...and a Happy New Year.

On this night, when all our friends and neighbors are celebrating the passing of the old year and commencement of the new, we, the Angry Family, are settling down for bed. Angry Toddler decided to skip her nap today. Hence the celebration will have to go on without us. This reminds me of the time we spent New Year's Eve in a cramped and chilly Paris hotel room. Instead of frolicking along the Champs Elysées, I chose to retire early with a mild case of indigestion. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Crazy Mother continued her Holiday tour across this swath of square states, stopping off at Angry Sister's home for a few days before returning home. I am simultaneously heartened and discouraged that her visit with Angry Sister was even more unpleasant than her visit with us. She and Angry Sister were reduced to screaming at each other. She again slept all day and lurked all night, and consumed an entire box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the middle of the night. She returned home yesterday after 9 days of travel having spent a grand total of 19 hours on Greyhound buses, not having bathed nor (don't ask me how I know this) having changed her underwear more than once.

Today I called Angry Brother and we discussed her possible dementia, and courses of action. The only really feasible one seems to be a long-term disability policy taken out on her behalf.

Ho, ho, ho.

I did a bad thing. I invited Crazy Mother into my home for the holidays. She has, within 30 minutes of her arrival, sucked out all of my holiday spirit, like some sort of leech-like holiday spirit-sucking parasite.

Crazy Mother goes to bed around 7 pm, and arises at 3 am. She skulks around the house in the dark, leaping out to surprise unwary bathroom visitors to ask wildly inappropriate questions for 3 am, like, "Where is the antibiotic cream?"

Crazy Mother is a snoop. She will look through any cabinet and drawer shamelessly, and if she finds anything interesting, she will ask you about it unabashedly. "What is this medication used for?" "I see your retirement funds are mostly in low-cap funds. Is that a good idea?"

Crazy Mother refuses to take a shower. Now in the third day of her visit, she is starting to look like a homeless woman. She takes quiet little sponge baths in the bathroom sink (at 3 am), but for reasons that escape me, will not avail herself of shower nor bathtub.

Crazy Mother lurks. Rather than joining us around the table or in the den in front of the television, she stands outside the room in the darkened hallway, arms akimbo, watching our little tableaus with inscrutable expressions on her face.

Crazy Mother suffers from diseases for which we must rush out into the night and purchase over-the-counter remedies. This visit, it is some creeping and contagious rash that, by her report, has now spread across the upper half of her body.

Crazy Mother never says "Thank you," not for anything. After Angry Baker plunked down $50 for a casual meal last night, and I paid for another meal the night before, she said nothing. Absolutely nothing. She must be taken care of, and she expects that we will pay and that no thanks or gratitude is necessary. Angry Baker is livid.

Crazy Mother talks in baby talk. And not just to Angry Toddler (who keeps asking me when Gramma is leaving). She has always done this. I am at a loss to explain it.

Crazy Mother takes things. Sections of the newspaper. Books. Last night my placemat at the restaurant. She pulls them out of the hands of her victim wordlessly, no "Please" or "Thank you." I am at a loss to explain this too.

Crazy Mother eats like a bird when seated at the table, pretending a delicate constitution and even more delicate appetite. But she shows no such hesitation if the food contains sugar. Candy, cookies, cake, pie, rolls, chocolate, nothing is safe from her at 3 am. Crazy Mother talks a lot about an imaginary metabolic disorder, trying to get sympathy for the fact that she is fat even though she eats so very very little. At least we won't be burdened with these leftovers next week.

But by far the worst: Crazy Mother derives her worldview from FOX news. This morning I endured some lame exposition on why the public school system was failing and why charter schools were such an excellent idea: Bad teachers. And school shootings.

I can't stand it. I'm going to grab my Christmas tree and spend the rest of the holiday at the hotel down the street.

Woo hoo!

Finally, some sign of intelligent life.

Vandalism in my evaluations.

I just received the statistics on my course evaluations. My return rate, using the web-based system, was 47% (over 50 students). I guess that's not so bad, considering how bad it could have been. My overall rating (the only number that really counts) was a 4.6 on a 5 point scale, about at the 75th percentile for similar courses around the university.

LSU has a set of boilerplate questions that I have never modified, including "well organized," "well prepared," "interested in helping students," etc. For the most part my ratings were positive, as they always are. What has me scratching my head are the two students who ranked me as low as they possibly could on every single item, even the "interested in teaching" one.

Who are you guys? Were you even in my class? How could you have gone to even one lecture and come away with the idea that I wasn't interested in helping you or teaching you? If you knew which car was mine, would you key it? What keeps you from spray-painting my office door? Why don't you just head over to ratemyprofessor.com? I hear they don't have enough of your kind of people over there.

Evaluations are in!

For the first time, I used LSU's electronic course evaluation system, so for the first time I actually got to see the student comments.

My favorite comment: "[AP] is one of the best professors I have ever had in my entire life and I have learned so much from her and will continue to apply the information I learned from her for the rest of my life."

My least favorite comment: "when test come up give us an outline of things to study so that we won't have to study for thing that are not on the test" [sic].

Oh well. You win some, you lose some.

I should just disappear, like everyone else.

For one extra credit point:

What is your instructor's name?
Some (incorrect) responses:

Laura

Dr. Lashley

Dr. M

Vanessa

Kazuku

Paula

McC...

Karen

Theresa

Sanchez

Ellen

Teacher

Final grades are in.

(6 p.m., two days after the final)
Dear Angry Professor,

Three days before the final something really really bad happened. I thought I could handle it and I took all my finals anyway but I just feel terrible about my performance and I need to know if there's anything else I can do to raise my grade. I'll write a paper or retake the exam, anything. I needed to get an A in this course so that I can get into graduate school. I really wasn't performing at my best and I was trying not to cry in front of the TA but I can't stop crying now. Please, please help me. I'll do anything.

Sincerely,
Upset Student

(6:30 p.m., two days after the final)
Dear Angry Professor,

I see that my grade on the exam was only a C. If I get my mother to write you a letter verifying this terrible thing that happened to me, could you please please let me retake the exam? Or I'll write a paper, or anything. Let me know. I guess I'm counting on a miracle.

Sincerely,
Upset Student

(9 a.m., three days after the final)
Dear Upset Student,

I'm am very sorry that you are going through a difficult time right now. Unfortunately, I don't know how to help you.

I have your grades in front of me, and I see that you had a D in the class before the final. You actually did very well on the final and you managed to raise your grade from a D to a C. To get even a B-, you would have needed a perfect score on the test. Did you really think it was possible to raise your grade to an A? Indeed, you would have needed a miracle for this to happen.^*

Sincerely,
Angry Professor

No response.

^*Edited to add: My actual response was much longer than this. When the soft and sympathetic words were stripped out, this is what it said.

Sign me up?

One of my students pointed me to www.bmezine.com, a fabulously disturbing e-zine. No, the "bm" doesn't stand for that, it stands for "body modification." And no, we ain't just talking pierced ears here, folks.

I have no problems with piercings. I have one or two myself. Angry Baker has some nice tattoos. (Angry Toddler, if you even think about piercing or tattooing yourself I swear to Sweet Hairy Jesus I will find out about it and lock you in the attic until you turn 40. With no television.)

It's not news that people do stupid things to their bodies. They color them and stick holes in them and "sculpt" them and cut them up. But this was a new one for me. I'd love to hear Orac's opinion on this idiocy.

A little quote, to pique your interest:

This weekend I had a hole drilled through my skull. I read that this increased one's consciousness permanently. I read about the supposed de-conditioning properties. I read about more parts of the brain working simultaneously as there would be more blood up there to help this happen. The arguments for it all seemed to be quite lengthy, quite detailed, thought out and researched, and very intelligent. The arguments against it were based solely on the opinion that it is 'crazy' and talk like, "What's more conscious than conscious?". I heard from an acquaintance on telephone that she was glad she had done it, felt more mental energy, and had days of brilliance. I came to believe that the key to a permanent consciousness increase was a hole in the skull, to restore the full brain pulsation of infancy. After several months of research, discussion, speculation, watching surgical videos and trepanation documentaries, and even an actual viewing of a trepanation, I decided I certainly did want to be trepanned, and sought a way to do it.

And, from the same site, dig this sterile field.

I must buy a lottery ticket.

Occasionally I seek sustenance from the vending machine down the hall. In search of pretzels, I headed there today.

As I fed my money into the slot, I noticed that one tasty snack had gotten snagged on the curlicue that feeds the vended item forward. Behind it was a package of Reese's peanut butter cups (one of AP's favorites). What the hell, I thought, and punched the number for the Reese's. Bingo! One package of Reese's plus a free extra snack.

Then I put my money in for the pretzels, and the little curlicue fed them forward. They fell down on top of the Reese's and the free snack... and a bag of chips that someone forgot to remove from the machine! I returned to my office with a full four day's supply of treats.

