Category Archives: Personal

Risk assessment with a stuffed-up head.

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I have succumbed to what I hope is my last cold of the calendar year. (If I manage to fit in another after this, I will be tempted to claim it as a testament to my efficiency, rather than the capriciousness of my immune system.) And, seeking relief of my symptoms, I have returned to using my neti pot.

However, since last I used this handy device for nasal irrigation, I saw this news item:

Louisiana’s state health department has issued a warning about the dangers of improperly using nasal-irrigation devices called neti pots, responding to two recent deaths in the state that are thought to have resulted from “brain-eating amoebas” entering people’s brains through their sinuses while they were using the devices.

Both victims are believed to have filled their neti pots with tap water instead of manufacturer-recommended distilled or sterilized water. When they used these pots to force the water up their noses and flush out their sinus cavities — a treatment for colds and hay fever — a deadly amoeba living in the tap water, called Naegleria fowleri, worked its way from their sinuses into their brains. The parasitic organism infected the victims’ brains with a neurological disease called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAME), which rapidly destroys neural tissue and typically kills sufferers in a matter of days.

OK, first thing? Every neti pot user I have spoken to since seeing this story uses tap water. I no longer have the box for my neti pot (on which the instructions for use were printed), but I cannot recall the instructions stressing — or even mentioning — that the neti pot only be used with distilled or sterilized water.

Not that I don’t routinely ignore recommendations or void warrantees. It’s just that I generally do so consciously, rather than accidentally.

Anyway, a headcold sucks. Brain-eating amoebae would probably suck even more.

Commentary I have seen on this story suggests that the real danger is not so much nasal irrigation with tap water as the questionable quality of Louisiana tap water. The quality of the tap water in the San Francisco Bay Area is pretty high. So, probably I could safely continue to use tap water in my neti pot.

But, now that I have the possibility of introducing brain-eating amoebae into my brain on the brain (as it were), the magnitude of the bad outcome (amoebae eating my brain) is big enough that I’d rather reduce the risk of that happening to zero. And, I’d feel like a fool (in the moments of self-awareness that I had before my brain got eaten) if I did fall victim to this bad outcome, as unlikely as it is, by betting wrong.

Which means, I’m now boiling my tap water first before I use it to irrigate my nasal passages. And, as I get used to this new protocol, I’m risking the discomfort of applying saline solution that has not cooled down quite enough.

But so far, I haven’t seen any news items about brain tissue denatured by using a neti pot with too-hot saline solution.

The perils of streaming movies while sleepy.

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I know I should be better about recognizing when it’s time to sleep, regardless of what the clock says. But darn it, there are only so many waking hours in a day, and now that I don’t have hundreds of papers in front of me to grade, I want to do fun things. Like watch movies with my better half.

Streaming video is, of course, a great boon for us (not least because I hate nodding off in the middle of a movie I’ve paid ten bucks to see).

But.

Sometimes, I end up as engrossed as possible (given my sleep debt) in one movie, then I drift off for what seems like just a moment, and I encounter something on the screen that seems like it might be the same movie … until it doesn’t.

And then I’m left having to double-check with my better half that the Benazir Bhutto assassination plot did not, in fact, involve zombies.

Holiday repost: words of advice about caroling mice.

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This was originally posted in December of 2007, when the elder Free-Ride offspring was eight years old. How the years fly.

Today I stumbled upon a story the elder Free-Ride offspring wrote. Possibly intended to strike a Charles Dickens-like tone, I think it ended up a bit closer to Dostoevsky.

Of course, I have to share it:

MiceTitle.jpg

When Mice Go Caroling

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MiceCaroling.jpg

When mice go caroling, you better watch out.
When they’re done, they will ask for cookies.

OK, so at this point I’m expecting a plot arc of the sort found in the classic book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Likely there will be some unforeseen consequence — or some elaborate chain of unforeseen consequences — following upon this innocent act of generosity. Hilarious hijinks will ensue.

Right?

MiceText2.jpg

If you don’t give them cookies, they will kill you and eat you and eat your cookies.

Uhh … I’m guessing, then, that the smart think to do would be to give the caroling mice your cookies?

