Lahars at the Drift River Tank Farm, Mt. Redoubt, Alaska. Photo from AVO.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
3/27/2009
11/03/2008
Lazy post - funnier than me anyway
FSP I love you. That's Female Science Professor to those of you who don't currently substitute her in your mind into the vacuum of lady-scientist role models at your institution.
FSP has written of a recent search to fill a tenure track position as her cat in the fall of 2007.
FSP has just announced that happily Kitten X has been awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Cat X.
For those of you involved in/subject to either of these processes I think you will enjoy this.
FSP has written of a recent search to fill a tenure track position as her cat in the fall of 2007.
FSP has just announced that happily Kitten X has been awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Cat X.
For those of you involved in/subject to either of these processes I think you will enjoy this.
8/05/2008
Can you thank a reviewer?
Maybe this is a rookie question - most certainly it is - but when you learn very much about your own work from sending a paper off to review, is there an appropriate way to acknowledge someone who spent more time (and expertise) working on your paper than the co-authors have done? A way to thank a reviewer who has acted as an advisor?
Answer: Don't send off a chapter of your thesis to a journal.
Answer #2: If it's not rejected outright, on the basis that it is just a chapter of your thesis, and it takes a very long time to rewrite and re-review same, feel lucky, and improve.
ps. Will I outgrow the stage when I need this kind of help?
Answer #3: Only if I publish only where I am comfortable - not a near term option, given my recent research activities.
pps. Can I write a review which is simultaneously direct, stringent, rigorous and supportive? Especially when I am sent a paper to review which is clearly a chapter of somebody's thesis?
Answer #4: I must work on this point.
Answer: Don't send off a chapter of your thesis to a journal.
Answer #2: If it's not rejected outright, on the basis that it is just a chapter of your thesis, and it takes a very long time to rewrite and re-review same, feel lucky, and improve.
ps. Will I outgrow the stage when I need this kind of help?
Answer #3: Only if I publish only where I am comfortable - not a near term option, given my recent research activities.
pps. Can I write a review which is simultaneously direct, stringent, rigorous and supportive? Especially when I am sent a paper to review which is clearly a chapter of somebody's thesis?
Answer #4: I must work on this point.
6/14/2008
And what do you want to be when you grow up?
In the fall of 2000, I went to the GSA Meeting in Reno. I was 6 months out of college, 6 months into wage slavery under an egomaniacal boss in an environmental consulting firm. I knew I didn't want to stay where I was, but didn't really have a good idea of the transition from undergrad to graduate student, hadn't been a particularly good undergrad anyway. I remember a vague sense of disappointment from some professors when I put rugby ahead of school (time and time again). On the rugby team I was the leader, the decider, director of all things! In the classroom I was one of many, and not calling all the shots.
I didn't have any sense of the incremental pathway between a bad case of senioritis and professorship. I knew I wanted to chase my own ideas, regardless of the fact that I didn't have any! Without of view of that path, I never pictured myself walking it.
At the GSA meeting I met a new kind of character, one I had read about in John McPhee but didn't really see on the East Coast where I went to school. The old crusty cowboy kind, dirt in the beard, leather boots molded to his feet, plaid western shirt, plus or minus big lump of turquoise on bolo, belt buckle or pinky ring. I've always referred to them as GreyBeards, although some are neither grey nor bearded. This character is a bit of a composite, clearly. Here's my portrait of one, gruff, sh*t-talking, "good ol days" wildcatting, tall-tale telling, swaggering example (before his time, even): Don Foss in the field in 2001:
He's somewhere between Jules Verne and Deadliest Catch, if you get the picture. My composite character hovers somewhere between mining exploration and academia, with plenty of distrust for both sides. He is a desert rat. He has nemeses who look just like him. He might have an axe to grind about how things are done these days. He probably has a beard, or at least a mustache. He does not respond to attempts by Eager Young Geologists to charm him with their enthusiasm, but might be easily flattered if he is recognized by the same. He is 100% geologist, everywhere, all the time. He knows no other life.
