New Element Named Cp

It is semi-official:

Now that the existence of element 112 has been certified, the discoverers have given their recommendation that it be named "copernicium", Cp, in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Interesting choice.

This breaks a long string of names for trans-plutonium elements that reflect either the location of the discovery (Am, Bk, Cf, Db, Hs, Ds) or key people in the early history of nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry (Cm, Es, Fm, Lr, Rf, Sg, Bh, Mt, Rg). Until now, the exceptions were Md (101) and No (102).

I am stuck on the pronunciation. Will it be

1. koh-per-NEE-cee-em (similar to other names)

or

2. koh-PER-ni-CEE-em (to preserve some similarity to the name)

???

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Climate Change in Hell ... and more

Here are some great articles from The New Yorker for your entertainment.

• Shouts and Murmurs takes a look at a symposium about Climate Change in Hell that was (allegedly) hosted by Former VP Al Gore

This is a short, fun article. It is an amusing twist on the usual physics problem concerning the temperature of Hell (as in, is Heaven hotter than Hell) and the on-going Big Science of Global Warming that manages to skewer a number of suspects. For example, why does Sony have a Portal to Hell in one of its sub-basements?


Hitting closer to home,

• XXL, which looks at books about possible explanations for the rapid growth of obesity in the US.

Favorite factoid about consequences of changes in the past few decades: "It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually." I personally thought the problem was a result of the SUV (like goldfish in a bigger bowl, people grew to the size of their vehicle), but the author seems to argue that the vehicles were needed to carry our supersized fries.

By the way, at my CC we are starting to have problems fitting students into the standard desks in our standard classrooms. Anyone else have this problem? We might have to cut class sizes just to make the aisles big enough for students to navigate their seats to their seats.

• A movie review of Bruno by Anthony Lane

The review might be funnier than the movie. Not that I would know, since I won't bother until the DVD comes out, so to speak. It can't possibly compare to Zoolander.

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Harry Potter

No, I haven't gone to see it yet, although I can't wait.

The reason for this blog entry is to point to two brilliant analyses of the book series (not this particular film, although book 6 is where you begin to see what has been going on all along). Both are thick with spoilers for anyone who has not read the entire series, so the links and comments go below the fold.

These articles are not, by the way, the sort of fawning nonsense you see in the popular press. Muggle Children, consider yourself warned.

• Matt on Harry Potter and the Tremendous [Screw Up] pointing out the obvious - every bad thing that happens is Dumbledore's fault
• Penny on Harry Potter and the Fascist Ubermensch on class as portrayed in the books

I think the second article goes a bit overboard by taking the control of the Muggle PM as more than a conceit needed to explain how this entire world - and its wars - can remain invisible, but the books do take a rather deterministic view of the world.

The only thing missing from the second article seems to be any notice that the Goblins can be seen as a particularly racist caricature of hook-nosed Jewish Bankers. Or maybe it was in there, but was just left unsaid.

Where I disagree with the second analysis (and agree with the first) is that the books are not about a Chosen One, a "christ figure" come to save the wizarding world, even if he gets Resurrected to finish the job. That is the way it is cast when you start in book 1, and the way you might read it superficially, but the reality is that it takes collaboration among many individuals - each with their own special skills and weaknesses - to win the final fight.

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Sweet Tweets

From PhD Comics today:

Great Tweets of Science


But where was one for Schroedinger or Bohr?

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Basic Research Proves the Obvious

According to a study reported by the BBC, cats 'exploit' humans by purring:

Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

(Follow the link above to see video evidence of this, as if we needed any!) Look below the fold for LOLcat evidence of this phenomenon from a photo posted late last week:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

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Slow Progress on the Economy

This morning's news concerning new jobless claims, where the number dropped below 600,000 for the first time since the last week of January (2/5/2009 release), seems to have been ignored by the markets. Oddly, "investors" did not buy into what looks like a nascent recovery, choosing to buy 3% T bills instead.

Now it is true that the moving average is still above that 600,000 level. However, the moving average now has a sustained (slightly) negative slope -- sustained since the middle of March (when the stimulus bill was passed). I expect we will still see a lot of new jobless claims even as some stimulus projects get started (highway projects in our state are just going out to bid) because the hiring will not be in the areas where layoffs are still likely to happen.