I feel a little bad that I have benefited from someone else's misfortune, but not bad enough to stop eating.

Bad, bad professor.

I had an extra day on my syllabus. Rather than prep an extra lecture on something important, I put that day before Thanksgiving break and cancelled class.

And I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about it either. Have a happy holiday, everyone. If you see a panic-stricken woman chasing after a toddler with wet pants in Boston Logan, that will be me.

Honors students need not apply.

A large sorority has blanketed the bulletin boards in my building with a flyer that reads:

If your going Greek why not be a Goddess?!!!
Rush [Alpha Beta Delta]!

Luckily, I carry a Sharpie in my bag.

I love teaching this class.

In my "ESP and Aliens" class, we recently discussed hypnotherapy. We discussed the qualifications that one needed to have in order to practice hypnotherapy. I made a sarcastic remark to the effect that it seemed that all one needed to claim was ownership of a couch. I have one in my office, I said. Come to office hours and I'll see what I can do.

I got an email this morning, and it went something like this:

Dear Angry Professor,

I really want to be hypnotized. I have always been really interested in this phenomenon. Could you please hypnotize me? What I really want is for you to implant a "false memory" in me. I want to see how real it feels. I will sign any waiver that you require without having to worry about any liability. I am serious! Please write back and let me know.

Sincerely,
Interested Student

With great regret, I had to turn the student down, in the course of my rejection explaining about Institutional Review Boards and Ethical Treatment of Human Subjects and other bureaucratic nightmares associated with working with humans. What a party-pooper I am.

Here's what evil looks like.

Sometimes something is just so over-the-top offensive that it makes me wonder if that whole First Amendment thing was really such a good idea after all. But then I wonder: if it weren't for people like this, who would the rest of us laugh and point at?

I just learned that the "Reverend" Fred Phelps and his family at the Westboro Baptist Church have over the past year been picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, branching out from their usual picketing of the funerals of gay men and women, suspected (or mistaken) gay men and women, Catholic church officials, and gay supporters.

The logic? America has turned its back on God (and the Westboro Baptist Church in particular), and therefore God has become "America's Terrorist." Therefore the church members rejoice when Americans are killed, maimed, injured, etc.. But there's more, something strange that I can't quite put my finger on. From the WBC FAQ, "...These turkeys are not heroes. They are lazy, incompetent idiots looking for jobs because they're not qualified for honest work."

The mind boggles.

I give up.

Almost 10% of my class believes, "Ockham's Razor is used in the preparation of homeopathic remedies."

And so it begins.

Angry Toddler has only recently vocalized the fact that there are two kinds of days: "stay-home" days and "not stay-home" days. She woke up this morning and tried to persuade me that today was a stay-home day and that we could go to the zoo.

When she realized it was Monday and not a stay-home day, she cried. I did too. Welcome to the rest of your life, honey.

My heart is breaking.

Be it hereby resolved that I will never again proctor one of my own exams. Why is it that students think I can answer the question, "Is this the right answer?"

Here are the words I was asked to define during today's exam:

ambiguous

depth

darkness

dissemination

anecdotal

effective

marginalization

commercial

continuity

light

God how I hate multiple-choice exams.

Go figure.

I asked my students to send me exam questions, and told them that if I liked them I would put them on the test.

Not a single person sent me anything. I guess writing a test really is harder than taking one.

Gah.

Q: I will be missing class today and I was wondering what we will be covering and what information I will need to know for our midterm.

A: Please read your syllabus and the course outline on WebCT.

Angry Toddler's costume is a poodle.

This weekend the Angry Family went to the zoo. It was cold and drizzly -- a perfect zoo day, because the weather kept almost everyone else away. To combat the weather, the zoo was holding its annual Hallowe'en party. Unfortunately, this drew some people out that we would have preferred stayed away.

The Angry Family, as misanthropic as we are, has often been chased through such public venues by groups of people we find abhorrent, and this was the case even on this dreary day. One threesome consisted of a mother and her son, and a second woman who had apparently taken on the role of educator. Because this woman insisted on wearing a huge handsfree earloop with microphone, we thought (briefly) she was a docent.

This illusion was shattered at the gorilla habitat, in which she spoke loudly and incorrectly about the taxonomy of the family Hominidea. Apparently, humans are descended from Homo Sapiens, now extinct, and we are Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Bzzt! Thank you for playing!

Ms. Never-Actually-Went-To-Anthropology-Lecture-But-Showed-For-The-Exams was irritating enough on her own that we would have left the park to escape her. But it was the rest of her group that held our attention, particularly the young man. In the spirit of the season, he was costumed, not as the Incredible Hulk or Frankenstein's Monster, but as a pimp. His costume was not unlike this one: a fake zebra coat with matching walking stick, purple velvet hat with a feather, and lots of plastic bling. His mother was also wearing a big hat with a feather, but it wasn't quite as obvious what effect she intended to achieve.

So I have some questions:

How does someone explain to an 8-year-old boy what a pimp is, and then encourage him to wear a pimp costume for Hallowe'en?

How is dressing an 8-year-old White kid up as a Black stereotype anything but incredibly offensive? How is this different from slapping on some blackface and tucking a watermelon under one arm?

Am I being too sensitive? I googled "pimp costume," and got 25,600 hits. Most of the links I examined had their pimp costumes modeled by White men and kids.

So much for Wednesday.

Wednesday is my no appointments/no teaching/all research day. But, Angry Toddler has croup, and I had to drop everything and go get her. Right as I was seeing light at the end of a nasty long tunnel of a problem, too.

Poor little monkey.

Would this have happened, were I a man?

I gave a quiz last week, and despite all my warnings, one student arrived just as the quizzes were being collected. Nonetheless, she wrote out the answer to the quiz question (which was up on the screen), and then thrust it into the TA's hand as class was dismissed.

When I explained that I could not accept this quiz, that it was a security breach because the quiz was closed book/notes, and she had been in possession of her quiz, with her open notes, for a full hour and a half, she was insulted. It wasn't fair, she said, she was only late, it wasn't like she'd missed the "whole quiz." (Right, just the first 19.9 minutes of a 20 minute quiz.) And to tell her that there had been a security breach with her quiz was a "slap in the face." No, I don't think so. What university does she attend, that students get to call the conditions on their quizzes and exams?

You can take a different quiz, I said, if you have a valid excuse for being late, but I will need documentation to put on file to protect myself against charges that I gave her an unfair advantage. "I was standing in line at the post office," she said.

She genuinely believed that I was being completely unreasonable! This discussion, somewhat loud and heated, took place at the front of the lecture hall in the moments before class began. After class, I told her that I could see no way I could allow her to make up the quiz, but that she had ample extra credit opportunities to earn back those lost points.

You can guess her response to this: "But then I don't get any extra credit!"

This is what I get for trying to be responsive to my students' concerns. Spoiled little brat.

My child is the cutest, brightest, sweetest child in the world.

Last night in the ice-cream parlor, she screamed through the plate-glass window at her father, seated outside, startling all customers, "I YUV YOU DADDY!"

Also screamed at top volume on a recent hay ride: "MOMMY, DOES DADDY HAVE A PENIS?"

Last night she also recited the entire alphabet for the first time. "A B C D E F G HJIKJKI L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Next time won't you say with me."

Heard when she wants to see something: "Can I hold it in mine teeny, teeny hand?"

Heard in the back seat of the car yesterday: "Harryhausen's? HARRYHAUSEN'S?"

I gave a quiz yesterday.

Of 117 students, these guys missed it:

Two took it yesterday so they could observe Yom Kippur. (Pats on the back for these two.)

One had a migraine and couldn't get out of bed.

One was bed-ridden for other reasons.

One's car broke down.

One works on the other side of campus and couldn't make it into the lecture hall until after the quiz was over.

One was just really, really late, but turned in a quiz anyway at the end of class, long after all the quizzes were collected. My email to her was answered with the following message, copied verbatim:

yes i was the one in late today and rtight when u were starting the notes i stopped writign so is not to miss any notes but i htought it unpoliete to walk out in front of u teaching to turn in my quiz how could we handle this. if i need ot write u on a dif. subject i am fine iwth that it is my fault for being late today

This must have been sent to me via cell phone, right? People don't really type/write this way, right?

LSU has a policy that all dispensations must be accompanied by acceptable documentation. Before I schedule a makeup quiz, I must have these documents. Right now, I have none.

I love these guys.

I think these are the coolest creatures. Ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by them. This isn't the greatest picture, but it was the best I could do in the dark. And their cousins are pretty darn tasty.

You've got to be kidding.

Dude, you are so hot.

However, I am older than your mother.