MiceBackSmall.jpg

If you give them cookies, they tell other animals.
Soon you’ll be dead broke and starve.
The end

Reading between the lines, I’d have to say the very best thing to do if you see or hear caroling mice approaching your door would be to kill the lights and call animal control.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

In which the faculty member glimpses her future.

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One of the facts that seems sometimes to escape the notice of university faculty (especially early-career faculty) is that a sizable proportion of university administrators used to be regular faculty members. Fortuitously, my early encounters with administrators kept underlining this fact for me.

When I started my appointment at my university, the Associate Dean of my college was a member of the Philosophy Department. He wasn’t teaching any courses for the department then (because Associate Dean-ing was a full-time gig), but he was very much connected to the culture of the department. And, the fact that he ran the weekly meetings of the College Curriculum Committee (on which I was the representative for my department) meant I got to see first-hand how, as an administrator, he helped facilitate something like a culture of the college from the different departmental cultures that informed the committee members as they dealt with matters curricular. Getting those different interests to play well with each other, for the most part, would have been a much harder job for someone without experience living in a department and trying to get the daily work of that department done.

As an aside, I suspect that some readers will react with horror to the idea of a first-year faculty member being assigned committee work, especially on a college level committee, rather than being left to get the teaching assignment and research activities under control. My department has a policy of assigning committee work to all regular faculty, partly because there is a large amount of important committee work to be done (i.e., impacting on the well-being of our students and faculty, and on the resources on which we depend) relative to the number of regular faculty members. And, spreading the committee work around as we do is part of how we get a three-course load (while the university’s standard per semester is four). Practically, serving on this college-level committee in my very first semester on the ground helped me understand the culture beyond my own department — and a lot of the nuts and bolts of getting things done at this particular university — much faster. That was a help. It also helped me make friends in other departments, which often comes in handy.

Anyway, as events unfolded during my first few years here, I was in a position to notice faculty members rising through the ranks of administration. When we got a new university president, my college’s dean became the university’s provost. The faculty member who chaired the chemistry department when I was hired became Associate Vice President of Graduate Studies and Research for the university. Other chemistry professors of my acquaintance (what is it with the chemists) became associate deans in undergraduate studies and student support units. (What is it with the chemists and administration, I wonder?)

One of the things I learned is that it is really, really helpful to have people who understand the challenges of teaching and conducting research, especially in times when resources are scarce, involved in making the plans that will shape how teaching and research go forward. The administrators who have been faculty members are committed to actively involving people who have a stake in the decisions in the decision-making. Sometimes this means the decision-making takes more time and effort, but it also seems to result in policies that actually work. That is a good thing.

A danger, though, in working closely with administrators (something I, for one, might have done less of were they not people to whom I could relate because of their origins in the faculty) is that you start seeing how important the administrative work is in supporting the core missions of teaching and research. More than this, you start imagining strategies that could effectively address the persistent problems you’ve started to notice in achieving some particular goal you care about. You develop insight into how to fix things, and also, if you’ve been blessed to watch effective administrators at work, insight into how to get people with distinct interests to work together effectively to pursue common goals.

At first, you freak the hell out when your dean uses phrases like “untapped administrative potential” to describe you. After a while, you stop freaking out and start making peace with the idea that at some point, you will probably step up and try to do what needs to be done. And, you will do it not because it is your ambition to be an administrator, but instead because you care about your department, your college, your university, your colleagues, your students — because you are part of the community and you want to help it be as good as it can be.

That’s how they get you.

I think I have some time, though. I have a book to finish writing. I have kids’ soccer to coach, something that doesn’t lend itself to the long official business hours administrators seem to work. And, I would need to work out how to dress like a responsible adult rather than a graduate student trying to look like a grown-up.

But my sense is that my future may hold more business hours and more grown-up clothes. And, because this university community and what we do matters to me, I’m okay with that.

A Possibly Useful Tip on the Process of Writing a Dissertation

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Fair warning: if you joke around about dissertations with someone who has written more than one, that someone is likely to share a Possibly Useful Tip on the Process of Writing a Dissertation. But, possibly it will be useful.