In that last bit, I found a model, an identity. It explained, in so many ways, why even though I felt sooo far away from college (6 months, but a very transformative 6 months) I was having difficulty performing basic social functions, such as hiking and chatting. Or driving. Past road cuts. Or bidding a remediation job at a very well known archaeo-Olympic Tahoe ski resort without asking the age and mineralogy of the tills into which the UST were leaking. Geological details had moved from facts I had to cram for a test to welcome, necessary diversions to keep me entertained during increasingly repetitive jobs.
I iconocized a cast of males, many-post retirement, in part because of their pride in being a bit "dying breed", a bit TOO FIELD for even the GSA meeting. God forbid they ever meet the dark matter of AGU. But I digress. At the same meeting, I ran into peers I had known in college. Some of them were graduate students, presenting their first posters. I weighed myself against them, competitively. Sure, my grades were lower, but hadn't I helped her when she totally bottomed out on Norm Calculations? Hadn't I helped (another) her when we studied all night for the paleo exam? Yes, I had. I was just as good. So why did I feel so inferior?
I applied for grad school. I got one rejection, some serious wine-and-dining, and one tenuous, not yet funded option at a school I hadn't meant to apply to, in a subject which had been my weakest in college. STRUCTURE - A subject I had somehow understood to be the web in which all my other subjects were suspended but just couldn't get my head around at the time. But in a brief interview with a potential advisor (of which I did many, and so should you) I met somebody who presented the most interesting questions I had heard, in a fascinating field area, with deep global relevance for fundamental processes in HOW FAULTS WORK.
This potential advisor was not my iconic character in the sense I understood it - he was young (or so he looked!) and quiet. None of the bluster and pushy dictation of project (amazing project! big money and big papers!) I heard at other universities. But he asked me some pretty hard questions. Not about what i knew, but about what I wanted to know.
The project took me to new places, more meetings, new people. Realized that my iconic old men were probably rolling out the GB persona for GSA meetings, as much as I was rolling out my best "promising young student" persona. My icon morphed from a bearded old grump into something much wider and deeper. Best yet, I finally found the female side.
My first discovery was at the same Reno GSA all though I didn't recognize it at the time, I can still picture her so clearly. Long straight grey braid down her back, middle part. Corduroy skirt, birkenstocks, wool tights. Festooned with what must have been a brutally heavy thick beaded necklace of picture jasper, or some similarly non-precious ROCK. She was nearly hidden among a crowd of plaid dusty men in bolo ties. Bingo. The "Grey Braid". Many of these women are not "grey" in terms of being "old". I mean to say that they are venerable, they have a sense of history, and some are every bit as crotchety as the Grey Beards, whether old or young.
Once I picked up on this phenomenon I started watching for more women like her, and there they were. At a local society meeting I met an incredible retired USGS geologist with brightest red hair, wearing a sparkling gold ruffled blouse with a full slab of Green River Shale with a fish in it around her neck. My new fashion icons were generally younger than the original Grey Beards, maybe because there aren't as many women geologists in their post-retirement era at GSA, certainly there were fewer field geologists in their generation. I met a volcanology prof at a neighboring college - the first woman at the UofO volcanology field trip. She had a rattle snake skin on her office wall. She had dispatched this huge specimen by throwing her bowie knife through its neck while it menaced some not-so-supportive (male) fellow students. Hell yah! The Grey Braid mythology grew.
I met more and more women who struck me as heroes of geology. Of women in geology. My kind of geology. My kind of women. My reluctantly glamorous field camp mentor who did volunteer autopsies at the Nairobi zoo and carried her baby on her back to dinosaur digs. A USGS mapping geologist who carries a whip in the field and takes no prisoners. The great gun-toting field geologist women of Alaska, who move easily between tectonics and petrology, geochronology and geomorphology, present and past as if they can see the whole Great Land in four dimensions before them at any time and place. One while wearing a brightly colored vest she quilted herself.
These women all have striking stories behind them. Stories of finding their own way into doing the field geology they love, often through very circuitous paths, often making great sacrifices by leaving the straight-and-narrow career path. Each of them eventually created a niche for herself- maybe not perfect niche, but a balance between career and family and love that works.
