Pres. Bush attacks Pres. Bush

Rove may be gone, but spreading lies by false juxtaposition has not ended, Pres. Bush announced today in Israel. In a speech equating "talking" to an enemy with "appeasement", the President is now on the record as charging his own administration, not to mention that of President Reagan, with appeasement in the middle east. Along the way he attacked a fellow Republican, the late Sen. Borah of Idaho, and fellow preppie John Simpson McCain III.

It is well known that Reagan negotiated with the terrorists who took Americans hostage in Iran and helped arm Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Similarly, Bush had no qualms about negotiating with Iran to get their assistance when the time came to attack bin Laden in Afghanistan, just as he is now negotiating with North Korea. Interestingly, McCain implicitly attacked Bush for both of these actions while trying to jump on the Half-Lie Bandwagon once driven by Karl Rove. Or maybe McCain simply doesn't remember what Bush did in 2001, or more recently with Korea.

Obama was quick to counterattack, and even got support from wannabe VP Hillary Clinton, showing he doesn't plan to lie down and take it like candidates have in past elections. That forced the White House to state publicly that this attack was not directed at Obama and was not '08 politics ... so maybe the President was directing it at Condi Rice and others in his administration who want to engage Iran? If Bush wasn't trying to attack Obama, or create the misimpression that he was attacking Obama, then was he really just trying to deflect attention from how far he has gone to appease America's enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

And anyone who has read the report of the 9-11 commission from cover to cover knows that it was the Bush administration that backed off on the pursuit of the people who attacked a US warship in 2000. Someone with that record should not be talking about appeasement of our enemies.

Updated 16 May 2008:
It didn't take people who own libraries of videotaped and audiotaped interviews to find that McCain was also attacking himself yesterday for proposing that the US talk to Hamas "because they're the government" that was democratically elected in Palestine. Given an opportunity to say "No, American diplomats should not work with Hamas because they are radicals", he did nothing of the sort. Two years later he calls his former position on Hamas "appeasement". Even today, the best his spin experts can come up with is a different interview where he made a conflicting policy statement, adopting the current Obama/Clinton position that it is OK to talk to Hamas if they accept Israel's right to exist. That gets around the "terrorist" part of the Bush-McCain attack, but not the "radical" part.

It was also interesting to see a commentary supporting my recollection that Rice supported talking to Iran, and adding Defense Secretary Gates to the list of "appeasers" ... and Khadafy in Libya to the list of "rerrorists and radicals" that Bush has negotiated with.

Meanwhile, the people who told the press (off the record) that Bush was referring to Obama continue to avoid answering the real question: If Bush wasn't talking about Secretary of State Rice or Senator Obama, who was he talking about? Name names. Whose actions did he think constituted appeasement, and why?

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Aliens are My Brother?

No, not that brother. The generic Biblical one.

The title of this post is the same as the one written by a Vatican astronomer who claims that a search for life on Mars, or even SETI, is acceptable because G*d could have created life on other planets.

The short article raises a few semi-serious questions.

If life on other planets falls into the category of "brother", then do all other forms of life on earth fall into that protected category? That would move the Catholic Church deep into the territory of PETA and general tree-hugger environmentalism, which is wildly at odds with their implicit endorsement of neo-con Republicans by actively opposing environmentalist Democrats via single-issue politics.

Does this imply that sentient life on other planets would have souls, and that Christ would have had to be incarnated there to save those souls? If so, that would cause some complications for doctrinal opposition to the claims of Mormons ... unless its done on a one-visit-per-planet basis. OK, so no real problem there, and a good reason for the Church to build missionary rockets just to be sure.

The comment about the possibility that aliens might be free from original sin was especially interesting. My view has long been that Original Sin is code for the animal instincts that remain in our genetic wiring as a result of the way evolution works, what Freud called the Id. How could an alien not have to deal with a similar life history?

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Career Paths

There is a new Scientae Carnival about Career Paths that I want to promote in conjunction with the series of articles I started last year about the academic job market. You don't have to be a female academic to learn a lot from what has been collected there!

For example, the article by Twice Tenured, although mainly about her career trajectory, also illustrated the differences between two major types of institutions, the very visible SLACs and the seemingly invisible mid-tier Directional State Universities (such as Compass Heading U) that lack PhD programs.

One comment there was similar to one that showed up in part 3 of my series, where I blathered on about the types of academic jobs as a lead-in to a discussion of how to prepare to get and keep one of them.

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Career Day - Mathematics

Rebecca, an applied mathematician blogs for advice about giving a talk on Math Careers at a local middle school.

This is a "been there, done that" for me in my past life (as a grad student helping give tours of our physics lab to elementary school kids and as a research scientist doing the same in an applied math shop or in schools), but I now have a very different perspective from what I see advising students entering our CC.

First, do your best to represent the category "PhD Mathematician". They don't know that you have done research and discovered something that, literally, no one else in the entire world knew until you did it and published it. You are not an actor playing a scientist, you are not a "teacher", you are a REAL Mathematician. You could be the first person they have met who has a PhD. Make sure you are introduced as "Dr. Rebecca".

Check out a recent press release on the "geeky" image of math and its effect on enrollment in that area in the UK. The same is probably true in the U.S.

Second, show them something cool. Visual. High tech. You work with computers that, again, are more amazing than anything made up for TV. Boggle their minds, and then share with them your own insecurity about being able to do anything back when you were in middle school. "I did it, you can do it." And make it clear that you enjoy what you are doing. You get paid to do things that you think are fun! How cool is that?

Third, be real clear that the "it" they can do does not have to be Real Math. You aren't there to sell this career to everyone, but you need to sell them on learning as much math as they can handle in high school if they want one of those famous "high paying jobs" like the business majors working for Donald Trump, or Dr. House, etc. Business majors need to take "business calculus" and pre-med, pre-dent, or pre-vet biology majors need to take "real calculus" and "real physics". Same for most pharmacy and architecture majors (whether they really need to know it or not). If they spend four years in high school slacking their way through "basic algebra" and "consumer math", just enough to get the credits required for graduation, they will face an uphill battle in college. We see it every day here at this CC, and I'm sure they also see it at universities.

Example from my Dorm Days:
My freshman roommate was a biology major. From all appearances, he was a pretty good biology student. He had taken everything his (small town) high school had to offer, then done independent study projects (including decent science fair projects). He knew all sorts of hard-to-memorize facts and botanical names, etc etc. But he knew squat about math, and flunked out of college in the two years it took for him to fail calculus twice after needing multiple tries to pass college algebra and trig. Sadly, a big part of this were "student centered" teachers and counselors. He was good at biology and didn't like math, so they let him take extra biology instead of math during his last two years. That made him real happy ... until he got to college and learned that biology majors take calculus.

If he had started at our CC, he would have worked through a slower sequence of math classes and might have had a chance to improve his skills enough to pass calculus. The university course pretty much assumed you had taken a solid class in algebra 2 and trig, but simply forgot most of it. Maybe he did go back home to a local CC and manage to succeed in his career goals, but he was a fish out of water at the university.

Example of a typical CC business student:
The ones with good SAT scores are (mostly) at the university, so we get the ones who passed high school and did OK on the "high stakes" exit exam but can't get into a university. That usually translates into "weak math". The typical student has to start out in a course that is the equivalent of the Algebra 1 class we took in 9th grade. That student is looking at two full years of math (that remedial class, then college algebra, then business calc, then statistics) plus two accounting courses. One standard deviation up and we have the kid who starts in college algebra. One standard deviation down and we have the kid who starts in a basic (7th grade?) algebra class (the one where the kids are afraid of letters). Those kids are looking at two and a half years of math IF they manage to pass each class on the first attempt, which is rare. (Having been lied to about how good they are at math, they usually don't take the class very seriously and fail it the first time they take it.)

The weakest ones almost always wasted two years in high school on some variant of "liberal arts" or "consumer" math. The ones who struggled through an algebra 2 class instead will usually make it, although they have to start in algebra 1.

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Another sign of the end times ...

Birthday card from Brother arrives before Birthday!

