoring a biology exam in a Christian-affiliated school with one of the most diverse populations of students I have ever seen. The teacher asked the following True-False question: "If humans could somehow reproduce asexually, would it be possible for a virgin woman to give birth to a male child?" If the intent of the question is to solicit that women typically have XX chromosomes while men have XY chromosomes and there's no way for an XX woman to pass a Y chromosome to a male child, why not ask for an explanation? A genetic variation among chromosomes suggest that some women have a set of chromosomes of XXY leading to the possibility of a true answer given the caveat of the asexual reproduction. But why frame this question in terms of humans anyway?

The interesting thing to me is that no one doubts the presence of a scientific canon but when I frame the concept, people recoil. But if there wasn't such a canon, then why are we very concerned with helping students "adopt a Newtonian worldview?" For my part, I would like to empower students to make observations about their physical world but I would never insist on calling Newtonian mechanics a worldview. At a certain stage, Newtonian mechanics work very well; at other stages, quantum mechanics seem to model the systems much more accurately.

Within the political sphere, I am always amazed at how many scientists operate from a position of unreserved benefit from technology, suggesting that science and technology are somehow value-free. "Oh the technology itself is not bad but it can be used for immoral purposes." Moreover, "it's not my job to determine how the technology will be misused." So we hide behind the idea of "scientific objectivity" and do everything we can to remove ourselves from social and political consequences.

My experience in such conversations seems to yield two sorts of people: a) those willing to listen to have a meaningful conversation and b) those who accuse me of not being a scientist utilizing coarse language. A more equitable science would have more people in the first camp even though it means questioning their understanding of how science fits into society at multiple venues.

scientiae-carnival

What Are We Teaching Anyway?

2009-01-26T15:12:00.002-05:00

So I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching. I have been in classrooms, interacted with professional associations, and diaglogued with any number of educational researchers. I'm even branching and learning about the underlying theories of how knowledge might be put together, learned, and transmitted. But at the crux of the matter of so many educational debates, I frequently locate a common idea: we don't know what we're teaching anyway. I mean, seriously. What should a 10-year-old know about science? Does it matter if science for 10-year-olds shifts forward or backward in the sequence? What do we mean when we talk about about science? Do we have a scientific canon with its own heirs and originators: Bacon, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, et al?

My own experience in teaching, that seems shared inasmuch as I used relatively common national curriculum expectations, reflects an jumble of names, famous experiments, and equations galore. I found relatively low tolerance among students, parents, fellow teachers, and administrators for practices designed to encourage critical thinking through sustained scientific inquiry. Granted, I will hold myself responsible for some of their resistance as I seemed highly unorthodox to them and I struggled to communicate my implicit expectations explicitly, but I think the resistance went deeper than that.

I worked in a school that had more lab equipment than I could shake a stick at, yet I was told to base my lectures off the books. Every exemplary science teacher in my school followed the same model: Powerpoint slides tightly coordinated to the textbook. Test questions worked best if they came from the test bank of the curriculum resources, and labs excited on the periphery of the classroom. I understand that not all science programs have the resources to conduct detailed scientific inquiry (and I'm grateful for low-cost scientific inquiry curricula such as Physics by Inquiry and Physics of Everyday Thinking that try to ease these constraints), but the fact of the matter is that I was flat-out told that route memorization was the best way to teach science.

I. beg. to. differ.

In my humble opinion (and one that happens to be shared by many, many, many science education researchers), science represents a combination of persistent inquiry and careful observations to construct explanations of how the world works. The question of the best topics and sequences to emobdy this idea represents one of the biggest open questions of our time, yet not many people appear willing to engage. I think partly because we have a historic argument of "Well, we've always done it this way!" combined with an irrational fear of somehow "losing science" if we reconsider some of the content.

But, then again, it seems like we're stuck in this additive model of education where information flows from teacher to students in an endless stream where the only response we have is to demand more time and money. Oh, and standardized tests.

Sunday Haiku

2009-01-25T16:57:00.003-05:00

Home, trying to read
Discouraged by progress yet,
Birds taunting my cat

Four-legged friends definitely make academically challenging days tolerable. And I've learned that I need at least 3 reading blocks of time for this one class...

A Poor Scholar's Soliliquy

2009-01-22T08:41:00.002-05:00

*I had a bit of a snag yesterday trying to get this posted.

I found this reflection today written by Stephan Corey in 1944. I'm a bit disheartened that it still holds true today.

No, I'm not very good in school. This is my second year in the seventh grade, and I'm bigger and taller than the other kids. They like me all right, though, even if I don't say much in the classroom, because outside I can tell them how to do a lot of things. They tag me around and that sort of makes up for what goes on in school.

I don't know why the teachers don't like me. They never have very much. Seems like they don't think you know anything unless you can name the books it comes out of. I've got a lot of books in my room at home-books like Popular Science Mechanical Encyclopedia, and the Sears & Wards catalogues--but I don't sit down and read them like they make us do in school. I use my books when I want to find something out, like whenever mom buys anything second-hand I look it up in Sears or Wards first and tell her if she's getting stung or not. I can use the index in a hurry.

In school, though, we've got to learn whatever is in the book and I just can't memorize the stuff. Last year I stayed after school every night for two weeks trying to learn the names of the presidents. Of course, I knew some of them--like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, but there must have been thirty altogether, and I never did get them straight. I'm not too sorry though, because the kids who learned the presidents had to turn right around and learn all the vice-presidents. I am taking the seventh grade over, but our teacher this year isn't so interested in the names of the presidents. She has us trying to learn the names of all the great American inventors.

I guess I just can't remember the names in history. Anyway, this year I've been trying to learn about trucks because my uncle owns three, and he says I can drive one when I'm sixteen. I already know the horsepower and number of forward and backward speeds of twenty-six American trucks, some of them Diesels, and I can spot each make a long way off. It's funny how that Diesel works. I started to tell my teacher about it last Wednesday in science class when the pump we were using to make a vacuum in a bell jar got hot, but she, didn't see what a Diesel engine had to do with our experiment on air pressure, so I just kept still. The kids seemed interested though. I took four of them around to my uncle's garage after school, and we saw the mechanic, Gus, tear a big truck Diesel down. Boy does he know his stuff!

I'm not very good in geography either. They call it economic geography this year. We've been studying the imports and exports of Chile all week, but I couldn't tell what they are. Maybe the reason is I had to miss school yesterday because my uncle took me and his big truck down and we brought almost 10 tons of livestock to the Chicago market.

He had told me where we were going, and I had to figure out the highways to take and also the mileage. He didn't do anything but drive and turn where I told him to, Was that fun. I sat with a map in my lap, and told him to turn south, or southeast, or some other direction. We made seven stops, and drove over 500 miles round trip. I'm figuring now what his oil cost, and also the wear and tear on the truck--he calls it depreciation--so we'll know how much we made. I even write out all the bills and send letters to the farmers about what their pigs and beef cattle brought at the stockyards. I only made three mistakes in 17 letters last time, my aunt said, all commas. She's been through high school and reads them over. I wish I could write school themes that way. The last one I had to write was on, "What a Daffodil Thinks of Spring," and I just couldn't get going.

I don't do very well in school in arithmetic either. Seems I just can't keep my mind on the problems. We had one the other day like this: If a 57 foot telephone pole falls across a cement highway so that 17 3/6 feet extended from one side and 14 9/17 feet from the other how wide is the highway? That seemed to me like an awfully silly way to get the width of a highway. I didn't even try to answer it because it didn't say whether the pole had fallen straight across or not.