I want to write a book about these women. Or rather, I want someone who can write to do it. I want it to be a big portrait book, like an art exhibit book, with beautiful photography of these women in all their non-precious jewelery, pyritized ammonite-wearing splendor. As a model I suggest Alison Owing's Hey Waitress! The USA from the other side of the Tray. I've been a fan of Alison's writing for some time, she writes these incredible anthologies of portraits which vary deftly from funny to profound, intertwining the stories to produce a portrait of a group of women without smoothing over the individual faces.
Why are the portraits so important, and why am I obsessed with Grey Braid fashion? Because it asserts so strongly the geologistness of these women, and the womanliness of these geologists. It represents a collective turning-of-the-back to mainstream ladies clothing, the clothes are functional, machine washable, there is almost a pioneer sensibility about the corduroy and wool. Layered on top of this functionality is a feminine flamboyance expressed in wacky color and irrepressibly geological, often uncomfortably heavy accessories. This look is every bit as vital and expressive as any form of fashion, and a good deal more individual than what my students are wearing these days.
In case you missed my birthday.
I didn't have any sense of the incremental pathway between a bad case of senioritis and professorship. I knew I wanted to chase my own ideas, regardless of the fact that I didn't have any! Without of view of that path, I never pictured myself walking it.
At the GSA meeting I met a new kind of character, one I had read about in John McPhee but didn't really see on the East Coast where I went to school. The old crusty cowboy kind, dirt in the beard, leather boots molded to his feet, plaid western shirt, plus or minus big lump of turquoise on bolo, belt buckle or pinky ring. I've always referred to them as GreyBeards, although some are neither grey nor bearded. This character is a bit of a composite, clearly. Here's my portrait of one, gruff, sh*t-talking, "good ol days" wildcatting, tall-tale telling, swaggering example (before his time, even): Don Foss in the field in 2001:
He's somewhere between Jules Verne and Deadliest Catch, if you get the picture. My composite character hovers somewhere between mining exploration and academia, with plenty of distrust for both sides. He is a desert rat. He has nemeses who look just like him. He might have an axe to grind about how things are done these days. He probably has a beard, or at least a mustache. He does not respond to attempts by Eager Young Geologists to charm him with their enthusiasm, but might be easily flattered if he is recognized by the same. He is 100% geologist, everywhere, all the time. He knows no other life.
In that last bit, I found a model, an identity. It explained, in so many ways, why even though I felt sooo far away from college (6 months, but a very transformative 6 months) I was having difficulty performing basic social functions, such as hiking and chatting. Or driving. Past road cuts. Or bidding a remediation job at a very well known archaeo-Olympic Tahoe ski resort without asking the age and mineralogy of the tills into which the UST were leaking. Geological details had moved from facts I had to cram for a test to welcome, necessary diversions to keep me entertained during increasingly repetitive jobs.
I iconocized a cast of males, many-post retirement, in part because of their pride in being a bit "dying breed", a bit TOO FIELD for even the GSA meeting. God forbid they ever meet the dark matter of AGU. But I digress. At the same meeting, I ran into peers I had known in college. Some of them were graduate students, presenting their first posters. I weighed myself against them, competitively. Sure, my grades were lower, but hadn't I helped her when she totally bottomed out on Norm Calculations? Hadn't I helped (another) her when we studied all night for the paleo exam? Yes, I had. I was just as good. So why did I feel so inferior?
I applied for grad school. I got one rejection, some serious wine-and-dining, and one tenuous, not yet funded option at a school I hadn't meant to apply to, in a subject which had been my weakest in college. STRUCTURE - A subject I had somehow understood to be the web in which all my other subjects were suspended but just couldn't get my head around at the time. But in a brief interview with a potential advisor (of which I did many, and so should you) I met somebody who presented the most interesting questions I had heard, in a fascinating field area, with deep global relevance for fundamental processes in HOW FAULTS WORK.
This potential advisor was not my iconic character in the sense I understood it - he was young (or so he looked!) and quiet. None of the bluster and pushy dictation of project (amazing project! big money and big papers!) I heard at other universities. But he asked me some pretty hard questions. Not about what i knew, but about what I wanted to know.
