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Random bullets of “I guess we’re back in the thick of things!”

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My semester has, in the last 10 days or so, shifted from “close enough to equilibrium to seem manageable” to “who parked their ton of bricks right on my soul?!” I suppose I should have seen this coming, right?

  • That weekend sprog blog never materialized. The proximate causes were a whole mess of grading, and the younger Free-Ride offspring working on yet another school project (for Band, which is technically an extracurricular activity, but I was too busy grading to pursue it).
  • Plus, it turns out that Dr. Free-Ride’s better half seems to have already recycled the aforementioned booklet on how to keep your kids safe (from cyberbullying, sexting, and the like) online. Perhaps this is evidence to indict us as bad parents. However, I think the record will reflect that we’ve been attentive to the dangers of creepy internet stalkers since at least late January of 2006.
  • Best thing at a science fair: the kid who can explain in detail how (and why) all of his strategies for measuring the variables of interest ran into unforeseen difficulties, and how (given more time, if not better instrumentation) he might MacGuyver his way around them. Especially when the kid is not defeated but enthusiastic about the challenges science presents, not to mention the fun of tackling those challenges.
  • Sadly, that good thing didn’t keep the worst thing in my inbox from knocking the wind out of my sails. It sounds like “the management” of the public university system of which my fair campus is a part is planning to go Wisconsin on the faculty union’s collective posterior as we negotiate our contract. After all, this is a terribly cushy job, and I and my fellow faculty members personally orchestrated the financial collapse.

Friday Sprog Blogging: one of *those* Fridays.

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This week’s sprog blog will be delayed on account of the younger Free-Ride offspring had so much school work to do last night, and then again early this morning, that you’d think the kid was trying to get a grant proposal submitted. (A salient difference is that probably most grant proposals submitted to NSF or NIH don’t require the use of a hot glue gun.)

Anyhow, given that the most recent discussions with the younger Free-Ride offspring have focused on time management (see above) and have involved more gnashing of teeth than witty repartee, this is your chance to weigh in on what conversation I should have, with either or both of the Free-Ride offspring, and then report here on the blog before the weekend is out.

Some possible contenders:

  • The younger Free-Ride offspring’s ideas for science fair projects. There’s been some discussion about figuring out a clever experiment to measure the limits of successful multitasking (at least in the population at Casa Free-Ride). Limits of memory (and especially, what kinds of things are most readily forgotten — project due dates, I’m looking at you) might also be a possibility. Otherwise the younger Free-Ride offspring wants to grow mold.
  • The elder Free-Ride offspring will be starting junior high next school year (yikes!). This means that Dr. Free-Ride’s better half went to the parent orientation at the junior high and was given a booklet on how to keep your kids safe (from cyberbullying, sexting, and the like) online. Within our draconian house limits on screentime, the elder Free-Ride offspring manages to be online a lot. I imagine this 11-year-old netizen may have some interesting views on the perspectives presented in the booklet.
  • We could also talk about why the sprogs never help me grade papers.

Sorry for the delay. We’ll get you some sproggy goodness before the next work week starts.

Midweek self-criticism: disdain for other flavors of geekery.

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Given that at least some denizens of the internet assume that I (like all my comrades in academia, especially at a public university system in California) must be a card-carrying Communist, public self-criticism may become a semi-regular blog feature here. (Verily, given how judgmental all that grading makes me, I ought to use some of it on myself.)

Anyway, the other night I was mulling over whether I wanted to watch the documentary film Helvetica, a film that explores the typographical font of the same name. I’ve spoken to people who have seen it and have really enjoyed it, and yet, I found myself resistant.

On the surface, at least, I put down my resistance to my impression that Helvetica is maybe a documentary best appreciated by font-geeks. While I appreciate a well-balanced font as much as the next producer or consumer of written language, I am not a font-geek.

At least, I’m not a font-geek at present. Maybe my hesitance to watch Helvetica was really a matter of fear — fear that the film might turn me into a font-geek. Not that there’s anything objectively wrong with being a font-geek, but I have lots of other kinds of geekery on my plate at the moment, and I worry that adding one more might be a geek too far. Also, I’m not sure I want to find myself staying up late switching the fonts on all my old web pages, handouts, and manuscripts (which is maybe something that a serious font-geek might do).

But, if I’m worrying that the activation energy to turn me into a font-geek is sufficiently low that an 80 minute movie could push me over it, maybe there’s an uglier side to my resistance.

I must acknowledge the possibility that what I really fear is that watching Helvetica will turn me into one of them (i.e., a font-geek), and that my real problem, should this outcome occur, is not that it will be time consuming to indulge in this additional geekery, nor that it will displace some existing geekery in which I currently partake. Rather, maybe I’d have a problem with letting go of my disdain for this other sort of geek that I am not, with their strange ways and odd interests. The emotional distance is similar to what I imagine a non-Trekkie would feel toward Trekkies when watching the documentary Trekkies.*

Am I a person who needs to hold on to disdain for others, even to the point of disdaining myself if I should find myself like those others in my appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of typographical fonts? I hope not.

