An addition to my syllabus.

Informed Consent

I have read and understood the contents of the syllabus for SS 101 "Statistical Methods in Social Science" and agree to abide by the rules, guidelines and schedule contained within it. In particular, I understand that

1. Dr. Angry Professor also agrees to abide by the rules, guidelines, and schedule in the syllabus.
2. I will consult the syllabus if I have a question about the course rules, guidelines, and schedule.
3. Dr. Angry Professor cannot make special exceptions for me without being unfair to everyone else taking this course.
4. If I fail to sign and return this consent form I will still be held to the rules, guidelines, and schedule contained in the syllabus.

Signed,

____________________

An end.

A sweet and gentle man died last week. We celebrated his life in fine Italian-American fashion: we ate. And ate, and ate. If you pack a reception hall with four generations of Di's and 'ellis and 'ettos (first, second and third cousins), open the bar, give them lots of food, let the little kids run around like crazy, then a funeral feels just like a wedding. I definitely like it better that way. There's no reason to cry when you're surrounded with that much love.

He would have loved his funeral mass, too. He violently eschewed his own linguistic roots and tried to cultivate an "educated" speech in his children. The "Lahd's Prayah" recited in 100 relentless New England accents would have made him smile. Ah Fathah, who aht in heaven...

Rest in peace, Angry Father-In-Law. I will miss you.

In which I need help to rescue a tiny amphibian.

I am now a real estate magnate. Not only do I own a sweet little post-Victorian home in the university district, I also own a mold-free big little house in the woods. Angry Kid and I kicked around the empty house in the woods for an hour or so this evening waiting for the guy from the home security company to come by and give us an estimate on switching from the execrable ADT to another (local, independent) company. Unfortunately, he never showed.

We had a lovely time running back and forth through the empty house, finding all kinds of little treasures the previous owners left us. (A clock! Cooling racks! Toilet brushes!) We also spent some time in the cavernous basement, where we found it.

The basement is not dry. Even though the previous owners coated every wall with drylok as part of the mold abatement, there is still some water seeping under the footers. In the farthest, wettest corner of the basement, Angry Kid found some unhappy sowbugs and, snugged into the corner, a salamander no more than two inches long.

Here's where one or more of you biologists come in. The temperature has recently dropped from lovely and unseasonably warm to typical square-state winter (20F-30F). Wee salamander should be curled up sleeping somewhere outside. In my warm basement, I assume he will not sleep, but neither will he find food. What should I do? Should I take him outside into the cold? Leave him alone with the sowbugs? Tuck him under the plastic moisture barrier in the crawl space? Please help.

I lived in the woods as a kid, and the fragile salamanders were some of the loveliest mysteries of my childhood. While I am thrilled to find one in my basement, I am also heartbroken that my warm house might kill him. (Especially because my warm house is, by virtue of drylok and other mold abatement measures, no longer a friendly habitat for an amphibian.)

The speed of meme.

Link here: http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html. It's science.

And so it begins.

Dear Angry Professor,

I am A. Serious Student, and I am enrolled in your statistics class next quarter. I wanted to let you know that because I am going to [A Bowl Game], I will be missing a week of class. I can provide proof of this if necessary. I wanted to let you know in advance in case there is any work I will need to make up.

Thanks,
A. Serious

Dear Mr. Student,

Congratulations on getting tickets to [A Bowl Game]. I wish I could go too. However, [A Bowl Game] is not a legitimate excuse for me to cancel class, and neither is it a legitimate excuse for you to miss class. We will have several quizzes and exams next quarter, the dates for which I will announce on the first day of class. Only you can determine if [A Bowl Game] is worth the zeros you will receive as a result of making [A Bowl Game] a priority over your course obligations.

Sincerely,
A. Professor

Delicious.

Here is Ann Coulter's take on yesterday's election. She is not a good writer, and her facility with irony, sarcasm and metaphor has never been very strong. But this reads like a drunken rant. None of it makes any sense, except, I assume, to Ms. Coulter herself.

Still awake.

I am so, so happy to announce that this square red state is now a lovely shade of, if not blue, at least pale purple.

Thank you, thank you, thank you - to everyone who voted, and to everyone who spent time and money to get us to this point.

Maybe next year I'll be able to vote for my third-party candidates.

Can't... stop...

...watching the damn polls. I have to do something I'm ashamed of: pray.

Dear Sweet Jesus, Please wake up the electorate and send them to the polls tomorrow: Republicans, Democrats, and even the goddamned Greens. Please, God of Abraham, push all the little mistakes that inevitably occur to favor the non-incumbents, whatever and whomever they may be. Zeus, Thor, Cthulhu... smite any ignorant hillbillies who attempt to steal the election for anyone. Flying Spaghetti Monster, we need your noodly appendages now more than ever: put appropriate ID in everyone's pockets. Ramen.

I'm not going to work tomorrow. I voted absentee, and I'm working as an electioneer at my polling place in the morning, and then manning the phones at a local candidate's office in the afternoon. Take three friends with you to the polls tomorrow, and encourage everyone you see to vote.

By Elohim, get the fuck out there and vote! There is light at the end of this tunnel. Don't let Rove steal another one.

Update: I stood in the drizzling rain for several hours this morning. Wow, I saw a lot of really, really angry Democrats today! Another precinct had closed its doors and neglected to tell voters where their new polling place was. Several of these voters, understandably upset, yelled at me when I told them that no, this was not the church, this was the school, and they needed to drive four more blocks down the street. Freezing cold and hungry I ran home, grabbed a handful of Cheez-Its, checked my email, and then headed to not-my-congressman's office. Imagine my dismay when I was handed a plastic poncho and a clipboard and sent out canvassing. No warm telephone bank? OK, I'll do it. I headed to a VERY REPUBLICAN district to hand out voting information for not-my-DEMOCRATIC-congressman. I have a whole new respect for canvassers. Be nice to them, even when three or four come by during dinner on the same evening.

CNN reports that the gay marriage ban in Virginia has passed and carried the election for Allen. Could this be true? I'm sad.

Tranquility begins a slow wind down.

Many of you may have noticed that I have not been blogging as much as usual. This is because, as many of you know, I am not teaching this quarter, having earned a short sabbatical for teaching and service over and above the call of duty. I have been relaxed and happy, and have not had many frustrating student encounters to share. This is about to change.

My classes don't begin again until January, but already I am getting emails from students. Will the books be the same? Will I sign them in to the class even though they have a schedule conflict and will be 20 minutes late every day? Will I override the registrar's waitlist and sign them in? Do they have to buy all the books? They have trips planned, will it be okay if they miss two weeks of class in February?

These messages are a real buzz-kill. I can just delete them, right?

On citations.

Have you ever opened up your favorite journal and seen a new study that is not only in your line of research but also builds on work that you yourself have published? Now imagine flipping to the references (confess - we all go there first), and seeing your name... nowhere. How do you feel about this?

I got in the middle of a spat between one of my coauthors and an old friend last week. We submitted a paper to a journal that is not in my area, but in a business-related field. My old friend read the preprint that we sent him, and got very angry that we had not cited him. In truth, we did cite him, but apparently not enough: he sent us a list of the papers that, in his opinion, deserved mention in our paper, plus the half a dozen or so "foundational" papers that establish the theory. My friend accused me of not thinking highly enough of his "life's work" to put it in our paper. I managed to calm him down, but the episode left me thinking, not about him, but about the whole issue of who cites whom and how much.

My science addresses a huge system of mind-boggling complexity. When I do experiments to answer questions about how that system works, I sometimes get some really interesting data. However, I don't put much stock in those data, not because I'm such a terrible empiricist, but because I am certain that the questions we ask about this system are so naive that the answers to them will be, in the long run, irrelevant. Those social scientists among you know exactly what I mean: my entire discipline's summed scientific effort is that of a tiny worm eating its way through a 50 lb sack of flour.

While I have some faith in the theories that guide my research, I have no illusions that my mathematical models of the system or the data I collect will endure into the next decade. For me, this is all just a game. I get paid to work out puzzles: to propose clever but simplistic representations of a system that is going to take us at least another century or so to even begin to understand. Some people may interpret this as the attitude of a bad scientist; I would argue that it's the attitude of an honest one. I'll keep throwing my ideas against the wall, and if one or two of them stick I'll be pleasantly surprised. But I'm doing this for fun, not because I think I can eventually discover The Truth.

When my work isn't cited, I don't get upset about it. Either I assume that it was an oversight on the authors' part or I just shrug it off. I can't imagine wasting mental resources worrying about something so trivial. My ideas are published; what other people make of them is their own business. The only immediate effect that such oversights have is on my raise, which is calculated based in part on the "impact" (citations) my work is having in my field. But I didn't get into this line of work for the money.

Something you might have overheard recently in a public toilet.

Mommy: Okay, now it's my turn to use the potty.

Child: MOMMY, IS THAT BLOOD?

Mommy: Shhh! Yes, honey, I'm menstruating.