Continuing unemployment claims went up modestly. Also not surprising, because the stimulus package - which Congress put mostly in the hands of the states - won't really get rolling at creating new jobs until next month. However, that does bode well for a modest increase in the unemployment rate in July. That will probably be when we will see a market rally.

But what is going on? Are people putting new IRA or 401(k) money into fixed return investments? I'm at an age where a big chunk of mine goes that way, but I would not ignore equities at a point that might be a market bottom, particularly when there is a good chance of inflation a few years in the future. Those 10-year 3% T bills will be worthless then.

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Blogging about some blogs

Some classics out there today:

Matt writes about clouds and the "chemtrail" conspiracy theories. Worth visiting just to see the photo of a fighter just about at Mach 1. BTW, Matt is correct about the second photo. It is from Castle Bravo, the largest yield device (at 15 megatons) ever tested by the US.

Amusing, but he needs to get more up to date. Check out this about sighting Michael Jackson's ghost in a CNN clip shown on Larry King.

Thanks to a commenter on FSP's blog about hating the iPhone for that last one. That was also where I found a link to another great article:

Is Google Making Us Stupid from the July issue of The Atlantic. Read it, and see if you start skimming before you get to the paragraph where the author quotes a blogger about the number of paragraphs he can read before he starts skimming.

For the record, I didn't start skimming until I read that prompt, but my attention span for scientific articles was never so great that I didn't usually follow the Feynman approach of reading the introduction and then jumping to the conclusion to see if they got the right answer. Unless it really mattered, and then it took days or a week to read the paper closely.

On that subject, Chad has a great "research blogging" article about entanglement and a hysterical article about a really bad press release title related to string "theory". I suspect that "possible relevance of mathematical tools developed for string theory to an entirely different problem" would not have gotten quite as much attention.

Also, some really good comics in the last few days. PhD comics on whether your research project is impossible (following up on a series about a student being sent on a wild goose chase) and xkcd on the 2038 bug in Unix (when the time counter runs out of seconds in 32 bits).

PS -
Like his fellow former sportscaster, Sarah Palin, Keith Olberman doesn't seem to know much science. Tonight on "worst persons" he said something implying that you use carbon dating to determine the age of uranium. Not even close. I wonder how many people noticed ...

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START Again

The agreement announced today to limit US and Russian nuclear weapons, to replace the soon-to-expire 1991 START treaty between the US and USSR (initiated by Reagan halfway through his first term and signed almost a decade later by GHW Bush just months before the Soviet Union collapsed), but in a way that actually extends and further limits nuclear weapons from what was allowed the most recent treaty (negotiated in 2002 by GW Bush and V Putin) with improved verification.

The limitation on actual warheads, although only a minor change from the limits in place for the last decade, is significant as a way of building confidence and restarting agreements such as the one that will allow us to finally use Russian airspace to get to Afghanistan. It also continues the process of reducing the most dangerous Russian nuclear weapons: the "non-strategic" weapons that would be most likely to fall into the hands of (or be sold to) terrorists. Continuing to turn these into fuel-grade uranium that is then burning in US power plants is a win for everyone in the world.

The graph that accompanied the article captured nicely some characteristics of the nuclear stockpiles of the two nations that deserves further discussion.

I include a small version of the figure here for purposes of discussion.

Click image to go to the full-size figure from the BBC article linked above.

First, look at 1960. Is there any clearer picture of just how big of an advantage the US had in strategic weapons during the Cuban Missle Crisis, or any doubt as to why Gen. LeMay did all he could to provoke Russian actions that would allow him to unload those 20,000 weapons on Russia? Did the Russians get the message?

Well, look at what followed, from 1970 to 1985. It took some time to ramp up production (they "only" made about 5000 warheads in each 5-year period from 1960 to 1970), but they made 10,000 additional warheads every five years after 1970. They had no intention of being caught in a similar situation. The SALT treaties negotiated by Nixon and Ford only limited launchers, not the MIRV systems or the number of warheads that could be built. It was arms "limitation" in name only.