Having recognized my error in resisting Helvetica and my own potential membership in the fellowship of font-geeks, I affirm my willingness to watch the film, as well as my commitment to hold no other geeks in disdain for the focus of their geekery.

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* I haven’t actually watched Trekkies, either. I don’t dress up in Federation uniforms or go to cons, and I never got too immersed in the shows in the Star Trek franchise that came after the original series, but I acknowledge that I’m at least a low-level Trekkie.

Question for the hivemind: workplace policies and MYOB.

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The students in my “Ethics in Science” course have, as usual, reminded me why I love teaching. (Impressively, they manage to do this while generating ever larger quantities of the stuff I don’t love about teaching, written work that needs to be graded.) But, recently, they’ve given me some indications that my take on the world and theirs may differ in interesting ways.

For example, last week they discussed a case study in which a graduate student is trying to figure out what to do about his difficulties with his research in a lab where the most successful student is also romantically involved with the boss.

In the discussion, there was about the range of opinions you’d expect about the acceptability of this kind of relationship and its likely effects on the collegiality of the training environment.

But there was a certain flavor of response that really confused me. It boiled down to something like this: The boss and the fellow grad student are responsible adults who can date anyone they want. Get over it, get back to your research, and for goodness sake don’t go blabbing about their relationship because if the department chair finds out about it, they could both get in big trouble, maybe even losing their jobs.

Am I wrong that there seems to be a contradiction here?

If the professor and his graduate student can get in official trouble, at the hands of the department chair, for their romantic involvement, doesn’t that suggest that the relationship is, in the official work context, not OK?

Or, looking at it from the other direction, if such a romance is something that they and any of their lab members who happen to have discovered it need to keep on the down-low, doesn’t this suggest that there is some problematic issue with the relationship? Otherwise, why is the secrecy necessary?

I’m thinking the crux of this response — they can date if they want to, but no one with authority over them must know about it — may be a presumption that workplace policies are unreasonably intrusive, especially when it comes to people’s personal lives. Still, it strikes me that at least some workplace policies might exist for good reasons — and that in some instances the personal lives of coworkers (and bosses) could have real impacts on the work environment.

Is “mind your own business” a reasonable policy here, official work policies be damned?

Friday Sprog Blogging: choosing sides.

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The Free-Ride offspring have been hunkered down with their school work (not to mention wondering whether their soccer practices this week will be called off due to … snow?), but they took the time to dash off some drawings to suggest where the parts of their minds devoted to science are lately.

The younger Free-Ride offspring followed radio reports of Watson and its wild success on Jeopardy.

Bender versus Watson

Regular readers may recall that the younger Free-Ride offspring is a fan of Bender. Naturally, therefore, the younger Free-Ride offspring would like to see Bender face off against Watson. Verily, the younger Free-Ride offspring would like to see Bender crush Watson in a battle of artificial intellects.

We are still searching for the Jeopardy category where this is likely to happen. Any suggestions?

Meanwhile, the elder Free-Ride offspring contemplates the science fair, and imagines more active participation from the proposed animal subject:

Snowflake versus the Internets

In the picture, Snowflake is reading what some yahoo has apparently written on the internet: “… Which proves that bunnies could never understand the importance of science.”

Snowflake’s response (which I can only imagine was preceded by a snort): “My big fluffy bunny butt.”

(It would appear that Snowflake is clutching an Eppendorf tube in her left forepaw.)

If it does snow here this weekend, we’ll check back in to share the apocalypse with you.

Tuesday headdesk.

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Did you ever go to your class and give what feels like a really good lecture on the reading (because the students look engaged, and they’re asking really good questions about both the specifics and the big picture) …

And, it feels like it’s connecting in a really effective way to issues discussed in the last class meeting (simultaneously reinforcing some of those points and challenging them) …

And, you didn’t even really have to dip into your list of half a dozen current situations that raise similar kinds of questions, because the students are all over it and have raised half a dozen such current situations of their own …

Only to discover
Continue reading→

Friday Sprog Blogging: science fair experimental design.

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The elder Free-Ride offspring is thinking about a project studying the behavior of Snowflake Free-Ride, the rabbit in residence at Casa Free-Ride. While finding interesting questions to ask about the bunny is pretty easy, working out reasonable ways to get data that might help answer those questions is somewhat harder:

Elder offspring: I want to see whether Snowflake finds food with her eyes or her nose.

Dr. Free-Ride: What are your thoughts on how to do that?