Child: MOMMY, DO YOU HAVE BLOOD IN YOUR BODY?

Mommy: Yes, honey. Everyone has blood in their body.

Child: MOMMY, CAN I SEE YOUR BLOOD?

Mommy: Shhh! Give me some privacy, please, sweetie.

Child: EEEW! THAT STINKS!

Mommy: GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THERE!

Child: MOMMY, THERE'S YOUR BLOOD IN THE TOILET!

Mommy: Shhh! Let's just go now, okay?

In which I feel icky.

In the past few years, our top-heavy department has begun hiring faculty at the junior level. I am very happy about this. My junior colleagues are smart and innovative and fun at faculty meetings. Furthermore, they are perceptive enough to smell bullshit and courageous enough to call it bullshit when they smell it.

LSU is a huge university, really, really huge. The faculty here outnumber the undergraduates at my former ILU. It is also an old university, which means we have a lot of old rules on the books, and rules built around those rules. We have a thick tottering layer of bureaucracy and administration that covers every aspect of our lives, from what we can spend our money on, to how many pizza lunches we are permitted per year, to what we have to do to remove long-defunct courses from the manual. We are also a state school, and Square State is very conservative toward higher education. The percentage of the budget coming from the state is now around 10%, but the state still dictates how the university operates, and sometimes the state's dicta are whimsical and nonsensical (cf. pizza lunches, above).

I tell candidates when they interview that every institution of higher education has a lot of bullshit piled around. You just need to know where not to step. LSU has a lot of bullshit, and unfortunately it's everywhere. Even so, and despite what I sometimes write on this blog, LSU is not a bad place to be. There are far worse places, believe me.

I had lunch with my young colleagues today, and I didn't have any fun. The lunch conversation consisted entirely of bitching about the university and the department. I remember well when I was just beginning, and many of my lunches then were also giant cathartic bitch-fests with my colleagues. But I have grown older.

Or have I become complacent? I have learned to work around and ignore the petty indignities that are visited on me by my administrators. (And when I say "administrators," I am not referring to my chair or my deans. I mean people like my grant manager, the departmental budget administrator, the secretaries down at LSU's research foundation, the receptionist who answers the phone for the IRB, and so on.) It seems to me now that this kind of bitching serves no purpose except to make people angry and more miserable than they were when the bitching started.

Revolutions have never been fomented in committee. Maybe bitching of this sort inspires faculty to force change when they eventually become chairs and deans. I, though, don't ever want to be a dean. I just feel tired and depressed.

Too busy to breathe...

In lieu of posting anything new, I give you this delightful piece, found via Pharyngula. Please spread it far and wide. Send it to your friends, post it on your blogs. Where have I been, that it took me a week to become aware of it?

The official end of my summer.

No, it wasn't the autumnal equinox, nor the first day of classes. It wasn't even the day that the "pro-life" fundies came back and paraded around the Quad waving large pictures of aborted fetuses.

It's today. Today I finished the 19th and last chapter of the book revision I've been working on since June. I didn't get those three papers in the mail, but the big bitch is done. Now I can go back to doing stuff that's fun (at least until my editor starts pestering me for an art manuscript). Woo-hoo!

Today is also the day of our first search committee meeting. Woo-hoo?

Random updates on a Thursday morning.

• A few days ago I got one of these. I love it! I've loaded almost all my favorite CDs onto it -- I only have DiMeola, Henry Mancini, and the Chairman of the Board left, and I still have lots of room.
• My Predict-O-Meter is swinging up, sitting at about 70% now. The couple who owns the house is "retiring" to Palm Springs, and they had really hoped to get there before this coming winter. The mold abatement team comes in on Saturday.
• With much dismay, I must report that welding is out for this quarter, until the mess gets resolved. So I'm taking Time Series, which I need for an ongoing collaboration with the course instructor anyway. I also found an electrical wiring course through our public school system, and I think that one is a definite eventually, too.

In which I marvel at the mystery that is my somatosensory cortex.

Almost exactly 3.5 years ago I had major surgery to remove a large parasite from my abdominal cavity. The surgery was a grand success. My oh-so-stubborn daughter, who was determined to remain comfortably in my womb in a breech position, was forcibly evicted. My obstetrician is some kind of surgical artist extraordinaire: I don't even have a scar, even though she was in a hurry to catch a plane.

What I do have is a 2 inch swathe of tissue across my belly with no sensation whatsoever. I have had other minor surgeries, so I am familiar with the (lack of) sensation that results when small nerves are unavoidably cut. I assumed that, given time, sensation would return to my belly just as it eventually did for all those other little cuts.

But no. In fact, not only has sensation not returned, but I have a phantom itch. A persistent, intense itch that has waxed and waned for almost exactly 3.5 years. Imagine, if you will, a large mosquito bite on the back of your hand, and trying to relieve the itch by scratching the air at a point in space about a foot removed from your body. You can scratch the air all you want, but the itch will still be there. Now imagine that the bite has been itching for 3.5 years.

I know all about Ramachandran's work with amputees and phantom sensation, but I'm damned if I know how to apply it to myself. My genius obstetrician (unapologetic for cutting some major nerve in my belly, although I am willing to forgive her) tells me that my only hope is Neurontin. Better living through chemistry!

A little pick-me-up.

The professoriate here at LSU are pretty grim this week. Classes have begun, and the hallways are not only crowded and noisy, but they even smell different: a combination of shampoo, cigarette smoke, and freshly sharpened pencils.

So here is some divine inspiration for y'all (thanks for the link, AB). Hang in there -- Thanksgiving break is just around the corner.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The coffee shop nearest our home is a popular hangout for LSU's "writers." The Angry family dropped in last Sunday for sweet, hot beverages and pastry. At a nearby table was a meeting of the university's Journalism club.

As the meeting was breaking up, I overheard one undergraduate talking to another about how she makes a little extra cash on the side. Ready for this one?

Copyediting.

Now I understand.

Sticking it to The Man, parts I and II.

• The Angry Baker just figured out a way to bypass his company's firewall prohibiting IM. I won't say how he did it, because I don't want to jinx it.
• With our realtor's help, we crafted our "To Do" list for the sellers of the big little house in the woods. It's comforting to know that, even if they do everything on the list, we can still walk away at the last minute if we feel the mold is intolerable. The list includes (of course) professional mold abatement, and many expensive modifications to the roof and venting of in-house ventilation systems, as well as a new furnace, new bedroom ceiling, new basement stairs, new flues... Everything will be fixed. Or we walk. I hope they fix it, but my personal Predict-O-Meter has that probability at about 20%. Consequently, we are making plans to plant trees in our (present) back yard.

In which our rose-colored glasses are torn off, stomped upon, and smashed into tiny little pieces.

Our house inspection was yesterday. You remember, the perfect big little house in the woods? You know it's a bad sign when, at the end of a 3.5 hour inspection, the inspector is visibly disgusted and shaking his head.

• There's a hole in the brand-new roof, caused by torn-off flashing. We've had a lot of rain the past few weeks.
• All the plumbing is do-it-yourself. 'Nuff said.
• Neither of the "Two Wood-Burning Fireplaces!" are safe to operate, although the owners have been doing so. One has a big hole in the flue and must be lined, the other has a big open space between the liner and the masonry which has allowed creosote to seep through the brick and onto the livingroom walls.
• Both bathrooms and the fancy range hood are vented into the (unventilated) attic.
• Furnace: 22 years old, would not fire up.
• Gas line: very old, failure is imminent.
• Brand-new patio door frame: rotten.
• Basement stairs: rotten.
• The front bedroom, which has three exterior walls, has seen extensive water damage. The water has poured down the inside of the walls on all three sides. The ceiling tiles, affixed to failing plaster, are going to come crashing down in days, if not hours.
• The brand-new electrical panel is just for show: 100 amp service.
• Crawlspaces are filled with discarded construction materials, including concretized sacks of concrete and old lumber (i.e., termite food). There are no vapor barriers anywhere, just mud.
• MOLD. Mold. Mold, mold, mold mold mold. Mold in the attic, mold in the trashed front bedroom. Mold under the shiny new paint? Did I mention the mold? MOLD. On the walls, on the rafters. Mold.

Last night the Angry Baker and I were so skeeved we couldn't even think about living in the place. After a night's sleep, I feel a little better about the situation. Either the owners fix it or we stay right where we are. No way in hell are we dropping over $300K into a "fixer-upper."

And after they fix it, we still want a mold inspection.

More decisions.

Because I am on "sabbatical" this quarter, I want to take a class. Here are my options:

• Physics (the introductory one for physics majors)
• Welding
• Time Series (a fun refresher, taught by a collaborator)
• French Conversation (this would probably require that I test for "placement," ichh)
• Chemistry (inorganic)
• Some other fun math or statistics course (Integral Equations? Topology?)
• Woodworking (this is my top choice, but I can't find a class, not at LSU nor any of the community colleges)

I have too many decisions to make right now. Someone just tell me what to do.

Congratulate us.

We have a contract on the big little house in the woods. Now excuse me while I go liquidate my retirement account.