The project took me to new places, more meetings, new people. Realized that my iconic old men were probably rolling out the GB persona for GSA meetings, as much as I was rolling out my best "promising young student" persona. My icon morphed from a bearded old grump into something much wider and deeper. Best yet, I finally found the female side.
My first discovery was at the same Reno GSA all though I didn't recognize it at the time, I can still picture her so clearly. Long straight grey braid down her back, middle part. Corduroy skirt, birkenstocks, wool tights. Festooned with what must have been a brutally heavy thick beaded necklace of picture jasper, or some similarly non-precious ROCK. She was nearly hidden among a crowd of plaid dusty men in bolo ties. Bingo. The "Grey Braid". Many of these women are not "grey" in terms of being "old". I mean to say that they are venerable, they have a sense of history, and some are every bit as crotchety as the Grey Beards, whether old or young.
Once I picked up on this phenomenon I started watching for more women like her, and there they were. At a local society meeting I met an incredible retired USGS geologist with brightest red hair, wearing a sparkling gold ruffled blouse with a full slab of Green River Shale with a fish in it around her neck. My new fashion icons were generally younger than the original Grey Beards, maybe because there aren't as many women geologists in their post-retirement era at GSA, certainly there were fewer field geologists in their generation. I met a volcanology prof at a neighboring college - the first woman at the UofO volcanology field trip. She had a rattle snake skin on her office wall. She had dispatched this huge specimen by throwing her bowie knife through its neck while it menaced some not-so-supportive (male) fellow students. Hell yah! The Grey Braid mythology grew.
I met more and more women who struck me as heroes of geology. Of women in geology. My kind of geology. My kind of women. My reluctantly glamorous field camp mentor who did volunteer autopsies at the Nairobi zoo and carried her baby on her back to dinosaur digs. A USGS mapping geologist who carries a whip in the field and takes no prisoners. The great gun-toting field geologist women of Alaska, who move easily between tectonics and petrology, geochronology and geomorphology, present and past as if they can see the whole Great Land in four dimensions before them at any time and place. One while wearing a brightly colored vest she quilted herself.
These women all have striking stories behind them. Stories of finding their own way into doing the field geology they love, often through very circuitous paths, often making great sacrifices by leaving the straight-and-narrow career path. Each of them eventually created a niche for herself- maybe not perfect niche, but a balance between career and family and love that works.
I want to write a book about these women. Or rather, I want someone who can write to do it. I want it to be a big portrait book, like an art exhibit book, with beautiful photography of these women in all their non-precious jewelery, pyritized ammonite-wearing splendor. As a model I suggest Alison Owing's Hey Waitress! The USA from the other side of the Tray. I've been a fan of Alison's writing for some time, she writes these incredible anthologies of portraits which vary deftly from funny to profound, intertwining the stories to produce a portrait of a group of women without smoothing over the individual faces.
Why are the portraits so important, and why am I obsessed with Grey Braid fashion? Because it asserts so strongly the geologistness of these women, and the womanliness of these geologists. It represents a collective turning-of-the-back to mainstream ladies clothing, the clothes are functional, machine washable, there is almost a pioneer sensibility about the corduroy and wool. Layered on top of this functionality is a feminine flamboyance expressed in wacky color and irrepressibly geological, often uncomfortably heavy accessories. This look is every bit as vital and expressive as any form of fashion, and a good deal more individual than what my students are wearing these days.
In case you missed my birthday.
4/21/2008
More on Plagiarism
Yesterday I posted about the issue of students plagiarizing from blogs, which, judging from the response, is clearly a touchstone issue for a lot of us in the business. The comments mostly centered around discussing the criteria for appropriate use of blogs (and similar sources) for students.
