Pi Day pie #1: End-of-winter fruit pie.

It’s not Pi Day yet, but there’s no reason to believe my first pie will be the one that hits the target. So, here’s my opener in anticipation of March 14th, a dried cherry/dried apricot/apple pie in a nut crust. I’m calling it an end-of-winter fruit pie because it’s made with what I have on hand as I wait for spring, summer, and fresh stone-fruits to arrive.

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The recipe follows.

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Animal rights activist takes drugs tested on animals.

I’m not a regular reader of the Huffington Post, but I received a pointer to an article there that strikes me as worthy of comment.
The article, Why I Take Animal-Tested Drugs, was written by Simon Chaitowitz, the former Communications director for the animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
From the title, you might expect a defense of animal-tested drugs, or at least a coherent explanation for why the author is taking them. However, what the article actually offers is condemnation of the use of animals in biomedical research, and even a claim that animal-tested drugs and medical interventions contributed to the author’s cancer.

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Happy Square Root Day!

It has come to my attention that today’s date (03-03-09) makes this a Square Root Day.

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The Free-Ride household will be marking the occasion pretty much the way you’d expect — with an evening meal that includes square roots.

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Things could get worse before they get better (starving student edition).

Times are tough all around these days. However, at schools like mine, a large public university with a population that includes a significant number of students who are older than traditional college age, are the first in their families to go to college, and/or were in economically precarious situations before the current economic crisis, the situation feels especially dire.

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Assessment in higher education and unfunded mandates.

Today at Inside Higher Education, there is a must-read essay about the impact that demands for ever-greater assessment has on faculty workload. Written by a member of the faculty at a large state university, the essay notes that faculty members, like other earthlings, have only 24 hours per day, many of which are taken up with crucial activities like research, teaching, and responding to student work. If new assessment tasks are to be added to faculty duties (as they routinely are, at least at universities like my own), it suggests that the administrators or committees adding them think faculty have infinite stores of time and energy.
They don’t!
Thus, the essay argues, those looking for additional assessment need to make reality-based plans:

From now on, all plans for assessment should come with plans for who is going to do the labor, where the labor time is going to come from, and, if need be, who will pay for it. This side of any assessment plan should be as detailed as the requirements for assessing itself, including an estimate of the added number of hours required for the assessment, as the IRS estimates the time to do our taxes.

I’m guessing, if new assessment mandates took account of the real costs, there might be more demand on the front end to assess whether the assessment was worth the projected costs.
It’s a good essay. Click over and read the whole thing.

Purple-striped jellies.

During our second day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium last weekend, I finally got my much needed jelly time. I also had occasion to notice that their jelly exhibits have shrunk significantly since their height a few years ago, and that some of my favorite varieties are no longer on display. Booo! MOAR JELLEES PLEEZ!
Ahem. Where was I?
Anyway, there are still some pleasing jellies on display. One of these is the purple-striped jelly (Chrysaora colorata).

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What not to do to a public university in the face of a budget shortfall.

You knew the California budget shortfall was going to have an impact on higher education in the state. But maybe you didn’t know that the pain will not be distributed evenly. Last weekend, John Engell, a colleague of mine from San Jose State University (and currently chair of the Department of English & Comparative Literature), examined the pain that may be visited on our university in an opinion piece he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News:

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