The list of things to repair and remedy in our current place before it lists next week, as given to us by the interior decorator who we hired for this purpose, extends to three pages and includes having a moving company come in early and put about half our clutter in storage.

Clutter? My gigantic oak "Sunday paper" coffee table is clutter? Them's fightin' woids.

Random happy stuff.

• All around the blogosphere, grouchy professors are meeting their students for the first time.
  • LSU is on the quarter system. We still have a month before they come back.
  • I am on sabbatical this fall! I don't have to see 'em until January!
• After much agonizing, fighting, and hand-wringing, we have decided to upgrade our living arrangements. Yesterday we viewed a perfect big/little house out in the woods, but still as close to campus as we are now. I want this house so badly! Why?
  • It's quirky. Must have lots of quirk in my house.
  • Two working fireplaces.
  • Two full bathrooms.
  • Door to the back yard from the master bedroom. Can anyone say, "jacuzzi?" Anyone? Anyone?
  • All one level, a huge monstrous basement, but the laundry is upstairs! Hooray!
  Now I have to control myself, let the Angry Baker make up his own mind without me whispering "gimme gimme gimme" in his ear, and try not to think about the thousands of other people who no doubt would walk over corpses to steal this house away from us.
• The Angry Family. Aren't they beautiful?
  
  

My father's death.

The Angry Baker's father is very sick. We learned last month that what was originally diagnosed as Parkinson's Disease is in fact a rare combination of both Parkinson's Disease and amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The ALS is progressing at the expected rate: horribly quickly, and yet too slowly.

I lost my dear father over a decade ago, and so I have been through much of what the Angry Baker is soon to experience. It isn't just my father's gone-ness that hurts. I also had to watch my father change into a different person, lose his intellectual gifts, become incontinent, and experience all the other indignities visited upon the terminally ill. Consequently, I not only lost my papa, I lost my brightest memories of him. When I dream of him now, he is irrational and sick, not the brilliant scientist who once helped me solve an important, tricky problem, nor the gifted teacher who taught me the secret of how to grade on a straight scale. As an adult living far from home, those memories were perhaps more precious to me than the man himself.

My stepmother called me in desperation (and at the behest of social workers) in the middle of a hot, hot summer. I bought a one-way ticket, and arrived at my childhood home the day after I got her call. What I found was, it seemed at the time, too horrible to bear. Papa was wheelchair bound. He was unrecognizable, because he had developed Cushing's syndrome, a side-effect of the massive amounts of steroids he was taking. He was petulant and demanding, and ran my stepmother ragged keeping up with his childish whims. He was also inhospitable and embarrassed. He didn't want me to witness his deterioration.

I can't remember now how long I was there. Was it weeks, or maybe months? My stepmother and I hid inside the house, caring for him when he was awake, turning him when he slept, doing jigsaw puzzles and watching old movies together. Friends and neighbors brought us food. Sometimes we went for a walk around the block when the hospice nurse came, but it was too hot and we were always happy to go back inside.

His hospital bed was in his bedroom, pushed close to the bed that he had shared with my stepmother. We all slept together in that room, so that I could help her change his sheets and turn him in the middle of the night. Like a little girl, I held his hand through the rails of his bed while I slept.

As the days passed, he awoke only for brief periods, and was less cogent every time he awoke. He would ask one of us to read to him, as he had lost his sight a few weeks earlier. Eventually he stopped asking. We stopped feeding him, because he couldn't swallow. Only a day later, he stopped urinating, his lungs filled with fluid that rattled when he breathed, and then early the next morning the rattling stopped. I sat on the bed and watched him for a long time.

I lost (most of) my fear of death that morning as I watched his body turn gray and cool. It was so very natural, I thought. You're born, which is an amazing event, and you die, which is another amazing event. I realized that with good care, which my father was fortunate enough to have, death can be almost beautiful: painless, dignified, and, for those of us who remain, life-affirming. I realized that Dr. Jack Kevorkian is a sick fuck, and that a good physician can help his/her patients die without murdering them. I decided that day to have a child. I realized that religion had nothing left for me. I stopped calling myself an agnostic and became a joyous, unrepentant convert to atheism. I grew up. I didn't think I could live without my papa, but I've managed okay so far.

The Angry Baker returned home yesterday from the first of many trips he will make to help his father die. My dearest love, this is probably the hardest thing you will ever do. But it is also the most wonderful, most important thing you will ever do, and I love you all the more for it.

It would be so easy for you to just stay home and let the nurses do it all. My siblings chose not to share my father's death, and so they carry their memories of him intact. You will never regret going back, even though it means you will never be able to clearly remember your father without also remembering how sick he is now. Your strength and courage, and the love on which that strength is based, take my breath away.

I know your crushing grief, and how keenly you feel your regrets. I hope that you can embrace your grief and find some beauty in your father's death.

The foul and disgusting Sylvia Browne.

After packing the car last week, I grabbed my knitting and turned on the tube to wait for the Angry Baker to get home. I was fortunate enough to hit "record" just as this aired. Here is a copy from youtube.

Watch the evil Sylvia Browne crash and burn. Watch how she doesn't give a shit who she hurts. It's all about her, after all.

Some light reading for a short vacation.

Part Two, Chapter 9, Section 5, Subsection 1:

"Under established International Law, you are considered a belligerent until captured. As long as the national uniform is worn, soldiers are considered to be under orders to evade capture, and not to surrender voluntarily. This entitles you to commit acts of violence against legitimate military targets without the risk of prosecution after capture for violation of the local criminal law. For example, it would be permissible to kill, in the line of duty, any of the enemy who may impede your effort to evade capture. Such entitlement does not extend to you as an escapee. Such a killing by you as an escapee would be considered murder and you would be liable for trial and punishment."


I'm off to the woods until Monday. Have a great weekend!

Making the hard decisions.

Do I want an iPod, when all I really need is a digital AM/FM radio for the gym?

In which I ponder the budget.

Several years ago LSU moved to a business model budget. Under this model, each department has control over its own funds. We might choose, for example, to give everyone a big raise. Or, we might choose to hire new faculty. We might purchase equipment, or furniture.

As with all such schemes, the administration makes sure that they will get money from somewhere to sustain their bloated salaries. Each department pays a "tax" to the college, which is determined by enrollments and indirects as earned in "Year Zero" (the year before the new budget took effect). If the department fails to generate at least the enrollments and indirects earned in this year, the college will take the shortfall out of the departmental budget. We're not talking about that funny fake money that colleges usually shuffle around, but real dollars: my raises.

You can imagine what this has done to inter-departmental relationships. It was hard enough to get department chairs to sign off on interdisciplinary grant proposals before, and now it's almost impossible. Each chair wants the indirects to go exclusively to his/her department, or they quibble for weeks over who is getting the larger percentage. There is no incentive to establish research "centers," which have no budgets of their own and which funnel indirects away from the departments. We used to have really strong centers in Population Studies, Cognitive Science, etc., but they are now moribund.^*

Each department is now in direct competition with every other for undergraduate enrollments. Sexy majors are being trotted out every year, like "Visual Communication" and "Forensic Sociology." In the social sciences, every department is trying to offer statistics courses in house, so we now have about 8 courses titled "Introduction to Statistics in [insert department name here]." Because all new course offerings must be approved by a college level committee, many of these redundant courses are being offered under old course numbers and titles: "Applications of Industrial/Organizational Psychology" is now "Introduction to Statistics in Psychology," but you wouldn't know that by looking in the student handbook. The Engineering College is fighting to (wait for it!) offer all core curriculum classes in house, including the writing core, History, and foreign languages.

The new budget has erased some of the lines between pots of money that used to be sacrosanct. New construction and building renovation were once paid for from a "capital improvements" budget, but no more. One department in my college is responsible for several million dollars of the construction costs associated with their new building. My department and several others have taken advantage of the new model by "firing" the custodial staff provided by Physical Facilities and hiring a private contractor to keep the bathrooms looking spiffy. I must say, the bathroom has never looked cleaner, and my office carpet has been vacuumed for the first time in several years.

But shiny, fresh-smelling toilets will only go so far. I see nothing but disaster on the horizon. The strongest departments in the college are struggling to maintain the numbers established in Year Zero, and are starting to lose faculty members as a result.^* Since the new budget was established, we have not had one faculty meeting in which we discussed curricular issues from a teaching and training perspective; we have only discussed strategies for getting more butts in the lecture hall. Departments within the college are fighting with each other, rather than forging interdisciplinary programs. There is no hope at all for Humanities and Fine Arts.

Only two groups of people seem to be benefitting from this model: the deans and the marginal-at-best departments. The dean no longer has to make the hard decisions about which programs to support and which to cut. S/he no longer has to deliver bad news, but only sits back and watches the marketplace in action. The marginal departments, the ones with the lowest possible academic standards, are pulling in vast numbers of warm bodies and the tuition dollars associated with them.
The departments that formerly only provided degrees to the football players are now thriving.