And a very charming card it was, at that. Thanks, Bro!

Now all you have to do is remember your wedding anniversary ...

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Physics - Biology link

Interesting article in the BBC news feed today:

• Microwaves 'cook ballast aliens'

That is, using microwaves to eliminate invasive species in ship's ballast.

I just saw this, so not time to digest it, but will add some comments if I get a chance to locate the paper or a better press release at LSU.

My first observation is that the paper comes from the LSU Agriculture Center, so this is a classic example of a Land Grant university at work applying physics to solve an ecological problem created by using physics to engineer large ships that transport species in ways that Darwin could barely imagine.

Update:
Additional links

• New Scientist article(lots more technical detail)
  
• ACS abstract and link to pdf of accepted article
  
• Abstract of article on modeling heat transfer in a flowing fluid

They used a 5 kW industrial microwave at 915 MHz, and showed success running at a rate of 1 to 2 L per minute.

This is quite far from being ready for commercial use, either in capacity or cost, but that last remark assumes that shippers will continue to get free access to the public good we call the water in a harbor.

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Planning

OK, the top item on the "to blog list" is something about what I learned in a year on the colleges most important faculty governance committee, but that has to wait for a few others. However, you will see that this topic is not entirely unrelated to being on the major governance committee (where we don't get any release time).

Dean Dad had a great column this week about the "silly season", the last week or so of the semester when the entire campus (from students to administrators) go insane because of all of the things that must get done. (I tend to disagree with his premise, but more about that where you see the word "Christmas" in bold face down below.) My answer to his question about how to stay sane was a rather simple one:

Planning.

Oh, yes, and a little bit of the "Grumpy Old Road Foreman" technique of keeping the rules the same from start to end.

But just saying "planning" is a bit of an oversimplification. The real answer is to maintain an even strain, the same advice I give my students about using weekends and "off" weeks to advantage, and avoiding the trap where cramming for one class creates the need to cram for another. But the only way to keep the workload steady is to plan ahead. It doesn't happen with wishful thinking or procrastination. Or even by making planning an end in itself. You can't have a recursive "to do" list that has "work on previous to-do list" as the fifth item from the top.

I can't take credit for this. I am an inveterate procrastinator who often thrives on the energy that flows when a job needs to get done. I've had to resort to false deadlines in the past to have an excuse to get started early enough to get some larger tasks completed.

I have to credit Mr. Algebra for being the wind beneath my wings on this one.

I remember my first semester. I'm in the mail room getting ready to send my syllabus to the central print shop, cutting it rather close to have it back by the first day of class, and he's collecting his first two hour exams. You read that right: He had printed the exams for the first month or so of the semester even before fall registration had ended.

Impossible. Even the other senior faculty thought what he did was nuts.

But is it really impossible? Now there are always some problems I come up with at the last minute based on something I decide to emphasize in class (or that the students decide to emphasize by struggling with a particular problem type on a previous exam to the point where I promise them they will see something like it on the midterm or final), but others are dictated by my "no repeat" rule that assumes last year's tests are public record.

More importantly, its not like I don't know what class I am going to be teaching. Heck, I even know the room and hour assignments for next spring! (Our college does a pretty good job of planning as well, a task shared by the administration and the faculty.) So why not put off until August the job of planning my course calendar for Fall? OK, other than the fact that this is the way I always did it, mostly because my earlier experience had been in a department where you sometimes didn't know what you were teaching until the day before you walked into the classroom.

And you know, Mr. Algebra always seemed so relaxed during the semester.

Maybe this is something to think about. What can I get done during the summer? Can I get the entire course calendar planned out, fine tuning it based on my "as built" notes of what I actually did each day last semester (and ideas on what I might change the next time)? Schedule the exams so there is plenty of time to grade one before I have to do the next one? Prepare the web materials? Update and copy what will be needed by the TAs in the lab I run, particularly things that rarely change? And if I have that done, then I can use August to think about the exams, and so on, paying it forward, as it were.

What got me started down this path was Christmas a few years ago. I see the winter "break" as the worst season of all, but then I don't have to go to any alumni dinners or other Dean-ish level duties that are timed to graduation. December is a nightmare. Not only do you have all of the final grading from the fall semester, you also have to prepare everything for the spring semester and go Christmas shopping and maybe even travel across the country to spend a week with relatives. A week where you can't possibly get much work done. And that year, we had a particularly tight window between finals and the start of the spring semester. There would only be a few days between getting back from the trip north and stepping into the classroom. My solution was to pull together the Spring schedules (and even the web pages, stuffed away in their own little stocking) in August while I did the ones for fall.

It worked better than expected. I had less to do than the year before, even with the travel. A solution exists. And just in time, since this past year I not only had to plan for a Christmas trip, I had to keep mental time free for what turned out to be an "interesting" year in the college governance business.

Now a lot of faculty at my CC teach a heavy summer schedule, particularly some of the younger ones who have student loan debt and maybe a new sub-prime mortgage to deal with. Some of the older ones teach extra classes to pay for a trip or prepare for retirement. I take a light load so I can clear my mind for another serious year of spending 16 hours a week (18 this coming fall) in a physics classroom. But that means I am going to work every day with only about half of a day's work to do.

So I am working, very gradually, on my plans for fall ... and spring. Right now the only hassle is that the college hasn't published the final exam schedule for fall, but that is only one entry in the calendar and the syllabus. (I think the admins are busy dealing with budget hassles.) I plan to spend a few weeks on the different calendars I need to develop, then do a rough cut on the web materials so I just have to fine tune them if I change something somewhere else.

And some extra time to blog, which translates into extra time to think about such things as what works (and doesn't work) when it comes to our labs and whether I can make more use of "active learning" methods this semester. My extra teaching load actually comes with smaller classes. Can I do something with that?

Finally, I'll interject here that I noticed Profgrrrrl mentioned doing pretty much the same thing last Tuesday (in "rethinking the course" if you want to read it while it is still available). She was planning all of the projects (in detail) and other assignments in conjunction with the choice of a new textbook while putting together the syllabus for her summer class. Now admittedly she appears to be doing this all in the last week before classes start, but she had her final assessments (and when they are due) in her plan from the beginning and was also thinking about how she might continue to evolve the course in the fall. That is driving the course, rather than letting the course drive you. Definitely a sign of experience, which means it is something that needs to be added to a list of things that should be passed on when mentoring new faculty.

I wonder if our formal system includes anything like this? It should.

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George Johnson on Colbert

Thanks to Chad at Uncertain Principles, the video of George Johnson on the Colbert Report last week:



Faraday's Law, showing electromagnetic induction (the way we generate electricity).

The highlights are between 3:30 and 4:00 (when Stephen "gets off" on the classic magnet and coil demo), and the last 30 seconds (when Stephen discovers that high voltage electricity hurts but you don't die).

I really need to do that second demo in my class next fall.

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Graduation

Sitting through more than two hours of commencement while dozens of final exams are at home waiting to be graded is hardly anyone's idea of fun. The thought of listening to another one over a cell phone, even if it is that of my niece, is mind-numbing. (Maybe if her graduation was in June, after ours had worn off, as was the case for their HS graduation ceremonies.)

Oddly, however, it is the shortest part of our ceremony that is the worst. The longest part, the calling of the names as each student gets 15 seconds of fame all alone on the stage, is the best. Even when I don't know most of them, the audience reminds me of why our CC is such a big deal in the community. And some are incredibly special.

This year was no different.

The commencement speaker included at least one well-worn cliche ("when you come to a fork in the road ... take it" - Yogi Berra) and another ("statistics say you will earn an extra million dollars with your AA degree") that is becoming more common as the cost of tuition increases. The student speaker once again had an inspirational background and a mercifully short speech. The prayer was predictable, although a few years ago we had a keeper: the preacher also thanked the Lord for financial aid, bringing forth shouts of praise from the audience (from the black-church part, that is).