Even in shop I don't get very good grades. All of us kids made a broom holder and bookend this term, and mine were sloppy. I just couldn't get interested. Mom doesn't use a broom anymore with her vacuum cleaner, and all our books are in a bookcase with glass doors in the living room. Anyway, I wanted to make an end gate for my uncle's trailer, but the shop teacher said that meant using metal and wood both, and I'd have to learn how to work with wood first. I didn't see why, but I kept still and made a tie rack at school and the tail gate after school at my uncle's garage. He said I saved him ten dollars.

Civics is hard for me, too. I've been staying after school trying to learn the "Articles of Confederation" for almost a week, because the teacher said we couldn't be a good citizen unless we did. I really tried, though, because I want to be a good citizen. I did hate to stay after school because a bunch of boys from the south end of town have been cleaning up the old lot across from Taylor's Machine Shop to make a playground out of it for the little kids from the Methodist home. I made the jungle gym from old pipe. We raised enough money collecting scrap this month to build a wire fence clear around the lot.

Dad says I can quit school when I am sixteen, and I am sort of anxious because there are a lot of things I want to learn--and as my uncle says, I'm not getting any younger.

50 Amazing States

2009-01-20T18:14:00.002-05:00

visited 37 states (74%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project

So I saw this at EcoGeoFemme's site and thought I would play. I'm noting a deficiency in the Western part of the map. I also think it's telling that I've lived in 8 of these states... I move too much.

Variations on a Theme

2009-01-17T10:37:00.002-05:00

I really like jazz music. It's low-key, personal, intimate, and fun. Jazz tells a story much like so much of life within a simple concept: variations on a theme. Good jazz musicians do any number of things to mask the dominant theme so you really see them catching fire at the power of a suggested theme. Listening to jazz can be an acquired taste as occasionally the group sounds like they are going n+1 number of directions when n is the number of players in the group. Some people view jazz musicians as showing off, particularly when a solo artist goes into the stratosphere of musical goodness. But there's something about the power of a theme and seeing truly amazing and inspirational variations.

So many things in life could work a lot like jazz. Taking a simple theme and reconceptualizing it in a variety of different ways using a variety of tools. My ideas of good research also feed off my ideas about good jazz. A research career typically is marked by a framing question, methodology, or burning desire that the able researcher can twist, spin, modulate, and/or transpose into something that is both fun and fundable. Helping others see the meaning and value to our underlying theme often enables the transition to the fundable.

What sort of ideas are helping you create ridiculously on-fire melodies of science?

The Costs of Educating Students

2009-01-16T11:16:00.002-05:00

Let me say at the outset that I believe no "investement" could be better marketed than the "investement in a college education." I use the word "marketing" because that seems to be what we do: in order to be successful, go to BRAND college for the annual cost of $5x,xxx.99. For many people, existing in our society requires going to college so you can get the 4-year degree in order to obtain a decent job.

Recently, I came across some articles from the Delta Cost Project's report on the shifts in university spending. While initially agreeing with their conclusion, students spend more money for their college education only to receive a lower-quality education, I wound up disagreeing with the methodologies as reported.

Looking at what was meant by spending on education, I actually had to look at the report itself to see what constituted as spending on instruction. I found my answer on page 33 of the full report where spending on instruction includes such items as "faculty salaries and benefits, office supplies, administration of academic departments, and the proportion of faculty salaries going to departmental research and public service." Then later, the report divides spending according to three categories: Instruction, Student Services, and Admin/Support and Maintenance. So I'm looking at a classification problem because what exactly is "Admin/Support and Maintenance" and would costs occurred in the administration of academic departments get reported in this category? The 8 categories from pages 33 and 34 ostensibly get regrouped into the 3 reported categories, yet I can't figure out how.

And, ironically, the above rant leads me to my point: what does it take to have a high-quality education today? I consider three critical elements: teachers, students, and a learning environment. Yet, we don't report on those three elements all that often. At the college level, we have professors who reflect well-educated persons who may not know anything about teaching. The element of paying for a service leads to consideration of the students as consumers. And we often conceptualize a learning environment as a space with writing surfaces (supported by various forms of technology), chairs, heat, and light.

Yet, why do we educate students? What do we hope they obtain from the process? Do we impart knowledge or support students along their career development? Do student advisors count in the educational or administrative costs? Does the cost of transforming an old lecture hall into an active-learning environment get billed as an instructional or maintenance expense? For schools with residential communities, are residential communities learning environments or operational spaces?

I think we have learned a lot about learning. I believe that reconceptualizing the questions of what does it mean to educate can serve us well. Asking "What are students paying for?" can be a good first question, but how does the college environment serve to add value to a student's career experiences? We can rant and rave about student's underpreparedness or unwillingness to work hard, yet I do not know how well that discourse serves us if it is not attached to questions of fundamental importance. Why is education so critical in today's world? Is it really just because that's what you need to obtain a good job? Or is there something else that education is supposed to accomplish?

On Outsiders and Insiders

2009-01-13T09:50:00.002-05:00

Frequently, I find myself asked a question that goes something like this, "Academic, how could you ever see yourself as a part of (a particular group) because you have (a particular trait)?" On one level, my questioner has a point; at an entirely different level, I feel bemused at the question...every time. As presented, the question is really about "How can you consider yourself an insider when you're really an outsider?"

Yet the insider/outsider question arguably reflects one of the most unfortunate constructions in all of human existence: the us/them construction. And therein lies the rub. Some groups long to define the "us" utilizing as many different barriers to entry as possible. Other groups have very few barriers to entry. Still other groups have barriers to entry that need not be present and so you have people like me mucking around in the various systems to identify those various barriers and expand the group's vision of what could be. Some barriers exist because of willful selection, but it seems from my vantage point, more barriers exist out of ignorance and superficial consideration of some of the meaning behind a data point. Yet operating as a change agent requires interrogating the system to move beyond the superficial.

At the end of any day, I will always find people who agree with the group memberships I afford myself and people who try to exclude me from the groups. Being human means that it is really hard to reduce our humanity to a sum of parts designated by various labels. And working towards change often requires being a bit of a non-conformist.

The Problem-Solution Paradox

2009-01-05T08:53:00.002-05:00

So, today, I came across this article about female-friendly science at DePaul in one of my many news updates. I feel a little mixed because while I know, know, know, KNOW that women have sparse representation in science, I often feel caught in the problem-solution paradox. Today fits nicely into that paradigm.

On one hand, I'm glad that certain universities step up to the plate and try to realize the ways they can shift the status quo in the STEM disciplines (and even this construction can be problematic because of the difference in the more physical sciences and the more life/behavioral sciences). I realize that the choice of where to do studies often requires access to critical information that (can be both socially and culturally difficult to obtain and) permits people to consider an array of factors important to them. I enjoy seeing traditionally liberal arts schools (like Smith College in MA) broaden their degree programs to include engineering. In hindsight, I would have loved to learn more about the nature of an engineering degree necessary to do the type of work I thought I wanted to do after graduation to have been able to broaden my search to include a different type of school.

YET, one aspect of the article really got to me, so I'll quote it:

Nationally, half of chemistry majors are female, but only 40 percent of graduate students are women. But at DePaul University, where Rizzo is about to graduate before heading off for advanced studies, 61 percent of chemistry students are women.

To me, half of chemistry majors being female strikes me as a good thing, 40% of graduate students strikes me as unfortunate. But why celebrate 61 percent at DePaul?

Do we celebrate DePaul because women increasingly enroll in college at higher rates so 61% at DePaul reflects the sex balance present? Do we celebrate DePaul because women transfer to DePaul at a high rate in order to be in the department after having some bad experiences in their early years at other schools? Do we celebrate DePaul because an uncharacterically high percentage of DePaul's female chemistry students go on to graduate school? Or, do we celebrate DePaul because it's at least a university willing to care about these sorts of issues so the school bends over backwards to try to recruit, encourage and mentor budding women scientists?