It started when, after passing his Ph.D. oral exam, Eric Michael Johnson tweeted:

“ I passed! Now there’s just a little matter called the dissertation. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Are those hard?
ericmjohnson
October 18, 2011
“ @ericmjohnson If someone tells you the 2nd dissertation is easier, she’s lying.
docfreeride
October 18, 2011
“ @docfreeride You mean, you can’t just copy and paste from your first one?
ericmjohnson
October 18, 2011
As it turns out, you are often better off not copying and pasting from an earlier draft of the same dissertation.
In the process of writing a dissertation, you spend a lot of time grappling with a theoretical approach, or an experimental design, or a concept — whatever kind of intellectual heavy-lifting your subject requires.  Then, you need to use words (and sometimes also graphs or charts or other visual representations) to communicate what you’ve been grappling with to an audience that probably hasn’t been grappling with it as actively as you have.
What I found (in dissertation #2, the philosophy one) was that my grappling generated a lot of words on the page, and that the generation of those words was crucial to figuring out the stuff I needed to figure out.  However, not all the words on the page advanced the goal of communicating what I had figured out to an audience not already in my head.
My very smart advisor, noticing that I had become too precious with some of the elaborate examples that had helped me crystalize my own view as I revised draft N to draft N+1, gave me a writing tip that made all the difference to the task of communicating that view.  He said, “For the next draft of this chapter, start a brand new file. You are not allowed to copy and paste anything.  Whatever you want to carry over from the last draft verbatim you need to retype.”
I followed that advice and lo and behold, my chapters became quite a bit shorter and quite a bit clearer, simultaneously.  However, I’m pretty sure that the longer, less clear drafts were a necessary step on the way to get to the optimized final form.
Happy disserting, Eric!

A small happy parenting moment.

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A conversation yesterday at the dojo where my better half and the younger Free-Ride offspring do aikido:

Younger offspring: I think [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] needs to man up and start coming to aikido regularly again.

Dr. Free-Ride: I get what you’re saying, but when you say “man up”, what are you suggesting about women?

Younger offspring: Oh, I didn’t think about that.

Dr. Free-Ride: Because the quality you want [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] to summon isn’t something only men have, right?

Younger offspring: No, women have it too. I didn’t mean men were better.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know that. But sometimes our words seem to say things we don’t mean them to mean.

Younger offspring: I could say “toughen up” instead, ’cause that’s what I mean.

Dr. Free-Ride: That would totally work.

I’m especially happy that it took all of five minutes for the younger offspring, aged 10, to get the distinction between what she meant to say and what the words themselves might communicate — and that she was able to have this discussion without feeling attacked or turning it into an exchange focused on the innocence of her intent.

To me, this feels like significant progress towards maturity.

State budget cuts mean … executive salary increases?

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The California State University Board of Trustees met July 12. As expected, they approved yet another student fee increase. Because, how could they not when they’re facing down at least a $650 million budget cut for the 23-campus system?

Not so expected (at least by those of us not on the inside) was their vote to pay Elliot Hirshman, the new president of San Diego State University, an annual salary of $400,000. Because … remember that $650 million budget cut for the 23-campus system?

How is this supposed to work again?

It should be noted that California Governor Jerry Brown sent a letter to the Board of Trustees urging them not to approve this salary increase. The letter (PDF here) is so clear in identifying the problem that I’m going to quote the whole thing:

As this Board well knows, California is still struggling to overcome the effects of the great recession which forced tens of billions of dollars in state budget cuts.

The state university system has been particularly hard hit with painful sacrifices on the part of faculty and students alike. As trustees, you have to make tough calls and strive as best you can to protect our proud system of higher education.

It is in this context, and prompted by the salary decision you are about to make today, that I write to express my concern about the ever-escalating pay packages awarded to your top administrators.

I fear your approach to compensation is setting a pattern for public service that we cannot afford.

I have reviewed the Mercer compensation study and have reflected on its market premises, which provide the justification for your proposed salary boost of more than $100,000. The assumption is that you cannot find a qualified man or woman to lead the university unless paid twice that of the Chief Justice of the United States. I reject this notion.