The system can't possibly last much longer. Eventually LSU is going to drop so far in the national rankings that someone will realize that the business model must be scrapped. Someone in the administration must recognize that higher education can't be sold like burgers at McDonald's. Someone will have the guts to tell the trustees that a university is not supposed to make a lot of money, and that we should strive for academic excellence above all else. The provost who championed this system has left LSU to plunder some other university, and surely no one wants this to continue any longer than it has already.

Right? Right?

^*My best friend's husband had a chaired position in Political Science, and he established the Population Studies Center. The dean then refused him any budget from the indirect costs generated by the Center's own funding. He left to take a faculty position at a real university, and took my friend with him. Yeah, I'm a little bitter.

Guilt.

The Angry Kid found one of these beauties creeping across the sidewalk yesterday. She fell in love, and so I went to find a mason jar. I stuffed it full of damp Queen Anne's lace and popped in Mr. Caterpillar on a nice sturdy stick. Of course I nailed some holes in the lid before screwing it down. He crawled around inside the jar for a while and then settled down on a comfortable part of the stick.


The problem is that Mr. Caterpillar had kind of a rough time before we installed him safely in the jar. He was dropped from great caterpillar heights several (3) times. The Angry Kid learned that if you poked him, cool orange things would pop out of his head and he would squirt something foul-smelling.

Because he was fully mature and crawling around on the ground, I expected him to pupate. Sure enough, this morning he was still on the stick, and had pasted his tail down with a glob of silk. But he was strangely quiet, and seemed smaller somehow.

To make matters worse, I had promised the Angry Kid she could share Mr. Caterpillar with her preschool friends. We took him in this morning, and I left his jar on a table in the classroom.

I think I killed him.

Update. The Angry Kid's teacher must have convinced her that Mr. Caterpillar would be happier outside. So he was stuffed into a "hole in a bush" (AK's words). At least I don't have to throw a teeny tiny funeral.

Update 2. The Angry Kid's teacher told me today that the caterpillar was alive at the time of his release. Furthermore, the preschool class checked on him today and he was gone. I suspect he was transformed into bird food. The Angry Kid is convinced he transformed into a butterfly. Who am I to argue?

Blogging on the road: The final chapter.

I am now President of my society. (Pause modestly for applause.) This is not as impressive as it sounds. Members of the society are elected to the Executive Board for six years, two new board members every two years. The presidency is handed off to the board members who have been on the longest. Becoming society President is like being the last roll of toilet paper under the sink.

Nonetheless, being on the Executive Board and the Editorial Board of our journal means that I have to go to a lot of meetings while at the conference. Committees are formed, reports are made, budgets are examined. It's way more fun than hanging out in the hotel bar with the friends who were the real reason that I came to the conference in the first place.

Which brings me to my story. We have a relatively new member of the society; let's call him Dr. Bane. Is it possible for one person out of 150 to make us all so miserable that we are ready to disincorporate the entire society just to make him go away? I am here today to testify that yes, such noxious personalities exist, and yes, Dr. Bane is just such a person.

The society was incorporated about 40 years ago, and many of the original founders still regularly attend (and present). Dr. Bane, unknown to all of us, even our founders, arrived three years ago and has never introduced himself to anyone. I presume he believes that introductions are unnecessary for luminaries such as himself. Secure in the knowledge that we all know who he is, he asks us who we are, repeatedly. I have given my name three times. One of my colleagues has introduced himself to him five times. After my presidency was announced at the banquet, he greeted me with a jeering, "Hi, [not my first name]."

I didn't bother to correct him. I do not like Dr. Bane. I won't go into all the things Dr. Bane has said and done over the past three years. Suffice it to say he is offensive both in appearance and opinion, and his research is uninteresting. Topics of conversations with him are usually oriented around his own intelligence. He seems to be delusional: He regularly tells undergraduate and graduate students that he and he alone founded not only our society but our discipline itself. He "invented it," he says.

Since his first appearance three years ago, I've been complaining to the other members of the Executive Board about Dr. Bane. Our officers are, for the most part, absent-minded professors of the meek and mild variety. They dismissed my complaints as the rantings of a premenstrual woman. But everything changed this year: Dr. Bane crashed the board meetings.

Our board meetings are conducted over lunch. Dr. Bane has never seen food that he didn't eat, and when he saw the buffet table past the open door, he came right on in and sat down next to me. I told him that the seat was taken, by the journal Editor no less, but he sat there anyway. He filled a plate with food. The Editor tried to explain that this was the Editorial Board meeting. Dr. Bane started eating. We were helpless.

The meeting commenced, beginning with a report of number of manuscripts submitted, rejected, accepted, etc. The Editor had to stand, as there weren't enough seats. Dr. Bane mumbled, "Oh, I guess I shouldn't be here." Then he picked up the journal report documents (with "Confidential" printed across the page) and perused them carefully. We worked our way through the report. When Dr. Bane didn't understand something, he pressed for information. He offered his opinions. He had new business. He filled his plate with food three times.

The other officers of the society suddenly realized that Dr. Bane was a problem. The Executive Board meeting was over lunch on the following day, but in a different room. Even knowing that he hadn't been welcome at the Editorial Board meeting, he attempted to attend the Executive Board meeting as well. After turning him away once, we posted a hotel guard at the door. Despite successfully repelling him, by the time we held the General Business meeting later that afternoon (to which all society members are invited), he somehow had knowledge of the items on our agenda.

I suppose it is pure coincidence that last week I wrote a short piece on territoriality, and the ways that people can infringe on other people's territory: invasion, violation, or contamination.^* We've been invaded. Dr. Bane has entered our space for the purpose of controlling it. At least now I'm not the only one who knows it.

^*My research has nothing to do with territoriality.

Blogging on the road II.

There is a crazy person at the conference this year. This is not unexpected: our discipline attracts a certain number of these people. Because we are lazy about reviewing submitted abstracts, the moonbats are occasionally given a platform to speak. Because our discipline is mathematical, these presentations usually involve quantum mechanics or Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Dr. Moonbat, unaffiliated with any academic or scientific organization, presented a poster last night. Most poster boards have an area of about 8'x4'. This was not enough: he had printed his poster on pieces of glossy stock, maybe 17"x11", and covered the surface of the board. Pieces around the side were affixed by their edges, so that they stuck off into thin air and encroached on the neighboring poster. Each panel had its own title: "Local Lorentz Symmetry," "de Broglie Equation." There was no presentation title, no abstract, and no conclusions. The panels were arranged in seemingly random order. If you read the panels vertically, the first equation encountered was (4); horizontally, (19). There were at least three Equation (19)s, each completely different.

Mostly everyone avoided Dr. Moonbat like the plague, but a few kind souls wandered by and asked about his research. Dr. Moonbat launched into his presentation with the fervor of a television evangelist. When he noticed me watching from a slight distance, he motioned me over excitedly, trying to draw me in. I absent-mindedly wandered away (behavior typical of those in my discipline).

Later that night in the hotel bar, I noticed him alone at the bar. He seemed pretty drunk, or maybe just insane. He tried to engage the bartender in conversation, and when that failed, he tried to enjoin a nearby table of tourists. It only required a few sentences for the tourists to realize that this friendly stranger had issues; they switched from speaking English to German in an attempt to get him to go away. It worked.

While there is a certain tragic air surrounding Dr. Moonbat, I don't feel too badly for him. He is gainfully employed. He could afford plane tickets and the hotel room to come here. He has a rich fantasy life. He has a hobby. We should all be so lucky.

Blogging on the road I.

I am at a conference in a large Canadian city. Getting to the conference hotel was a bit of a challenge, because there is a four-day festival of sorts and the downtown streets were packed with revelers. I was stuck on an airport bus for an hour with two "ugly Americans."

The ugly Americans were befriended by a city native, and one of the nicest guys I've ever overhead. He gave them a guided tour of the city as we slowly drove through the crowds. Upon hearing that the festival was celebrated with fireworks, one of them asked how Canadians celebrated the Fourth of July. It took all of my self-control not to lurch out of my seat and give him a dope-slap. The Canadian patiently explained about Canada Day; the ugly American seemed comforted that Canada Day falls on July 1 -- close enough to July 4.

I'm trying to think of how this week could be more awful.

I've been home for a few days. Does anyone have any hints for numbing the pain of hand-foot-mouth blisters? We've tried the Maalox thing, and it was not very popular. I just tried a Sucrets, and it was spit out with similar disdain. Before I try and talk the pediatrician out of a lidocaine prescription, is there anything else we should try?

Happy? Successful? Thin?

A recent post by Ianqui has me thinking about weight, body image and success for women in academics. As a rough estimate, I'd say about 50% of the young women in my field have had or are currently battling an eating disorder. Of my close friends and colleagues over the past decade, that proportion is staggeringly higher (like, all but two or three).

For example, one of my deans has a problem. This is common knowledge among all the women in the college. At official functions involving food she orders salad with lemons (no dressing). In the middle of the meal she excuses herself to go to the ladies' room, where she purges. She is painfully thin, and extraordinarily successful. Not only is she a dean, but she ranks among the top researchers in her department. She is in her early 30s.