Is it just a numbers game with so few institutions willing? Do we need schools like Smith (100% women in their chemistry major) and DePaul to try to make up for programs where women might only make up a third of the classs?

Does DePaul use their new building in some way that brings uber-hot science to the forefront where the science advanced reflects the ideas of the population gathered? Moreover, the only thing we can tell about the program's composition from the article is its sex balance...is it truly diverse?

And so, these types of questions leave me in a space of paradox.

(No I'm not trying to knock DePaul's program in the slightest. The article launched me back into an ongoing conversation in my own head.)

Being Known

2009-01-03T11:13:00.002-05:00

So I just got back from a Gathering of Like-Minded Academics and Ms.PhD has a post up about Street Smarts in the Academy. The intersection of these two events got me thinking.

As a junior academic, I constantly find myself in places and venues where I have absolutely no friends in attendance. Within my department at Bridge U, many of us gravitate towards some conferences; yet for my part, I find that perhaps I would be wise to explore professional communities other than the "obvious" communities. My work is very interdisciplinary; I have research interests that make some rather creative, and I daresay compelling, points of intersection. Yet how to survive?

Some thoughts:
1. Take advantage of various small-group opportunities. Pre-conference workshops can be a great warm-up to the big event because you get to know a few people before jumping into the main sessions. Occasionally, conferences can be organized to incorporate various "break-out" kinds of conversations.

2. Introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you. Here's where name tags can be awesome because you can say "Hi Academic. What do you do at Bridge University?" It's almost on par with "How are you doing?" but it has professional relevance. If you have an amazing conversation, you could say something to the effect of "Would you like to continue this conversation over lunch?" and score a lunch buddy other than your conference program.

3. Notice opportunities to chat with the plenary speakers. These people come to speak at these things because the community deems them to be significant. The Gathering of Like-Minded Academics had a chance to meet with all of the plenary speakers after-hours. Quite cool.

4. Follow-up on conference leads. I personally allow my name tag to become a repository for business cards of the new people with whom I have connected. I write on the back why they gave me their card and try to follow up in under a week's time.

5. Be cool with hanging out by yourself. Networking can be exhausting and less than fruitful at times. As an introvert, I struggle to keep the willingness to network at all times. Sometimes it is nice to just wander by yourself or treat yourself to a nice meal.

Other thoughts?

Thinking in Binary

2009-01-01T12:39:00.002-05:00

Welcome everyone to 2009! No, I did not fall off the face of the planet. I just spent time away from my computer and blog while I sought refreshing on my time away from campus. What a marvelous time it was!

While on my vacation, I found myself spending 18 hours a day in frantic, yet restful, motion. I traveled to the Parents Academic, the Extended Academics, and a Gathering of Like-Minded Academics. I dealt with severe weather in traversing the Extended State, yet arrived for a spectacular holiday time with my family. The Christmas presents under the tree seemed to be in frantic reproductive form; yet independent of that a wonderful time was had. I spent time greatly enjoying a gift that will increase my productivity for research, even as I spent significant hours of the day gathering together my data in the appropriate software. I saw Extended Academics I have not seen in years, even though it meant many hours in a car stuffed to the gills with my family and the gifts through hazardous weather.

A Gathering of Like-Minded Academics occurred in Cool Big City where it was entirely permissible to retreat to Hotel Land while only needing to exit in seek of nourishment once a day. After a time spent of significant traveling, I sincerely appreciated the chance to stay in one place. Encouraging conversation, stimulating presentations, and deep reflection marked the Gathering. The drive back to Bridge City was uneventful and I returned home refreshed.

I spent my day relaxing at home after I realized that my travels and interactions depleted my energy store more than I had noticed before. Shortly thereafter, something happened where I could have surrendered the refreshment I had experienced for significant anxiety. But as I thought about it, fear can operate like a switch, forcing us to see the bad over the good. I dealt with the situation that arose, but then recovered the refreshment.

All break it seems I had an invitation to focus on the growing stress or the opportunity for refreshment. It almost does seem like a true either/or. I do hope that I recognize the stress-refreshment binary more in the coming year.

Winter Vernaculars

2008-12-22T09:44:00.002-05:00

In the academic world, winter break is upon us! With that, I thought that I would clue you in on my general approach to greetings at this time of year.

"Enjoy your break" Generally appropriate for all audiences. Use sporadically with Staff as many schools have calendars that mean they have limited time off.

'Happy holidays" Again, all purpose, but I find this one to be a little stale. I generally reserve this greeting for people who deck out their space with a variety of symbols and seem really into the holiday season, in general.

"Merry Christmas" The "big gun" in various politically correct circles. If people talk about celebrating Christmas along conventional lines (tree, Christmas decorations, Santa, what have you), I generally find the greeting appropriate.

"Blessed Feast!" I'll admit it: this greeting is my preferred greeting (to receive) around the holidays. Generally only appropriate the week before the 25th, but then solidly appropriate until 6 Jan.

"Safe travels" Critically important for those embarking on Northern State travels this time of year. Generally wise to make sure people are traveling before throwing this greeting out there.

If "Blessed Feast" sounds odd to you, it could be that you are unaware of my various traditions. I've worked in a variety of situations where people celebrate things in ways that I did not grow up with, but I do try at least to learn the greetings. I get the greetings for the Jewish high holidays crossed and I've forgotten the greeting during Ramadan; but I know they exist and I will check with people who I know who celebrate these events when I get a chance. But I'm the person who will always ask on how to greet you appropriately during the holidays.

Cheers to all! I hope all that are traveling travel safely. I'm off to hang out with the clans.

And now for another favorite of mine:
"May peace and good will abound with you and yours."

Year in Review

2008-12-21T14:16:00.002-05:00

Now that the semester's over, I can finally... work on all of the projects that got pushed aside owing to classwork.... er take a break ;)

But I thought I would take a look at the life of Academic Crossroads over the year by looking at the first line of my posts each month...

March the birth of the blog....
"Welcome to the journeys of yet another woman trying to make a difference in the world."

April reality hits...
"So today I managed to get a lot done, but it was also a needed ego check."

May recovering from a demanding schedule...
"Last night I got to bed late so I really wanted to sleep in a bit."

June adding weight for Scientiae
"When I think about added weight, I think mostly about the weight of responsibility."

July on one's voice for Scientiae
"At any rate, I'm going to stick to my original plan of conversation."

August quite the hiatus....only 3 posts in August
"Hello to the Internets."

September on consequences of starting school
"So sorry for the sparse blogging but the semester has solidly begun!"

October Donor's Choose drive!
"Okay, I know the economy's not doing so hot right now."

November back for more Scientiae
"So I'm a little late for this month's Scientiae but I still want to write on the topic."

December Naughty Monkeys with Dr. Isis
"So Dr. Isis has tossed down the shoes for this month's Scientiae. However, Dr. Isis's Naughty Monkeys are no match for my science."

Obviously, if I don't write for Scientiae, then my post count crashes that month. Time management seems to be a prevailing theme. Hopefully next semester will be a bit better as I've already got projects in the hopper so they are not all starting at the same time. When it seems like I can't talk about anything else, I decide to weigh in on something political, like standardized tests and energy. Hmmmm....data feature unknown.

But I have kept my blog running since I started it, connected with some pretty awesome folks, have a healthy amount of lurkers, and even have people commenting on a few posts. Not bad for a 9 months!

Definitely more to come as I continue on my academic journey! As always, comments most welcome ;)

Please Let Me In...

2008-12-19T22:22:00.002-05:00

This blog post is my entry to FSP's Statement of Purpose contest. For those unaware, the purpose of the contest is to make a complete mockery of the traditional graduate school application ritual called the Statement of Purpose.