I can't even imagine what it cost the USSR to build 2000 nuclear weapons EVERY year. I knew each side had produced hundreds of metric tons of pure U-235 and Pu-239 (that's right, tons, when only tens of kg are needed for a weapon) but I had forgotten what a head start we had with the production facilities built during WW II and expanded afterward. If you remember all the arguments about dealing with the waste from those production facilities and how they were shut down for cleanup in the 1970s, this picture shows you why we could do that. We had 30,000 nuclear weapons in 1965, so we could reuse and recycle them as we refined our stockpile to a slightly smaller number of smaller and more effective weapons in the 1970s. We didn't need to make any more weapons-grade materials. The Soviets did, and they bore that expense every year for 15 years as shown in this graph. We did too, but we spent that sort of money in the 1950s and then shifted our resources to technology rather than tons of weapons-grade material.

As obvious as that might seem to you reading this, I think the origin and CONSTANT RATE of the Soviet weapons buildup in the events of October 1962 has been lost in the construction of the myth that Reagan's "Star Wars" ABM plans made the Soviet Union spend itself into bankruptcy, or (on the liberal side) that the Soviets would simply respond by making more bombs. Both are nonsense, because they were - and had been for a decade - building them anyway in continued response Khrushchev's humiliation when he underestimated the guts of the new young President who had backed out of supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion just a year earlier.



ASIDE:
The Wiki article on MIRV includes a great picture (towards the bottom of the page) showing the reentry tracks of 8 dummy warheads heading for Kwajalein. It isn't the best version showing what we can do. Somewhere I saw a picture of a MIRV counter-force attack where you could see the converging tracks of pairs of warheads, with each pair heading toward separate targets (presumably missile silos) and with the warheads in each pair originating from a different missile. They launched two missiles, each one separately targeting the same group of targets. It might have been in the nuclear weapons museum in ABQ. We really got our money's worth from the navigation systems built into those missiles.

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Happy Fourth of July

In some places, today is simply July 4th - but here in the US it is the "4th of July", synonymous with Independence Day. And, just like on every official holiday, the flag is flying out front:

This one, which I have owned since college, has faded a bit (it was flown every day for months after 9-11) but it is still going strong.

We don't use this holiday to celebrate the thousands who gave their lives to win our independence from the King of England; that is for another holiday. However, it is worth remembering that something like 1% of our population died in that war - although most (like George Washington's son) died of disease rather than combat. They, helped by the French, fought for the liberty we enjoy. And so do our soldiers today, although many are fighting to bring liberty to others.

One of those, in particular, has been in my thoughts today. A Marine, one of my students this summer. His sacrifice was one of the worst: His best friend was killed by an IED just over two years ago. I know about this because he was on edge one day in class, and explained the situation (the 2nd anniversary) to me after class. I was able to put him in touch with some other vets, also Marines, that I know from classes over the years. And add his friend to the list of people I remember - other friends of other former students.

In many ways, the war in Iraq has been closer to me than the war in Vietnam was.

But back to Independence Day.

The 4th has always struck me as an odd sort of holiday because we celebrate something that had not yet happened. Simply declaring our independence in 1776 was only the start of a six (or eight) year process - and it wasn't even the start of the Revolutionary War! The conflict had started a year earlier, in Lexington. Furthermore, it didn't end in the United States we know today. It ended with a loose Confederation (which had ten, mostly unknown, Presidents from 1781 to 1789) rather than the Constitutional government we celebrate on this holiday. It was this Confederation that won the war, signed a peace treaty with the UK in 1783, and eventually dissolved after the Constitution took effect in 1789.

And, I would argue, we weren't really independent until the War of 1812 was settled and the UK was convinced that we were an actual country like the Treaty of Paris said we were. In that sense, we are still a few years short of a significant bicentennial. Back in 1976, with the long lead-up to the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, I had argued that we really ought to have continued that "200 years ago today" lesson of what it took - and how long it took - before the United States really existed.

It took 46 years, not one day.

And its not over yet, since we have been losing liberties (think warrantless wiretaps) in recent years as we ignore Ben Franklin's [?] warning about giving up our essential liberties for a bit of temporary security.

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This Beer's for YOU!

Check out this article featuring a NK beer ad. There sure isn't much in the way of competition for the quality advertising work like this!

However, it does remind me of some lame ads from the early days of American TV. Is that a North Korean version of this old Hamm's Beer ad? Contrast the fake "injun" music with what I assume is standard national fare in NK, but the biggest difference is that you weren't allowed to show anyone actually drinking beer back in those days in the US. Later they pushed the envelope by showing a full glass and then one half empty, before that rule was lifted entirely.

