Some thoughts on ClimateGate.

It’s quite likely, if you’re reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you’ve already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you’ve been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who’s telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you’re still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of scientific consensus on climate change, or the responsible conduct of science more broadly.
Honestly, I’m still sorting out what I think, but here’s where I am at the moment:

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Search term hilarity.

I have a couple of substantive posts percolating, but I need to scrape some ice first. (Plus, you know, attend to some grading and administrative tasks.)
In the meantime, I wanted to share a sampling of some of the search queries that have brought people to this blog:

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A downside of the fact that faculty members are not fully interchangeable.

In response to my post yesterday considering some of the difficulties in restaffing a course when its professor falls ill, Leigh commented:

Sometimes nothing can be done. Last winter I had to cancel my evolution course, which doubles as a laboratory in the philosophy of science, because of a serious illness. (I had already given the course in the fall; I voluntarily added the winter one because the fall course was doubly oversubscribed.) Fortunately this happened just after the course started, so the students were minimally lurchified. The course is quite idiosyncratic, with no actual lectures after the first class, and there just isn’t anyone who could have taken it over.

My first thought was, “I would love to take that course!” My next thought was that Leigh raises another key issue that makes it challenging to reassign a course to a different faculty member, even if you have lead time: our syllabi, teaching styles, and skill sets are not fully interchangeable. This is a fact that rears its head not just when a department is making course schedule, but when that course schedule needs to be remade on account of faculty work other than teaching.

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Changing professorial horses midstream.

In comments on my earlier post about what happens to a college course in progress when the professor teaching it dies, a lot of folks raised interesting questions about what would be the fair policy to adopt with respect to student grades. I think actually implementing whatever we might agree was a fair grading policy could be complicated by practical considerations, like whether the professor had left behind updated grade records that were accessible to his or her department, whether he or she had already written a final exam (and a guide to grading that final exam), etc.
It’s an interesting set of questions, but that’s not the subject of this post.
Something else that came up in those comments was that a goodly number of commenters had actually been in a course where the professor died, or fell ill, or had to withdraw from teaching the course to deal with a pressing emergency of some sort. In such situations, someone either has to jump in to take over teaching the course — sometimes without much information from the original professor about how to teach it, or with very different views than the original professor about how the material ought to be covered — or the course ends up being concluded prematurely. I think this, as much as the issue of how to calculate grades at the end of the term raises some big questions, many of them connected to what the students enrolled in a course are owed.

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Fun drawing (by a sprog).

(Not the post title I’d have chosen, but the sprog in question is sitting right next to me.)
The younger Free-Ride offspring likes to draw, and seems to have a fondness for marine mammals. Today, we offer two drawings of otters.
Here’s an otter with a sea urchin.

Otter1.jpg

I’m told the otter plans to eat that sea urchin.
This is an entirely different otter (which the younger Free-Ride offspring tells me is the baby of the otter in the first picture), and a dolphin:

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