And without further ado, I offer the following:

"Meaningless! Meangingless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" -Solomon in Ecclesiastes

With these words, Solomon (who is most often cited as the author of Ecclesiastes) announces the consequences of obtaining wisdom. Solomon is also credited with authoring the majority of the Proverbs. Therefore, I announce my application to the Biology Department at FSPU where I will conduct a systematic meta-analysis of all evolutionary biology work in order to offer support to fundamentalist Creation Science programs around the globe.

While I have absolutely no background in college-level biology, I have had a fascination with science since the womb. My lab skills are impeccable as I duplicated Mr. Wizard's experiments flawlessly in my kitchen by the third attempt. I still retain the knowledge that if you want to remove an ice cube from a water glass with a string, then it is best to position the string on the ice and sprinkle salt. My electronic set and LEGOs represent my favorite toys as I systematically followed the instruction to produce the desired result. I have also experimented with plant watering frequency extensively and found that plants watered less than once a month tend to die rather rapidly.

I developed an interest in my present research when I moved to the Bible Belt where people convinced me that evolution was a conspiracy theory advocated to advance the gay agenda. Knowing of my instrinic interest in science, people continually told me to study biology to provide sound apologetics for Creation. In college, I chose instead to study Literary Criticism because I cry at the sight of a caged animal but have been unable to find gainful employment outside of the retail sector and food service. I consider my employment history to represent God's judgement on my previous career path.

I desire to attend FSPU because of the presence of Extremely Famous Professor, a leader in evolutionary biology. By connecting within a Very Distinguished Department, I will be able to observe lab practice critically to detail the many limitations of the methods and errors in the data analysis. Moreover, I will have unparalleled access to EFP's publication record and data behind those publications allowing for a strong meta-analysis that will further accent the lab's methods and errors. With the results of this research, I can establish that like everything that has time to live, it is now time for evolutionary biology to die.

I sincerely think that I can make a strong contribution to the community at the University of ScienceWomen and look forward to hearing from the Department of Ecology soon.

------
Parts that are true of the statement above
1. I have no background in college-level biology.
2. I have been encouraged by a Fundamentalist to study Creation Science from a Young Earth perspective because I'm good at science.
3. I don't read Ecclesiastes while I'm having a bad day.

Engineering of the Future

2008-12-13T17:39:00.002-05:00

This wordle was inspired by Alice over at ScienceWomen. I used the text of the National Academy of Engineering's report on the Grand Challenges. Although, as I read the report carefully while getting it into a format suitable for upload, I could not help but notice how all of the perceived achievements of engineering came from American engineers. In addition to the Grand Challenges, they have also detailed the last 100 years of the Greatest Engineering Achievements.

I sincerely hope we employ global solutions to the engineering challenges of the future.

Score One for Science

2008-12-10T22:38:00.003-05:00

So Obama announced his Environmental team today.

Some favorite quotes:

I also am glad to see they chose an engineer to run E.P.A. The typical choice is an attorney.

An understanding of the art of the possible in energy technology will be critical to the development of a cost-effective climate change policy.

At the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, (Dr Chu) has sponsored research into biofuels and solar energy and has been a strong advocate of controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

From what it seems like, President-Elect Obama is surrounding himself with people informed from a wide array of pragmatic perspectives. It will be interesting to see the evolution of green industries over the next 4 years.

End-of-the-Semester Ego Boost

2008-12-09T22:35:00.002-05:00

I've been working on a paper all semester, targeting it towards publication. I got my draft to my co-author a few days ago (who has provided some valuable insight into the draft construction but I've actually written all of it) and even though things have shifted a bit as a result of the writing process (doesn't that always seem to happen?), I just got the ALL SYSTEMS GO! notice. Granted, we're at a hold in the count as we have to meet to discuss the nature of the revisions but WOOHOO! The paper is done! And my co-author thinks that we can submit it with rather minimal changes :)

*insert "Happy Academic" dance here*

(Yes, this paper represents my first real attempt at publication.)

Triaging the End of the Semester

2008-12-09T00:37:00.002-05:00

If I were an ER doc, I would have to characterize my end of the semester as a composite of gun shot wounds and full cardiac arrests. I have knocked out four major projects in the last four days and am just starting to hit my stride. Lucky for me, my cat has outstanding abilities as a triage nurse. He regularly monitors the temperature of my appendages while also ensuring to check for my ABCs: alertness, building arguments, and creative thought. His behavior also encourages me to stay connected to the computer. I credit my cat with the fact that I'm still sane.

Study break!

2008-12-06T18:56:00.004-05:00

Today is the Feast of Saint Nicholas. My holiday observances have officially begun!

I realized today why I struggle with a snow-free holiday: ALL of my decorations incorporate snow! Even my Nativity Set is designed around the concept of snow people.

A Very Snowy Nativity

But now I return to my regularly scheduled time of studying. The end of the semester is fully upon us all.

Sometimes I feel like these guys...

Hegemonic Holiday?

2008-12-02T21:51:00.002-05:00

And in this post, I will own up to my complete and total nerdness right up front. So yes, this post indicates I am a total nerd.

That being said, has anyone ever looked at the cultural representations of the celebration of the holiday known as Christmas?

I grew up in the Northern Town of Podunk. My family always did Christmas to the nines even though we weren't religious attenders of any stripe. The day after Thanksgiving marked our official entrance into Christmas mode as the tree went up, the decorations got dispersed, and the holiday music started blaring. We watched Christmas movies en masse, baked all of the assorted cookies, and made requisite trips to the grandparents' homes.

But when I moved to Southern Big City, I realized I had a problem. No snow at Christmas. Have you seen Christmas movies without snow? What's Christmas without letting it snow to make Frosty the Snowman? How can you go over the river and through the woods on a sleigh without snow?

From what I've read, the fat man in a red suit version of Santa Claus started in Civil War. Is my reading of "Northern cultural hegemony" just because I grew up in the North and then spent some time in the South? Do people who live where it does not snow have similar disconnects with the cultural representations of Christmas?

Exploring!

2008-12-01T20:26:00.005-05:00

So Dr. Isis has tossed down the shoes for this month's Scientiae. However, Dr. Isis's Naughty Monkeys are no match for my science.

Figure 1: A Shoe Ill-Prepared to Help One Traverse My Science

(To honor the host, I have presented this post Dr. Isis' style.)

You see, my science involves rough crossings into brand-new domain spaces. Spending any length of time in Dr. Isis's Naughty Monkeys would leave my toes, arches, and ankles screaming. I like my toes a lot; kicking open new realms of science requires serious toe protection. I also try to keep my feet dry as wading through significant amounts of literature from a lot of fields can get a little swampy sometimes. I never know if I have to weave left or right to get where I'm going, so I want to keep my feet on the ground and my ankles well-supported. Keen Footwear is an amazing brand to traverse my type of science (and I think Science Woman may agree.)

Figure 2: A Shoe Capable of Meeting the Demands of My Science

And, lastly, I think my science is hotter than Dr. Isis's Naughty Monkeys because I do not have to dress to the nines to partake in community discourse. My science resonates with who I am and connects me to an awesome community. Although, I do enjoy the opportunity to be a bit more formal at times.

Figure 3: Slightly More Formal Science Shoe

scientiae-carnival

What Makes a Feminist?

2008-11-28T11:18:00.003-05:00

Happy Black Friday everyone. If you decided to brave the stores, I hope you didn't get trampled by Dr. Isis's Naughty Monkeys. (Speaking of, don't forget about Scientiae this month!)