This body that you admire is held together only by the miracle that is Spandex. Let us bow our heads for a moment to give thanks to DuPont. It has seen four pregnancies and a caesarian section. I have stretch marks on parts of my anatomy that I bet you didn't even know could stretch. I sport a complete map of the Boston subway, worked in purple veins, on the backs of my thighs. I have not dyed my hair in interesting streaks of unnatural color: that is all-natural salt-and-pepper that you see. Those marks on my face are wrinkles, and that thing under my chin is called a wattle, which is only going to hang lower in years to come. That man over there, sitting on the deck of the hot tub, is my husband. He looks on my body with eyes blinded by love, seeing only the young, thin graduate student he met so many years ago.

The child with him is mine. Although she speaks in complete sentences and is almost potty trained, she is not yet weaned. She and I have given new meaning to the term "extended breastfeeding." I would probably be arrested in most states, including our own, if I were to give in to her demands to nurse right here and now. These breasts you keep staring at have been reduced to flat envelopes of skin, with nipples that point straight at my feet. Again, let us give thanks and praise to DuPont.

If your sole purpose in coming to the gym is to sport your wicked awesome tan and jiggle your perfect pectoral muscles at receptive booty, then for God's sake, wear your contact lenses in the hot tub. If you really do find professors who resemble your mother hot, then (all creepiness aside) you must get better lines. After two husbands, a string of lovers, and all the emotional detritus that builds up over nearly half a century of life, "Aren't you in my EE class?" and "What's your major?" come over as subtly as a fart in an elevator.

It is, however, my birthday today: one more mile-marker on the road to oblivion. I would rather believe that Angry Baker sent you into the hot tub to make me feel young again than that you could be so stupid.

Dear Angry Student,

I am so happy to hear from you! And so early in the quarter, too! Why, I have only given two lectures, and I have already deeply offended you. I couldn't be more pleased. Usually I only offend people at the end of the quarter, when I determine final grades.

Thank you for sharing your belief system with me, but I'm afraid I don't see its relevance to the scientific method, which was the topic of yesterday's lecture. Does the prospect of thinking frighten you? Do you anticipate having to objectively evaluate evidence that you would prefer to ignore? Does your particularly kooky world view forbid you from the free exchange of ideas or respecting dissenting viewpoints?

You ask that I take your feelings into account in future lectures. How do you propose that I do this? Must I, perhaps, reverse the objectives of the course? Should I teach all my students that it is appropriate to accept demonstrated fraud as fact, or that confused, credulous thinking is acceptable in scientific enterprise, because to do otherwise might hurt your feelings?

Finally, thank you so much for suggesting that I have no feelings. Surely someone as skeptical as myself has never really loved anyone, or experienced the death of someone I loved. Because if I had, as you point out, then I would be able to understand your point of view.

Sincerely,
Angry Professor, Instructor
ESP and Aliens

Attendance revisited.

We have had several discussions, here and elsewhere, on the value of requiring attendance vs. letting our students hang themselves. I think that attendance in my classes has been particularly low in past years because I make my overheads available online.

I had a frank discussion with my class about this today. I explained to (almost all 120 of) them that I had no desire to make attendance required, but that I recognized that my overheads are at times dense with material, and I would like to ease those note-taking stresses. The problems, as I saw them, were that (1) constructing note outlines would take as much time as making the overheads themselves, and I have trouble enough just keeping up with lecture prep (not a good excuse, but they seemed sympathetic), and (2) making the overheads universally available doesn't reward the students who come to class enough, in my opinion.

My students thought that making the overheads available but password protected, with the password changing with each lecture and only given out in lecture would perhaps be a reasonable solution. I think it's still too easy for no-shows to get the overheads from friends, and emailing the general announcement that the overheads were ready for those who had been to class seemed really petty and lame. But I'm going to give it a try.

Of course, not 20 minutes after I posted the overheads, someone wrote me to complain that the format was inconvenient. Sheesh.

A night in the bookshop.

Angry Baker and I were out on a date last night, and ended the evening at our local book/coffee shop. It was a lovely outing, except for the following two sightings:

At the front of the shop was a display of Catherine Crier's latest, Contempt. I glanced at a few pages and thought, Yikes! This is scary! I put the book down, reasoning that I don't like Crier anyway, sort of a preemptive ad hominem attack to rationalize my desire not to read it.

I eventually found myself at the back of the shop, where I found David Kupelian's The Marketing of Evil. I glanced through this one, too. While Crier's offering was disturbing, Kupelian made me want to run home and hide under the covers. He writes (lies) about the "myth" of church-state separation and the intentions of our "strongly Christian" founding fathers. Maybe he doesn't live in the U.S.?

So I slunk over to the "guilty pleasures" section of the shop to see if there was anything new from Amanda Cross. No such luck.

Bad chemistry in Ellesiouville, U.S.A.

I have written before of my neighbors. Generally speaking, our ideologies are more similar than dissimilar: our politics, child-rearing philosophies, and sociological concerns are the same. However, our positions on science and religion are so different that, unfortunately, we will never be able to be true friends.

Most recently, they have been discussing soap with Angry Baker. Angry Baker makes our soap. It is lovely stuff: usually superfatted, it is soft and lathers like a dream. It doesn't have the same perfectly formulated fragrance that a detergent bar has, but it is dirt cheap and not as harsh on the skin.

The making of soap requires the use of an alkali, usually NaOH (lye) for bar soaps. Here's where the problem comes in. Lye is, of course, a chemical, extraordinarily caustic even in low concentrations. According to my neighbors' logic, "chemicals" are bad, hence soap made with lye is bad.

Does soap have lye in it? Absolutely not. The process of saponification completely removes the alkali, leaving only fats and glycerin. But didn't Angry Baker just stir a whole can of lye into the soap? Yes. Then soap has lye in it. No. Such is the miracle of chemical reaction, which they can't (or refuse to?) understand.

They gave us a pamphlet, printed up by some local soapmaker, which proclaims loudly the fact that there are no "chemicals" in their soap. Well, of course there are chemicals in their soap: all substances are chemicals. But it's true that there is no lye in their soap, for the same reason that there is no lye in Angry Baker's soap. However, the pamphlet goes further, claiming that their soap was made without "chemicals," and this is just a lie. There is no way to make a bar of "soap" without an alkali or a detergent (which is worse, ecologically speaking, than the lye).

We had a similar argument a few months ago about bleached flour. Bleached flour is "bad," as we all have heard. But this is because most bleached flours are refined, not because they are bleached. We were sitting around a dinner table, and somehow the topic came up. Angry Baker had recently become interested in how flour was bleached, and attempted to explain that it was a benign process.^* In the middle of his description someone interrupted and exclaimed, derisively, that chlorine could not possibly be benign under any circumstances. It is, of course, a "chemical" that, when thrown about in large quantities, can make life miserable.

However, almost everything, in large enough quantities, can make life miserable. Water, for example, can kill in any number of ways. But life would not be possible without it, you argue? Well, life would be pretty tricky without chlorine, too. Chlorine is a component of common salt. Yes, chlorine is used to make mustard gas, but if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have salt. Among other minor functions, salt maintains the integrity of the cells of our bodies, keeps our hearts pumping, and makes our neurons fire. There would be no life on earth without chlorine.

This knee-jerk reaction to eschew any product whose manufacture was assisted by a "chemical" really bewilders me. There is a huge subculture devoted to consuming the all-natural, the organic, no-"chemical" product. Such products are marketed with lies, and cost twice as much as comparable products without the hype. I too try to purchase products that have a minimal impact on my environment, but this credulous bullshit makes me want to run to Walmart and buy a cartload of Raid Ant and Roach Killer. Doesn't anyone take chemistry in high school any more?

^*Benign with respect to the resulting flour. I have no idea if the process itself has any negative ecological impact. Edited to add: Bromate is the bleaching agent for flour, but my neighbor interjected his remark about chlorine anyway.

Congratulations, Dr. Angry Student!

Angry Student, my first "real" Ph.D. student, has just completed his oral defense with flying colors: an easy pass, no thesis revisions.

Angry Student, you were the best. You were the kind of student that every professor dreams of getting the opportunity to mentor. You actually thought about things. You had ideas. You didn't need me to tell you what was interesting. You solved problems. You taught me.

I don't care if you decide to teach, do research, or work in some private company. Go out there and make a difference. Shine. May the wind always be at your back.

A great way to procrastinate.

I just finished my academic genealogy, which I intend to present to my student who defends his dissertation tomorrow. I got back to before the Enlightenment for two branches, and the third got stuck at Gustav Fechner. I found Fechner's thesis and a nice librarian sent me the first few pages, but I can't read Latin. Any volunteers?

It was very time consuming, very educational, and very fun. Not only did I learn a lot of history of my own discipline, but I learned a lot about my library's databases. If you want to do it yourself, you should check out the Mathematics Genealogy Project, the Chemical Genealogy, Dissertation Abstracts Online, the Philosophy Family Tree, and (most important) WorldCat, the World Library Catalog from OCLC.

Random questions on a Friday morning.

