Category: Uncategorized

Schools

I’ve been reading the comments to this blog post by an inner-city teacher for the last few days. The major discussion is about whether or not it is right to separate students who care about their education from those who do not want to be in school. Good points have been made on both sides, but the excerpt below (from comment 126) really makes sense to me.
 

Charter Schools aren’t always the answer. Children who have experienced gun violence, house fires, abusive parents, gangs, hunger – are not going to be able to learn whether they are in a charter school or public school.

We need to declare war on the inner city – not Iraq. We need to make our children safe, warm and nourished if they are to succeed in school.

The first step towards having an educated populace is making that populace feel that they can get an education safely. This is an American freedom: are the kids and adults in the inner city able to achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Or are they limited by the devastation they see around them every day? If you don’t see anyone around you achieving anything, it makes you think nothing can be achieved.

We should declare war on the inner city. We should make the entire country safe for our children. I can’t see any argument against this–when we have problems like this in our own country (people losing faith in the economy, people losing faith in the public schools, people losing faith in themselves, people losing faith in students because of how they act), we should act to fix them. This means eliminating gang violence. This means eliminating any sort of criminal activity.

It also means more investment in education. It means offering courses (with childcare) for people who never finished high school. It means engaging the youth before they decide that hanging out on the street corner is more exciting than Edgar Allen Poe, mitochondria, or astronomy.

Destroying the inner city means making people proud of where they live, not because it makes them tough but because it’s their home. It means enforcing building codes and keeping street lights prepared [In good repair?  2014-02-07]. It means making sure that our police force is synonymous with honesty and integrity, not with power and corruption.

This will take time, and it will take money. I for one am willing to donate that time (by volunteering and teaching) and money (yes, even if it means a tax increase) if we can build a country where everyone is free, everyone can feel safe, and everyone can get an education regardless of their circumstance.

UPDATE: Thomas Friedman is saying the same thing.

 

R and installing mvtnorm

Just a note, since I had to figure it out.

Mac OS X Tiger PPC, R 2.6.1

To load the ICSNP library in R, you need to install the mvtnorm package. The package installer for some reason would not do this, but you can download the binary from this page and install it with Packages & Data -> Package Installer -> Local Binary Package (under “Packages Repository”) and click Install, which will let you grab the package from the place to which you downloaded it.

UNIO listserv/mailing list

Since I just spent a little while tracking this information down I figured it would be useful for people to know.

The UNIO mailing list, devoted to the discussion of unionid mussels, seems to no longer have a home page that describes how to subscribe or unsubscribe. One can, however, go through the Listserv software at the Florida Institute of Technology.

List homepage: https://lists.fit.edu/sympa/info/unio

To subscribe: Send an email to sympa@lists.fit.edu with no subject and this line only in the body of the message:
subscribe UNIO your-email-here

To unsubscribe, I suppose you would do the same, substituting “unsubscribe” for “subscribe.”

Happy hunting!

Grad School, some more

I was going to sit down and write about how I was inspired to write again by this post by YoungFemaleScientist, but then people came into the computer lab, my papers finished printing, and now it seems like I’m wasting time again.

I don’t think I am though. I don’t take enough time to write anymore, either by blogging or in a notebook, and it’s at this point that things fall through the cracks. I’ve been doing more work lately with my thesis, which is great, but I’ve also been doing some super-secret coding for a website that may or may not last in the long run. Through it all, I keep avoiding doing the thing that may most help me out, which is to read some more articles and write a paper that is unrelated to my current thesis but is probably more important to get out there. It either gets buried in doing thesis work (#1 priority), spending time with the girl (of course, also #1 priority) and working on this website (#2 or 3 priority).

I’m being circumspect because I’m becoming too public of a person and I want to stop it. I may just start the blog over with a fresh mindset and be able to freely blog about things without having to think about how what I write can be connected to other things I have written or said. People manage to have wonderfully open and professional blogs and stll admit who they really are, but I’m not sure I can do that with the history of this blog the way it is (through high school, through college, etc.) It’s a weird feeling thinking that if someone wanted to find out about me, they could search back through this blog and then hold me to things I said or ideas I had when I was in high school [Interestingly enough, even before I moved some (but not all) of my previous blogging from Blogspot to Drupal, I had cleaned out what must have been a substantial number of posts from before 2004.  I’ll have to dig around my computer and see if I still have them somewhere. 2014-02-04]. Maybe I should leave it all up as a monument to how much a person can change though.

For today, however, I am going to focus more on what’s important to get done–real research before computers, real teaching before fun, and sending my grandmother her birthday card before I forget. These are the important things.

Cleaning and Eyes

Don’t worry, I didn’t splash cleaning fluid in my eyes this morning.

For anyone who doesn’t know me (read: all of you), I can be sort of anal at times. I know, this is shocking, but true. I’m trying to repress it, but mostly it comes down to people being polite less often then they should be. (This would be a good time to talk about my differentiation between wanting to be nice to people for PC reasons and wanting to be nice to them just because, well, it’s nice. But I’m already combining two topics today, so you have to wait.) I have to be honest here, I’m not a cleanfreak (neatfreak, sometimes, but even that is being whittled away over time as I get busier) but I do like things to be relatively clean and free of the largest clumps of dirt and dust. My roommates in the townhouse senior year may think I’m the filthiest thing ever since I would let two weeks go by before cleaning the bathroom, but what can you expect when you live with four girls? (Note to self: never live with four girls again.) I sweep my place and wash what’s needed and have done with it.