I've been talking with friends who are professors. One of them was amazed that a female student could be "anti-feminist" so he asked the class if they supported women making the same amount as men for doing the same job. When everyone invariably raised their hands, my friend pronounced everyone in the room to be a feminist. The discussion then moved where anyone who believes "all people are equal" where their definition of people includes men and women would be considered a feminist.

Is this definition sufficient? What are the benefits and risks of identifying "feminists" so broadly? If you identify as a feminist, does "equal pay for equal work" have a significant role in your feminist identity? If you do not identify as a feminist, what parts of your personal philosophy do you invoke if you support equal pay for equal work?

Eat, Drink, and Be Thankful

2008-11-27T08:59:00.002-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Thanksgiving always tends to arrive as I'm swamped with work, overwhelmed with life, and generally in a downer kind of mood. Perhaps that's why it arrives so consistently. I appreciate a day where people stop to give thanks on a national scale, going to extremes to be with friends and family. For my part, I tend to celebrate Thanksgiving locally, so I'm in Bridge City this year. A challenge for me is to make every day a day of giving thanks. Yet I'm grateful for one day to pause.

In no particular order, here are some things that I'm especially thankful for this year:

A job where I am surrounded by really great people who honestly try to help each other out as much as possible.
An academic program where my brain has been revived in thinking big, grand thoughts about the world.
The friends that I've made since coming to Bridge City
A church within a reasonable driving distance
An apartment that pulls off a fairly decent view even if I need to restrict my memories that I'm overlooking a parking lot.

Yet Another Dose of Sexism

2008-11-24T22:21:00.002-05:00

Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper did not have a good spacewalk a few days ago, losing a bag she thought was tethered. I read a news blog saying astronomers have spotted the bag with various telescopes. The comments follow some of the wretched pattern of women in science sexism.

They range from "This is why you shouldn't allow women to use tools" to "If the bag was COACH, she wouldn't have lost the thing" to "She deserves what happened because she didn't take her husband's name at marriage." Absolutely no one acknowledges the other space walker present, Steven Bowen, who also took responsibility for the mishap.

Stefanyshyn-Piper is a Navy captain and a mechanical engineer. I wonder how much crud she has had to put up with simply because she's a girl.

/rant

The Power of Advisors

2008-11-24T14:37:00.003-05:00

So Dr Isis has a spectacular post about graduate school advice. She quotes a professor from Duke at length; I have to steal the second paragraph in its entirety because it is just that good....

Second, choose your advisor wisely. Not only does this person potentially have total control over your graduate career for five or more years, but he/she will also be writing recommendation letters for you for another 5-10 years after that. Also, your advisor will shadow you for the rest of your life. People will always think of you as so-and-so's student and assume that you two are somewhat alike. Finally, in many ways you will turn into your advisor. Advisors teach very little, but instead provide a role model. Consciously and unconsciously, you will imitate your advisor. You may find this hard to believe now, but fifteen years from now, when you find yourself lining up the tools in your lab cabinets just like your advisor did, you'll see. My student Alison once said that choosing an advisor is like choosing a spouse after one date. Find out all you can on this date.

I cannot stress enough the importance of good advisors, even at the undergraduate level. When I started college, I had a "Sign my form" relationship with my undergraduate advisor. He was not a bad guy at all. What is more, he even tried to draw me out a bit to get to know me personally. Yet, when I switched my major, I did everything I could to select an advisor I knew I could relate to. Even within my minor, I adopted an advisor who I could relate to within that field.

In Graduate School Take 1, I once agin experienced being assigned an advisor. Of all of the faculty I had met during my visit, this guy was the last guy I wanted as an advisor. The flexibility within the department to change advisors did not exist; I left graduate school instead of staying in a toxic mentoring situation.

In Graduate School Take 2, I approached the question of advisors with great intention. With regard to my research interests, I could fit with a wide range of faculty members. Yet, in considering my different experiences with advising, I made sure to choose someone I could get along with.

But it's a little disturbing to see how true the sentiment of "in many ways you will turn into your advisor" can be. So, buyer beware!

Battling my Project Que

2008-11-23T19:43:00.002-05:00

And I feel like I'm losing. I'm trying to write papers, consider how to motivate some studies, analyze data, and keep my health all at the same time. (Yes, I am aware that this battle plagues all academics.)

Lately, the only metaphor that seems to capture the writing process is the idea of giving birth. Granted, I never have given birth. Yet, I think the metaphor captures some of the reasons why I feel oddly maternal about my writing.

My nose must go to report to the grindstone before more projects arrive next week.

Academic Transparency

2008-11-22T16:04:00.002-05:00

Hello Blogosphere, I have a quandry about academic life as it relates to one's professional specialization. Therefore, comments are extremely welcome on this post!

Around cultural debates, it seems you can throw a rock and hit someone who says "Well, I hold a doctoral degree in the field of fruit; this cultural debate cannot apply." Often times, it can be pretty easy to check these spokespeople out: go to their university's website, scope out their CV, and see if anything exists that causes you to add credibility to their claims.

So a couple of days ago, I had reasons to doubt the claims of an academic. He makes some bold claims basically citing "I'm a -ologist." The source I had cited his full name with middle initial. So I looked him up. In the course of trying to validate his credentials to speak to the issue, I discovered his school's website (Go Google go) but no faculty profile or CV of any kind. Odd... But I figure, I'm getting good at navigating around ProQuest's Dissertations and Theses so I'll try to figure out what he wrote his dissertation on. I found his master's thesis in a subfield that doesn't map to the subfield that he's making his claims. Okay, okay, so some people begin early and publish around a bit. So I go to the discipline-specific database, and see what comes up.. He has a limited publication record all in his master's subfield. So I try to Google Scholar because I was starting to feel a little irked. On Google Scholar I find a citation to his PhD dissertation (turns out it was completed at a university that does not require dissertations to be published). But it's still in his same Mater's subfield. After finding his PhD citation on Google scholar, I found a record of his publications on his school's hidden web through Google web search. All of his published scholarship, save his most recent work, is published in his Master's subfield and his most recent work is published by a non-academic publishing house in a different subfield.

I find this situation to be perplexing because a) I wasn't trying to stalk the guy and b) most academics leave a trail of published breadcrumbs to tell a story. But I guess this hunt also begs the question about specialization. If you train in a subfield (like molecular biology), does that mean that you could also be a specialist in a different subfield in the same discipline (like evolutionary biology)? Do academics have some sort of public service obligation to let the world know what they publish? Do these expectations vary across disciplines (ie are the rules different for history than they are for chemistry)? Does it matter the Carneige classification of the academic's college or university?

Creating Change in a Stagnant System

2008-11-21T09:07:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about a professional society. Unfortunately, like a lot of professional societies, the professional society in question (PSIQ) does a spectacular job at preserving the status quo. However, because of my involvement with the PSIQ, I personally feel that members of the PSIQ do not enjoy their role as maintaining the status quo. PSIQ functions as a bare-bones society with limited membership. Also, many members of PSIQ maintain association with much larger professional societies so people expect the bigger, better resourced societies to do something. But there is only so much that can be said for trying to move a bigger society. Some places find themselves in similar territory as PSIQ while others have much larger mechanisms that dwarf the missions of PSIQ.

One of the problems of PSIQ is two committees have significant leverage to try to induce changes that are necessary. The relationships between these committees are problematic because one appreciates the need to affect policy but does not know how to do it while the other committee is quite insular, almost to the point of being a bit inbred. These two communities do not co-exist well together, even though I know both communities quite well. They consist of great people who have vastly different outlooks than one another. (Yet I do not think it's as bad as say, the Republicans and the Democrats.) However, after spending some quality time with PSIQ, I'm thinking there might be a collection of folks interested in effecting policy. Most of the people who realize the need for the change are over-worked practioners within the society but these practioners tend to be well-organized across 4 other communities within PSIQ. Interestingly, the committee most knowledgable about the political realities faced by PSIQ tends to be the one most closely aligned with direct practioners. The insular community tends to be most aligned with discipline-specific academics.