I watched three of my students walk across with a perfect 4.0 average. That is no small feat when it includes both semesters of my calc-based physics class and three semesters of calculus from an equally demanding math department. All three of those were the kind of student that needs a community college. Two are only in college because they got laid off when a high-tech manufacturer closed down and moved away. They also had perfect a HW grade (all 575 problems over two semesters). The other, just as sharp, needed the personal attention we offer in our intro classes. You see, his father was a police officer who died in the line of duty. That is a lot to carry on your shoulders through your teen years and on to college.

It was also a joy to watch another, a former resident of the Hotel for Felons, walk across the stage to pick up his degree. Diligent, smart (had once been too smart for his own good when it came to being able to handle cocaine), and working a full-time day job as an electrician as well as going to college. He has a rather different perspective on the party crowd at Wannabe Flagship.

And there were others. The students I had only known as an academic adviser, or the ones I helped struggle through a gen-ed science class.

But most of all, there were the ones who are the first in their family to earn any kind of college degree. Anyone who says that there isn't community support for education in some minority neighborhoods needs to attend our graduation ceremony. It is there, in the stands, shouting and (literally) dancing in their seats as their daughter, sister, or mother (sometimes all three) (or brother, father, or son) had their moment in the spotlight. They take up three or four rows even when the graduate is not the speaker -- and many wear their Sunday finest.

And that last part is what is so different from where I went to college. There was never any question that I would attend college and graduate in four years. The same was true of the kids I hung out with. My PhD changed my life, but college didn't, certainly not the way it has changed the future for these kids. They make teaching here a really special experience, but I didn't realize how special until I attended my first graduation.

Note added:
Dr. Crazy wrote a great article about why she enjoys attending graduation that I highly recommend.

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Meeting the Major Prof

Tales of the PhD defense over at Unbalanced Reaction reminded me of a bit of ancient history, one that we had been talking about just the other day here at the Pion household: When My Mom First Met My Major Prof.

It happened in the few months between when I first met Mrs. Pion and when we started dating, on a football weekend when my parents visited campus and we went to the Land Grant Tavern ... the same one my niece used to celebrate her graduation. My mom got carded (which really made her day), but that is another story.

This one is even better.

My parents show up in mid morning for an early tailgate brunch at the house we were renting in the heart of gentrified faculty homes. Awesome house (owner was a physics prof on sabbatical) and awesome location. Walking distance to campus, but well past the range that undergrads will walk so no student slum dwellings or cars cluttering up the streets trying for free parking.

During the usual greetings, my Mom mentions this "poor man" she saw walking down the street as they drove to the house. It was a chilly day and he couldn't even afford any socks.

Lights go off in my head.

Was he wearing Top Siders, deck shoes that look like moccasins, and a tan London Fog raincoat? Older, gray hair, walking sort of slowly and aimlessly, etc etc?

Why, yes.

Ah, that was probably my major professor, Dr. Scatter. He lives a few blocks over that way and often walks around the neighborhood when he doesn't have time to go hiking.

She thought I was joking. For good reason, since I am my father's son, and often make fully factual observations in a joking manner and make outrageous statements with a straight face. But I wasn't joking.

So a couple years later they are in town because I was going to be given an award, and they meet Dr. Scatter at the reception. Mom could not believe her eyes.

Yep. That guy she thought was a homeless man without enough money for socks was him. A world famous physicist. And he was wearing those same Top Siders with his suit, and no socks.

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Ping: Relative Dog Motion

Great article by Chad over at Uncertain Principles about explaining Special Relativity to his dog.

I really like the way he uses "the house is where I keep my stuff" to illustrate the huge draw that some places have as a preferred frame of reference. This is as important when teaching classical physics (helping students recognize why they prefer to look at fictitious forces rather than real ones) as it is when teaching physics at "relativistic" velocities. We think Newton's First Law is valid everywhere we might be, everywhere we keep our stuff, even if we are turning a corner in a car.

That might have been a better point of digression for Chad, since the relativity fallacies that are not due to frame jumping are usually due to hidden acceleration. He needs to explain that to his dog before Emmy falls prey to a door-to-door paradox salesman.

My only complaint is that he did not answer Emmy's main question very well.

"Why do they call relativity 'relativity?' Why not something cooler, like Superfast Timeslowing Squirrelcatching Dynamics?"

Actually, it is called "Special Relativity", and that name was added to distinguish it from the General theory that came along a few years later. The original paper actually was about Squirrelcatching Dynamics. It was about the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (squirrels, for example, and how they are influenced by electric forces).

... picking up from where I had to leave this ...

Further, there was nothing at all radical in Einstein's notion of relativity. His paper starts with the same postulate that Newton has: that all physical laws are the same in every inertial frame (that is, every coordinate system where the First Law is exactly true). [No cheating here: If you allow a tiny but non-zero acceleration that violates the first law, you can generate as many bogus paradoxes as you want. Just like you discover when shooting a long-range cannon while ignoring the Coriolis effect.]

What was radical was that he changed which laws should be covered by the first postulate. He picked Maxwell's equations over the Galilean Newtonian ones, thus predicting (correctly, we now know, based on bazillions of high energy experiments) that classical equations of motion are only an approximation. His paper was written around the experimental data for light, an empirical starting point that would not surprise Karl Popper, but today it might make more sense to start with Maxwell and the very obvious result that those equations are obviously false in a frame moving at c. [You have a stationary wave, so the spatial derivative of a B or E field is not zero but the time derivative of the field is zero. QED.]

Actually, even that was not a radical notion, it's just that no one had thought of it (except one guy who did not see its significance). Instead, they were busily rejecting relativity in favor of crazy ideas like "time changes when you are moving" so that all time had to be compared to where Emmy (Chad's dog) lives even if any other reference point (like Greenwich or the Williams Rugby field) works just as well. Einstein's solution was obviously more sensible than that used by Lorentz, but he did not get the Nobel Prize for it because the experimental proof of it was not clear for another 40 years or so.

He also failed to tell Emmy that her "time" is not affected by motion. It is affected by acceleration (which also resulted in a speeding ticket for Chad, if we believe the entire story) but not by speed alone. We also know this from experiment, most notably the clocks in GPS satellites.

...

And if you like that article by Chad about his schizophrenic conversations with his dog, there are also the all-time classics

• Bunnies Made of Cheese (you can also see an image of said bunny)
  
• Many Worlds, Many Treats
  

that are indicative of great things to come when his book makes it through the publication process.

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Let's remember

My Danish relatives celebrated their liberation, the surrender of German troops, today ... as they have every year since 1945. One of those relatives fought in the resistance movement in Denmark, and we should all remember those who risked their lives in that conflict. That they still celebrate while VE and VJ day go ignored in the U.S. says a lot about the difference between fighting a war and living inside it.

And my niece graduated from college yesterday.

Our family celebrated, and we wish we could have joined them at the Land Grant Tavern for dinner afterwards. Instead we joined them via cell phone between ordering dinner and the arrival of the salad. Helping contribute to the circle of history is the detail that my brother graduated in the same building several decades earlier. [Hey, Bro, blog about that!]

Two down, one to go!

As significant as that moment is, the simple fact that his kids are the fourth generation of the family to go to college makes it a bit different for us than it is for many of my students. My appreciation of the role my CC plays in the community, as well as its meaning to my students, changed completely when I attended my first graduation. It is a huge deal to earn a two-year AA degree when no one else in your family has ever even attended college.

Going to college paid off for my grandfather (the WW I vet I think about every time I check for a new letter from Harry). I hope it pays off for them as well.

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Mathematics of Growth

OK, three end-of-semester snarky posts ought to do for awhile. Lets get down to business.

A week or so ago I posted a "homework problem" in the comments on a blog about whether there is really 200 years of coal left. I was quite impressed that someone (Bartlettman) got it right, albeit on the second try.

Because answering a question like "How long will 847 Gt of coal last if the current consumption rate of 6 Gt/yr increases at 5% per year?" is extremely important for a variety of reasons (ranging from national and international energy policies to local decisions about encouraging growth of a community), I thought I should post the solution here.

If you don't want to see the mathematics, you can skip to the section with the final formula and the answer to this problem. Evaluating it for any problem of interest (such as "when will my city have the same population as (name) if it grows at X% per year") is then a simple matter with any basic scientific calculator.