I've been there, too. I am 5'9". In graduate school, around the time of my qualifying exams (and my divorce), I weighed about 95 lbs. I wore a size 2. I felt empowered and happy. Not having to eat made me feel strong and warm - a strange feeling that I've never been able to describe, but "warm" captures it as well as anything.

Then I met the Angry Baker, and he got me back into the habit of eating again. That's the stage at which I was: sub-clinical. Not eating wasn't yet a compulsion, but a habit I had developed. This habit was inconsistent with keeping an Italian lover whose favorite hobby was food. I was back up to 115 lbs within a few months of taking him into my bed.

My problems with anorexia are long behind me, but it's telling, I suppose, that even now I don't feel like it was a real "problem." I know that many professional women struggle with eating disorders. However, it seems as though the Academy has a disproportionate number. Perhaps it's just the social sciences, or my discipline, or maybe just me?

It's Monday.

What do you expect to find when you come into your office after a weekend? Maybe a precariously stacked pile of papers slid onto the floor? Your least-favorite student shoved a term paper (due Friday) under your door sometime between 5 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Monday? The custodian unplugged your computer so that she could plug in her vacuum cleaner? My colleague in the office next door once left her windows open and a squirrel came in and partied all weekend long -- what a mess!

But me? The last thing I expect is to see two big, brown, sagging ceiling tiles and puddles of brown tea on my desk. There are gooey, sticky puddles around my keyboard, mouse, and coffee cup, and my monitor is covered with brown "splash." All this in itself would be bad enough, but guess what was under those ceiling tiles...

...First editions. First editions of books by authors with names like "James," "Scheffé," "Student," and "Luce," many with the original dust jackets, dust jackets now hopelessly pasted together. Some were signed by the author. Some were given to me by the author, and some were given to me by other authors whose work I have admired and studied and who were inspired by these books. While they are still valuable to me because I know where they came from and I can still read the words, they are now worthless to anyone else who cares about books.

I can't even cry. I'm too numb.

Update: I spent yesterday afternoon assessing the damage. It looks like only two important books were seriously damaged. Two others had some water damage but not enough to make me cry. The three that were completely destroyed were my (my) undergraduate textbooks in my main discipline and Methods, plus a softcover on critical thinking.

I found this link, and spent a lot of time playing with paper towels. Unfortunately the two books I really wanted to save were printed on glossy stock, and it wasn't so much a matter of drying them out as it was getting the pages unstuck. I managed, but not without damaging a few pages.

I'm going to ask my chair about compensation. I read over the university rulebook yesterday, and I didn't see anything in there about liability.

In which I clean out my mailbox.

Messages from a statistics student, "Claire," by week:

Week 2: Hello! I am a student in your stats class. I have been very sick this week and missed both lectures. I know I have missed a lot but I was curious if there was any way I could talk to you and you could fill me in on what I missed or something like that. Please get back with me and let me know what I need to do. Thank you!!!

Week 3: I never recieved a syllabus because I was late the first day and I asked someone in class and he said it was on-line and that you did not pass one out??? I couldn't find it on-line anywhere. I am very sorry for the inconvienence, but I had to go to court on the day of the quiz!!! I can show you some documentation if you need me to. I am very sorry about all this. Thank you.

Week 5: Hello, I am in your statistics class. I emailed you about how i had to be in court so i could not take the first quiz. I frankly forgot about it until today when we took the second quiz. I think i still have my proof that shows i needed to be in court if you need to see it. I was wondering if there was any way I can somehow make it up. Please get back with me sometime soon. Thank you very much.

Week 6: Hello, I was wondering if I could stop in your office sometime and give you my proof that I had to miss the first quiz to be in court. I also wanted to talk to you about the class. Please let me know when a good time would be. I could do any time tomorrow, thursday, or friday after 3:00. Thank you very much!

Week 8: Hello, I emailed you a while ago about wanting to come in and see you. I need to talk with you about making up the first quiz because I have an excuse for not being there and I had a question or two about some of the information that was on the second midterm. Please get back with me with a time I can come in and see you. I am done after 3:00 every day. Thank you very much

Week 10: I am in your statistics class and I had talked to you about an excuse for missing the first quiz. You said you would excuse this quiz and average the grades for the last two quizzes. I just realized that I missed the second one because I was sick and the third one I was late to class because my alarm did not go off and so I missed that one too. I know I am very close to a D and was wondering what could be done. Please get back with me. It has been a very crazy quarter for me and there have been a lot of changes going on and it has affected my school work. I am sorry about all of this but thank you for you help.

You make the call! What was Claire's final statistics grade?

It makes as much sense as any other religion.

From The Truth (pp. 252-253), by Terry Pratchett (which I just finished):

      "What do you think happens to people when they die, Tulip?"
      Mr. Tulip was taken aback.
      "What kind of ---ing question is that? You know what happens!"
      "Do I?"
      "Certainly. Remember when we had to leave that guy in that ---ing barn and it was a week before we got to bury him properly? Remember how his --"
      "I don't mean bodies!"
      "Ah. Religion stuff, then?"
      "Yes!"
      "I never worry about that ---ing stuff."
      "Never?"
      "Never ---ing give it a thought. I've got my potato."
      Then Mr. Tulip found that he'd walked a few feet alone, because Mr. Pin had stopped dead.
      "Potato?"
      "Oh, yeah. Keep it on a string round my neck." Mr. Tulip tapped his huge chest.
      "And that's religious?"
      "Well, yeah. When you die, if you've got your potato, everything will be okay."
      ..."Even if..." Mr. Pin swallowed, for he was in territory that had never before existed on his internal atlas, "...even if you've done things that people might think were bad?"
      "Like chopping up people and ---ing shovin' 'em off cliffs?"
      "Yeah, that kind of thing.."
      Mr. Tulip sniffed, causing his nose to flash. "We-ell, it's okay so long as you're really ---ing sorry about it."

Scenes from the municipal pool.

I try not to be judgmental, but I have to wonder about mothers who tattoo "Fuck Off!" on their legs.

[Updated to avoid having to edit the plural from the title:] And then there was the mom with a perfect imprint of a man's hand in bruise on her upper arm. Her partner, whose hand probably matched the bruise, was covered with abrasions.

And then there are the women who stay all day at the pool. Their wrinkly hides are tanned a dark and evil red brick color. Again I'm trying not to be judgmental, but do you think they think they look good in that condition?

I suppose I should have titled this post "Skins from the municipal pool."

The Angry Kid comments on current events.

"Hezbol-LAH, Hezbol-LAH... Hezbo-BUTT, Hez-BUTT, Hez-BUTT... CHEEZE-butt, CHEEZE-butt... Cheeze-BOTTOM, Cheeze-BOTTOM, Cheeze-BOTTOM, Cheeze-BOTTOM!"

Why can't I eat my favorite foods?

Things that make my stomach hurt:^*

Avocado

Almonds

Banana

Cantelope

Mango^**

Peaches

I can't find any compound that these foods have in common. This situation really breaks my heart. I could live on bananas. And really, is there anything more sublime than an almond, if not a ripe peach? Is there any reason to continue living?

My physician has been singularly unhelpful, saying only that if it hurts I should avoid it. Gee, thanks. I was having trouble figuring that out myself.

I guess I'll always have butter.

^*Hurt? Well, how about double-me-over in pain because demons have built a campfire somewhere in the vicinity of my duodenum? A glass of beer sometimes helps reduce the nauseating burn a little, but frequently I just have to go to bed and not move.

^**Just to be funny, mango will also kill me. My last mango sent me to the emergency room, where I was introduced to I.V. Benedryl. If the hives hadn't crept over my genitalia and if I had been able to get air reliably into my lungs, I might have enjoyed the experience.

It's never too early to shop for Christmas.

I think it was Ianqui who first directed my attention to these adorable plush toys. These toys opened my mind to the exciting potential of acrylic fake fur.

Now Kevin tells me about the plush microbe. The Angry Kid will definitely be getting some of these. I think she'd really like giardia, and probably helicobacter pylori.

Hell, I'll just get her the whole set, and she can have Athlete's Foot, bad breath, pimples, and Epstein-Barr, too.

Why not toenail clippers, too?

I am proud to report that the Angry Baker and I spent less than $700 on our wedding, including the rings and my dress. Our rings are plain 22K gold bands purchased in the local Indian market. (They have a lovely rich color and, after all these years, a nice scratchy patina.) We catered a large party in our home, and the only thing we really splurged on were the cheeses. We had no wedding cake, but instead got an assortment of small cakes from the local Italian bakery.

We neglected to inform the friends and family invited to our nuptial celebration that we had in fact, after years of cohabiting, actually tied the knot. Hence, the only gifts that people brought were bottles of wine or six-packs of beer. We didn't have millions of thank-you notes to write for gifts we didn't want in the first place, and we didn't put our many friends still in graduate school under any obligation to spend money that they didn't have.