NK happily shows drinking, but has its own ban on showing women as consumers. Talk about patriarchy!

But what I really love about that ad is the short bit of socialist realist art showing a sweaty worker downing a cold one. Doesn't last long in the ad, but to their credit, the BBC features it on the freeze frame.

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Green Shoots?

Maybe, maybe not.

We have one REALLY BIG green shoot locally: one of the houses across the street finally sold - after nearly a year - and a young couple is moving in. (Oddly, the real estate agent never put up a "sold" sign despite all of the signs - survey stakes and inspections - that it was taken. That is either poor marketing of a successful agent or a serious case of not wanting to anger the sales gods.) The other one keeps getting lookers but no takers.

The other big news was the release of the June unemployment data, which allows us to add the first NEW data point to an infamous graph showing projected quarterly average unemployment rates. Below is an update of the graph I showed last month to correct some major misconceptions about what the economy was doing - and was going to keep doing - before Obama took office.

Click to get a full-size view.

Consistent with the flat trend in new jobless claims, we seem to have a second derivative consistent with zero. That is what the lower of the two pink lines tracks. That is an improvement over the large positive second derivative - indicating an acceleration into a depression - that was the case during the fall of last year before the initial steps were taken by the Fed and the Bush administration (drawing all sorts of grief for Bush and the lame-duck Congress) to turn it around.

Thank God that Bush didn't act like the Hoover wing of his party wanted.

So, is the slope of the "new jobless claims" data zero or negative? Is the break shown by the June unemployment data real or a statistical fluctuation? That we will not know for months, certainly not until we see if there are any significant changes in July once "stimulus" money starts to flow in the new fiscal year. Given all of the delays in getting the Stim Bill passed and then incorporated into state budgets, I didn't expect significant spending by states until well after July 1.

Locally, there are several "shovel ready" highway projects (plans and permits all in place) that are just going out to bid. One is drawing fire from idiots who think it is wasteful to build a particular project earlier than planned just to put people to work. (They must want a 4000 Dow and 15% unemployment.) In addition, most of the jobs that will be shed by local and state government were ended in June as the fiscal year drew to a close. If that sort of action was common nationwide, that may explain part of the bump up in the June job loss data (which had a big chunk from government layoffs) that has thrown the markets into a tizzy today.

This could be a good tizzy. If the Dow gets below 8000 or into the mid 7000s, it may be a great time to put some Roth IRA money into the market early. Even if we have a "stagnant" recovery like I have seen in the past (like the days of stagflation only without the inflation) we should see the GDP pick up. Remember, unemployment is a lagging indicator!

One thing is for sure: the second derivative wasn't negative back in December as the Obama economic transition team had assumed in constructing the blue graph. I wonder what the reaction of the economy would have been in January if they had shown the upper of the two pink lines as the "without" model. Actually, we don't need to wonder. It likely would have been much worse than the March collapse of the stock market as the situation became clearer to investors.

PS -
This new figure has a "credit" on it as well as a minor tweak of the green line described in my earlier article. This is the figure to borrow if you want to include my analysis showing the true starting point Obama had to work with.

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Flash from the past

From ancient history, we have the confirmation that the remains in the crypt under the altar the Basilica of St. Paul are old enough to be contemporary with Paul (nee' Saul). The assertion in the news story that this "proves" they are his remains is a bit of an exaggeration. It only proves they could be his.

The Vatican still hasn't figured out how science works ....

From the more recent past, we have a great story about giving a kid a Sony Walkman to use for the day at school. Makes a great read.

I still have mine somewhere. The headphones were the first part to die.

The Walkman was the second step toward personal music. Now I have to decide which was the first, the transistor radio we had when I was a kid (I sure wish my parents hadn't tossed the one they got way back when they were new) or a hand-crank portable Victrola (purely analog operation) that my mom had and that I now have. The latter would have been the first way you could take music on a picnic, and it was louder than a boombox.

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Third time is the charm

We got a chance to see Star Trek in IMAX this weekend, and took it.

This third viewing (others were normal format and digital) allowed my wife to confirm her belief that Scotty had a pet Tribble on Delta Vega.