MATHEMATICS of GROWTH

Use R(t) for the Rate of consumption of coal at a particular time t, measured in years from now. The initial rate is called R₀ = R(0).

Use C(T) for the total consumption of coal between now [t = 0] and some future time T. This is calculated as the integral of R(t) from 0 to T. We use this to calculate how long some specific amount of coal, C, will last.

The same analysis applies to something like the population of a city if we replace R(t) with P(t) everywhere and simply ignore the discussion of the consumption C(t).

(A) Rate does not change

The rate of change is zero, dR/dt = 0.

Answer for the rate at any future time: R(t) = R₀ is constant.

C(T) = integral (from 0 to T) of R(T) = R₀*T.

Answer for how long an amount of coal C will last: T = C/R₀.

(B) Rate increases at 5%

dR/dt = 0.05*R. Notice that the change in R depends on R. As R gets bigger, it increases by a larger amount each year. This is called a "differential equation". This particular one is rather easy to solve by a method called separation of variables, where we cross multiply (saying this makes a real mathematician react like someone scraped fingernails on the board) to get dR/R = 0.05*dt so we can easily integrate both sides of the equation. The result is ln(R) = 0.05*t + R₀.

Answer: R(t) = R₀ exp(0.05*t), where I use exp to denote the exponential function e^x.

The consumption is just the integral of R(t). The nice thing about the integral of the exponential function is that any child can do it: the answer is equal to the itself - the exponential function. Well, almost any child, because you have to be careful about that 0.05 in there. The result is [R₀/0/05] * exp(0.05*T) evaluated from 0 to T, which gives:

C(T) = [R₀ / 0/05] * [exp(0.05*T) - 1].

Solving this for the T when the consumption is C is, however, not child's play. We have to unwrap the exponential function and use the natural logarithm to get rid of it. Skipping some details, the key intermediate step is to get

C * 0.05 / R₀ = exp(0.05*T) - 1
then
1 + C*0.05/R₀ = exp(0.05*T)
and
ln(1 + C*0.05/R₀) = 0.05*T

Answer for how long an amount of coal C will last: T = ln(1 + C*0.05/R₀)/0.05

If you have a scientific calculator, there will be an ln(x) or ln key, with the e^x function right above it.


ANSWER TO THE COAL QUESTION

This calculation is for a rate of 5% (0.05 in the formulas). You can do it for any other rate of increase by changing 0.05 everywhere to whatever you want. You would use 0.03 for a 3% rate, etc.

How long will the coal last?

We have C = 847 Gt and R₀ = 6 Gt/year, with T in years.

Evaluate ln(1 + C*0.05/R₀) / 0.05 = 41.7 years.

Compare C / R₀ = 141 years.

We should really round these answers to 42 years and 140 years given the lack of precision in the numbers being used.

"Bartlettman" got 42.8, which is probably due to a different assumption about when the rate was 6 (start of the year or end of the year), or was based on an amortization type calculation where the rate is constant during the year. Like I said, good enough for government work, since we are talking about a 1 year difference compared to a 100 year effect!

Shortcut:

It is really easy to calculate the projected life of the resource if someone gives you a number calculated under the assumption of no growth, such as the 141 years, because that is equal to C/R₀ in the other formula. So if we want to know the answer for 5% growth if the resource could actually last 200 years with no growth, we simply evaluate

ln(1+0.05*200) / 0.05 = 47.96 years = 48 years

Instead of lasting 60 more years, it only lasts 6 more years! This is due to the fact that the consumption rate is increasing exponentially, because its increase gets bigger as R gets bigger.


DOUBLING TIME: the rule of 70

A population with double in 70/(% rate of growth) years.

If you read this far, you are probably interested enough to want to know a simple formula that does not require the use of a calculator. This is particularly useful for questions about the rate of consumption itself, or related questions about population growth, where we want to solve the equation (again for 5% growth)

P = P₀ * exp(0.05*T)

for the time T when we reach a certain population. The answer is

T = ln(P/P₀) / 0.05

In the special case where the population doubles, P = 2*P₀, we get

T = 0.693/0.05 = 13.9 years.

Al Bartlett (see below) and others (investment counselors) often talk about the rule of 70. This comes from noticing that 69.3% (the natural log of 2) is really close to 70%, and it is easier to divide a number into 70 than 69.3 and nothing we are doing is accurate enough to worry about that third digit anyway.

I used this to estimate that the coal consumption rate will double in 70%/5% per year = 14 years and double again in 14 more years. That is how I was able to write in another comment that we would be burning 24 Gt of coal per year in 28 years if our consumption rate grew at 5% per year ... without using a calculator. Just divide 70 by 5 to get 14, then double 6 twice to get the rate in 28 years.



HUGE PUBLIC POLICY DETAIL

The assumptions behind these calculations are false.

An economy based on constant growth is based on false assumptions.

A constant percentage rate of increase is not sustainable to the end.

The assumption is, basically, that it is possible to use 48 Gt/yr (17% of the entire earth's coal resource) in the last year !! before we run out. That is not how "extraction" industries operate. [But it is how population growth operates; by the time you realize you are running out of space, you have already run out of space.] The last half will be harder and more expensive to get out, for the simple reason that you will dig up the easiest half first.

That is the essential idea behind "peak oil", something we are seeing play out right now. (Just as peak production by the US was correctly predicted, it would seem that peak production by the Saudis was also predicted pretty accurately. It is highly likely that OPEC is not refusing to increase production because it wants to keep the price high. It is quite likely that some major producers can no longer increase production.) When exponential growth runs up against a finite resource, a peak will result somewhere around the time you have consumed more than half of the resource.

Better to ask when we will use up half of all of the coal out there. (The answer would be 30 years at 5% growth rates.) After that, the growth rate would become negative and consumption would tail off. It might take a century or more to get at the last bits of coal, but it is only in that sense that coal will last centuries.

One reference and closing comment:

Since (as I explained in that comment) I first learned about this subject from a beautiful talk given by Prof Al Bartlett of the Univ of Colorado, I thought I should link to a transcript of a more recent version (circa 2004) of that talk. In scanning it for what might have changed from the 1970s (not much except for verification of his predictions), I was intrigued to see a reference to a Newsweek magazine article that was extremely optimistic about the amount of coal left in the US. There was a similar article in Time that prompted me to write them a letter documenting that the coal reserves they described would not last 600 years because we would burn coal equal to the mass of the earth in 600 years if we kept increasing its use at the rates discussed in the article. Needless to say, they did not publish it. Yet here we see that, primarily due to increased global consumption, there are now saying that there are less than 200 years of coal left. Surprising? No. The lifetime of the resource has dropped because the rate of using it has tripled (about right for 4% growth over 30 years) since that previous estimate.

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Bad Hat Day

Quick question:


Which hat owner was most likely to have made a wrong turn leaving Talladega and ended up at the Derby?

I have my money on the guy on the left.

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Mission Accomplished

I went looking for a news video clip on the 5th anniversary of the "major combat operations have ended" speech, but found something far better:

The Engineer's Guide to Cats



I think the highlight is the "postmodern cardboard deconstruction" art work by Oscar, but be sure to pay attention to what is in the cupboard in the kitchen and the grocery cart in the store ...

... many identical jars of peanut butter and jelly! Except the cupboard is full of grape jelly (?) at about 1:33 (with cat food on the top shelf), only to be seen containing only marmalade (?) at 1:51 (with tuna on the top shelf)!

Ooops, noticing that must be indicative of my engineering genes.

Don't be distracted by the engineer mating ritual in the store and miss the grocery cart contents at 4:14. And stay tuned for the cat yodeling and renewable cat electricity at the end.

And just in case you don't notice the viva chihuahuas! video ad in the corner, well, click the link.

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Testicular Fortitude

The latest Tempest in the Electoral Teapot suggests a new symbol for the Clinton campaign:


This concept combines the latest redneck icon (truck nuts) with the obvious pun.

You saw it here first! (No one can be as nuts as I am.)