At a time when the state is closing its courts, laying off public school teachers and shutting senior centers, it is not right to be raising the salaries of leaders who — of necessity — must demand sacrifice from everyone else.

If it were me writing the letter, in the last paragraph I might also mention the already deep cuts to the CSU (many of which I’m sure have been obvious to the students at SDSU, as they have been to students here at SJSU). This is a situation where maybe President Hirshman and the trustees are banking on the students not following state news, because if they do keep up on current events, it might get awkward.

Of course, it’s being reported that some of the 12 trustees who voted to approve Hirshman’s compensation package (3 voted against it) say it’s necessary to pay him so much because of “the complexity of running a major university and the salaries that other university presidents around the country are paid”. This strikes me as a variant of the old saw that “we need to pay administrators so much because of how much they could be making in the private sector”.

Maybe it’s the larger class sizes, the absence of funds for graders or for work-related travel, or possibly the fact that the existence of my public-employee pension (which, given the way this job is going, I might not live long enough to use) has been used to demonize me and other CSU faculty like me in the minds of the voters, but I need to call shenanigans on this.

Could university administrators be making buckets of money in the private sector? It’s not clear to me that the private sector is doing a lot of hiring these days. But if they are, I’m inclined to tell those administrators, Vaya con Dios. Do what you must to feed your family, to fortify your compound, to get your yacht ready for the sailing season, to find fulfillment, but right now we can’t afford you. In a perfect world, maybe we could pay you what you feel you’re worth, but this, my dear, is nothing like a perfect world.

I’m sure your cash-strapped students can fill you in on some of the local details of its imperfection.

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that this newly increased salary doesn’t put President Hirshman close to the top slot of best-compensated California public employee. That honor goes to UC Berkeley football coach Jeff Tedford, at $2.3 million a year, with UCLA basketball coach Ben Howland ($2.1 million) a close second.

For comparison, Jerry Brown earns $173,987 a year to be Governor of the state.

The economy might be getting better for someone …

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… but I daresay that “someone” is not the typical student at a public school or university in the state of California.

The recent news about the impact of the California State budget on the California State University system:

The 2011-12 budget will reduce state funding to the California State University by at least $650 million and proposes an additional mid-year cut of $100 million if state revenue forecasts are not met. A $650 million cut reduces General Fund support for the university to $2.1 billion and will represent a 23 percent year over year cut to the system. An additional cut of $100 million would reduce CSU funding to $2.0 billion and represent a 27 percent year-to-year reduction in state support.

“What was once unprecedented has unfortunately become normal, as for the second time in three years the CSU will be cut by well over $500 million,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed. “The magnitude of this cut, compounded with the uncertainty of the final amount of the reduction, will have negative impacts on the CSU long after this upcoming fiscal year has come and gone.”

The $2.1 billion in state funding allocated to the CSU in the 2011-12 budget will be the lowest level of state support the system has received since the 1998-99 fiscal year ($2.16 billion), and the university currently serves an additional 90,000 students. If the system is cut by an additional $100 million, state support would be at its lowest level since 1997-98.

Two immediate responses to these cuts will be to decrease enrollments (by about 10,000 students across the 23 campuses of the CSU system) and increase “fees” (what we call tuition, since originally the California Master Plan for Higher Education didn’t include charging tuition, on the theory that educated Californians were some sort of public good worth supporting), yet again, by another $300 per semester or so.

“Why cut enrollments?” I hear some of you ask. Well, because the state still puts up a portion of the money required to actually educate each enrolled student (although that portion is now less than half of what the students must put up themselves). So 10,000 less students means 10,000 less “state’s share” expenditures. And, short term, that’s a saving for the tax payers. Long term, however, it may cost us.

Those students circling the tarmac, hoping to be admitted to the CSU (or University of California) system as students, are only going to cool their heels in community college for so long. (Plus, the community colleges are impacted by the decrease in transfer slots due to slashed enrollments, and have had their budgets cut because of the state’s fiscal apocalypse.) At a certain point, many of them will give up on earning college degrees, or will give up on earning them in California. And if the place where they earn those college degrees is less enthusiastic about slashing education budgets to the bone, these erstwhile Californians may well judge it prudent to put down roots, since it will make it easier to secure a good education for their offspring or partners, or a good continuing education for themselves.