Elder offspring: Well, we need a room …

Dr. Free-Ride: … OK. Tell me more.

Elder offspring: We need a room with a fan up at the top.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why do we need a fan up at the top?

Elder offspring: To blow away the smells.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. So you’re looking for some mechanism to mask smells and see if she can still find the food.

Elder offspring: Yes.

Dr. Free-Ride: I guess I’m not totally convinced a fan is the best way to mask a smell. Also, I worry that it might freak her out.

Elder offspring: Oh.

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, your hypothesis is that she’s either finding the food by smell or by sight. So how would you tell if sight is what she’s using?

Elder offspring: We start the fan and put the food there and if she can find it … We may also need to use a clothespin, like in those cartoons —

Dr. Free-Ride: We’re totally not putting a clothespin on the rabbit’s nose, smart aleck!

Elder offspring: (snickering) I know.

Dr. Free-Ride: Let’s back up a little bit. We’re talking about two possible ways you think the rabbit could locate food — one is by vision, one is by smell. Masking smell means we have to figure out a way to get the volatile stuff that the nose detects away from her. But my own hunch is that masking sight might be easier. Do you have any thoughts on how to mask —

Elder offspring: Blindfolds.

Dr. Free-Ride: Uh, no. You’ll have to be more clever, since you can’t blindfold the bunny.

Elder offspring: Put her in a dark room.

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know how good her night vision is. (Or how good your night vision is if you’re in the dark room trying to observe her.)

Elder offspring: If we hear munching …

Dr. Free-Ride: Isn’t she always munching on something?

Elder offspring: We’d use a food where the munching sounds like crunching.

Dr. Free-Ride: Aside from utter darkness, can you think of any other way to mask visual contact with the food?

Elder offspring: What if we surround a carrot by things that are visually distracting?

Dr. Free-Ride: Does that really test whether she’s using vision to find the carrot, or whether she can pick it out visually amongst a bunch of visually distracting things? Maybe you need to think about whether there’s some way to disguise it looking like a carrot, but it would still be there for her to smell.

Elder offspring: How about we put it behind a curtain or something?

Dr. Free-Ride: Ah, a barrier that keeps her from seeing it. Then, with the carrot out of sight but in smelling range, you’d see if she reacted like, “Where’s the carrot. GIMME THE CARROT!”

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK, that seems like a key part of your experimental design: how exactly are you going to mask the carrot’s visibility but not its smell?

Elder offspring: Invisibility cloak!

Dr. Free-Ride: You don’t get to use things that don’t exist in your science fair project. Unless you can successfully invent them, in which case — if you can successfully invent an invisibility cloak, I submit to you that that would probably be a more impressive science fair project than this information on rabbit behavior that you obtain using the invisibility cloak.

Elder offspring: Yeah, OK.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, is it going to be a problem that you have exactly one rabbit to study?

Elder offspring: Nah.

Dr. Free-Ride: What’s that going to do to the conclusions you can draw.

Elder offspring: I probably can’t say that all rabbits are like this based on the behavior of this one rabbit. But, she’s a pretty typical rabbit.

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you know she’s pretty typical?

Elder offspring: Because, she’s a breed [New Zealand white] that’s raised for lab use, and they want typical animals for lab use.

Dr. Free-Ride: Which means you would be surprised if she were very weird, as rabbits go?

Elder offspring: Yes.

Dr. Free-Ride: Of course, she’s been living with you for almost a year now. That might be enough to make a rabbit weird.

Elder offspring: Hey!

Dr. Free-Ride: I’m just saying. So, back to your experimental design, since Snowflake is a smart rabbit — she learns stuff — what if you make a curtain or some other barrier and she starts associating it with carrots?

Elder offspring: Maybe sometimes we could just put a rock behind it instead of a carrot.

Dr. Free-Ride: Good call — something that isn’t edible and doesn’t smell like a treat.

Friday Sprog Blogging: comfort food.

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We had to fetch the younger Free-Ride offspring from school yesterday midday on account of an unscheduled bout of vomiting.* Because, you know, the microbes and immune systems tend not to take account of things like our work schedules. (“Or whether we have a science test,” the younger Free-Ride offspring chimes in.)

Anyway, since experience has established me as the puke-parent** in the Free-Ride household (the one upon whom a child will vomit in instances where someone is vomited upon), I now have something of a procedure when I get home with a pukey kid. We cover the head of the bed, the pillow, and the floor area adjacent to the child’s bed with towels (since, in case of puke, it’s easier to remove and replace a towel or two than to strip the whole bed and change the sheets). We provide a nice big aluminum bowl next to the bed … just in case.

And we don’t even think about putting food into that tummy until the tummy shows no signs of erupting.