Andrew has taken to the next level with his comment:
"Christie, you've probably been plagiarized before. What's different this time is that a colleague informed you--but why did they do so? Did they ask you to change your practices? What do they do at their school? This is a separate discussion from the one you've chosen to feature. What do you expect of your peers? Can teachers be 'bad teachers' "
I should clarify here that the colleague who contacted me did not ask me to take down the material, or to stop blogging about local field trip areas. His words:
Andrew has taken to the next level with his comment:
I should clarify here that the colleague who contacted me did not ask me to take down the material, or to stop blogging about local field trip areas. His words:
"Your blog should include a warning -- "NOT TO BE USED FOR UNDERGRADS ASSIGNMENTS" !"
He's right - and so timely considering the discussions going around - rather than complaining about use/misuse I can take steps to address inadvertent cases by giving some instruction for appropriate use when I post potentially useful information. You'll see from the warning I chose to put up that I didn't follow the letter of his recommendation. I do think undergrads can use this information for assignments, according to principles of appropriate use. I don't know the details of the field assignment at Neighbor U.
In answer to Andrew, you're right, I probably have been plagiarized before. My initial response to hearing about it from a colleague was a bit embarrassed - wondered if I had done something wrong. Glad to have been reading all the recent discussion about blogging because it helped clarify my opinion that the internet really has changed everything about information and intellectual property, as well as propriety - and our societal expectations haven't adapted to address that. Asking my students not to google a topic when they have been assigned to read about it would be even more hopeless than asking them not to download Heroes from a mirror site in Thailand. But I digress.
At my institution we are able to use Turn-It-In, a service which compares submitted text to millions of print and web sources and simply highlights identical strings. I then go through and visually review each string. I did an informal experiment in which I read a paper first and circled suspicious areas. Turn-it-in identified the same trouble spots, but saved me a lot of time by identifying the source. This service has taken a lot of criticism for various reasons - one being the presumption of student guilt. Since professors have been manually comparing sources to check for plagiarism since the dawn of papers, I think the writing and the checking should move into the internet age together. I am not swayed by any of the arguments against using the service.
My undergraduate institution had a very strict honor code. I left with a very polarized view of plagiarism and people who committed it.
In my current position, I realize that plagiarism is probably much more common than I previously thought, and that there are subtleties that can cause students to cross the line without evil intent. For example, I busted a student last year for a "mash-up" essay - basically interleaving complete sentences from two or three sources into semi-coherent paragraphs. When I confronted the student about this, he/she replied that this approach was necessary because he/she didn't understand the material but was trying to patch it together to complete the assignment. He/she was genuinely horrified to be accused of plagiarism and had honestly wanted to do the right thing. The concept of synthesis - of taking information 100% from other sources but phrasing it in such a way as to make it your own - was not there.
In response, I developed a handout on writing - probably too long to be read by many students in full! But I am comforted to know that when a student is in violation, I can at least demonstrate that they were specifically given a definition of the "mash-up" and told that it was not appropriate. At a school which has no liberal arts component, sometimes students are expected to learn this by osmosis but in my opinion, it is much more effective to teach them explicitly how to write scientific papers. Subsequent results have been much better and the students are motivated to follow my guidelines. So in answer to Andrew's "Can teachers be bad teachers?" I think I would hesitate to use the word "bad", but maybe we fail our students when we assume prior knowledge that they don't have. And that includes failing to give them clear instruction on our expectations.
This situation is not really a test case for all these subtleties, because the student who plagiarized was so blatant that there is no way it could have been inadvertent, and the colleague who contacted me made a simple request that I agreed with: to suggest guidelines for appropriate use when publishing information that could be used in many ways.
(c) 2008
*Click here to download my writing handout in Word format. Anyone may use any part or the whole document for any teaching purpose, no attribution is necessary. It is somewhat poorly organized anyway so I will fix that for next year.
In answer to Andrew, you're right, I probably have been plagiarized before. My initial response to hearing about it from a colleague was a bit embarrassed - wondered if I had done something wrong. Glad to have been reading all the recent discussion about blogging because it helped clarify my opinion that the internet really has changed everything about information and intellectual property, as well as propriety - and our societal expectations haven't adapted to address that. Asking my students not to google a topic when they have been assigned to read about it would be even more hopeless than asking them not to download Heroes from a mirror site in Thailand. But I digress.