I do not imagine a brain drain would do much to help California’s economy to recover.

In possibly related “what is the deal with our public schools?!” news, the elder Free-Ride offspring will be starting junior high (which, in our district, includes seventh and eighth grades) in the fall. The junior high school day consists of just enough periods for English, math, science, social studies, lunch, and one elective.* The elective choices include things like wood shop, or home economics, or band, or a foreign language. But unless your child has mastered bilocation, there is no option to take French and band, or mechanical drawing and Mandarin. Plus, school is out at like 2:15 PM — well before the standard 9-to-5 workday is over. Of course, this doesn’t take into account how many parents work more than eight hours a day (and may be hesitant to complain about it because at least they still have jobs) or how much time they have to spend commuting to and from those jobs. The bottom line seems to be that the public is unwilling to fund more than five academic periods per day of junior high. The public doesn’t even appreciate the utility of keeping the young people off the streets until 3 PM.

Verily, I suspect that only thing holding us back from abolishing child labor laws is that the additional infusion of labor would make our unemployment numbers worse, which rather undermine the narrative that the economy is turning a corner to happy days.

This lack of progress addressing the budgetary impacts on education — indeed, this apparent willingness to believe that education shouldn’t actually cost money to provide — makes me a big old crankypants.
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* There is probably also some provision for physical education, because there is still something like a state requirement that there be physical education.

Ask Dr. Free-Ride: how much help is too much help?

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In the comments on the post about the younger Free-Ride offspring’s science fair project, Isabel asks:

I don’t remember if I’ve seen your response to this question before, but, if you don’t mind my asking, how much do you help your kids with their homework/science projects?

Actually, I’m pretty sure I haven’t explicitly answered this question on the blog before, partly because the answer is something that constantly feels like it’s being renegotiated. We’re constantly trying to find the right level of assistance/engagement/oversight that ensures that the kids are:

  1. really mastering the material they’re supposed to be learning,
  2. maybe seeing some of the stuff they’re learning has cool extensions or consequences (because this is where a lot of the fun in learning seems to be),
  3. showing their teachers what they know (so that there’s some chance of their grades reflecting that knowledge),
  4. doing their damned homework (please don’t get me started on this),
  5. finishing their damned homework before bedtime.

As you might imagine, these goals are sometimes in tension with each other. Also, it turns out that I and my better half often have a fair bit of work that we’re trying to accomplish at home (“homework”, if you will), and no one is stepping up to help us with that — the point being that we have to strive for some level of efficiency in supervising/helping the sprogs, else get our hands on a time machine.

I should share two nuggets of experience that I think inform my strategies on helping my kids with homework and projects. One is an interaction I had with a colleague maybe six years ago, when the elder Free-Ride offspring was in kindergarten. This colleague had a child in fifth grade and was bemoaning the fact that the school seemed to be assigning projects that it would be practically impossible for a fifth grader to do on his or her own. “So the parents end up doing much of the projects, because what choice do they have? If you resist it, it’s your kid who gets the bad grade.”

This state of affairs, dear readers, rather pissed me off. It helped me decide that, if my own clever kid’s best effort was not enough to satisfy the requirements of a given project or assignment, I should be conferring with my kid’s teacher about whether that project or assignment was actually appropriate.

The other experience that has informed my view here is what it was like to get help on schoolwork from my dad. His approach was, in a word, Socratic. I could approach him with what seemed like s straightforward question (e.g., how do I get started balancing this redox reaction) and he could be counted on to launch into no fewer than twenty minutes of questioning designed to help establish what I already understood and to help me figure out how to extend that knowledge to the problem at hand.

When I was a teenager, this bugged the heck out of me — sometimes enough to motivate me to engage in my own (more focused) Socratic inquiry. But darned if I didn’t develop some effective problem-solving strategies as a result of his questioning.

So, we pretty much went Socratic on the sprogs as soon as they gave any evidence of paying attention to what we were saying. (The Friday Sprog Blogging archives will attest to this.) And, this naturally carried over to homework once they started bringing it home. We routinely asked questions like:

  • What are you supposed to do here?
  • What can you tell me about how to do that?
  • How can you check whether doing it that way works, or whether your answer is a reasonable one?
  • Can you think of any other strategy for figuring this out?