How do you make the cast-on row for a sock as loose as the ribbing? I've been ripping out the cast-on row after the sock is finished (a blind cast-on), but that doesn't leave a neat edge.

For two positive continuous functions $f$ and $g$ with support $\bb{R}^+$, let $g$ be strictly increasing. For an arbitrary $f$, can I find a $g$ such that $f(g^{-1}(x)) \left| \frac{d}{dx} g^{-1}(x) \right|$ is strictly increasing when $f$ is strictly increasing and increasing-then-decreasing when $f$ is increasing-then-decreasing? If not, can I show that no such $g$ exists?

How can I convince Angry Toddler to wear panties to daycare if the Dora the Explorer panties aren't enough to make her want to?

Countdown.

I have 10 days to get all my revise/resubmits done and then I have to appear in a classroom again. Of course I won't get them done, because I have course prep to do too. And I just learned that 120+ butts are currently registered in my class and the room holds... (dramatic pause/drum roll) ...90 butts. Now this should make for interesting exam days.

Aaahhh!

My usual morning beverage, a frothy, sweet, decaffeinated concoction, was accidentally mixed with two shots of high-test caffeinated espresso. I haven't drunk caffeine for over ten years.

I'm climbing the walls. My hands are shaking, my head is pounding, and I think I really must claw my eyes out. How do all you "real" coffee drinkers handle this every day? This is one nasty dirty buzz.

On being the only one.

I don't usually feel that I have been penalized by being a female in my profession. There are very few women in my field -- there is only one other woman of senior rank in my professional society. My way up the ranks has therefore tended to be facilitated by my senior male colleagues, rather than hindered, in their desperate attempts not to appear sexist.

However, there are some things that fall to me to do because I am the only woman. These are things that I must do because my male colleagues, bless their little Y-chromosomes, simply can't see that they must be done. Today's case in point: a struggling graduate student.

This student's primary advisor is not in our department. Therefore it has been easy for her to do nothing at all without anyone taking notice. She is, after several long years of doing nothing at all, on probation, and she must submit a draft of her thesis within a few weeks or leave the program. She has been avoiding everyone, including her advisor, all summer long. We all thought that she was working on her thesis.

She came in last week from out of town. She made lots of noise in the hallway around our offices, talking about how she was in town for the sole purpose of meeting with her advisor to get the last details of her thesis ironed out. "No, I can't go to lunch with you all," she said when asked, "I have to go meet with Dr. Advisor about my thesis." She packed a huge bookbag with notes and papers and her draft. "I'm going now to meet with Dr. Advisor," she announced, and disappeared.

Well, she didn't meet with Dr. Advisor. She didn't even have an appointment with Dr. Advisor, who is pissed as hell and threatening to pull himself from her committee. She drove several hundred miles for the sole purpose of putting on a show. The rest of my colleagues are not worried at all about this behavior, chalking it up to laziness or procrastination. After all, this is not their problem, she is not their student. They are happy to boot her out of the program, weeks before she is to defend her thesis, knowing that they are doing the "right thing," that she had plenty of chances and ample warning.

All these things are true. However, no one has ever talked to her to find out if she's okay or to ask if she needs any help from us. Yes, she's a procrastinator, but she's also a sweet, smart woman, and the lying and posturing are so out of character that she must be seriously ill. So this is my task for tomorrow: I have to call her and find out what the hell is going on. I am dreading this conversation, and wishing I had a big, hard penis that could relieve me of this responsibility.

Update 9/7: I called. It wasn't so bad, so I don't know why I was dreading it. I didn't get too much information from her except that she is working very hard, and she seemed very grateful that I was concerned. If she's sick, she's hiding it well.

I expressed to her the importance of being visible and communicative, and explained how these deadlines we impose are usually meaningless when we have the impression (no matter how faulty) that progress is being made. She promised me she would call Dr. Advisor today. I hope Dr. Advisor will give her one last chance.

What would you do?

I cried when I read this story. Then I asked myself, what would I do in the same circumstances?

Would I loot a grocery store to get food for my family? Yes.

Would I loot a store to get new things like DVD players or microwave ovens? No.

Would I pick up a gun to protect my family from looters? Yes.

Would I pick up a gun to get food for my family? Maybe.

Would I pick up a gun to take food away from someone who needed it as much as my family did? No.

Would I try to take someone else's place on an evacuation vehicle? No.

Would I put my daughter in someone else's place on an evacuation vehicle? Yes.

Would I have put my family in this situation by staying in New Orleans when I had a chance to get them out? No. But, I am, compared to most of those souls trapped in the Superdome, unimaginably wealthy. My family would have had options that few of them had.

In which I am blown away.

In a comment below, I defended my position as a speciesist by appealing to the awe-inspiring extent of human potential. After I hit the "publish" key, the irony struck me: I use this blog as a place to complain about my students and the general stupidity around me. While I am able to wax poetic about the potential of a child, when children turn into the big galoots that sleep through my lectures, their potential seems significantly diminished.

Therefore I feel compelled to write about an experience I had when I was a faculty member at Ivy League University (ILU). I had just taught my first large lecture class at ILU. By "large," I really mean large: there were 200 students in this lecture. The undergraduate student body at ILU numbers around 4000. I learned that despite the practically impossible admission standards at ILU, a large subset of ILU students are just as lazy and stupid as the laziest and stupidest here at LSU. The difference between ILU and LSU students is the feeling of entitlement. ILU students are Paying Customers and they Expect Something In Return. LSU students slack off honestly, and generally do not expect special treatment when their behaviors result in poor grades.

It was with some trepidation that I agreed to serve on ILU's Ethics Committee. This committee is composed of and chaired by undergraduates. Two faculty members are placed on the committee as observers. The committee is only convened when an accusation of academic misconduct is leveled against a student. I thought that what I was going to see on this committee would be similar to what I experienced in the classroom. I thought there would be an us-versus-them mentality on the part of the committee members. The faculty member's accusations would be treated lightly and an attitude of "the customer is always right" would result in no action at all.

This particular case involved a pre-med student. At this time, the competition among pre-med students was so fierce that some students resorted to felonious behavior to insure their place at the top of the curve. Cheating was rampant and some students were injured. One of my students had to drop out of my course because of injuries he sustained in chemistry lab: a classmate had poured acid in his equipment locker and on his lab notebook, resulting in serious burns to his hands. At the time I left, ILU had hired a special dean whose job was to attempt to change the culture among the pre-meds. I don't know if the attempt was successful.

The accused pre-med student was enrolled in biochemistry, a required course in the pre-med program. This course was very large by ILU standards, with hundreds of enrollees. In a class this large, with three or four TAs, it's easy to get lost in the crowd, which was an advantage for this student. He had devised a system wherein he changed his answers on homeworks and exams after they had been returned to him, increased the assigned points, and then he complained that his points had been added up incorrectly. Over the semester, this student had submitted at least three separate pieces of work for grade recomputations. It was the last one, the last midterm exam, that did him in.

All the exams in this class were xeroxed by a single person on a single machine in a locked room, all at one time, and then numbered. (Did I mention cheating was rampant?) One page on this particular exam had question that used a band pattern from a gel electrophoresis. The student got this question right but, apparently, not the question immediately proceeding it. He carefully removed this page from his exam, used whiteout or some other masking agent to erase his original answer, wrote in the correct answer, and then xeroxed the corrected page. He then copied back the graders' marks with higher point values, using the same colored pens, replaced the page in his exam and submitted it for a grade recomputation.

Were it not for the gel electrophoresis it would have been difficult to detect cheating. The bands on the gel were reproduced in varying gray levels, visible after the first xeroxing, but after the second all shades of gray were just black and white. There was no way the electrophoresis question could have been answered correctly given the figure that resulted after the second xeroxing.

The student offered no defense. He said that he was being persecuted, that he was honorable, that he would never cheat, etc. etc. He was asked why he had xeroxed the page. He could only insist that he had not. His demeanor was such that everyone in the room was reluctant to believe that he could have so deliberately, and with such premeditation, cheated so blatantly. This was not the hurried and sloppy behavior of the panicked; this took a lot of time to accomplish, and he had over a week to do it and turn it back in to his TA.

The students on the committee were not what I had expected. Two of them had been students in my own classes. They were the good ones, not Paying Customers. I had given one of them his only B ever at ILU. (In retrospect, I feel quite badly about that.) As committee members they were sober, serious and mature. They asked questions of the accused and accuser, not to choose sides, but to get as much information as possible. They were distressed by, not dismissive of, what they were hearing. They took their jobs very, very seriously, and as I watched them, I knew I would not hesitate to have any one of them as my own physician some day. I also knew that I probably would not be given that opportunity, because these people were going to be too busy running the world. I was astonished.