Primary observation:
Sound quality was superior to the otherwise outstanding theaters we saw it in originally. This might be due to the fact that there are few seats in an IMAX theater that are not centrally located, but the multi-channel separation was outstanding - particularly for the phaser battle on the Romulan ship. It was also easy to hear other details, such as Pike giving a battle order to Engineer Olson or (most important to fans) Bones giving an order to Nurse Chapel.

Related observation:
Film quality was similar to the digital version we saw, possibly a bit inferior at times - although it is possible our location relative to the screen and the size of the image allowed us to see flaws in the film making itself (inconsistent focus).

Other details include confirming that the Star Fleet Academy building was the library at CSUN, doing all we could to avoid saying too much about "beer factory" so we wouldn't annoy the people around us (shooting in an AB Brewery was confirmed at the second viewing), and that they definitely were using short wave antennas on the bridge of the Kelvin.

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More - and Less - Humorous News

In the wake of the passing of two pop icons of my youth, here is something a bit different from what is dominating every news outlet.[*] Well, everyone except one. MTV broke in with the news of Michael Jackson's death, but then went right back to its regular programming. I can't believe they couldn't cue up an obit show, or just pull a set of videos out of the archive. He made them a fortune. I wonder how long it will be before TCM shows "The Wiz" or The History Channel shows his biography.

Now for the story that is truly a bit different:
Stoned wallabies make crop circles
The posted comments are as priceless as that story. Could have been from The Onion.

Anyway, back to the real news ...

I feel a bit disconnected from the intensity of the coverage. Even though she is older than I am, I was in college when Farrah Fawcett became a pin-up queen of kids much younger than I. And Michael Jackson came along with the 'bubble gum' hit "Rockin' Robin" when I had moved on from "Mony Mony" to "Sergeant Pepper". I view his work more intellectually than I do The Beatles, because it was really his performance and production sense in his rock videos - starting with "Thriller" - that . That won't be the case for some younger colleagues who grew up with his records on a portable stereo at a pool party like I did with The Beatles.

Farrah Fawcett, age 62.

I can't believe she was that old. Or that my mom gave me a copy of her poster as a birthday gift sometime in the mid-late 70s. Her fame is kind of odd because it seems based entirely on that poster! Her acting roles were pretty forgettable.

Michael Jackson, age 50.

I can't separate Michael Jackson from MTV. That's why I was so disappointed that they were showing some movie rather than showing the videos where he displayed his true brilliance. He created some memorable music, unique choreography, and the ability to be a movie director if he chose to move into longer format film.

The only thing I take exception to in the coverage I have seen is the characterization of his work as music that brought black and white together. To me, that happened with any number of artists in the 60s, but particularly The Supremes and The Temptations. What was once 'race music', banned from 'white' radio, would be played right along with every other band. There were any number of songs that I didn't realize were by black artists until I saw them on a TV show.

By the way, the photo sequence in the BBC "Life in Pictures" tribute is as surreal as the rest of Jackson's life. He was getting to the point where he looked older than Keith Richards, who somehow managed to outlive Jackson.

It is sad to say, but maybe now Michael can rest in peace, even if someone turns Neverland into Graceland.

Condolences to all of their family and friends. Parents, even one as controlling as his father reportedly was, should not have to bury their kids.

UPDATED:
Well, MTV finally woke up and smelled the stale roaches. They now have a tribute program on the "original" channel (where they used to show videos, just like CNN used to have news on CNN) and continuous Jackson videos on one or another of its other channels. I happened to catch the "Thriller" video, from the start, on a digital channel just by channel-surfing luck this morning. That made this event more real than any of the news coverage. I remember well when we put the debut of that video on our daily TV schedule. It was truly ground breaking, and in many ways it still is. It, and a few others, will be remembered in the same way some as the films that sprang from the genius of Gene Kelly.

And I take back a bit of what I said about his role in integrating music. The commentary that pointed out he integrated MTV was on the mark. In addition, my views of music integration might reflect the region I grew up in. I was remembering last night, when re-reading my post, that I heard a "Top 100 Rock Hits" program around 1980 in a southern state that did not include a single #1 Motown hit.



[*] Footnote:
The BBC is streaming their live BBC World News coverage onto a regular web news story. I've never seen that done, but it is interesting how much better their coverage is to the cable networks in the US - and it is after midnight there! I really can't believe that I was watching live video from Los Angeles of the helicopter carrying his body to morque by way of England over the Internet....