A good time was had by all, except the cats. They had to be shut up in the bathroom all day, after my mother-in-law caught them sampling the cheeses.

The Angry Baker and I still look back on that day with great nostalgia, and both of us can say without hesitation that it was one of the best days of our lives together. We have no regrets about how we chose to marry or celebrate our marriage. We also like to think that our friends and family remember it as one of the more joyous and honest wedding receptions they have attended.

So we were both stymied by an invitation to a cousin's wedding shower we received in the mail yesterday. Included with the shower invitation was a list of over half a dozen stores where the happy couple has registered their gift wishes. Their registry listings are endless. It must have taken them months to pick out all these items. They range from the usual, like specific dinner service pieces in specific patterns or towels in a particular color, to the bizarre and inappropriate. For example (I'm not making this up): a nose-hair trimmer.

My cousin's peculiar lack of decorum does not make us look happily forward to her celebration. Can the couple not see that asking for a nose-hair trimmer trivializes what should be one of the most important days in their lives? Or, if you want to get really pragmatic about it, how do they expect to word the thank-you note? "Dear Aunt Polly, Thank you so much for the nose-hair trimmer. Justin has always wanted a comfortable and efficient way to tame those tickly bastards, and it really does the trick. As we continue our lives together, throughout the years, we will always remember you and our special day whenever we use it."

We don't go to weddings any more. We were never very fond of the spectacle^* in the first place, and even back in our day the naked greed was often palpable. However, we had planned to go to this one. Now we're thinking we should just stay home. We have other cousins, nieces and nephews who will probably marry some day.


^*There was a brief period back in the '80s when going to weddings was a bit like watching stand-up comedy: that era when the happy couples believed that writing their own vows was ever so much more deeply meaningful than using a traditional program. One exchange of vows I witnessed had the groom praising his bride for her prowess in bed. Another had the participants (both eager graduate students at the time) describing how their union was going to make them much better teachers.^** Thankfully, the not-yet-married who were forced to endure these awkward sentiments and painfully embarrassing revelations managed to reverse this disturbing trend.

^**That marriage lasted less than 8 months. The couple who focused their vows on the bedroom instead of the classroom are still married. Hmm...

Is a good thing just around the corner?

I recently saw a beautiful short man in a coffee shop. (Note that I have never fallen in love with any man taller than myself.) I won't go into all the ways he could have made me weak in the knees, had the Angry Baker not so thoroughly weakened them already himself. He was mysterious, too: he pulled out his wallet to pay for his food and interesting sparkly hardware fell out, with "POLICE" prominently emblazoned above all the metallic bits and pieces.

The most exciting thing about him, though, were his big-framed glasses. The lenses went down below his cheekbones in a comforting '80s kind of way. Oh, I envied them so. Just think of all that landscape that could be devoted to my presbyopia correction! To be able to see, really see again, through more than the quarter-inch of lens at the very bottom of my ridiculously trendy narrow glasses!

If cool, hunky men are wearing big glasses, does that mean I can wear them again too? I promise not to half-tint the lenses pink.

"It's a Hummer."

Las Vegas stands out on the American landscape like Ski Dubai on the Arabian Peninsula. Even though the hotels use less water than you think (given the tropical greenery, water displays, misty evaporative cooling systems, and green lawns so perfect they look like astroturf) the contrast between the carefully contrived tropical illusion and the surrounding natural desert landscape makes me ashamed to visit and consume just that much more water.

Our trip was not very pleasant this year. Angry Father-In-Law is declining, and it was hard to see this once active and intellectual man struggle with simple tasks like walking and talking. He and I used to have great conversations, as we share some common research interests, and now he is unable to speak (although he is still lucid).

The last time we visited Las Vegas, Angry Baker and I spent a good deal of time hiking in the surrounding desert. There is no place on Earth more eerily beautiful than Death Valley; Red Rock Canyon has to be seen to be believed. Most of our positive recollections of Las Vegas came from these experiences. But now there is the Angry Kid.

We were unwilling to take the Angry Kid hiking in 110F heat, no matter how much the Angry Baker and I might enjoy the experience. This meant we had to stay on the Strip. If you don't gamble, and you don't like shopping malls, you will not have much fun on the Strip. We don't gamble, and we don't like shopping malls.

The Angry Kid had great fun in the hotel pool, slathered in SPF 60 sunblock. When we couldn't stand the sun any more, we took her to see the fake canal boats in the Venetian, or the moving statues in the fountain at Caesar's Palace. So, pretty much all we did was watch water evaporate into the desert air. (And Angry Baker lost $20 playing video poker.)

Things overheard on an airplane.

Oh, there were so many to choose from. Here are my favorites:

Flight attendant, to an elderly passenger: Is that a good book?
Elderly passenger: Well, I just started it. But I saw it in the bookstore and the salesperson told me that it's required reading in a lot of schools.
Flight attendant: Wow, really? Required? What's it about?
Elderly passenger: A boy's school.

Someone not currently employed as a math teacher: To declare my major they said I had to take Calculus III. Now, why on earth would I need Calculus III to teach math?

Someone else: Oh, I'm not at all adventurous. Sushi, Korean food, my husband eats that stuff but I can't stand it. Now, Chinese food, I love Chinese food. Have you been to P.F. Chang's?

In which I take a short vacation.

I have spent the past several days cleaning my office. It is now so clean that I am unable to get any work done in it. Apparently there must be a minimal amount of strewn paper and garbage over the surface of my desk before I can be productive.

This was the only task I had scheduled to complete post grant panel and pre family vacation. So now the Angry Family is off to Las Vegas. This is not our preferred vacation destination, but the Angry Inlaws are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and Bakers are gathering in Las Vegas from around the globe.

Here is a conundrum, something that I think about every time I ready myself to go to Las Vegas. Suppose I take a sum of money ($i) to the roulette table and place $1 bets on red. The probability that I win on any spin of the wheel is p = 18/38.

Now suppose that my (modest) goal is to win $1. If i is large enough, the probability of winning $1 before losing all $i at the table is [(1-p)/p]^(-1) = 0.90. I like those odds.

So if I take $100 to the roulette table, I will, with probability 0.90, have $101 in front of me at some point before I go broke. My plan is to walk away from the table as soon as I have $101, and take my $1 and put it in my hotel room. Then I take my $100 and go back to the table and play again.

I know, I won't be able to recoup our plane tickets this way, even if I were willing to take 1200 dollar bills up to my hotel room one at a time over the course of four days. But it's fun to think about. I like the nickel slot machines, too.

I need an entomologist.

My compost heap is infested with ants. (I think they are Monomorium minimum.) When I say "infested," I really mean it. On cold days they clump together for warmth and I can scoop softball-sized clots of interlocking bodies off the top of the heap. Their eggs are everywhere, lining the walls mostly, and if I move compost off the top, I can find big clusters of eggs underneath. This is the biggest nest of ants I have ever seen.

This morning they swarmed. Thousands and thousands of workers coated the sidewalk and wall of the garage, led by what looked like one or two new queens and maybe half a dozen soldiers (or maybe they were all new queens - the soldiers that I see in the compost heap are much smaller than the 6-8 that were leading the swarm). The Angry Kid was fascinated. She could have watched them for hours, except that she got too close, and they swarmed onto the skirt of her dress. By the time we noticed she was pretty much covered with ants. She was a trooper, though. She thought it was more funny than creepy. (That's my girl!)

Here are my entomological questions:

Without looking at an actual specimen, does this description fit with my guess that these are little black ants?

Were the large "soldiers" in the swarm really new queens? I thought only one new queen went out at a time.

Is this nest something I should eradicate? The ants don't bother me much. They aerate the garden nicely, but they do kill earthworms when they find them. I would like to have my compost heap back. I'm betting that if I just empty the compost and start over they will have reestablished the nest in days (if not hours).

In which I realize that I work in a shithole.

S/he graduated.

In which I return to work.

I am back in town after traveling to Our Nation's Capital to help give [Federal Agency's] money away to worthy research in the social sciences. After we weeded out the proposals that were batshit crazy, it took us two days to sort through the rest.

It's hard to describe what happens on these panels: you really have to be on one to appreciate it. While for the most part the system works fairly well, panelists can get pretty punchy by the end of the day. This panel, the biggest on which I've ever served, was completely interdisciplinary. The psychologists barely avoided getting into fistfights with the economists, the sociologists hung back with the geographers, and the political scientists formed alliances with everyone. I managed to get two or three young people in my discipline funded. A great time was had by all.

While I resisted the temptation to blog between my proposals, I noticed that many of my fellow panelists did not. I did check my email and received: (1) Still more begging for grades; (2) The written comments from my course evaluations^*; (3) A new editorial assignment from my journal; (4) Many updates from Angry Baker on how the Angry Kid was doing on our very first separation (thanks, Baby).

Remind me not to do this again.

^*Ouch, I shouldn't have looked. Why is it that one negative comment in a whole stack of good ones is enough to make me feel like a failure?