Creating changes in stagnant systems involves looking at the wheels that can be pushed. As an engineer, I can find such a situation to be akin to a seized gearbox. Where do I have access to that can create motion at other places in the system?

Yet, when you identify substantial national politics as part of the thing that's seizing the box, it can be difficult to know where to get started. Difficult yes; impossible no. Politics just demands strategic thought and placement.

5 Things Meme

2008-11-17T21:27:00.001-05:00

Wow, everyone loves me! Isis, Microbiologist XX, AND ScienceWoman have all tagged me to spill the beans about 5 things, so here I go.

5 things I was doing 10 years ago:
1. My first "real research" science fair project
2. Beginning my formal instruction in calculus
3. Ending my first significant relationship (no correlation between these events)
4. Started going to church
5. Trying to find a car that could transport a string bass

5 things on my to-do list today:
1. Give presentation
2. Catch up on back tasks
3. Read books
4. Work on manuscript
5. Get shots :(

5 snacks I love
1. Ice Cream
2. Frozen Custard
3. Sorbet
4. Gelato
5. Klondike bars
(yes there's a pattern....)

5 things I would do if I were a millionaire
1. Establish a fund in honor of my grandmother
2. Pay off all of my debt
3. Invest in development of green technologies
4. Provide reliable support for my friends who are missionaries
5. Travel to expand my worldview (particularly the places no one goes to visit)

5 places I've lived
1. On a dirt road
2. On a major ambulance route
3. On a boarding school campus
4. On a hill at a summer camp
5. On the 10th floor of a freshman dorm (RA)

5 jobs I've had
1. Camp counselor
2. Teacher
3. Resident assistant
4. Consultant
5. Research assistant

Jennie at Just a Girl and Mad Hatter haven't posted much. You think they want to play the game?

A Vision of Research

2008-11-15T09:14:00.004-05:00

Today's PhdComics cracked me up (as is usually the case with this fantastic graduate school stress reliever).

Here's the comic for your enjoyment:

For my part, I tend to focus too much on the technical details and the difficulty in moving them forward. This orientation towards research leaves me a little myopic. Yet if I'm myopic in one eye, I'm hyperopic in the other as I think grandiose thoughts that are subject to "Lifetime achievement" awards should I ever manage to pull them off.

Looking at research can be tricky because research differs inherently from the eye chart at the doctor. Most of the time, we do not even realize what we hope to see in order to keep our field of view wide enough for that really surprising result. Gauging process can be challenging because what is the step size of your progress? Are baby steps just as useful as the gigantic leaps?

Hmmm...Is my cat trying to tell me something?

2008-11-12T22:25:00.002-05:00

So I just got home, greeted the feline, grabbed some food, and busted out the computer for another long night of writing. My backpack is on the floor, but from the way my cat is acting, it's a very interesting object. He's attacking the straps, putting himself between the straps and the bag, getting a taste of the strap adjusters, etc. Seriously he's going nuts. Yet I cannot tell if he's waging war or trying to get a sense of what it must be like to be me spending so much time at school...

And today's backpack activated my "Passenger Airbag Off" light because it was just that heavy. Usually my cat is the only passenger that manages that trick. (And no, my cat was not in my backpack...that would be cruel.)

Stock Photo Poetry

2008-11-11T18:16:00.003-05:00

I've recently been blogging to try to jumpstart my writing a bit. Being back in school has awakened my poetic muse. So, inspired by a random stock photo, here's my poetic offering to the blogosphere.
A page awaits, blank.
The course undefined;
The possibilities endless.
The future unknown.

So many ideas to call upon
Each acting as a passport.
A white space
Takes on the shape of a window.

Synthesizing My Thoughts

2008-11-10T22:19:00.002-05:00

Synthesis seems to be an overarching theme for me lately.

My thermal solution in my house has been to wrap up in my fabulously oversized fuzzy sweater that I would never wear in public because it is just that huge. I feel like I've grown fur. And then I think about my beloved spastic cat who looks at me like I finally caught unto his secret.

I've also been seeing connections among nearly everything I'm reading; it also extends to things past reading. I do like that various course readings talk to one another. I don't mind that research-related literature takes up all of the time I have for reading. Movies represent my principal decompression zone where I can get out of the space of thinking about school for a while. But the last movie I watched (50 First Dates) reminded me of the essential nature of writing daily in my research notebooks. Who would have ever thought that Adam Sandler would find a way into my academic thinking?

So it's cold.

2008-11-09T19:30:00.003-05:00

The weather here in Bridge City seems to have fully shifted into the "Thinking about Winter" mode. I have to say this type of weather is the worst. It's cold but not cold enough for snow. It does the driving rain thing that can freeze on the roadway. I monitor the air temp to figure out if we are moving in the right direction for black ice.

At this point of year, I also have a weird contest with myself to determine what thermostat level I can live with by trying to keep the heat off in my house as long as possible. It helps that I have an absolute obsession with all things sweater and blanket. But I have to say the thermal challenge was a lot more fun when the weather was dry outside!

Spastic Cat

2008-11-09T00:08:00.003-05:00

So my cat is sprinting around my apartment, making a game of everything he sees. I have never understood the energy of these creatures. He's quite funny to watch.

But right now I'm wishing I had his energy. He's leaping to the counter tops with a single bound. Do you think I can do that with my writing?

Economic yo-yo

2008-11-07T17:38:00.002-05:00

Gas prices have been tumbling, tumbling, tumbling. You should check out Gas Buddy to find the trends near you. Driving around Bridge City, I discovered that the $2/gallon threshold had been broken yet again. Nationwide, gas prices are running 50 cents cheaper a gallon than they were a year ago. Normally, my mood is inversely proportional to the price of gas. However, I wish that were the case over the past couple of weeks.

Energy in many ways powers our economy and will spur us forward into the land of innovation. With the economy's present slump, wise economic policy would encourage us to push into new industries. After the Great Depression, World War II challenged us to expand aviation. The 1960s expanded the consumer markets while reaching for the moon. While we left the Moon behind, America pushed into a whole new season of mass consumerism. Increasingly, college education became the commodity par excellence. Science and technology continues to drive our economy forward into the space of new ideas just as it allows us to achieve flight in all of its forms and a consumer-driven culture. Green energy sources represent a realizable opportunity to propel us forward into new spaces.

Yet the gas prices have fallen through the floor. As near as I can tell, gas prices serve as an indicator for conventional energy. If gas prices remain low, conventional energy remains cheap making it harder to push new ideas through the marketplace. Do not get me wrong: I hated paying for $4/gallon gas (even though I know that's very cheap on a global scale) but for seemingly the first time in a while, the rest of America was with me. From what I can tell, Americans seem to have wised up a bit because we're driving less.

The 1970s represent a missed opportunity to change how we do business related to energy. I hope that Americans keep up the demand for green energy as I personally see this industry driving us forward.

Writing for Gold Stars

2008-11-06T19:23:00.002-05:00

The Election distracted me from InaDWriMo. From the looks of my RSS feed reader, I am not alone. But I thought it would be best to update on my writing progress.

So I plan to go the grade school route and celebrate achievements with gold stars. Even though some would say I'm too old to get kicks out of gold stars, I say that I can motivate myself however I want. Just because I'm starting to deal with more adult-type responsibilities does not mean that I have to grow old!

I've decided that I can earn a reading star and a writing star every day. My project involves a lot of reading so on reading days I try to keep a document open to type my notes in directly. I also have a concept map space to try to figure out where ideas fit together. Overall I'm pleased that I'm developing academic writing strategies and appreciate the stimulus to read through a lot of this literature.