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RBOC - Light summer reading

This will be about as random as it gets.

• Zambia leader hit by press leak

I won't spoil this for you. Go read it right now while keeping in mind the question of whether the Federal Reserve's pronouncements would generate more surprise and get more attention if Bernanke spoke in a garden under a tree.

• Who wants tenure anyway?

Thought provoking (although I am old enough to have seen this topic debated and discussed many times in two different centuries) and also making clever use of some great academic cartoons.

• The tragedy of Fred Hoyle

A great article pointing out the Nobel-worthy contribution Fred Hoyle made to our understanding of the production of the elements in stars. This contribution to nuclear physics helped destroy the Steady State theory that Hoyle promoted until his death. How? It showed how nuclei beyond He could be produced in thermonuclear reactions, making Big Bang predictions of the production of only a few isotopes of the lightest elements consistent with what we see in nature.

• A thought experiment from 1963

Would it have helped or hurt the Civil Rights movement if something like this had happened in August 1963?

In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”

Did Osama bin Laden help or hurt Kerry by endorsing him just before the election, and did bin Laden do it to keep Bush (and his dis-engagement from al'Qaeda) in office? Imagine what would have happened if he had endorsed Bush ...

• Video analysis of whether dynamite on a hammer can lift a guy off the ground

Like it says. Go look at the video and pay attention to the last few seconds.

My analysis of the analysis is that the author's video interpretation results in a major underestimate of the velocity of the hammer after the explosives detonate. It is only in frame for a short time, and is slowing via both gravity and an interaction with the person holding it during that time. The energy in the hammer was surely much greater than estimated, so the question might really be "How high would he have gone if he had not let go of the hammer?"!

Now go watch it again. Clearly this person is using much more explosive than the others. See how theirs just go off? Notice how several people are doing this before he walks out, but then the area clear completely as he prepares to try his experiment? Right now I am speculating whether you could pull yourself off the ground by swinging a sledge hammer if you had it tied to your hands.

BTW, I wasn't too impressed with an earlier article. As Uncle Al noted, the Magnus Effect (what makes a baseball curve) was first seen with musket balls and studied with curved barrels (much like the paintball guns mentioned in the Wiki article he quotes) centuries ago. It is quite an oversight to leave that out, but even Wiki understates how big it can be: ever watch a golf ball rise when driven by a real pro? Lift from the Magnus Effect is why the optimum launch angle for a golf ball is only about 12 degrees.

• Interview of Chad and his dog Emmy about quantum mechanics

This last one makes for some great summer fun!

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Jobs - Update to Parts 4 and 5

Lots of blog-world action related to both tt Uni and CC jobs that deserves collecting in one place.

I'll put mention of Unbalanced Reaction's posting of part 1 of a series about experience with a 1-year Visiting Assistant Professor (VAP), not to mention using it to leverage a successful job hunt for a permanent t-t job, up here above the fold. I'm looking forward to the rest, and will add the links here when they appear. One thing I am curious about is which college category this new job falls into, to help see the relevance of the VAP as a teaching post-doc. I'm guessing it is a regional comprehensive or smaller 4-year school, possibly one that doesn't offer an MS degree in UR's science field.

I'll also be looking to UR's discussion of POGIL.

A few articles from IHE, with comments, will be linked below the fold.

I'll start with this one, about taking a one-year position because you don't have a job when May rolls around.

My observation is that there is a big difference between temp teaching as an adjunct and working full time in a one-year not-necessarily-renewable faculty position. The latter should come with a living wage and benefits and an opportunity to develop the teaching portfolio you need for some kinds of jobs. That is how it worked out for Unbalanced Reaction. Given the current state of the economy, there may even be some of these that might be potentially tenurable if the money is still there in a year or three.

There are also lots of links to resources that would be useful if you want to bail out of academia.

An article offering warnings about working as an adjunct should be must reading for anyone entering grad school ... along with the first few parts of my jobs series, if I should say so myself.

It is not quite the same as working as a Visiting Asst Professor, but it can also help with that teaching portfolio if you are realistic about your goals and the chances of reaching them.

I highly recommend one about Seven things to do this summer before starting a new job in the fall. A few of these suggestions even apply to us old timers.