Both sides of the case heard, the accusing faculty member left, not to return. The accused was also asked to leave while the committee discussed the situation and decided on a course of action. As the doors closed, the committee members stared at each other. Guilt or innocence was not a question here. The only issue to be determined was the punishment to be meted out. Once again, I was astonished. These students were appalled at their classmate's behavior. The premeditation of the act loomed large in their minds. They were all pre-med students themselves. They knew the pressure to cheat was nearly irresistible, and though none of them had ever bent under that pressure, they were willing to be sympathetic to a classmate who had a momentary lapse. This was not such a case and they were angry.

They were angry that an ILU student could devalue an ILU diploma in this way. They were angry that a person like this might someday become a physician. They were ready to pronounce the harshest sentence they could: permanent expulsion from the university. To my surprise, it was I and the other faculty who argued for leniency. What do we want to achieve? we asked. Can we prevent this person from ever becoming a physician? Would that be sufficient? Expulsion had other serious consequences, which in this particular case included deportation. Did we want that?

The students were swayed by our arguments. The student was not expelled. He was given an F in the course, placed on academic probation, and a notation was made on his transcript indicating that the failure and the probation was for academic misconduct. This, we thought, would be enough to keep him out of any reputable medical school. It also gave him a chance to reform. By working hard he could, we thought, overcome this black mark and turn ignominy into success. I don't know if I would argue for leniency if I were faced with the same situation today, but I still believe the punishment was fair.

I think back on this experience at certain moments. I was so proud of these kids - kids who are probably finishing their residencies now. When I look out over the sea of faces in my lectures, I find myself doubting that there are any students like them here at LSU. There was something about them, something more than genius and hard work. They had a sense of citizenship, of duty and responsibility; an unspoken agreement that they were going to use their talents to make the world a better place.

The number of students at LSU is an order of magnitude larger than the number at ILU. Statistically speaking, I know there are more students like them out there somewhere. I hope I find them, or they find me, eventually.

So maybe it's not such a good idea.

Sometimes, on bad days, I daydream about liquidating my portfolio, selling the house, buying a nice doublewide and a little plot of swampland in southern Louisiana, and getting a job at the local Home Depot.

These people are having a much worse day than I could ever have. Let's wish the best for them.

Some lives are more valuable than others.

Those of you with affiliations to universities with medical schools have probably received some version of the spam that I got today. This mass-mailing was sent by the reprehensible Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an extremist animal rights group devoted to the elimination of all animal exploitation. They want "total animal liberation," meaning a society with no zoos, circuses, or rodeos, no consumption of animal products as food (a vegan diet), no fur or leather products, no pets, and especially, no animal models in medical research.

PCRM is an especially unsavory bunch of individuals that use every media opportunity to denigrate and distort animal-based research. The letter I got today claims that very few medical professionals still believe that animal research is necessary for continued progress in understanding the effects of disease and injuries in humans, and that the use of animal models to advance our ability to treat disease is nothing but cruel. They delight in relating the gory details surrounding some of the methods used in animal research: "The tiny, fluffy, affectionate purring kitten is strapped into an immobilizing device so that the cold-hearted evil scientist can, by dropping a cantilevered weight onto its trusting little head, bash out its brains etc. etc...."

Deliberately left out of these disturbing descriptions is the fact that such procedures are very, very carefully monitored by both internal and external agencies to insure that the "horrors" they describe inflict minimal pain and distress on the animals involved. Deliberately left out of these disturbing descriptions is the fact that these research protocols have undergone intense scrutiny by peer reviewers, the local Animal Care and Use committee, and the agency that funds the research. Deliberately left out of these disturbing descriptions is the fact that animal models are the best way we have to prevent the transmission of disease and develop new treatments for debilitating and life-threatening illnesses like HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

PCRM's statements implying that all "good" scientists know that these kinds of research techniques are outdated and cruel are simply lies. The name of the organization (Physicians Committee) is a lie: less than 5% of the members of PCRM are physicians. The founder of the organization, Neal D. Barnard, is not a nutritionist or a clinical researcher as all PCRM's documents would have you believe, but trained as a psychiatrist.

Dr. Barnard and his ilk argue from the position that the life of a non-human, no matter how small, is just as valuable as the life of a human. From this position, one must also endorse the position that abortion is evil (they do not take any position on abortion), that mosquitoes and flies are to be tolerated and not swatted, and, one must assume, that antibiotics cannot be used to cure infection. Some questions I have about this ridiculous stance include: Are cats to be prevented from catching mice, and lions antelope? Are invasive species to be allowed to drive native species to extinction? The dogma of the extreme animal rights groups is internally inconsistent. In a strange perversion of logic, one of their spokesman has openly advocated assassination of animal researchers to discourage the use of animal models in research.

I am not an animal researcher, but I depend on data from animal research to advance my own research agenda. Despite the fact that animals are killed as an indirect result of my curiosity, I (and all the animal researchers I know) love and respect animals. We are grateful and respectful of the sacrifices they make on our behalf. Following an honest and frank description of what happens to animals in his laboratory, Steven Rose writes a deeply touching and sensitive essay on the relationship between society, animal researchers and research animals in the second chapter of his book The Making of Memory. I could quote the whole chapter to make my point, but I will quote one paragraph:

At home we have a much loved and exceedingly beautiful cat... But if I had to choose between saving the cat's life and that of any other human child, I would unhesitatingly choose the child. And my cat at the expense of a chick [Rose's research animal].

I will go further, and say that if I had to kill all the sweet, furry kittens in the world to save the life of one human child, I would. Some lives are more valuable than others.

Twitchy fingers.

Don't type http://gentlemansc.blogpot.com or http://gentlemansc.blogpsot.com/. If you do, make sure to wear sunglasses and grab your bible.

Google before you post.

Okay, it was filmed last month. Yes, only one month. So Tommy really didn't get a grade in Chem 101. Too bad: that would have been very amusing.

Was I the only one...

...who watched "Tommy Lee Goes To College" last night? It was about what I expected: lots of extracurricular activities and lots of moaning about Chem 101. I was amused (and not surprised, having played percussion myself) that Mr. "World-Class Drummer" completely sucked when asked to read and play music with real percussionists.

I find myself obsessed with when they filmed this stuff. Last fall? If so, I wanna know what Tommy's Chem grade was.

Random thoughts on a Friday morning.

I must be off that committee. The candidate is supposed to defend on Monday and I haven't been asked to sign anything. Either way, it feels good not to worry about it.

It cost $30 to fill up my tank yesterday. I have mixed feelings. Is the world coming to an end? That would be bad. On the other hand, we could turn into France, who has never had much oil. The French were paying this much for gasoline decades ago. We could see real public transportation in our cities, restoration of the country's rail systems, and the demise of the "Walmart" economy. Imagine a little market every few blocks. It could be wonderful!

All my zucchinis died. And so did all of my neighbors', all up and down the street. Tiny little worms burrowed into the stalk and destroyed the vines. I thought they were squash borers, but they look too small. Should I try to kill the worms next year? My local greenhouse says to dust the young plants with sevin, but won't that kill the mantises, too? On the bright side, I have lots of cucumbers and tomatoes.

Summer is ending. I feel cheated. Rather than getting lots of writing done, I agonized over bad theses and departmental politics.

Kids say the darndest things.

My daughter's current favorite song is "Frère Jacques," in French, of course. She asks me to sing it over and over again, every day.

She says, "Do Mother Fucker, Mommy."

We're granting too many Ph.D.s.

My little saga isn't over yet. I received another inadequate draft of the candidate's thesis revision last week, despite my urgings that he take his time and not risk failing a second defense. There are, again, lots of external deadlines that seem to be driving everyone's decision-making processes as this drama unfolds, and surprisingly little cognitive activity. This morning I wrote my formal request to the Graduate School to be removed from the committee. Wish me luck.

On a related note, I stumbled across this online service this morning, which claims to serve the role of advisor (for a fee) to students whose advisors are incompetent or have failed them in some way. Were I not so bruised by my recent experience, I would have laughed out loud, but instead I just hung my head in shame.

Some of the testimonials published on this website are disturbing in the extreme. Consider this one:

"I am extremely pleased with Dr. Granoff's work. He coached me in the statistics portion of my dissertation as well as advised me in preparation for my orals. He is very thorough and answered all my questions. The wonderful part is he understands the anxiety and emotional stress of the project, he is an expert in the field, and he will describe elements in lay terms to be sure there is complete understanding. Dr. Granoff’s work I rate at excellent and I would highly recommend him." --Anne

I first interpreted this remark to mean that Dr. Anne had to have her own research explained to her in lay terms. But it turns out that Dr. Granoff is the company's statistical consultant, and I've preached enough about this kind of attitude toward statistics.