But, I will require time at the grindstone to complete today's writing. Away with me!

What will be different this time?

2008-11-05T18:22:00.002-05:00

I woke up this morning feeling like I was still in a dream. The 2008 Presidential Election invited all to participate in a way that stands to transform our country by affirming that the way we work together can produce unity instead of discord. However, friends of mine counter that the next 4 years will not be any different; the positions have just swapped.

People listened to President-Elect Obama's speech in Grant Park last night and treated it like a rallying cry. But at a point to bring us to a point of reflection for the road ahead, I went ahead to find some various presidential acceptance speeches. Can you identify the speaker? Some are repeats.

a. Today the American people have spoken. They have affirmed our course. They have told us to go forward.
b. I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.
c. We agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest.
d. But, together, you and I vowed to turn our country around, with a strategy to meet our challenges and protect our values, opportunity for all, responsibility from all, an American community of all Americans.
e. America has spoken, and I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens. With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans, and I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your President.
f. I want to thank you for everything you did to make the calls and to put up the signs, to talk to your neighbors, and to get out the vote.
g. And I am not frightened by what lies ahead and I don't believe the American people are frightened by what lies ahead.
h. The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep.
i. The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what is needed in Washington, D.C. It is the challenge of our moment.
j. Talk is no longer enough. We must act and act now. And the American people will be watching the leaders of both parties to see who is willing not just to talk but to act. I am willing to act, and I ask others to join me.
k. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.
l. I aim to try and tap that great American spirit that opened up this completely undeveloped continent from coast to coast and made it a great nation, survived several wars, survived a Great Depression, and weГll survive the problems we face right now.
m. They are sending us a message: Work together. Meet our challenges. Put aside the politics of division and build America's community, together
n. There's an old saying, "Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks."
o. So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other.

These 15 statements came out of somewhere and marked the efforts of elected Presidents to energize the nation. Reading through the speeches in full, I am amazed at how similar they are to one another. The difference, apparently, starts with us, people like you and me. Last night showed what happens when people try to break through the apathy and participate in the workings of our government.

As individuals I feel that we have different levels of focus and responsibility. Some of us will choose to work through political engines, some of us will work through our workplaces, some of us will work through our communities of faith, some of us will work through our families; but common to all of that is a desire that we must break through our own apathy to declare that we can be the difference that we want to see in the world.

I sincerely hope that people continue to advance the cause of our freedoms and appreciate the responsibility we all share to help one another.

What will our legacy be?

a. Bill Clinton, 1996
b. Barack Obama, 2008
c. George W Bush, 2000
d. Bill Clinton, 1996
e. George W Bush, 2004
f. George W Bush, 2004
g. Ronald Reagan, 1980
h. Barack Obama, 2008
i. George W Bush, 2000
j. Bill Clinton, 1996
k. Barack Obama, 2008
l. Ronald Reagan, 1980
m. Bill Clinton, 1996
n. George W Bush, 2004
o. Barack Obama, 2008

Election Day

2008-11-03T23:43:00.002-05:00

Have you voted? Go now. Vote.

Right now I find myself anxiously awaiting one statistic that overshadows everything about this election. I want to know the percent voter turnout. Call it a preoccupation with the democratic process. Call it taking part of history. Call it restoring what it means to be American. Call it revitalizing a latent passion to take a stand. I am wanting to see record voter turnout in every sense of that word.

Why? Well, a big part of me feels that independent of who wins the election, large voter turnout makes it clear to me that America spoke to pick its leader. I do not like being disillusioned by hanging chads and the reality of winning the election while losing the popular vote. I am tired of elections being needlessly close because so many people stayed home. I know the system is far from perfect; but it is our present system. The system depends ideally on participation; participation can shape the system.

Please vote.

For the comments: Why do you vote generally? Why did you vote in the 2008 election?

On Dispatches from the Christian Right

2008-11-03T07:24:00.002-05:00

Christian Right, Moral Majority; whatever you want to call them, you can take your pick.

The impetus behind this post is that I have been spending more time on Facebook. One of my friends joined a group protesting the latest Focus on the Family publication of why we should pray for the election to go a certain way. The publication carries the form of a letter that runs 16 pages. Yet, of all of the potential issues, gay marriage carries the day as to the source of the unraveling of American society.

For my part, I understand the reasons both pro and con to gay marriage; I can understand why the word "marriage" invokes a particular response. Yet, I cannot for the life of me figure out why politically, gay marriage represents the worse idea ever in American society. (Honestly, weighed against issues like poverty, failing schools, significant foreign conflict, a sputtering economy, etc, why should something like gay marriage be a focal point?)

I think Americans must be able to practice 1st Amendment rights that include freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. I love that these freedoms can be expressed civilly. We can have disagreements in this country while retaining the dignity of people involved. I believe that people being able to say things are "wrong", "unjust", "sinful", or "unloving" is a necessary part of the discourse. Again, we can certainly disagree with how other people see an issue; yet taking a stand based on personal convictions can be a good thing.

For most people, the conservative conversation around gay marriage centers around the rights of parents and the rights of churches. Parents must continue to play a central role in their child's education. Downplaying parental involvement will only limit what schools will be able to do. Similarly, a hosting venue does have restrictions on various event forms that can occur within that venue. Typically the idea that one member of a couple has been a member of a particular church for 6 months seems to be increasing as a requirement to be married within a particular church.

I'm just tired of allegations suggesting that GLBT persons are somehow the impetus of all that is wrong with America.

/rant.

InaDWriMo 08

2008-11-02T08:28:00.003-05:00

So I'm a bit of a newcomer to the academic world, but I do have a piece of academic writing that I'm trying to complete in the next couple of months. I'm going to call it an "article" as it does not strike me as a traditional journal paper. For the first part of the month, I'll be working on the paper using section drafts; the second half of the month has me trying to compile these section drafts into a reasonably competent draft of the full paper.

But I have to admit, I have no idea how to think about this project in terms of word count. My brain seems trapped in the undergraduate model of thinking about pages. Also, I am hoping to overwrite in my section drafts so I can streamline the paper once I get it all together. Because it seems like most of my blogging friends are working on assorted writing projects this month, can I get some help in the comments?

Welcome to November folks.

Tricks and Treats of Academic Life

2008-11-01T09:53:00.002-04:00

So I'm a little late for this month's Scientiae but I still want to write on the topic. Here I go...

Some of my tricks:
Keep your head up at conferences. You never know who you may meet at a workshop, over lunch, or in an open committee meeting. Working the whole conference can help you forge invaluable relationships over time. The more awareness you have of the conference scope, tempo and feel, the easier it becomes to sound intelligent within the space.

Avoid touchy discussion unless relevant. Mostly politics and religion falls into these categories. Race, class, and gender conversations require an appropriate window of time and a decent level of relationship. If there's a venue to discuss these touchy topics, I have always found it helpful to go provided they do not have a huge "time and energy" vacuum effect beyond what I'm willing to invest.

Know your catalog. If you find yourself tending towards a research area that spans more than your major field, then keep up with other departments, professors, and relevant courses. Extending your plan of study with space holders of "I would love to take this kind of course if offered" can help keep your radar attuned.

Be yourself. Know why you're in your program, even if the reflection resides in your journal only to be seen by your significant other. Pick your battles, but it's worth doing everything you can to hold fast to your motivations. Once you graduate, you're mostly on your own, not doing things professionally because someone told you that you must. I am doing my best to practice that in my graduate school experience.

Treats
No shortage of intellectual conversation. I love being surrounded by thoughtful people, even if I disagree with them.