It never rains but it pours.

Dear Professor,
I am supposed to graduate this quarter but my gpa is only 1.9. I failed the final in your course because my grandmother died over the weekend and I couldn't study. Can I do anything to raise my grade? Please contact me at [xxx-xxxx] as soon as possible.
Thank you,
[Another Student]

So Granny died, eh? And this event wasn't important enough to tell me about it before the exam? Of course not -- it didn't happen, did it? Guess what: as far as you are concerned, I am out of town. My grades are in, the quarter is over, and to get really technical about it, I am not on the payroll again until next fall.

Have a great summer! I guess I'll be seeing you.

AP

In which I receive more email.

Hi this is [a student]. I took you class last quarter. I received a C in the class was there any possibility that I could have received at ct. The reason I am asking is that I am suppose to grade this quarter and I have talk to all my teachers except you. I have a gpa less than 2 I got on probation winter quarter I had got real sick with the flu and was getting better towards final but not competlely healthy. I am suppose to graduate this quarter and I was just hoping a miracle coulkd occur. I am so desperate because I already told family and friend that I was graduating and I even have people coming out of town to come to the graduation. I have already finish my classes this quarter but is left with a gpa less than 2. If you were able to give me a ct instead of C I would be able to graduate this quarter. Your my last hope. Ihope it possible because I am already feeling depressed. I don't have the ability to ake out any loans or grants or have the money to take one class in the summer just to take a class to increase my gpa. I been praying everday for a miracle maybe you be the person to give it to me. I hope that you will be able to contact as soon as possible because the deadline to have all grades in is saturday. I can be reached at [xxxxxxxxxx].Thanks so much if you are able to change my grade and GOD Bless You

An email to which I did not respond.

Ignoring this message (sent early Sunday morning around getting-home-from-the-bar time) was probably the best thing I could have done. As a result, the author has not bothered me since.

My thoughts are inserted into the missive in italics.

[No salutation]
Nice.

It isn't fair that you won't let me make up the quiz that I missed.
Who said life was fair?

I sent you two emails before the quiz and got no responce [sic].
This is a lie. I responded quite clearly: I told you that I was displeased with your request and that your reason for wanting to take the quiz early was insufficient. Your response to this was, "Well, it doesn't hurt to ask." Remember now? I saved our correspondence if you would like to have a look.

I couldn't talk to you after class because I didn't know where your office was. There wasn't anyone at the front desk and I even asked some classmates where your office was.
Wow. You tried really hard, didn't you? For what, five minutes?

I clearly wanted to take the quiz early but you never gave me the opportunity.
Can't argue with you on this one. But then I never intended to give you the opportunity.

Going on a weekend trip should not cost me 15% of my grade.
Guess what? It cost you 15% of your grade.

I'm an honors student and quite frankly the [sic] is absolutly [sic] no reason that I should be fighting to get a B- in your class.
This is also a lie. Honors students are identified on the class roster. You, sir, are no honors student. Quite frankly, a B- is all you deserve.

I don't understand why something can't be worked out.
There are a lot of things I don't understand too. Like why an "honors" student would take off on vacation in the middle of the quarter. Or why an "honors" student would take off on vacation without making absolutely certain that there would be no consequences for doing so. Or why an "honors" student would find it surprising that a professor would not want to bend the course requirements for a single individual. Or why an "honors" student would treat me with such disrespect. Fuck off.

Perhaps I am a terrible mommy.

Many of Angry Kid's friends are becoming older brothers and sisters in the next month or so. I.e., many of my friends are nearing the end of their second pregnancies.^* Consequently, the Angry Kid is fascinated with these big bellies around her and where babies come from. Her interest is now at a fever pitch. Babies come out of vaginas? How? Mommies push them out? How?

OK, then. She wants to know, she needs to know. We've been watching the birth scenes from NOVA's Life's Greatest Miracle. I pause the video at points to show her the mommy's vulva, her vagina, the baby emerging from her vagina, the baby's umbilical cord, everything she asks about. Like the Angry Kid's fascination with Finding Nemo and Cinderella, she wants to see it over and over and over and over and over...

The Angry Inlaws would probably have me imprisoned for child endangerment, if they knew.

^*This has been playing havoc with my hormones. It is impossible to explain to Angry Baker that yes, pregnancy was pure torture; no, I did not enjoy puking for nine solid months right up until the day we delivered; no, I don't have the emotional or psychological resources to have another child; no, I don't even want a second child... JUST SHUT UP AND GET ME PREGNANT AGAIN, DAMMIT!

In which I prepare a manuscript not for publication.

Student Consumption of Faculty Effort in Formal and Informal Contexts

A. Professor
Department of Social Science Discipline
Large State University

Instructors of college-level classes commonly report student underuse of scheduled office hours. It is not unusual to hear anecdotal reports from instructors that students in a given academic period fail to consult them even once during formally scheduled office hours. In such situations, instructors are forced to remain in one location for the duration of the contracted hours, and may fear being caught out during quick trips to the restroom, to get coffee, or to discuss minor matters with neighboring colleagues or administrators.

This study investigated the influence of formal and informal office hour schedules on students' willingness to consult the instructor outside of scheduled class periods. We determined that informal office hours increased the total amount of instructor time spent meeting with students outside of class. These data suggest that scheduling formal office hours actually discourages students from seeking help from instructors outside of class.

Method

Subjects. 228 undergraduate students enrolled part- or full-time at LSU (varying majors) were randomly assigned to the formal and informal office hour conditions. 108 students participated in the formal condition, and were enrolled in the Winter quarter of a popular social science class. The remaining 120 students participated n the informal condition, and were enrolled in the Spring quarter of the same class.

Materials. The same instructor taught both experimental groups, using nearly identical notes and overheads, syllabi, grading criteria, quizzes and exams. The two groups met in different classrooms but at identical times: Tuesday and Thursday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Procedures. Students in both conditions were told that the instructor would be available outside of class by appointment, but also that students were welcome to drop by at any time and that the instructor would do her best to make appropriate time available for them. Students in the formal condition were told in addition that the instructor's office hours would be held Monday and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.. In the formal condition, students who asked for appointments outside of class were first asked if the formal office hours were convenient. If the students then indicated that they could not come during these hours, appointments were scheduled using the same procedures as appointments scheduled for students in the informal condition.

At the end of each quarter, the instructor made a subjective estimate of (a) the average number of hours per week spent interacting with students outside of class; and (b) the standard deviation in this number of hours over the 12 weeks of the quarter.

Results

The instructor answered the question, "Approximately how much time did you spend with students outside of class?" twice: once at the end of the Winter quarter and again at the end of the Spring quarter. Her responses are shown in Table 1. A textual analysis resulted in the data presented in Figure 1, which shows the subjective estimates of consumed instructor effort per week together with estimated 95% credible intervals. Assuming that hours per week was approximately normally distributed, the credible intervals were computed by multiplying the instructor's estimated standard deviation by 1.96 and adding and subtracting the result from the estimated mean.



The number of hours consumed by the informal group is approximately three times that of the formal group. Furthermore, the informal group more consistently consumed larger amounts of time than the formal group. Although the estimates shown in Figure 1 are in fact just a single subjective rating (per quarter) by the instructor, the 95% credible intervals do not overlap, indicating a difference between the formal and informal context significant at at least an alpha=.05 level.

Discussion

In this study, two groups of nominally identical students were provided with formal and informal office hours permitting them to contact their instructor outside of class hours. Students approached the instructor far less frequently when formal office hours were provided than when formal office hours were not provided, even though both groups of students were told that they could visit the instructor at any time that was mutually convenient.

This finding suggests that not only do students underuse formal office hours, but that the very presence of such a schedule inhibits them from seeking out the instructor at other times as well. This finding has important implications for college-level instructors everywhere, depending on their goals. Instructors wishing to minimize contact with students should schedule formal office hours, whereas instructors wishing to maximize such contact should not hold formal office hours. Furthermore, students will more consistently seek out instructors who do not hold formal office hours, apparently sucking up as much time between classes as instructors have available, resulting in a "ceiling effect" in the amount of effort expended by the instructors. This conclusion is supported by the smaller 95% credible set observed in the informal condition - which is remarkable given the much higher mean in this condition.

Our data suggest several exciting new avenues of research. It is evident from the instructor's responses in Table 1 that the informal context may have led students to believe that the instructor was willing to listen at great length to a great many personal revelations that had nothing to do with course material or requirements. It may be that a student's willingness to reveal personal secrets correlates with the degree of formality imposed by the office hour. Would shorter office hours lead to more or less formality in the student-instructor relationship? Would longer office hours keep students away from the instructor for longer periods, or is the absence of formal office hours equivalent to expansive formal scheduling of office hours? Finally, is it simply the presence of a schedule, no matter how stingy or generous, that keeps students away?