But then, what to put in the tummy — what counts as a “gentle” food for a kid recovering from a stomach bug — is a source of some controversy at Casa Free-Ride.

In the household in which I grew up, flat ginger ale and saltines were the canonical first foods after an upchuck. If they stayed down, maybe 24 hours later you’d get to try some baked custard, the eventually “real” food.

Sadly, we hardly ever have ginger ale in the house, and the Free-Ride offspring have declared saltines strange and disgusting. What this means is that I don’t have a well-established safe food with which to test tummy stability.

Indeed, as I was laying down towels, right before I was going to make a batch of baked custard, the younger Free-Ride offspring mentioned that a teacher at the after school program had said that eggs (an ingredient of baked custard) are not a good food for your tummy after vomiting.

This suggests to us that what people consider as the right kind of food to give a kid who’s been throwing up must be pretty strongly shaped by what kind of food they were given as kids trying to get better from crummy tummies. Also, it suggests that there is no clear unified theory of the optimal macronutrient composition for these foods — at least not one upon which a clear majority of grown-ups taking care of these kids agree.

My strategy, drawn from my childhood, has been: fluids with a little flavor (because water tastes funny when you’re sick), then carbohydrates with negligible fiber (the dreaded saltines), then some not-too-wobbly protein, and none of it very far from a flavor range it would be fair to describe as “bland”. Probably a banana somewhere in there, too.

But, see, now the younger Free-Ride offspring and I are wondering if this strategy is bunkum.***

So, because the younger Free-Ride offspring tells me that a PubMed search would not be a relaxing way to spend a sick day, we’re appealing to those more likely to have an actual evidence base here (Pal? Pascale? Other medical/nutrition types?) to tell us whether there is any informed-by-science consensus on what a kid ought to be fed (and in what sequence) once the puking subsides.

______
* No, we don’t have scheduled vomiting. It’s just that these stomach bugs hardly ever happen on a day when we had nothing else to do.

** The companion role to “puke-parent” is “poop-parent”. My better-half assumed that role, but hasn’t gotten any action in it since the sprogs were in diapers.

*** My current favorite alternate theory on why to eat bland foods in the wake of a stomach-bug: You don’t want to eat foods with more interesting flavors and textures, especially foods you really like, and then throw them up (if you’ve tested the tummy too soon) lest you develop a long-lasting aversion to those foods. It took me maybe a decade to get over my aversion to spaghetti and other long pastas served with tomato-based sauces … because of a stomach flu when I was about 11. On the other hand, if you develop an aversion to saltines, it doesn’t really impact your quality of life in quite the same way.

Morning grouse.

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My “To do by 9:00 AM” list today:

  1. Nag students who received add codes to actually use them to add the course.
  2. Nag students who haven’t logged in to the online course to do so, stat! (Or, if they plan to drop the course, to do that ASAP.)
  3. Figure out the lag time between official university enrollment in the course that is online and the “rebuild” enrollment updates are supposed to trigger in the online course shell that lets enrolled students access the online course.
  4. Email 28 students who want add codes to tell them that at this moment I don’t have space for them.

It’s a good thing the actual teaching is fun, because this other stuff is manifestly not fun.

Opportunities for you to help level the playing field.

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At the San Francisco Bay Area She’s Geeky conference this past weekend, I had the opportunity to chat with an awesome woman from the Level Playing Field Institute about some of the initiatives that organization is undertaking to understand bias in various work and educational environments and to do something about it.

One of these is an anonymous survey of IT engineers and managers, and employees in tech start-ups. The description of the survey notes:

This anonymous survey explores the experiences and perceptions of employees within the Information Technology industry. … This survey is part of a research study entitled Understanding Bias and Fairness in IT Environments.

The survey runs through tomorrow (February 3, 2011), but if you complete it, you will receive a $10 Amazon giftcard and be entered to win a 32GB iPad. So if you have some experiences of IT from the inside, why not click over and take the survey?

Even if you’re not in IT, there are other initiatives they’re doing that may be of interest to you. For example, they run SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors) Academy, reaching out to high-achieving, low income high school students of color in the Bay Area:

Our goal is to help SMASH students be admitted to top-tier colleges and universities where they can continue their STEM studies.

SMASH scholars spend five weeks each summer in UC Berkeley or Stanford dorms while they are immersed in rigorous classes. They also receive year-round support to stay on track for academic success.

If you know a student who might benefit from this program, the application deadline is February 21, 2011. Here’s the FAQ, and the link for students to apply.

The SMASH program is also looking for instructors for these summer classes, with openings posted for instructors of algebra, pre-calculus, calculus, biology, chemistry, physics, and technical writing. If this sounds like you (or someone else you know who might be looking for a summer job), check out the job descriptions. Applications for SMASH instructor positions are all due February 15, 2011.