At my institution we are able to use Turn-It-In, a service which compares submitted text to millions of print and web sources and simply highlights identical strings. I then go through and visually review each string. I did an informal experiment in which I read a paper first and circled suspicious areas. Turn-it-in identified the same trouble spots, but saved me a lot of time by identifying the source. This service has taken a lot of criticism for various reasons - one being the presumption of student guilt. Since professors have been manually comparing sources to check for plagiarism since the dawn of papers, I think the writing and the checking should move into the internet age together. I am not swayed by any of the arguments against using the service.
My undergraduate institution had a very strict honor code. I left with a very polarized view of plagiarism and people who committed it.
In my current position, I realize that plagiarism is probably much more common than I previously thought, and that there are subtleties that can cause students to cross the line without evil intent. For example, I busted a student last year for a "mash-up" essay - basically interleaving complete sentences from two or three sources into semi-coherent paragraphs. When I confronted the student about this, he/she replied that this approach was necessary because he/she didn't understand the material but was trying to patch it together to complete the assignment. He/she was genuinely horrified to be accused of plagiarism and had honestly wanted to do the right thing. The concept of synthesis - of taking information 100% from other sources but phrasing it in such a way as to make it your own - was not there.
In response, I developed a handout on writing - probably too long to be read by many students in full! But I am comforted to know that when a student is in violation, I can at least demonstrate that they were specifically given a definition of the "mash-up" and told that it was not appropriate. At a school which has no liberal arts component, sometimes students are expected to learn this by osmosis but in my opinion, it is much more effective to teach them explicitly how to write scientific papers. Subsequent results have been much better and the students are motivated to follow my guidelines. So in answer to Andrew's "Can teachers be bad teachers?" I think I would hesitate to use the word "bad", but maybe we fail our students when we assume prior knowledge that they don't have. And that includes failing to give them clear instruction on our expectations.
This situation is not really a test case for all these subtleties, because the student who plagiarized was so blatant that there is no way it could have been inadvertent, and the colleague who contacted me made a simple request that I agreed with: to suggest guidelines for appropriate use when publishing information that could be used in many ways.
(c) 2008
*Click here to download my writing handout in Word format. Anyone may use any part or the whole document for any teaching purpose, no attribution is necessary. It is somewhat poorly organized anyway so I will fix that for next year.
Bad Students! No!
I just received word that a 3rd year student at a nearby university turned in significant portions of my Sea Point Contact field trip post for his/her own field trip report to the same locality. Fool! No pity for plagiarizers!
As a new grad student I once googled some suspicious-looking text strings in a student's New Idria field report and discovered that a recently graduated student had posted all of his school projects on his website for some reason. Naturally the student failed and I wrote to the blogger and asked him to take the material down or password-protect it. At the time I felt this was a fair course of action because the material he posted was an exact model of what we were asking students to do.
Now what about geoblogging? Field trip blogging? There's been a lot of buzz lately about whether it is ethical to critique or comment on peer-reviewed papers in the blogosphere, where the public often has access to the critique but not the original paper. In my opinion, anything that's published becomes public information and commentary is free. However, some discretion is advised, because these blogs are often written by people who carry some kind of official authority on the topic and there is a fine line between the "official word of the scientific community" and some casual spouting off by somebody who writes the "official word" as their day job. The discussion made me think about my flip language on this blog and my tacit assumption that if nobody comments, nobody reads it. Not true, eh? I suppose I could check my stats on blogger or something.
Anyway, I would like to think that somebody might be interested in the geologic information I post, as I am interested in others' posts, particularly field experiences, research questions, etc. but I am HORRIFIED that students might misuse this material. Almost worse is the thought that students or anybody else might inadvertently use blogs over more reputable sources. Students:
(I'll spare the rest of you for now, but any students who want to hear it, drop me an email.)
I am not going to stop blogging about field experiences and interesting problems. I can't anticipate every assignment that might be set at every university (although I could have anticipated this particular one, had I thought about it) to avoid writing something that might be utilized by an unscrupulous person. I will however, add a threatening copyright notice.
It's in the sidebar.
What else can be done? Anything?