Obviously this is not the most efficient way to get the homework done, at least in the short term. But it does seem to have helped the sprogs to get better at answering their own questions and developing their own problem-solving strategies, if only to get their Socratic parents to shut up.

For longer term projects, like science fair projects, we get a little more involved, not so much in directing the projects as in helping the kids assess whether the projects are plausibly doable in the time available and with the materials we have on hand or are willing to purchase. We help somewhat in developing the initial idea (I want to grow mold) to something like a testable hypothesis (although again, this help is Socratic in flavor). As well, as they’re coming up with their experimental design, we’ll ask more questions to help them think about whether their observations will really help answer the questions they’re trying to answer, what confounders might complicate things, and so on.

The execution of the experiment is then up to the sprog.

I will cop to beating the time-management drum loudly and regularly for this round of science fair projects. Both concerned biological systems and data that was either necessarily to be collected over time (mold growth) or of a sort that you couldn’t count on being able to collect all of the night before (because the rabbit gets bored hunting for treats after a while). Also, since the elder Free-Ride offspring’s project involved research with a USDA regulated vertebrate animal, I was a hardass about getting the kid to commit to an experimental protocol in time for a veterinarian to give feedback on it before signing the required forms (and before any data collection commenced).

I did not micromanage how the sprogs kept their project notebooks. This meant that the younger Free-Ride offspring had to reap what was sown (with data recorded on dated but not chronologically ordered pages) when it came time to collect and analyze the data. I have a feeling that’s a lesson that’s going to stick.

As far as data analysis and visual representation of the data, this is something I discussed with the sprogs (again, Socratically) as they were deciding on the approach that they thought made the most sense. Once they settled on an approach, it was up to them to execute it.

They wrote up (and typed out) their own narratives for their project boards. They also decided how to organize text blocks, photographs, tables, and graphs on the project board. I, however, wielded the can of spray adhesive, on the theory that the sprogs would get into more trouble with sticky hands than I would.

Our approach to helping here is not always successful from the point of view of getting the sprogs to do their best work (or to actually turn it in). But, I think it has been a reasonable strategy in terms of ensuring that the sprogs know how to do that work, even the more challenging long-term projects. Also, they bring home grades that reflect their work, not their parents’.

Professional advice (from a 10-year-old).

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Near the end of June, I’m going to a conference at the University of Exeter (in England). The information posted about the area notes that “June is generally a warm and pleasant month to visit Exeter. With temperatures ranging from 19° Celsius and lows at around 11°C with temperatures getting higher near the end of the month.”

Converting that to Fahrenheit (the temperature scale to which my intuitions are calibrated in matters of “dressing for the weather”), we’re looking at lows around 53 oF ranging to highs (?) around 66 oF. Maybe that’s warm June weather for England, but in this part of California, that’s chilly.

Indeed, since it was about 66 oF when it was time to retrieve the younger Free-Ride offspring from the afterschool program, I walked over without a jacket or a sweater. I shivered the whole way there and the whole way back.

On that walk back the younger Free-Ride offspring (speaking from the comfort of a fuzzy winter coat) said, “You should get ready for England by spending a lot of time in a room that’s kept at 66 oF. Eating ice cream and drinking ice water.”

“Or I could just dress for the weather,” I countered. “It’s just that packing to dress for the weather might require a bigger piece of luggage than what I originally planned. Probably fewer summer dresses and more trousers and sweaters.”

“But if this is a business trip,” the younger Free-Ride offspring said sternly, “you should be bringing suits. And tights, to keep your legs warm.”

“But this is a meeting of philosophers of science,” I said. “Dressing professionally does not require a suit.”

“For philosophers of science,” said the younger Free-Ride offspring, “I think you should wear a suit, and tights (to keep your legs warm), and a white lab coat over it.”

Dear readers, the sad thing is that I am halfway considering taking this advice. After all, the younger Free-Ride offspring’s fashion sense is better developed than my own, and a lab coat would provide an additional layer of warmth.