Here is another:

"I'm in the process of reading the research document you sent and it is absolutely exquisite!! You have pinpointed the areas most relevant in the literature and to some degree I feel validated that much of what I intended to incorporate you have so eloquently addressed." -- Karen - Ph.D. candidate, Education

and another:

"Roxann did an excellent job of contributing to the writing of the first and last chapters. Her services saved me a lot of stress and she was a needed complement to a research advisor that was not very ambitious/thorough in his editing/proofing." -- Daniel Hennessy

What we have here, it seems, is more than an advising service. I can attest that some advisors do not advise very well, if at all. However, a Ph.D. is supposed to be a student's independent contribution to the scientific literature in his or her field. The role of an advisor is to advise, not to do the actual work. Reading over these testimonials it seems that even good advice would not have been enough to get them through their programs. They needed more: they needed people to do the analyses and interpret them, to do their proofreading, and apparently their literature reviews too. It's no wonder that many of them were dissatisfied with their advisors.

This service dances over and around the line between providing assistance with writing ("In fact, many college/university advisors will suggest that you obtain an editor to polish the narrative") and work-for-hire ("We will advise, edit, and rewrite portions when you are struggling to express your ideas"). It encourages their clientele to believe that a good advisor is supposed to do all these things for you: analyses, interpretation of analyses, literature review, writing, and more. It perpetuates the misguided belief that if, say, an advisor requires you to rewrite a chapter or two, rather than do it him or herself, then that advisor is neglecting his or her responsibilities.

Furthermore, despite their claims to anonymity, they seem happy to publish first and last names of their clients, like the Dr./Mr. Daniel Hennessy quoted above. I wonder how his thesis committee would feel if they knew that he had engaged the services of this company?

When I was a graduate student, one of my professors, who was wont to indulge in tirades about the decline of youth, began the class lecture bemoaning the poor quality of the exams we had just turned in, and declaring that most of us in the room had no business being in a Ph.D. program. Although I still believe that the man was an insulting little troll, there is one thing he said that I have never forgotten: people who get Ph.D.s don't get them because they want them. They get them because they are driven to them. Getting a Ph.D. shouldn't be easy, and it isn't fun -- unless you think that pulling all-nighters for months, working weekends for five years, and having to hear that your thinking is still muddled and your writing is poor four or five thesis revisions in a row is a good time. Even in the darkest days of thesis-writing, I would sooner have quit unfinished than turn to a service like this one for "help."

I suppose I could end this rambling little essay by wondering what the hell is wrong with graduate students these days, but it will make me feel too old (and trollish).

Parenting is hard.

I'm bug-phobic. Ever since I was a child, I just haven't been able to share my living space with bugs. I don't kill them when I find them, I just move them outside. The moving process can sometimes be very involved, as I can't bear to touch them. I usually employ a large drinking glass and a piece of cardboard. My aversion to touching bugs can extend to their images: I have a field guide to insects, and I have to be very careful about turning the pages, as I can't bear to touch some of the pictures.

I know that my inability to touch or be touched by a bug is irrational, and when my daughter first began showing an interest in the world around her I vowed that I would never let her see me behave like a ninny around a bug. With one exception (we were unexpectedly dive-bombed by a very large, drunken dragonfly), I have kept this vow. This means that, in the past few years, there are occasions in which I have had to touch a bug, or let a bug touch me.

Now that we are most of the way through the summer, life is pretty good if you're a bug. All the summer regulars, like the crickets and the cicadas, indulge in noisy all-night orgies of bug-making, and their exhausted bodies litter my porch and sidewalk in the morning. To my great surprise, I have found myself picking up these big monsters and moving them out of the way, without benefit of glass and cardboard. I have gently held, for my daughter's benefit, wasps, grasshoppers, crickets and a praying mantis.

I can now imagine touching something like a stag beetle without experiencing too much angst. I don't know if I could actually do it, but I can imagine it. In evaluating my progress, I realized that I have put myself through a course of treatment psychologists call systematic desensitization. I started small, with ladybugs and fireflies, and worked my way up to the challenging beetles and cicadas. I first imagined touching them, and then, when given the opportunity, gave it a shot in real life.

I am not completely cured. Like I said, I think I could pick up a stag beetle, but I'm not sure. And then there's this, which will always be a huge problem for me:

Brrrr!

Despite all my efforts, my daughter is also becoming bug-averse. I don't know if she's picking this up from friends or teachers at school, or if bug phobia is something innate that some people manage to overcome while others don't. Looking for a while at that picture of Mr. Roach up there, I'm inclined to believe that there's something prewired in my brain that prevents me from appreciating how handsome he is. Whether or not my daughter is able to put "entomologist" down on the list of things she'd like to be some day is rather beside my point, however. I just wonder: Will she ever appreciate how hard it was for me to hold a bug? Will she ever realize that I did it just for her?

If you have a moment, check out What's That Bug? It's a great site, with beautiful photos.

On being away from my desk.

My family and I have been visiting a Southern urban center since Monday. I have some business here in town, but mostly I'm here having fun. My roots are Deep South, and given only three days, I am struggling to keep a drawl from creeping back into my speech.

Things I have missed:

1. Sweet, sweet tea. By the gallon.
2. Grits with breakfast, even when I didn't order them. Push the butter in deep and pass the salt and pepper.
3. Red dirt.
4. BBQ sauce under my fingernails.
5. Fried okra.
6. "Y'all heyahv a nahce tahm hyeah, y'heyah?"

Here's something that really makes me mad.

Carroll, Violinguist, in the guise of a clinical psychologist, posted several anguished comments to this post, in which I describe the behavior of one of my not-so-good students. For the most part, Violinguist's remarks were addressed quite appropriately by other readers. I did not comment on them right away because: 1) I was gardening, and 2) they really pissed me off.

This is the remark that infuriated me:

Face it: in the grand scheme of things, your exam is not particularly important, nor is it a true measure of any student's aptitudes--particularly in statistics for aspirants to the social sciences (trust me; I know: I was horrendous in statistics in school but if I do say so myself I have blossomed into a darned good clinical psychologist).

From this statement alone it can be determined that the person writing the comment was neither (well) trained in the social sciences, nor a "darned good" clinical psychologist.

I fight the idea that statistics is irrelevant every day in my classroom. Not only is statistics important for social scientists, it is an important component of any liberal arts education. Understanding and dealing with variability in measurements is fundamental, critical, essential for anyone who wishes to be a rational contributing member of society. The media bombard us with statistics each and every day, on every news broadcast, in the papers, and on billboards. "Four out of five dentists recommend!" "The risk of Type II diabetes increases!" "Lifetime risk of breast cancer!"

Without an understanding of statistics, statements about health risks, public opinion, government, public policy, effectiveness of different laundry detergents (and on and on and on) must simply be taken as fact or rejected as lies. Arriving at a real understanding of how this information may or may not influence each of us personally requires statistics. To be able to sift good information from bad information requires statistics. To be a good citizen requires statistics. "In the grand scheme of things" statistics may be one of the most important classes a student ever takes.

Let's talk about voting, the most important responsibility a citizen of a democratic society exercises. Modern (and not-so-modern) technology has provided us with an array of different voting machines. Should we worry about how secure these machines are? When should we become concerned about vote fraud? Are our voices being heard? Should we have to rely on some expert to tell us that an election was fair or should we be able to figure it out for ourselves?

Of course we have to be able to figure it out for ourselves. This is the purpose of the exit poll. The exit poll is a sample of voters taken at the polling place immediately after they have cast their ballots. The actual vote count should be similar to the figures provided by the exit poll, within some margin of error. Exit poll statistics that are widely different from the actual vote count signal election fraud. The exit polls strongly suggest that the 2004 election that returned President Bush to office was flawed. If we were citizens of the Ukraine, or Rwanda, the United Nations might have declared our election results invalid and sent in observers to insure a fair election. Where is the outrage in our country? No outrage here: we are so poorly trained as consumers of information that we would prefer to watch NBC's Medium than the election returns.

On to the psychologists. When I teach graduate students the clinical psychology students are especially well-aware that statistics is a key component of their discipline. Not only do they need to understand statistical methods to conduct their research, but even those who do not intend to pursue a research career appreciate that without a good understanding of statistics they will be unable to read and understand the literature in their field. How would you like to go to a doctor who is so poorly trained that she must rely on drug companies or newspapers to tell her what drugs are more or less effective in treating a disease? The "darned good clinical psychologists" know statistics well and use it to make themselves better therapists.

I appreciate that not many people need to know how to do an analysis of variance, but I insist that everyone needs to know what a standard (margin of) error is and how a margin of error constrains the claims someone can make about their data. To say that statistics is "not particularly important" reflects a gross misunderstanding about how information is marketed and consumed in our society and a terrible misconception of the work of social scientists.

I went away, but now I'm back.

I took a few, several, lots of mental health days. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns. I gardened. (Why are my zucchinis dying on the vine?) I read. I knit. It was nice, and I'm not ready to be back in my office but I have to be so here I am.

This morning I had a wonderful dream. We had an emergency national election to recall Bush from office. Bush lost, and just like that, presto-chango, Kerry was president. It was amusing how similar the emotional overtones of the dream were to those of dreams in which I figure out how to fly.