(c) 2008 C. D. Rowe
As a new grad student I once googled some suspicious-looking text strings in a student's New Idria field report and discovered that a recently graduated student had posted all of his school projects on his website for some reason. Naturally the student failed and I wrote to the blogger and asked him to take the material down or password-protect it. At the time I felt this was a fair course of action because the material he posted was an exact model of what we were asking students to do.
Now what about geoblogging? Field trip blogging? There's been a lot of buzz lately about whether it is ethical to critique or comment on peer-reviewed papers in the blogosphere, where the public often has access to the critique but not the original paper. In my opinion, anything that's published becomes public information and commentary is free. However, some discretion is advised, because these blogs are often written by people who carry some kind of official authority on the topic and there is a fine line between the "official word of the scientific community" and some casual spouting off by somebody who writes the "official word" as their day job. The discussion made me think about my flip language on this blog and my tacit assumption that if nobody comments, nobody reads it. Not true, eh? I suppose I could check my stats on blogger or something.
Anyway, I would like to think that somebody might be interested in the geologic information I post, as I am interested in others' posts, particularly field experiences, research questions, etc. but I am HORRIFIED that students might misuse this material. Almost worse is the thought that students or anybody else might inadvertently use blogs over more reputable sources. Students:
(I'll spare the rest of you for now, but any students who want to hear it, drop me an email.)
I am not going to stop blogging about field experiences and interesting problems. I can't anticipate every assignment that might be set at every university (although I could have anticipated this particular one, had I thought about it) to avoid writing something that might be utilized by an unscrupulous person. I will however, add a threatening copyright notice.
It's in the sidebar.
What else can be done? Anything?
(c) 2008 C. D. Rowe
1/21/2008
Why no emails?
I don't know how the Guardian managed to get this murky scaryland picture of our beautiful city:
because it DOESN'T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE THAT! This is some photoshopper's impression of the apocalypse or something. But yes those are our Simpson's towers. They are small though.
However, the story from which I pulled that picture is correct, we are experiencing "load shedding", strangely reminiscent of the rolling blackouts Californians will remember when some corrupt bastards undertook to ruin everyone else. This is oddly familiar! Hopefully the party will take some fast action to allow self-generators to sell back to the grid. Because every self-respecting business and many of the universities (not us, of course) are generating their own power for the 2-3 hrs in midday when the blackouts roll through.
However, the story from which I pulled that picture is correct, we are experiencing "load shedding", strangely reminiscent of the rolling blackouts Californians will remember when some corrupt bastards undertook to ruin everyone else. This is oddly familiar! Hopefully the party will take some fast action to allow self-generators to sell back to the grid. Because every self-respecting business and many of the universities (not us, of course) are generating their own power for the 2-3 hrs in midday when the blackouts roll through.
1/02/2008
Science Debate 2008
A growing list of luminaries, dignitaries, and ordinary folks are pushing for the American presidential candidates to participate in a debate focused on science and technology issues.
At the urging of my acquaintance Andrew, a science journalist who writes for geology.about.com, I have added my name to the list.
There is not a single issue in foreign or domestic policy that doesn't rely heavily on science and technology, not just in obvious ways such as climate change issues, energy, defense, health care and food supply, but also in more subtle but far-ranging ways such as the treatment of evidence, fact, and reason in policy discussions. Many of the candidates have made sweeping statements suggesting that they rely more heavily on doctrine or belief than on scientific evidence, i.e., Huckabee's refusal to recant his 1992 suggestion that AIDS patients be quarantined to prevent transmission of the disease.
At the urging of my acquaintance Andrew, a science journalist who writes for geology.about.com, I have added my name to the list.
There is not a single issue in foreign or domestic policy that doesn't rely heavily on science and technology, not just in obvious ways such as climate change issues, energy, defense, health care and food supply, but also in more subtle but far-ranging ways such as the treatment of evidence, fact, and reason in policy discussions. Many of the candidates have made sweeping statements suggesting that they rely more heavily on doctrine or belief than on scientific evidence, i.e., Huckabee's refusal to recant his 1992 suggestion that AIDS patients be quarantined to prevent transmission of the disease.
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