Perhaps the most important aspect of this study is its potential influence on university policy. Many universities mandate that their instructors hold formal office hours so that the student/customer is guaranteed to be able to find their instructors outside of class when necessary. This policy may be well-intentioned but based on flawed reasoning. A strategy more likely to guarantee a higher level of instructor-student interaction may be to prohibit scheduling of formal office hours. More research may be necessary to justify a change in policy.

Ouch.

My hands hurt. My finger bones, wrists and forearms ache. I can't type, can't use my mouse, and (sob!) can't knit.

That is all.

Update: Things are much better. After no knitting for over a week, my left hand is recovered. My right hand still hurts, mostly from mousing. I think I have simple tendonitis. I have that little "click" in my wrist from the synovial fluid swishing around, and a lot of pain in the heel of my hand. Thanks for the words of support.

In which I fantasize.

Dear Angry Professor,

I just saw my grade for the first exam. I did very badly and got an F. I am very surprised because I thought I did much better. I will graduate this quarter and I have to pass this class. Can I do anything to raise my grade?

Distressed Student


Dear Distressed,

If you knew how many of these kinds of emails I get you'd be shocked. I'm shocked myself. If I were a student I would sooner roll over and die than ask for the kinds of favors that you kids ask of me. Have you no pride? Have you never, ever taken responsibility for anything, in your whole life? What, exactly, do you think my obligations are toward you? Do you think I care that you are graduating? I don't; your life doesn't interest me in the slightest.

Did you notice the curve on this test? Did you see that almost half your classmates made As and Bs? Did it strike you at all that you were one of only 5% of the students in this class who failed outright? What does this tell you? Really, please tell me how you interpret this, because I need to understand how someone could have so little awareness of how well he or she knows the material. Did you study at all? I provided you with note outlines for every lecture. Did you take notes? Did you even come to lectures? Have you done any of the reading at all?

It is clear that you have not read the syllabus. Throughout the syllabus, in class, and on WebCT I have described in elaborate, painful detail how you can get extra credit in this class. I spent probably 60 solid hours putting that syllabus together, hours expended for your benefit and not for mine. When you confess to me that you haven't even bothered to read it, I want to assault you physically. Seriously, I want to strike you over the head many, many times with my computer keyboard.

Please go away and don't bother me again. Students like you make me hate teaching.

Angry Professor

In which I can't focus.

I'm writing an exam. I hate hate hate hate writing exams. (I hate hate hate giving exams.) Well, I'm actually not writing an exam, I'm blogging about writing an exam, and therein lies the problem.

Because we recently reorganized the material in the statistics sequence, we no longer discuss probability except as it relates to the normal distribution. Therefore I can no longer ask the following questions on my exam:

Allison claims to be a "psychic detective." She "helps" police solve crimes using her psychic "abilities." One thing she claims to be good at is providing details of where a murder victim's body can be found. Police records for 250 murders show that the frequencies with which bodies are found near trees or water areAssuming that Allison is only guessing, answer the following
questions.
1. (1 point) If Allison "sees" a body near trees and water, what is the probability that she is correct?
2. (2 points) If Allison "sees" that a body is not near trees, what is the probability that she is correct?
3. (1 point) If Allison "sees" that a body is either not near trees or not near water, what is the probability that she is correct?
4. (2 points) Allison tells the police that a murder victim will be found near water. If she is correct, and the murder victim really is near water, what is the probability that there will be trees in the area?
5. (2 points) Because Allison is only guessing, what she "sees" and where a body is found can be viewed as two independent events. Most of Allison's "visions" (.9 of them) involve both trees and water. What is the probability of the joint event that Allison "sees" a body near trees and water and the body is actually found near trees and water?

In which a good student does something profoundly stupid.

One of my more engaging students came to class tipsy. Well, not tipsy... blind fucking drunk, really. He always sits in the front row and today was no exception.

He began my lecture by asking me irrelevant questions, loudly and with much guffawing. In particular, how enlightened was I and could I provide him with enlightening information? I responded somewhat coolly, and thankfully he calmed down before I was forced to escort him out of the room.

He passed out in the middle of the lecture. At the end of class I announced a pop quiz; he did not regain consciousness. He slept through the quiz, slept through the turning in of the quiz, and slept through the student exodus (120 students) at the end of the turning in of the quiz. I put my hand on his shoulder and asked him if he was okay. He lifted his head and said, "yes," then put his head back down and went back to sleep.

As far as I know, he stayed in the lecture hall for the next class that meets there, and perhaps the one after that too. He just called me, still drunk, to ask if I had found his notebook.

In which real life synchronizes with my syllabus.

I got to use the Ohio gubernatorial primary election results in my statistics class today. The questions we answered were

What kind of statistic is .56 or 56%?

What role does the Central Limit Theorem play here?

How can the final results of the election be determined before all the precincts have reported, or in other words, what is the standard error?

We also discussed, quite tangentially and in a nonpartisan way, why this particular primary election was important even for people who don't live in Ohio, and what, given the mismatch between the exit polls and the results in 2004, the United Nations might have done in Ohio, if Ohio had been Sudan or Ukraine.

About 50 of 70 students showed for today's lecture. When I asked them how many of them knew what had happened in Ohio yesterday, only one person raised his hand. Just out of curiosity, I asked them how many of them voted in our state's last election. Again, only one person raised his hand, not the same person who knew about the Ohio primary.

There's a can of mace in my desk.

There is a really creepy student in my class. He sits in the back, takes no notes, and stares intently at me throughout my entire 80 minute lecture. Yesterday he came to my office to tell me that he was unhappy with the exam. He did "poorly," and earned a C. He couldn't tell me why he had done poorly (i.e., what material he had misunderstood), but he wanted to let me know that he was unhappy. That was all. The conversation took 15 minutes, and went like this:

Student: I'm unhappy with the exam because I did poorly.
AP: I can't help you if I don't know why you did poorly.
Student: Well, I just wanted you to know that I'm unhappy with the exam.
AP: Is there something I can help you with right now?
Student: No, I just wanted you to know that I'm unhappy with the exam.

And on and on and on, with the creepy vibe permeating my entire office. He was very careful to say that he was unhappy with the exam, not with himself. I think he wanted me to confess that, yes, his disappointing performance was really my fault after all, or maybe the fault of those evil graders who took all his points away. The facts that there were several perfect scores, the modal letter grade was an A, and the median percentage was 89%, never came up in the discussion.

I died, again.

Laughing, this time.

I must not be getting through.

One of my students in my Critical Thinking class from last quarter just sent me (and about 500 other people) a chain letter telling me how if I just forward it to 500 of my closest friends, Bill Gates will send me thousands of dollars.

It's not just me.

I have a discussion group on WebCT that allows my students to give me feedback on how the class is going, how I'm doing, etc. The comments that I get are predictable: "You should give us your overheads" or (when I give them the overheads) "Your overheads are too long/short/rotated/inconvenient somehow." Also: "There's too much reading in this class"; "Tell us what will be on the exam"; "Make the exams all multiple choice"; "Eliminate the multiple choice part of the exams"; "Why did you ask us to buy this particular book when the readings from it are optional?"

One of my "nontraditional" students asked me about these comments yesterday. "Don't you get angry with these people?"

Why, yes! Thanks for asking!

Some interesting search terms.

Here are some of the ways that people stumbled across my blog:

my mom is a ho

how many ph.d.s are their?

most geniuses are tormented

Is it appropriate to read the bible while pooping

ghostwrite and faculty

thesis screwed up by phd advisor

deadwood professor

i hate my students

panties with rainbows

chemical contaminate raw chicken

What makes a horse sick?

student tuition pays professor

i want to pay someone to complete the statistical analysis and results portion of my thesis

turn it in said my papers plagiarized

dissertations ghostwrite

In which we try to hold back the tide.

The Angry Kid goes to a fabulous daycare center run by a church. I can't say enough good things about it. The teachers are some of the most amazing people I've ever met. Despite the fact that both Angry Baker and I live within walking distance of our jobs, we commute 24 miles a day to keep her at this center.

Unfortunately, the church board has decided to expand the "mission" of the center to include religious education. The director, knowing my strong feelings on this issue, gave me a little warning that this was coming, enough time to write a letter or two. We are not the only ones upset by this: most of the parents are angry, and many of the teachers are looking for other positions.

I really don't get this. The kids in the center are so young. The mission of the center has been to "serve the community" for close to 30 years, consequently there is a great deal of religious diversity among the center's clients. It's such a blatant attempt to indoctrinate them, to circumvent parents' decisions about appropriate religious education, that I can't believe they don't know what a huge effect this change is going to have. We have already found another center (walking distance from our home), and other parents are also thinking of leaving.

The director contacted me today to ask for references in developmental cognition (not my discipline, but I have resources that she doesn't have). She wants the committee to appreciate how, all other motivations aside, children can't understand the concept of God in any way more sophisticated than they understand Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Paul Bloom writes some short, sweet words in the last chapter of Descartes' Baby that I turned her on to. I also learned what promiscuous teleology is, which provides a perfect justification for the earliest exposure to religion possible, if the committee's goal is indoctrination.

I wish there really was a war on Christianity. I'd sign up.