And how is your summer going?

I had one student this past quarter who, because of a family emergency, could not take the final and so received an incomplete. It is probably not too surprising that this student was struggling in the class and would not have done well on the final even if exigent circumstances had not arisen. I find that the better students would rather take their exams and get them out of the way, early even, rather than leave their coursework unfinished, regardless of their personal disasters. I had a student last year who was being shipped overseas to the war, and he took his final three weeks early rather than take an incomplete.

My struggling student has now contacted me (via email) to take her final and resolve her incomplete. However, her inquiries into how best to resolve the matter are a little strange. Rather than, "When can I take my final?" she asks, "When do I have to have my incomplete resolved by?" Refusing to play into this (guidelines about incompletes are easily found online), I instead responded (cheerily), "Come in and take your final any time! Are you free this afternoon?"

Something tells me she won't be in touch for a while. Should I be astonished that she has not spent the past two months studying for her final? Or that she's in no rush to start studying now?

Time for a change.

Reading over my more recent blog entries, I see that my summer has taken a nosedive into... well, I don't exactly know into what. So I wanted to write today about something good.

I have a student working with me for the summer. He is a rising sophomore, in the Honors program, and almost delightful to have around. I say almost delightful because, in the course of our day-to-day interactions, I have learned that he is completely incapable of perceiving when I am busy and when I am not. He will hover in my office doorway for extended periods of time, even when I am deep in discussion with someone wearing shiny shoes and carrying a briefcase. Similarly, he is incapable of distinguishing between problems I am interested in (e.g., "If we implement a model of the process in this way, I can't fit the data any more") and problems that I am not ("The program stalls at about this point in the code and I don't know why"). Oftentimes the hovering is only to report that one of these uninteresting problems has been solved.

I overlook these annoyances because he's really and truly brilliant, one of the few really brilliant people I've ever met. Over the past 6 months or so he has taught himself parallel programming in Fortran 90 and how to use R. He has learned some really difficult stuff involving stochastic processes and Bayesian modeling and implemented the stuff in raw F90 code. (Note that he's only taken introductory-level statistics.) He programmed up a model and had it working (fitted to data) in about a month, after I myself had tried for six months to do exactly the same thing and failed.

Like most geniuses, he is pure geek. When he first showed up on my doorstep, I handed him an old but serviceable computer and a Fedora distro. By the end of the afternoon he had his own workstation connected to the lab LAN. I must note here that he didn't know a thing about Linux or Unix. I had to tell him how to create a file. "This is a terminal window," I said. "Type 'xemacs.'" Now when I go in the lab he has a million xemacs windows up, some containing little bits of code, some of them running R, others editing data.^*

Now if only he would stop locking himself out of the lab.

^*Of course I would never choose my friends by their choice of text processing application, but if you happen to use an emacsen, well, I'll just be that much more willing to buy you beer.

I can't believe it really happened.

It's probably hard for someone who hasn't served as a graduate student's advisor to understand how rare and horrible this event is: I failed a Ph.D. candidate on his oral examination yesterday. While the obvious blame for such a failure may seem to lie with the student, it does not. It is the advisor's responsibility to see that his/her students are adequately prepared for their examinations, and to advise them to wait when they are not ready. The oral examination should be a rubber stamp. When it is not, it says more about the faculty advisor than the student who fails.

While my judgment of failure was sufficient to insure that the student would be required to revise and resubmit his thesis for reapproval (he gets one more chance), in this particular case each and every person on his committee failed him, including his advisor. I am now carefully following the Graduate School's policy for extricating myself from this train wreck. I have no intention of sitting through a second defense like this.

Lost in translation.

Via Mindhacks, I was alerted to this report concerning future use of cognitive-enhancing drugs. Among other things, it contains the following remark by a respected researcher in a field that may or may not be related to my own:

In the long term, drugs that can delete painful memories could also be used routinely. "We are now looking 20-25 years ahead," said Prof Robbins. "Very basic science is showing that it is possible to call up a memory, knock it on the head and produce selective amnesia."

While certain drugs can impair or enhance performance on certain types of memory tasks (and, by implication, interfere with or facilitate the function performed by certain brain systems), there is no such thing as a memory that can be "called up," like pulling a photograph out of an album. What we perceive to be a "memory" is actually a reconstruction, dynamic and unstable, based on relatively impoverished information that some in the business call "contextual cues." The "memory" will not be the same on every recollection, and we have no reason to believe that different recollections of an event even use the same neurons each time, although the same brain areas will be recruited (but to a greater or lesser extent) each time. The idea that we could "kill" a single "memory" represents such a gross misunderstanding of memory processes that I can't attribute it to the respected Professor Robbins.

I have, on occasion, had to describe my research results to the media. I consider this one of my social responsibilities as a scientist, especially a scientist that accepts taxpayer-supported funding. However, I always require that the reporter give me a draft of the article for comment before it appears in print, to make sure that potentially complex theoretical ideas have not been misrepresented, as they have in this article. It often makes for less titillating reading, unfortunately. My stuff rarely makes the newspapers, and maybe my unwillingness to let the reporter's imagination run wild is why.

I wish I were somewhere else.

My favorite place in the world is a streetside café anywhere in Paris. If I close my eyes I'm there now: I'm sitting at a very small table on the sidewalk; it's early morning, a little bit cool, maybe even drizzly; in front of me there is a large bowl of chocolat chaud and a tartine thickly smeared with sweet butter; and there's someone at a table nearby smoking cigarettes and drinking espresso.

I was just out to get my coffee, and on my return I passed a displaced smoker pacing outside the building. I caught just a little bit of the smoke from her cigarette, and together with the smell of my coffee it was just enough to send me back to Paris.

Paris is a city of smokers, and once upon a time this meant that my favorite place in the world was not there. I was an antismoking Nazi. I was obnoxious. I tormented smokers at outdoor sporting events, waiting for subways, and huddled under umbrellas in the rain outside office buildings. The nadir of my obsession came when I yelled at some poor man for smoking near me in a diner, and then I realized that I was sitting in the smoking section.

I came slowly to the realization that I was a pure bitch. My friends tried to tell me, too gently, that when it came to this particular issue I could be very unpleasant. Yes, even more unpleasant than second-hand smoke. My conversion was complete when I heard the personal story of my very favorite humorist, who self-medicates his OCD with cigarettes (and, not too coincidentally, lives in Paris). I know now that while not all smokers need to smoke, many of them do, and it was not for me to judge who could smoke and, if outdoors, where.

So smoke on, Brothers and Sisters, but only if you must. And if it happens to be a cool summer morning, blow a little my way -- just a little. It's too bad no one in the states knows how to make a good chocolat chaud.

Ooh, ooh, that smell.

Can't you smell that smell?

Bad, bad things are happening. I may actually have to fail a doctoral candidate. I can only take comfort in the fact that I am outside the candidate's department and college, so I don't have to deal with these people ever again. After this, they probably won't want me to serve on any of their students' committees ever again, so that works out well for all concerned.

I'll blog it all later. But let me leave you with this little tidbit: Did you know that the intercept term of a multiple regression equation represents a probability? Don't let it bother you that the value of that intercept is (drum roll please)... 17.52. (No, that is not a percentage.)

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Oh, it hurts so bad, and, god help me, I'm only on page 12 (of 256).

"Experts have recommended that [doing these things] is important for long-term success because [these things] determine success over a long period of time."

Tagged.

Edited to fix nested links.

Someone bit me. I guess I'm it, but just this once. Hear me?

1. What were three of the stupidest things you have done in
your life?

1. I married a nasty man just so I could feel grown up. To compound the stupidity, I stayed with him for almost a decade.
2. I took advantage of a good friend and hurt him badly and he isn't my friend any more.
3. I really wasted the opportunities I paid for as an undergraduate. I would like to do my undergraduate education over again. I don't know that I would make different choices, but I would pay attention, at least.

2. At the current moment, who has the most influence in your life?

My daughter. She rules my life. She determines my schedule, my priorities, my plans, my moods... and I wouldn't have it any other way, for now.

3. If you were given a time machine that functioned, and you were allowed to only pick up to five people to dine with, who would you pick?

1. My father. God, how I miss him.
2. My grandfather. He was a self-made man, and listening to these and these, I keep wishing I'd paid more attention to his stories.
3. My grandmother. What an amazing woman she was, and ahead of her time. She was a foot soldier in the Women's Liberation Movement. I should have spent more time with her.
4. My husband's grandparents. Both were immigrants (from different countries) who came to the U.S. in the early 1900s. There's a lot of lost history on that side of the family.

4. If you had three wishes that were not supernatural, what would they be?

1. Health, happiness and long life for my daughter. I'll count that as one wish.
2. Neo-conservatives everywhere realize that they are terribly, horribly wrong and the North American continent becomes a powerhouse for social progress.
3. "The media" develops a social conscience and strives for truth and clarity rather than advertising dollars and advancement of agendas.