This unauthorized snark was not approved by the Clinton campaign, nor even by me.

I'm just glad I found a picture of those fine pink! attachments on a car with a bumper wide enough for the bumper sticker that popped into my semester-addled brain.

Note added:
For a different view of Hillary, check out this recent youtube video that may or may not come from the Obama campaign.

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Superheavy Nuclei Redux

Today I feel 32 years younger as I recall the excitement of an APS Nuclear Physics Division meeting that featured a special session on the reputed discovery of a primoridal superheavy nucleus in monazite inclusions ... allegedly found via PIXE (proton induced x-ray emission) by Robert Gentry. (Oddly, his wiki bio does not mention that part of his past research work given that it rated mention in the NYTimes after it got in PRL.)

This nostalgic flashback took some time to form. I saw the story in Chad's blog and glanced at the arxivblog article someone wrote based on a cursory read of the preprint that was posted a few days ago, but did not pull up the preprint until tonight. My jaw almost hit the keyboard when I say the author list.

I don't have time tonight to blog about the past and the physics of stable superheavy nuclei, but will come back to this when I get a chance.

For now, I'll just say that I am not an experimental physicist so I will defer to the commentary about mass spec by a nuclear chemist at Berkeley. Later I will go dig out my papers about nuclear structure calculations in this mass region and see what I can explain about the physics of stability. What I remember says what I posted in Chad's blog: Going from the known nucleus [118]294 to [122]292 is adding 4 protons (bad) and removing 6 neutrons (worse).

The wiki article on this physics is fairly incomplete and struck me as dated. Also dated, but more relevant, is a 1997 web article by Moller (of Moller and Nix) showing a nice calculation consistent with the heavy nuclei that have been found out past Rg in the past decade.

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Academic Economics

A recent article by Dean Dad (mirrored in his regular blog and on his IHE blog) drew a fairly naive set of comments by "SoonUnemployedAcademic" on the IHE version. Although I commented on them there, I thought I should elaborate on my answers here. [That is why I linked my signature to my blog.] My comments were running a bit long on IHE yet didn't begin to address most of the questions raised there.

Up here at the top I should also add that there was a carryover discussion on adjuncts and academic economics in DD's blog about shopping for value at a CC. I refer you there for things I will not discuss here. A comment by EliRabbet towards the bottom, for example, illustrates the economic situation at a mid-tier university. In the spirit of both of DD's articles, I will be looking at the issue primarily from the CC side but will also add my insight from my many years on the research side of a major R1 university.

I'll take up the rhetorical questions and observations from two separate comments by "SoonUnemployedAcademic" one by one:

[B]ut why don’t departments simply refuse to teach any students they cannot afford to teach with tenure-track faculty?

Short answer: It is not their choice. A professor who refused to teach a class required by their contract would be fired, whether "tenured" or not. Further, the faculty in a department have no role in deciding whether adjuncts or t-t faculty are hired or not. That is up to the chair or the Dean. A department chair who didn't do what the Dean or Provost asked would be fired and sent back to the classroom (if tenured) or out looking for a job. A Dean who didn't do what the President or Provost asked would be fired and have to look for a new job. And a President has to work with the resources provided by the legislature and/or the Board and serves at the pleasure of the Board. Granted that does not explain the decisions those administrators make that impact faculty and students, but you might guess that the unnatural selection process makes those decisions fairly predictable.

Longer answer for an R1: The premise that t-t faculty were hired to teach students is false. They were hired to generate funds for the university while creating new knowledge through research. (Granted I am looking at this from the science side, but this is also true in the social sciences. Liberal arts faculty, such as English, are probably always in the red on the Provost's spreadsheet. The others make up for that.) The research budget at an R1 is much bigger than the income from students, even including legislative funding. The cynic would say that an R1 views students as a justification for faculty numbers. (The cynic and scientific observer in me says that this becomes increasingly true as you move up the admin ladder.) The high quality of an education at many of those schools results from the dedication of the faculty, not tenure decisions or resource allocation.

Obligatory self-contradiction: At the R1 where I did my undergrad work, every instructor I had was a professor - with the sole exception of a senior grad student who taught me differential equations in my very first term as a freshman. He did a first rate job. While there, I taught recitations as an undergrad TA. This was also an important part of my education and was well supervised. I'd agree that the first group probably lost on the deal, but they got more than their money's worth by the time I was a senior.

Longer answer for a CC: We are an open admission college. We do not have the luxury of turning away students because too many show up. We only have the luxury of running out of classrooms. (I am not exaggerating. I need to move a class from one hour to another this next fall and it was a logistical nightmare. Every room was being used.) Our faculty are here because they value this environment and the opportunities it offers. (OK, some are here just for a job, but others are dedicated to teaching HS material to an audience that sometimes actually wants to learn it this time and most take the "from where they are to where they need to be" CC motto really seriously.) The idea of doubling or tripling tuition to reduce the numbers is anathema. We could pay part-time instructors a salary with benefits if we got more resources from the state. Otherwise we could only maintain our enrollment within our current state budget and tuition levels by doubling the student-teacher ratio ... and cutting student contact with faculty in half. This is not an option.

We refuse to have classes larger than 50 or 60 and (when recitations are needed) we put the same professor in the recitation that is teaching the lecture. We cannot teach 8-10 classes per semester and deliver the service expected of us. All of our organic chem labs, half of my physics labs, and about half of the intro chem labs are taught by a full-time professor. The others use adjuncts whose qualifications are higher than those of the 1st year grad students doing labs at the nearby university. The trade off for our smaller classes is the need for adjuncts to cover sections that must be opened due to the current level of demand. The universities already have high tuition and restrictive admissions and big classes for those who prefer that option.

Other institutions fall in between these extremes.

If the administration forces a department to hire adjuncts or takes punitive action, well, then the department can make a big stink — go to the press, the ranking reports, etc. Then the horrific exploitation that is ruining the promise of university education is on the administrators’ hands.

That is exactly what the faculty do, although most of them know the blame lies well above the administration and address the real problem: falling appropriations for higher education. IMHO, most of the blame lies with those who underfund higher education so they can reduce taxes on their supporters. Every change I have seen on the budget side of a college has reflected the reality of state budget cuts and (for universities) increased reliance on research grants to "grow" the institution. Our biggest problem at ICC is the per-student funding we get from the state.

I also think the decision to use adjuncts in an intro lab for a "service course" so that full-time faculty are available to teach a small upper division class is generally supportive of the promise of a university education. Besides, that grad student should be learning something in front of the classroom, something that is also part of a university education, and some might even agree with me that adjuncts are not always bad teachers. I can think of several instances where adjuncts appear to do a better job of getting students to learn than some full-time faculty.

Side remark: One of our organic chem profs is worshiped by the students as a fantastic teacher. This person was an adjunct at Wannabe Flagship before being hired to teach here at ICC, and came with glowing recommendations. (That does not stop some advisers at Wannabe Flagship from lying and saying that our chemistry program is inferior to theirs because ... we use someone they regretted losing?) Every top notch professor was, at one time, an adjunct in one form or another. One of our long-time adjuncts went straight from his PhD to a faculty position at a mid-tier teaching-intensive university.

Why do faculty continue to do the dirty work for grossly-overpaid administrators (I mean that relatively, not absolutely: faculty should all be paid in the range of mid-level administrators or, in other words, what used to be a middle-class salary decades ago).

Several false premises here.

First, we don't do any of the dirty work for administrators. A few faculty are in quasi-administrative roles at our CC because we don't have department chairs who don't teach. However, they do not have final hiring authority and do not make the decision on whether a new section can be opened. At a university, most department chairs are administrators and some could even be hired as a "head" rather than a faculty member. They do have hiring authority, but they are not "the faculty". They serve at the whim of the Dean.

Second, the faculty at our CC make more money than mid-level administrators, although I could be confused about what the writer considers "mid level". The number of admins making more money than our faculty is far fewer than the number of faculty. (I am not counting professional support staff with MA degrees who some might count as part of the administration. Our counseling and academic support staff are part of the faculty pay system and exist to further our classroom mission.) Our mid-level staff are paid squat.