My version of "paperwork" is all of the things that got deferred as the year wound down. My version of "set up your office" is to CLEAN mine. It currently makes a photo from 2 years ago look tame by comparison.

Finally, this article about summer teaching had some good advice.

I teach one small class in the summer, more for the fun than the money. (The college probably thinks the same thing, since their "profit" isn't very high for this class in the summer.) I get to do something completely different, interact with some great students from every walk of life at the college, yet have a reason to do to campus every day and do some of those catch-up tasks that just don't make it past triage during the school year. The comments in his "summertime, and the teaching is easy" section definitely apply to me. I'll be getting ready for fall soon enough.

But I worry about the burn out of some of our new faculty, who are teaching a very heavy load in the summer to help make ends meet or pay off student loans, whatever. It won't help their teaching evaluations in the regular year if they use up so much energy in the summer.

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Value of a 2-year degree?

An article about improving graduation rates in IHE contains the following statement:

“Today, a two-year or four-year college degree or certificate is a prerequisite for economic success,” Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success and special initiatives for the Gates Foundation, said to an audience of higher education professionals gathered at the Library of Congress here. Yet while tangible economic incentives to finish college are evident, she said, completion rates have been stagnant since the 1970s.

Emphasis added.

First, if you take even a cursory glance at the graph I constructed showing 4-year grads, you can see that the completion rates have soared since the 1970s - for women. It is only the rate for men that has stagnated.

Further, the relation between a two-year degree and economic success is not supported by the census data I used in that previous study. It shows (table A-3 towards the bottom of the page) only a modest premium for anything less than a 4-year degree.

They don't break out an associates degree from "some college", but the raw numbers from 2007 don't support that claim:

	Income
HS degree	31,286
Some college	35,138
College degree	57,181

A bit more than 10% might not make up for the opportunity cost or the loan debt some students get as the price of a failed attempt to go to college. A college dropout like Bill Gates is the exception.

By the way, those college-grad numbers really show why so many of my students see things like the recent announcement of federal support for "job training" at CCs as rather pointless. What they need is an extension of existing federal financial aid programs so they will pay for the extra year of classes they need to take before transferring into an engineering program. Students who aren't ready to start out in calculus as a freshman (ours often need a year or more of math before calculus) and also need a ton of science classes beyond the gen-ed requirements are ignored by the rules we currently operate under.

But high school completion, also mentioned in the article, is a BIG deal:

	Income
HS dropout	21,484
HS degree	31,286

Getting out of HS opens up lots of opportunities in the "skilled trades". I have no idea how a HS dropout can manage in our society, yet the census data say that about 14% never graduate.


BTW, I realize I forgot to work up the derivative data for college grad rates. I made a go of it, but the data are really noisy and I need to come up with a good smoothing algorithm that does not hide all of the fluctuations.

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The Sub-Prime Rich

One of the details in a story about the death of Ed McMahon at age 86 concerned his financial difficulties:

In 2007, he fell and broke his neck and as a result of not being able to work, he defaulted on mortgage payments on his Hollywood mansion.

Say what?

Having a 4.8 million dollar mortgage (according to Wiki) in your 80s, a mortgage so big that it requires earning a quarter million a year at age 84 just to pay the "rent" [*], is not my idea of planning for retirement. Our plan is to pay off our house well before retirement age so our "rent" is less than $200 a month.

Apparently Ed McMahon did not have (or likely could not afford) disability insurance to cover his mortgage should he be unable to work and pay his bills. Was he counting on winning the lottery, or the American Family Publishers subscription prize drawing he used to pitch to elderly folks along with everyone else?

It actually doesn't surprise me that much to discover that someone like McMahon was living in a sub-prime mansion. That circumstance might not fit the story some want to create about defaulted loans, but it fits what I am seeing in my town. Locally, there have been several large foreclosure auctions advertised in the paper for properties worth millions. In one case, it wasn't a poor black family that spent several million of someone else's dollars on a large development consisting of rental housing and then never even pay the property taxes on it. One wonders what those real estate developers did with the rent they collected.

[*] Footnote:
That would be just the interest on a 5.2% loan, which is probably an underestimate, so you still have to add in property taxes and insurance.

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Failing Grade on Significant Figures

This analysis is second hand (I have not read the journal article); it is based entirely on the article in today's Inside Higher Ed titled "Failing Grade on Alcohol".