Anyway, since I’m being paid back $100 a month to keep the apartment building hallway relatively clean and vomit-free, today I swept and mopped.

I try to do this on a regular basis, which probably averages out to once every two weeks and should probably be every week, but hey, I’ve got things to do. In any case, I returned from vacation last night to find the hallway full of more dirt than I thought would be able to accumulate (but luckily no vomit). I really don’t understand how three weeks of walking in and out of a building could produce this much dirt, but it did. I can deal with the dirt–a little sweeping, a little mopping, no big deal. Thing is, I also had to sweep up cigarette butts, bottle caps, an empty beer bottle, chunks of cardboard, and random other crap. What’s the deal here? Have people become so idiotic to totally trash the place they live? Granted these aren’t the nicest apartments in town, but they serve well, are warm in the wintertime, and with a little decorating can be made look nearly as nice as everywhere else. So why would you, no matter how drunk, toss your crap in the hallway as you came in or out of your apartment? If you’re bringing a girl (or guy) over and want to make an impression, is the impression that you live in the ghetto really the one you want to make?

The question is, how to fix this problem? We can call it a problem because it creates more work for me when people throw their crap everywhere and don’t think anything about it. I could go and talk to people about it, but a) I don’t feel like it, b) I don’t know when everyone is home and c) judging by some of the people who live here, it might create more of a mess out of spite. So what to do? I was planning on getting a couple doormats when I go out next to catch dirt when it comes in the building, and if possible I wanted them to say something like “Wipe your feet!” on them. Then I got to thinking: this is so obvious, is there a more subversive way to deal with it? Of course there is! It may not work as planned, but it should be interesting to try.

According to this paper in Science, the sense of someone watching you (in animals and humans) induces altruistic behavior. This can be seen in fish and birds, but also in humans. A “donation box” with eye-shapes (dark pupil surrounded by white sclera) on it supposedly gets more donations than one without the eyes because of the sense of being watched. Could this be my solution? Is keeping the place clean enhanced by putting down doormats with eyes on them? Would putting eyes on a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo make you wash yourself more seriously? I wonder how the eyes are associated with the object?

I’m interested in trying this out. I may not be able to find doormats with eyes, but I could surely paint some on to see if my scheme works.

UPDATE: Here is the doormat. I’m pretty sure it is not having the desired effect, but it is better at trapping dirt than the one that was there before.

Open-Access Journals

The current annoyance on the VRTPALEO list is the academic publishing industry, who will publish your work in exchange for owning the copyright (meaning that you, as an author, cannot distribute your own work without permission). A simplified but good analogy is made by Scott Aaronson here:
 

I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I’ll provide no “value-added.” My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.

But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they’ll need my seal of approval. I’ll convince developers that, if a game isn’t distributed by my company, then the game doesn’t “count” — indeed, barely even exists — and all their labor on it has been in vain.

Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I’ll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I’ll tell the experts that it’s their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!

We need to figure out a way to exchange information without making people pay exorbitant fees for it, but in the current situation we could be sued for distributing our own work in PDF format. I’m no opponent of paper copies of Journals, but if all you want is a PDF of a work that is peer-reviewed, there’s no reason you should have to pay for it.

EDIT: This person has something to say about it too, with an analogy to the QWERTY keyboard.

 

I just laughed my ass off

Seriously. It fell off, and my intestines are spilling out on the floor.

John Scalzi has put up a Flickr album of his trip the Creationsit Museum. People down the hall must have thought I was crazy because I was laughing out loud for so long. Be sure to read the comments; even the most mundane photos have a chuckle from the other people who have looked at them.

Interesting Statistics [College Athletics]

At the moment, I’m attending the University of North Dakota, which is currently in the process of moving into NCAA Division I for some unknown reason. I went to undergrad at St. Lawrence University, which is Division III in everything but hockey. Now I know it’s sometimes ludicrous to compare the two, but I found out some interesting things from the Office of Postsecondary Education website.

Undergrad Enrollment (here’s the big difference):
SLU: 2,111
UND: 12,833

Unduplicated Athletic Participants (men and women):
SLU: 636
UND: 447

Already, this begins to look interesting. SLU has more students involved in intercollegiate athletics, TOTAL. If we take that to percents of total undergrads, we get:
SLU: 30%
UND: 3%

Yes, only 3% of UND students are involved in intercollegiate athletics! I don’t know how this stacks up against other schools, but to me that seems really, really low for all the hype that surrounds them.

If we look at the money (and this is the weird part), we get expenses like this:
Total Athletic Expenses:
SLU: $5,616,179
UND: $11,250,249

And we get revenue like this:
Total Athletic Revenue:
SLU: $5,616,179
UND: $11,414,689

I’m not sure why SLU’s net balance comes out to be $0. It might be something to do with losing money on teams (maybe since they have to pay for it somehow, they can’t have a negative balance?). UND’s balance is a shocker: Apparently the school made $164,440 dollars last year on athletics.

I admit that I’m a little biased against UND already for putting so much money into athletics to serve a whopping 3% of the undergraduate student body, but did they really make a profit? Will this continue when they have DI bills to pay? Something tells me that the switch to DI is going to cost more than $164,440 per year.

You might wonder why I don’t give SLU a hard time about not making a profit at all in athletics. I have to ask you this–are athletics for the students, or for the university? There is a lot of money flowing through SLU, and if some of it can be used for athletics to keep the athletes happy, I can live with that. Not so with a school at which only 3% of the undergraduates are part of the athletic program.

UPDATE: I’ve been discussing this in the City Beat blog comments.