I also don't know what the writer thinks is "middle class". The $100,000+ salary plus full benefits typical for a professor at a major university is solidly in the top 20% for household income in the US. The starting salary at our CC is solidly in the middle of household income in the US (and substantially above the median family income in our region of the US, a better measure of the cost of a given lifestyle). Our faculty are already middle class. I think some confusion results because the middle class circa 1960 seemed better off because they weren't house poor (real interest rates were low and houses were smaller) and they didn't waste money dining out or impulse shopping.

The sad fact of the matter is that administrators have been given an impossible task. There is no immediate exam that will measure outcomes across-the-board. Education is much more complex and long-term than that and the more administrators kow-tow to corporate trustees, the worse the system gets for everyone.

That is a straw man. Only Giant-Bureaucracy Republicans seem to think there is a one-size-fits-all-majors exam that would measure college success at the lower division level or upper division level for every state in the nation. I believe there are good measures for outcomes at a CC, ones that take into account the long-term nature of the process, but I'm not going to blog about them today. I'd rather hear what a Dean thinks they are, so I can compare his views to those of my Dean and Provost. I've asked DD several times, so I hope he will talk about it.

What I meant was why do tenure-stream faculty accept that it is their job to meet the outrageous demands of administrations?

Most un-tenured (tenure-stream) faculty will do and say whatever it takes to earn tenure. You can guess why. At research universities, that means doing research, earning grants, and publishing papers. Elsewhere it might mean passing students who don't know the material to keep retention at the expected level, or what they think is the expected level. Most people call this "keeping a job" by "meeting expectations". I have heard that people also meet the outrageous demands of their bosses out there in the business world, but those are only rumors here in academia. [Maybe The Thomas could enlighten me, anonymously in the comments if necessary.]

Why do they acquiesce so readily to administration demands, especially when they know that it shortchanges students and even themselves (lecturing in front of a classroom of 200 students surfing the internet who will really be taught by grad TAs really sucks the lifeblood out of teaching).

None of the above applies in our CC because we don't have any 200-student classes and we don't use TAs in recitations. It also contains the false premise that any professor is shortchanging a student when it is the student who made the conscious choice to surf the internet rather than engage in the class. That student is shortchanging himself or herself, by choice. It is called personal responsibility.

When the budget is cut or the department loses a tenure line, why do faculty do administrators’ dirty work by hiring adjuncts or teaching increased class sizes?

We don't do that. Well, some actually ask for an extra class or a bigger class because they need the extra money (we get paid extra if our teaching load exceeds what is in our contract), which actually reduces the need for adjuncts.

Why, to top it all off, do they then make up some fancy webpage crowing about the wonderful education they are providing?

The fancy web page is not made by faculty, nor is it approved by faculty. It is a pure creation of the marketing arm of the college or university. If there is a single question that shows the naivete of SoonUnemployed, this would be it.

Tenure-stream faculty can create a bottleneck of students who need a required course if they simply refuse to hire enough adjuncts to teach the number of students the administration tries to shove down their throats.

We could if we hired them, but we don't hire them. And no one shoves students down our throats. They simply drive up and say "I think I'll go to college today". This statement must reflect a specific situation at a specific school.

There is also the budget reality that you need to be pretty sure you will have the money to pay someone for 30 years or more before you put them in a t-t job. I watched some serious budget problems develop in the late 70s when the baby boom faded and student enrollment simultaneously moved from the social sciences into business and engineering. Since a Professor of Social Work can't teach engineering mechanics, this is a major problem.

NOTE ADDED: I am also watching some serious budget problems right now, but the present ones are economic rather than inherent in the structure of the college. The origin of the problem does not change the need for caution.

Tenure-stream faculty would, of course, have to tell students what the problem is in order to redirect student anger at the administration. Right now, most students treat the faculty as the primary cause of their woes — a reasonable position since student evaluations only rate instructors and not class size or setup, placing all the blame on instructors for the inadequacies of the system.

Those must be the students who are web surfing rather than paying attention in class. If they pay attention, they probably know they can write a free response to go with that evaluation form that addresses any of their concerns. They can even write a letter to the college's student paper. They could even register earlier and pick a smaller section.

And, yes, there is an accreditation issue here. Adjuncts teach some of the most difficult classes, the ones that require broad perspectives and years of insight to synthesize diverse topics and explain why boring (to students) subject X is important.

I see several different issues here.

The most difficulty upper-division classes were not taught by adjuncts at the few universities (all R1) that I have experience with. I never had an upper division class taught by an adjunct, although I did have one graduate class taught by one (he was a visiting professor from another university, but still an adjunct).

At our CC, the most difficult classes (including prep classes as well as majors classes) are generally taught by a 50-50 mix of full-time t-t faculty and adjuncts. We try to keep that ratio on the 51-49 side, but fluctuating enrollments and limited state money make this an on-going challenge. We compensate by tending to put fewer resources into general-education courses that are "terminal" (not required for another course) than we put into majors classes. This is unfortunate for public scientific literacy, but is a perfect example of the Academic Economics issue that is the title of this article. However, someone who wants to learn gen-ed material from an experienced professor (or adjunct) only has to register early for the right sections.

The assumption that a broad perspective and an ability to motivate bored students is acquired automatically over time is not well founded in my experience. The fact that the great prof you liked had more experience does not imply that everyone with that experience is great. That one person was probably selected for that class and the others sent where they could do less harm. (Teaching grad students is one common assignment.) And that one person might have been just as good a decade or two ago as a graduate student. Remember, only the top 5% (by some measure) get jobs at an R1.

But it could be worse. You could get a t-t faculty member assigned to an important class who (the Dean discovers much too late to do anything about it) is utterly incompetent at teaching it and even incapable of realizing he is incompetent. Been nearby, seen that.

Finally, this all begs the question of why a student chose to take up a major if that student is bored with it. Reminds me of a student who complained about having to take physics with all of those boring problems about forces when he only wanted to be an engineer. That kid is in the wrong major.

Say what you will about adjunct enthusiasm and devotion, but few adjuncts have the experience to critique the biases of master narratives and comprehensive approaches to their fields. And, they’ll never get it as adjuncts, spit out when the initial attractiveness of their Ph.D. is usd up.

Will they get it if they are hired into a faculty position? Then why wouldn't the same person get it as an adjunct? A better question to ask is why your particular university does not have an adjunct training program. My undergrad college had one before you were born.

Universities risk poor instruction from junior tenure-stream faculty because they know it is one of the start-up costs to getting a mature faculty member. What, aside from the financial savings, justifies less experienced instruction in gen. ed. courses? That has to speak to quality.

There is a non sequitur here. If junior faculty and adjuncts are equally bad, where is the advantage in replacing an adjunct with a professor? There is also a hidden assumption that a junior professor who is a bad teacher will magically become a great teacher after a few years. I think that is a bad assumption, particularly if at a university where the entire emphasis is on not wasting time on teaching that could be spent writing a new grant proposal. I can only think of one person who went from being an awful teacher to one who could at least communicate to seniors, but it took 20 years. Most people who knew him thought it was a miracle.

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Race Photography

In my comment on Profgrrrrl's blog about making photographs of fast-moving vehicles, I mentioned my experiences at Indianapolis "last year". Actually, it was 2006 or it would have been in my blog from last summer! These were taken during open practice, where parking and admission together were $5, during a pit stop in the middle of a 600 mile drive. Made me late for dinner, but worth it.

Here is one of them (all three photos were cropped to 2400x1200 out of the full frame, reduced to 600x300, and "saved for web" to save space so not nearly as nice as the originals).


Details and two other examples (one spectacularly lucky) below the fold.

The key detail is that Tony Kanaan is going 219 mph when this was taken, which is 321 ft/s. I had set the camera to shutter priority at 1/200, meaning a blur distance of 1.6 feet. I was tracking the car, so the background is blurred. You will also notice that the tires and wheels are blurred, because I am only freezing the linear motion of the car.