According to the press release, the study came up with an allegedly shocking result

Using figures from government databases and national surveys on alcohol use, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) found that drinking-related accidental deaths among 18- to 24-year-old students have been creeping upward -- from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005.

that was published in the "Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs".

What is wrong with this? Everything, if IHE described the study accurately.

The IHE reporter says the authors did the following:

Researchers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism multiplied the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States, as reported by the Census Bureau, by the estimated percentage of deaths among 18- to 24-year-olds that were alcohol-related, as provided by 331 medical examiner studies. That number was multiplied by 30 percent, since three-tenths of 18- to 24-year-olds are in college.

Do you see the mistakes?

The biggest error is that "three tenths" has only one significant figure, although it might have had two before they wrote that sentence. That means their values should be stated as 1400 and 1800 (appropriate in either case because many people think that a leading 1 does not convey a full significant figure). Their choice conveys a hugely false sense of precision, as if they KNOW it was 1825 students, rather than 1824 or 1826, that died - particularly when it is quite likely that they don't know whether it was 1700 or 1900 that died as a result of alcohol use in that year.

The important point is that they don't know whether the people who died were actually students.

But there are several other errors inherent in this approach.

Are there equal percentages of men and women in college within this age group? The data I showed the other day suggest they aren't. Are men and women equally likely to show up in those morality statistics? Unlikely, given what I see in our newspaper.

There is also an unstated uncertainty in using a small sample of coroner data. (How many counties have a college in their coroner district?) What was the standard deviation in the mean value they used? Could it be that they are comparing 1400 +/- 200 with 1800 +/- 200 to get an increase of 400 +/- 400? Or worse?

Finally, all of this might be dwarfed by the use of a highly subjective term like "alcohol related". That box can get checked on a traffic incident report if one of the drivers reports having had a drink recently, regardless of whether there is a legal finding of intoxication or even fault for the crash. That means a totally sober student could have been counted if s/he was killed in a car accident with someone who had had a few drinks with dinner.

That doesn't even count concerns such as those of one person quoted in the article, who pointed out that many college students live within walking distance (or a short drive) of the parties they go to, in contrast to others in the same age group.

At least the abstract of the article said the "aim of this study was to estimate" [emphasis added] the mortality from alcohol use in the 18-24 age group, but that didn't stop them from giving a 4 sig fig value for a 1 sig fig result. This is particularly pathetic when the lead author believes "that it would have been better to have data on every injury death, but maintains that from the information he used, the results were a conservative estimate of the number of deaths" according to the author of the IHE article.

That means he knows that both the 1400 and the 1800 values were very uncertain, and that the true value of the first value might even be bigger than the second. This doesn't stop him from quoting "exact" numbers and omitting any estimate of the uncertainty in the calculated values. Surely, having risen to the position of Division Director at a national institute, he knows how to use a stat package to estimate the uncertainty? Oh, right. I almost forgot about this true story. Maybe there is a chance that he used the raw numbers from his calculation without a hint of a clue of how to estimate the uncertainty in the number of deaths from the uncertainties in the coroner data and in the fraction attending college.

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Attendance and Test Performance

In a post I made a few weeks ago I stated

And some of my students this summer must be from Wannabe Flagship, seeing the way several missed class (and a key review topic) the day before an exam.

A commenter asked whether there was any correlation between missing those two classes and doing poorly on the exam. I never got around to blogging it, but I looked at it at the time and the answer was "yes".

Quite a strong one, actually.

100% of the students who were absent on the particular day that I discussed Hairdressing (and were also absent when it was reviewed after homework was returned to them) got zero credit on a Hairdressing problem on the exam.

In contrast, fewer than 20% of the students who were present when I showed them how to Dress Hair got it completely wrong on the exam - and one of those was probably texting under his desk if past observations also applied that day.

Missing the review day was less critical if they were there the first day and also did the homework, but only 20% of the ones who got the Hairdressing problem completely correct were gone that day, while 60% of the ones who got partial credit had missed that day.

Perhaps more important is the subjective fact that several students who had been doing B/C work in the course missed those classes, missed the Hairdressing problem, and saw their grade drop significantly as a result.

[*]
I borrowed the "Hairdressing" term from profgrrrrl to stand in for one of the topics in my class.

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