5. Someone is visiting your hometown/place where you live at the moment. Name two things you regret your city not having, and two things people should avoid.

1. Regret: No beaches. I'm going to retire to someplace with big, sandy beaches.
2. Regret: Outside of the university, there's no place you can sit and hear people speaking a foreign language.
3. Avoid: Strip-mall Hell on the East side
4. Avoid: Engineered faux-city downtown Hell on the North side.

6. Name one event that has changed your life.

At a really low point in my life, I moved into a really dreadful apartment (no heat, cockroaches the size of sparrows) in a run-down little house across the alley from the man who is now my husband.

7. Tag 5 people.

Nope, sorry. Tag yourself, if you want. These meme things are starting to smell like chain letters.

How not to win friends and influence people.

Most of the journals in which I publish require authors to make their data available, within limits, to anyone who asks for them for a least a few years after publication. A message that looked kind of like this one popped into my mailbox this afternoon:

Dear Angry Professor,

Some time ago I requested the raw data for the studies that you published in [Social Science Journal]. I didn't get a response from you and I am now asking for the second time. If you have decided not to cooperate at least you could acknowledge my email.

Yours sincerely,

[Some Stranger]

Well! First, I can appreciate this person's frustration, as I have myself attempted to obtain data from authors of other studies. It came as a surprise to me, naive thing that I was, that relatively few authors will actually comply with the agreement they signed in order to get their study published. I have only had success obtaining data from authors that I know personally. This is a problem that my professional organization, who publishes these journals, should probably deal with at some point.

However, imagine, if you will, someone asking for your data for a study you published, say, two years ago. Most of the software that folks in my discipline use to collect data generate output files in proprietary formats. Rendering "the raw data" in a useful format requires (based on my afternoon's activities) at least a few hours of digging through old files, rechecking and repairing machine and experimenter errors, and then generating text files somehow.

Having seen both sides of the "can I have your data" scenario, the very last thing I would do to get the cooperation of the person who must put in all this effort to send me the data is to fire off a rude email insinuating that the author was an unprofessional hack trying to hide something. I would first try to determine if my original request^* had been received. But then again, this is probably a perfect example of how electronic messages can lead to misunderstandings and bad feelings.

^*The original message, which was conveniently attached to this missive, also contained the remark: "Our goal is to verify, by reanalyzing your data, the substantive claims made in your paper." Gee, thanks. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Why should I feel bad?

Last week I made a quick run to the grocery store. I parked in the middle of the parking lot and, as I was getting my daughter out of the back, a little dog shut in the car next to me stuck her nose through the crack her owner had left for her in the window.

It was blazing hot, 92F according to my nifty dashboard thermometer. It was in the middle of a parking lot with no shade, nothing but asphalt. I was concerned.

I decided that I would wait to do anything until I finished my shopping. I went in, picked up my stuff, paid, and came back to my car. The little dog was still there, now looking very, very uncomfortable. I loaded the groceries into the car and then went back in the store. I told the service manager about the dog. She paged the owner. I went back to my car and waited.

And waited, and waited. I got out of my car with my cell phone, getting ready to call the police, when a store employee walked by. As I was explaining to her how concerned I was, the owner of the dog finally strolled, leisurely, toward her car.

I should have guessed from the lacrosse stickers all over the car that this woman was going to be out of my social class, and she was. She was tall, lean, drop-dead gorgeous, with perfect hair and teeth. She was an LSU student, a rising senior by the look of it, but definitely not a student who would be caught in one of AP's classes. She was accompanied by her big, beautiful boyfriend who hung silently off her arm like a giant accessory. She saw us, me, and got a look on her face that suggested that she had just caught a whiff of something dead.

The ensuing dialogue went something like this:

AP: Thank god. I was really worried about your dog.

Girl: (coldly) My dog is fine.

AP: No, she's very uncomfortable.

Girl: (yelling) I was only in there for three seconds!

AP: (yelling) No you weren't! I've been in, done my shopping, and come back already! I was getting ready to call the police!

Girl: (still yelling) I take good care of my dog!

AP: (yelling even louder) Right! It's 92 degrees out here! (Girl gets into her car, glaring. Big Beautiful Boyfriend is still silent.) Next time I'm just going to call the police!

I felt terrible, and embarrassed. I wasn't polite, friendly, or constructive; from my perspective, she didn't give me the opportunity to be polite, friendly, or constructive. I had just had a shouting match with someone in a parking lot in front of my young daughter (who loved every minute of it).

But the story doesn't end there. We both drove out of the parking lot and down the street toward campus. She kept glaring at me from her rear-view mirror. She drove past my turnoff, and I went home and drank a huge glass of boxed wine. I thought some about where she must live (all the students in my neighborhood shop at that grocery store) and whether or not she was going to appear in any of my classes next year.

I was working in my front garden on Saturday when a familiar little dog ran into my yard. Sure enough, at the end of her leash was Big Beautiful Boyfriend. Great, he runs in my neighborhood, I surmised. Let's try not to think about how close he and she must live to me. Maybe a few blocks to the north, where all the student apartments are?

Last night I was walking my own little dog when Big Beautiful Boyfriend stepped out of his house with her little dog. He lives four houses up the street from ours. He's a good friend to friends of mine, who live next door. I know he's a decent guy because they've told me about him and how nice and helpful he is. He looked at me as if I was something he just scraped off his shoe.

I guess I'm just going to have to move.

The dog days of summer.

As an undergraduate I chose to attend LGU (Land Grant University), which was conveniently located in my home town. The beginning of summer there was heralded by the appearance of thousands of blue corduroy jackets stitched in gold: the young Future Farmers of America descended on the campus en masse in mid-June and departed again just as quickly by early July.

My previous institution, ILU (Ivy League University), celebrated the beginning of summer with Bible camps. I arrived to work early one morning to find the entire quadrangle covered with youngsters reading their Bibles in utter silence. The presence of so many humans in one place had driven away all the birds and small animals that usually occupied the quad, and the net effect was like walking into a sound-proofed room. My shoes made unholy clicking noises on the sidewalk as I tried to shuffle my sinful self through these hundreds of pure and certainly virginal scholars.

My present institution, LSU (Large State University), marks the beginning of summer with Freshman Orientation. The size of the incoming class is usually so large that Freshman Orientation takes place in shifts right up until August. Groups of two (Mom and Brandon/Kaitlyn) or three (Mom, Dad, and Brandon/Kaitlyn) move slowly through the campus walkways like little globs of bad cholesterol. Brandon/Kaitlyn always looks impatient, but grateful that s/he doesn't have to suffer orientation alone. Mom is always reading off times and locations from a printed schedule of events, and Dad is always at a dead stop, looking fiercely at a campus map while juggling at least one big plastic bag filled with LSU paraphernalia from the campus not-a-bookstore.

I used to be annoyed when I couldn't walk briskly along my chosen sidewalk. I used to tremble in grim anticipation of having Brandon as a student, after watching him and his parents, standing in front of a big sign declaring "University Hall," argue loudly about which way was University Hall. Now I am a little more charitable, because I know that will be me with my little Kaitlyn in not very many more years.

But I still wish they'd get out of the way. I have summer to enjoy, damnit!

No wannoo.

"No wannoo" is my daughter's favorite phrase. She says it frequently these days, usually when told that now is the time to change the diaper, take a bath, brush teeth, take a nap, come in and eat dinner, etc.

I agreed to serve on a dissertation committee for a man who audited one of my graduate-level courses a few years ago. His department renamed itself a few years ago to try to escape the stigma of their "science," but let's call it what it really is: Home Economics. Most (but not all) of the research in that department consists of poorly rehashed psychology, marketing, and food science. One of my colleagues made the mistake of agreeing to serve on a Home Ec committee right after she arrived here. She reports that the candidate had, among other grievous errors, misspelled more than one of the words in the title of his dissertation, and proudly reported p-values greater than 2. She was the only person on the committee who found fault with the candidate, and so the candidate was passed and received his Ph.D. She filed a grievance with the Graduate School and sent a copy of the dreadful dissertation to the dean for his perusal. Because of this kerfluffle the Graduate School now requires a unanimous vote for any candidate to pass.

When the Graduate School asks me to serve as the external member on dissertation committees, something we are required to do at least once a year, the offerings from the Home Ec department are the second ones that I cross off the list (right after all the offerings from the College of Education). So why did I agree to do this one? I just don't know. I was cornered, trapped, insane!

This gentleman would like to defend soon. But he doesn't just want me to show up at the defense, ask a few questions and then walk away. He wants me to read and comment on the rough draft of his dissertation. There's a message to this effect in my email box right now, staring at me, not blinking.

NO WANNOO! NO WANNOO!