The first pictures I took were awful (frozen car), but then I remembered that I could calculate the right shutter speed in my head. Long ago my dad taught me the conversion rule that 60 mph = 88 ft/s. Useful for driving safety, among other things. I didn't do long division, just estimated that 220 is between 180 (3x60) and 240 (4x60) miles per hour so the speed was between 3x90 (270) and 4x90 (360) feet per second. That meant 1.5 feet at 1/200 and 3 feet at 1/100.

OK, so can I get the car blurred and the background in focus? Easier said than done when using a telephoto lens. I deleted lots of photos with half a car or no car before I got a handle on my reaction time. (The camera has no delay other than the mirror flipping up, but human reaction time of 0.15 s means the car travels almost 50 feet in the time it takes to react. Shoot when you see it in the viewfinder and it is gone.) The trick I came up with was to focus the camera the way I normally do (one eye closed) but then open both eyes. My right eye kept the camera centered on the Indy logo and the track. I pulled the trigger when my left eye got a glimpse of the car appear to the right of the camera, and I got lots that look like this one:



I think that is a "3" on the car, so this is probably Helio Castroneves. I'm pretty sure this was made at 1/100, since there are others that don't have quite this nice smooth blur (and where you can read the numbers).

Those pictures were all taken from the Tower Terrace near the end of the front straight, looking down over the fence so there is a clear view of the track. This last one was taken on the backstretch looking through the fencing from one of the viewing mounds.



This is Danica Patrick in her "T" car. This is back at 1/200, but you can see how the fence in front of me is blurred from both depth of field and motional blurring. Only the horizontal parts of the fence show up.

Closing remark about animated films:
Motional blurring is a big deal in getting realism in digital (or hand) animation. Freeze any frame from a movie and you will see what I mean. If you go back to the beginning of digital work (Tron), you will notice that some of its lack of realism comes from how they handled motion back in 1982.

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Quickee Links

A couple of links from the BBC News feed that deserve reading.

Science explains brain fade! A study out of Ye Olde Homie Town of Bergen has found evidence that dull jobs numb the mind and detected a brain signature that indicates when you are likely to make a mistake by going on autopilot.

In typical British understatement, the BBC seems to be trying to find a way to tell India that Cricket is not supposed to be fun. It would seem that professional cricket in India is using American football as its model, right down to importing American cheerleaders and wearing stupid headgear in the stands, while adding its own Bollywood version of a Superbowl halftime show.

I was laughing at "The result is very few are actually watching the game at all." because my major professor made it pretty clear that he viewed cricket as an excuse to drink Gordon's gin.

Number two on the list of "top north west wales stories" was about some guy who dressed up as Darth Vader by pulling on a black trash bag and assaulted two members of the Jedi Church. That he had consumed most of a 10 L box of wine (that would be over two gallons!) might have been relevant.

Finally, and old technology story describes a video game controller that interfaces directly to the brain. Can't beat that for vegging out.

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Mentoring New Faculty

I guess I can do requests. Profgrrrrl picked up on a detail in one of the items I put in a to-blog list in my anniversary blog and asked for some information about our new faculty mentoring problem program. [That was a nice slip.]

I'm not going to give specific details about what we do here at Ishkabibble Community College, since this institution shall remain pseudonymous, but I'll try to describe both the good and bad sides of it.

Formally, our system for mentoring new faculty is two fold. Each new faculty member is assigned a mentor from among the t-t faculty, and the entire group of new faculty participate in a formal orientation program. There is also an informal third component whereby various faculty (such as the nut cases that populate our floor of the building) provide additional guidance, advice, and heads-up warnings about whatever is going on at a particular point in the semester ... and filling in the gaps and countering the non-science bias in the formal system. Besides, someone has to tell that now-tenured faculty member that "next month you're going to get a request to turn in X within a week or two, so start now." They are long out of the program, but there are things we do after tenure that we never did before it!

I should first mention a key detail: I was hired before the current system was put in place. Those who went through it would say it differently: they would say "I was spared going through the new system". (I would put it a different way: It would not have survived having me in it or ICC would be missing one of the few faculty to get perfect scores on student class evaluations. But I should also clarify that the current system has changed significantly during its lifetime due to feedback from the faculty who went through the first ones. One group was the Beta test, and you know what that means.) Indeed, I question whether I even had a formal mentor, but I can guess who was assigned to me and know full well why I would jump to that conclusion. More on that issue next. But I did have an excellent mentor/coordinator for the first class I taught at ICC, and got everything I needed from the wonderful nut cases on my floor, including one who was just two years ahead of me. However, there were some things I did not get that our new faculty get from the system we now have in place. One of those is camaraderie across the college within each group, but I still know several of my "class" on other parts of campus despite a very different system.

Mentors:

The role of individual faculty mentors seems diminished in the system we have, which is a bad thing unless the mentor is ineffective (as some appear to be). We do assign an individual mentor, but what happens there varies a lot depending on the inclination of the parties involved. It is not our main official way of getting faculty adjusted to this college.

One of my concerns is that some mentors do not seem to be well chosen. I would not assign as a mentor someone who punches a time clock with office hours. Who never goes to faculty governance meetings. Whose classroom expectations are so slack that a student wrote an article in the campus paper complaining about how unfair the departmental final was because the A students failed it. (Yep, that prof did not cover the syllabus or give tests that reflected the learning objectives of the course. This prof was also a product of the new mentoring system.) My mentor, if it was who I suspect, is much too casual to even mention being my mentor and probably limited involvement to asking me how things were going. Not that I needed any, but a walking tenured disaster case did need a lot of help and did not get it. (Not that he would have taken any advice, but that is a different story.)

I think we need a mentor training/mentoring program! Or, perhaps, more of an "it takes a village" approach to the new faculty. One of our problems as a CC is that we are too big to have intimate faculty meetings like at a small college, but also don't have the research groups that play that role at a large university. That is what I am thinking about for next year.

I also think several of us are going to increase our efforts this next year, because we are seeing some parts of the college culture and history slipping into oblivion.

Formal Orientation:

OK, to the main event.

I went through a multi-day orientation as a new faculty member that was incredibly intense. The proverbial drinking from a fire hose experience. About all I took with me was the knowledge that there were things out there that I needed to know more about. It was so rushed that I actually didn't even know where one of the places was. I had to get directions when I finally needed to go there later that year. That probably worked OK when they were hiring only a few at a time, but the new system of spreading this out over a year is a big improvement. More of a "just in time" approach. The part that was done that way for us, advising, was really effective. We got some specific training, then we worked side-by-side with someone who knew what they were doing.

In our current system, the new faculty are given a small reduction in duties on the service side (mostly advising and committees) in exchange for scheduling one meeting a week for orientation. They meet for a longer time before the fall semester for a total focus on HR (that took one day of my orientation as well) and first-day issues. There is also time for each Dean and department head to spell out how each fiefdom operates. Everything else (advising, governance, college culture, teaching philosophy, etc) is done in meetings that take place every week or so.

This part is run by our tiny faculty development operation, which is run by an in-house hire that I don't really respect. No significant classroom experience is a non-starter. It would be quite different if we had hired the candidate who did have that kind of experience, plus lots of experience with a variety of development tools (student interviews, classroom visits), but I suspect he turned us down (probably was on a pay-raise job hunt). Some of the presentations now come from faculty guests, and I think there will be more changes of that sort next year. If you go this route, the person in charge is crucial and it must be evaluated objectively each year.

Side comment: I did get some really good ideas from the talk given by the failed outside candidate, and got a great deal out of trying one of them this year.

The flaw in our present system that stimulated the comment in my "to blog" list is that the newest hires are uniformly clueless about how our college governance system works. I was too, but I had been deeply involved in governance at the university level as a graduate student, so I knew how one system worked. Nonetheless, ours has some idiosyncrasies that it took years for me to figure out and the lack of involvement by the new faculty had some consequences this past year. They did get a presentation about it, but it was clearly ineffective or did not connect.