Flexible work time and space. Planned ahead I can choose where I spend my time. I can't always control what I am doing at a particular time, but I can make sure that my work occasionally occurs in environments I enjoy.

The feeling of doing something new and different. I really like the thrill I get by thinking I'm exploring things in a unique way.

scientiae-carnival

6 Random Things about Me Meme

2008-10-30T08:55:00.002-04:00

So Acmegirl gave me the 6 random things meme. Rules are easy: post 6 random things about yourself and if you can think of people who haven't done it yet, give them a tag.

1. I deplore name games but frequently get stuck playing them. I do not understand why EVERY team building exercise set I've done involves some sort of name game. Because I've learned the games that have high levels of reoccurrence, I have a running file in my head for how I like my name to be played.

2. I have this nasty habit of leaving (indoor) Christmas decorations up for an absurd length of time. I don't particularly enjoy massive cleaning of my house, and I really like my artificial tree's personality so it tends to stay up. However, I am NOT the type to redecorate my tree in accordance with the season. I once visited someone who did (flag garland for 4th of July, pumpkin bubble lights for Halloween) and it's a bit odd.

3. I save money to the extreme only to splurge on bigger things that I really want to do. This habit has enabled me to go very interesting places. Even on a graduate student's budget, I can find ways to afford a bit of travel.

4. I like being able to wear long sleeves and pants. I sunburn pretty easily so I think that has something to do with it. But I really don't like when it's so hot in the summer time that you can't wear pants.

5. I occasionally am known to have full-blown conversations with my cat. He's quite social so stop looking at me funny.

6. The only category of material possession well accounted for in my house is books. I have so many books. I don't understand the clothes, shoe, and knick knack collection, but I certainly love my library.

I think I've seen this just about everywhere the past couple of days so I'm going to contemplate tagging.

My So-Called Life

2008-10-27T21:35:00.002-04:00

As I've blogged about before, graduate school has this nasty way of filling your life to the point of being all-encompassing. Today I realized November begins next week. Where did all the time go? Seriously, time, I would like you to present yourself immediately to be accounted for. Alas, militant creation of time does not fall in my superhero abilities.

November seems to be the "Oh my goodness, every project that could possibly have a major deadline does have them, all within 2 days of each other" month. December brings its own end-of-semester craziness, but November stuffed itself full of projects when I wasn't looking. (Note to self: I may want to try to stare down April next semester to try to balance month-to-month workload.) Generally, I'm used to the November craziness. Things typically get so busy that I don't bother with Thanksgiving travel. It's not fun spending more time traveling than I get to spend with my family while having a barrage of looming deadlines over my head.

So, here I was, starting to think about trying to motivate a bit of a social life. And now I'm coming to the realization that graduate school equals life.*

And to my friend Candid Engineer, I'm thinking I need to pull your trick of chaining yourself to your writing desk to crack out major projects over a weekend.

*I really like what I'm doing so I don't object to this reality. It's just funny when the reality of graduate school rears its ugly head.

The Power of a Blog

2008-10-25T22:56:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, tagging something with "all that is good in the world" caused me to well up with all sorts of emotions. Another tag I frequently blog with ("cultural insanity") does not have the same effect.

Well, Alice over at Sciencewomen had posted an update about her friend Annika who recently received a liver transplant near the beginning of the month. So, I started following the situation at Annika's mom's blog. For the whole effect, one should read the comments on the entries. I've known lots of kids in really scary medical situations (heart transplant, terrible burns, cancer) and supported their families in the process. Today, I paid Moreena a visit and saw this most recent of update. It never ceases to amaze me how people can rally around each other and support each other in times of need.

From my vantage point, I've been a registered organ donor since I was 16 and was deemed old enough to make that declaration for myself. My family has had candid conversations about our wishes surrounding organ donation. I try to be a blood donor when I can, but usually my attempts to give blood amount to being told that I lack the requisite iron. I pray for/with my friends as I know their requests and pray for my friends when I do not know their requests. I'm also the first to give hugs when an opportunity to do so presents itself.

I'm loving that people blog about the best parts of their world, the worst parts, the challenges and the triumphs because I feel like it's an invitation to have my heart expanded on a daily business. That and I've decided that I really do want to make sure I highlight things that strike me as "all that is good in the world" whenever the opportunity arises. At a time when people tend to worry about everything, it's good to join in the celebrations always happening around us when we open our eyes to them.

Totally. Freaking. Out.

2008-10-24T21:04:00.003-04:00

Today, I was reminded of all that is good in the world. Well, actually, all of this week. See, I've been following the Scienceblogs Donor Choose challenge. But, in the process I stumbled across Sarah Bunting's Tomato Nation and Linda Holmes's Things What Things blogs. Last year, Bunting challenged her readers to raise $100k for Donors Choose in exchange for her dancing around in Rockfeller Center wearing a Tomato Costume.

This week, Sarah rescued a cat (Nikolai) and decided to take a trip to Cincinnati. While she was IN TRANSIT to Cincinnati, Tomato Nation readers donated over ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS to the Donors Choose challenge. Anyway you slice it, I equate the performance of Tomato Nation as AWESOME. This year, the Tomato travels to Washington, DC.

And on a related note, can we rally around some of the Science bloggers challenges? The engineer in me would really like to see these two projects to get kids excited about engineering funded:
Future Engineers and Designers: Geometry in Kindergarten
Infusing Engineering Design into the Classroom

I need a little help from my (blogosphere) friends.

Journeys of an Academic

Returning to the blogosphere

Not from this angle!

31 Days of Awesome

More Thoughts on Trash

Please look at the legend before you assume you know the scale

And now for something completely different...

Thriving Beyond the Limit Point

Freeing ourselves from history

Where So Many Things are Just Trash

Living Without Elders in the Age of the Internet

Scientiae: Genius is...

Driving in Traffic, Academic Style

The Tryanny of Only

A Matter of Perspective

Free the Feet!

And it's my turn to host Scientiae!

Update: RBOC Style

An Open Letter to Engineering Professors

Be kind to your four-footed friends!

The Stuff Dreams are Made Of

Can We Speak of Communities?

Where is the Summer Going?

There's More than One Way to be Something

Free to Run

1 Pinch, 1 Chance

An Open Letter to Republicans...

Sometimes I do not want to pick up a newspaper

An Open Letter to My Friends

Bouncing Back

What are degrees good for anyway?

Why I find "Just Do Your Job" Rhetoric Repugnant

Wisdom in a Comic Strip

Rather impressive

But we like our class privilege!

ACHOO! It's dusty around here!

Payback is Sweet

I Want to Crawl Under a Rock...

*Crackle* *Crackle*

Now Entering Radio Blackout

Hitting a Shifting Target

The Challenges of Being a Female Engineer

The State of the Blog

On Spiritual Practices

Today is ROCKING on the email front

When I am an old academic

Awesome Carnival!

On Inquiry

Getting to know Otis Boykin

Education, Engineering, Science and Cognitive Dissonance

On seemingly fair practices

When Ideologies Collide

On Questions and High School Science

Forgive me while I go meta

Citizens Against Over-Simplification

The Limits of Scientific Civility

What Are We Teaching Anyway?

Sunday Haiku

A Poor Scholar's Soliliquy

50 Amazing States

Variations on a Theme

The Costs of Educating Students

On Outsiders and Insiders

The Problem-Solution Paradox

Being Known

Thinking in Binary

Winter Vernaculars

Year in Review

Please Let Me In...

Engineering of the Future

Score One for Science

End-of-the-Semester Ego Boost

Triaging the End of the Semester

Study break!

Hegemonic Holiday?

Exploring!

What Makes a Feminist?

Eat, Drink, and Be Thankful

Yet Another Dose of Sexism

The Power of Advisors

Crackle Crackle