The biggest problem with this one-size-fits-all approach is that one size does not fit all. We have hired faculty with years of teaching experience elsewhere (one recent hire came from a 4-year school that was easing its MS people out the door with dreams of being an R1) as well as total newbies (zero experience running an entire course at a college, or only experience with middle or high school classes). It is pretty insulting to treat both the same way. Actually, it is very insulting to tell someone how to teach when they are already a first-rate teacher ... maybe better than the person doing the telling.

Before going on to what else bugs me about this approach, a few words on what really works well. There are some things where one size does fit all. One of those is tenure and promotion. They spend many of their weeks on this, including work on their binder (I think they use the newly fashionable "portfolio" for this) and what it will have to include. If you (Profgrrrrl) are going to be bringing in several new faculty at a time into your department as you have alluded to, this would be a really good investment of someone's time. It is much narrower and clearer for our faculty than it might be for yours, but some things are universal and MUST be done right! Why not tell everyone the same story, and do an informal walk-through of what you need to put in it from the first year, second year (they also meet a few times during the second and third year), etc. Expectations. Tricks of the trade.

Aside: I was taught back in my post-doc days how to use a calendar to log things that need to go in annual evaluation documents, and that still pays off today. You can put it in a W*rd file or a folder, but the key idea is to note it as it happens so it is easy to pull together when you need it. Record keeping is essential.

What mistakes to avoid?

It is insane (I mean this literally, not figuratively) to pretend that methods that are the current fashion in a College of Education for a 20 person course on high-school writing skills or middle-school math skills or an upper-division philosophy seminar have any relevance to a 50 person lecture on Microbiology or the "majors" math and science classes we teach. A New Yorker cartoon showing students being asked how multiplication made them feel before they move on to division has made its way around our hallways. There is lots of research on teaching physics, but the little I have read is infinitely more than the person running the program has read. I am reminded of what Chad, aka Chad-zilla wrote about wandering around an active learning classroom in his 6'6" 260 pound rugby player body. Doesn't work. Terrorized students are not engaged students.

There are significant differences even within our own area (the sciences), because what works for majors does not work for non-mathematical gen-ed classes. We really should shift some of that program into our department, and use the opportunity to learn what other senior faculty are doing while helping the new ones figure it out.

There was also an element of indoctrination in the program. Some of it was good (they definitely need to know what to say and not say if they want to earn tenure) and necessary, but some of it strikes many of us as dangerous. That "some of it" has to do with a "student centered" philosophy where the only measure of learning is the fraction that pass a class. Now our college administration (both the Provost and the President) are on record as saying they view "learning" as what is measured by how a student does in the next class, but not everyone (or every Dean) is convinced. Worse, there are faculty who send students on to my classroom with the odd view that they should get two tries at every test and earn extra credit by going to office hours, and seem to have picked this up in the orientation and mentoring process. Those students will only get one try at my tests, and will be expected to still know the trigonometry they did not know when they took the final exam.

One of my goals for next year is to see if I can find out (in the form of actual data) how my students do after transferring to Wannabe Flagship University to study engineering. The idea is to get disaggregated data for kids who passed one or both of my physics classes before transferring and compare to "native" students and ones who transferred from ICC with their 60-credit AA degree but without taking calculus and physics at ICC. [The ones who go straight from being coddled to being herded are unlikely to do as well as my grads tell me they are doing, but I'd like to see the data.] I might also start looking at the math background of the kids who can't do algebra when they arrive in my class and see who gave them that B or C.

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Happy Earth Day!

Hard to believe it has been 38 years since the first Earth Day.


In celebration, here is a Day Lily that is probably blooming early because of a really warm microclimate in a corner next to the house ...

... or is it global warming? (I have no way of knowing, because this is the first year for this particular variety in my yard. It was transplanted late last spring.)

Some parts of the country have gotten worse since 1970, particularly some around where I live, but others have spectacularly improved. For example, the Cuyahoga River no longer catches fire in Cleveland, Ohio, and the water quality in Lake Erie has improved some ... albeit with the help of the invasive zebra mussel.

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World War I blog ... and movies

I have been following the "Harry's War" story, the letters sent by a WW I soldier that are being posted exactly 90 years to the day after the letters were sent home. Since we don't know if he even made it home alive, the one to two week gaps between letters leave us hanging and must have been harrowing for the family.

I knew a lot about the Great War from my grandfather, who was (as I recall) over there or on his way via crowded troop ship by now (meaning April 1918). He enlisted in 1917 after the end of the spring semester at college. When November 11 rolls around I will have to post his story of Armistice Day. But this soldier was fighting on the Italian front, so this blog has opened up a whole new story for me. Among other things, I now know where Asiago is located. Turns out it is more than a cheese; it was the site of a major battle in late WW I ... a battle that could play a role in the life - or death - of the man we are meeting through his letters. Through the miracle of blogs and the web, there is now a parallel site showing satellite images of the terrain where this all takes place.

If you have not checked it out, you should, but this note is also about what is showing this next month on Turner Classic Movies.

April 27, 8 pm
J'Accuse (1919) is a silent film that I am looking forward to seeing for the first time. Click for TCM (includes video clips) and IMDB info and a TCM article. The film contains footage shot during the war, and this is reportedly the original 3-hour version that was banned in France.

May 24, 8 pm
Paths of Glory (1957), by Stanley Kubrick, is showing as one of "The Essentials". I've seen this several times, and it is just as fresh (and harsh) each time. Click for TCM (includes video clips) and IMDB info.

Along the way, Rebecca (1940) is showing on May 3 at 8 pm as another of "The Essentials". Click for IMDB info. This just another of Hitchcock's great movies. I think it is spookier than some of his more popular ones. Another, Psycho, airs on May 31.

Now if they could only find a way to work in La Grande Illusion (1937), where Erich von Stroheim has a spectacular supporting role in another film about the futility of war. Click for TCM and IMDB info. (TCM has several video clips.) The timing of that film, just before WW II, might give an indication of why France was still recovering from its losses in WW I and utterly unable to resist Hitler. (Imagine if we had lost 5 million killed and as many maimed in the five years we have been in Iraq.) The most interesting thing to me is that these two aristocrats are multilingual, and the film assumes the viewer is as well!

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Belated First Blogiversary

This blog started a year ago on March 13, but that detail completely slipped my mind in the hectic end of the semester.

And this one has been more hectic than most. At least that leaves a full plate of pent-up topics to write about.

I really need to blog about a few things in the next few months, during the quieter time of early summer. If the past year is any indication, the mania that carries over from the pace of spring makes it easy to blog while only teaching the single class I choose to teach in summer while preparing for next year. What is on the agenda?

• A year on the biggest college governance committee. I can't touch the biggest item with a 10-foot pseudonym, interesting as it is, but there are some committee management and snark topics that need discussion. (done and done)
• I am long overdue on wrapping up the "jobs" series I started last summer.
• Some recent nice articles on tenure-track info mean I need to update one of the ones I completed last year.
• I also learned some things that our new faculty never picked up in the mentoring system we have, so I should blog that. (done)
• There are some teaching items in draft form about labs (done and done) , and one other about teaching students to work hard.

I really need to fix in my mind the simple detail that the blog started just before pi day, now renamed "talk like a physicist day" by some science bloggers. That should be easy ....

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Tax Day

Aside: I'm only bothering to post this so I can offer some solidarity to Becky Hirta as she hacks away at the forms for a trust in addition to those for her own income. See the idea below the fold.

Another year, another shipment to Uncle Sam. I always view it as a good thing, looking back at another year of income and outgo, since you only owe more taxes if you make more money. My only irritation was that the "worksheet" for the Alternate Minimum Tax was so conservative that we had to download the form and instructions just to prove that we are not even close to needing to pay it. It was worth it, however, just to appreciate those beautifully written instructions. Not.

My father has an excellent solution to that sort of nonsense:

Pass a law that simply forbids any elected official in the Federal Government, or any member of the executive branch that has to be confirmed by Congress, from using any paid or unpaid tax preparer when filling in their tax form. They could only get help by calling the IRS help line.

Congress and the President would have to do it all by themselves and face the consequences if they misinterpret the instructions or get bad advice from the IRS.

Guaranteed tax reform within one year.

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