There’s this passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” I been saying that shit for years. And if you heard it, that meant you were failing. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a student before I wrote “F” on the transcript. But I saw some shit this morning made me think twice. See, now I’m thinking, maybe it means you’re the evil man, and I’m the righteous man, and Mr. red pen here, he’s the shepherd protecting academic integrity in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is, you’re the weak, and I’m the tyranny of evil men, taking your tuition money for a class that you have no hope  of benefiting from. But I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.

I was talking to some bleeding hearts this evening, venting my frustrations about having so many woefully-unprepared students in my classes.  I argued that if you cannot write a coherent sentence, you should not be in college.  If you cannot do simple algebra you should not be studying engineering in college.  Yes, I’m aware that life has rained down a lot of heavy things on (some but far from all of) my students, and I’m aware that the high schools are terrible.  Still, if you lack the basic math and writing skills needed for college-level physics and engineering, you should either do something else, or else you should spend your time in some sort of remediation and not take college-level classes (let alone college-level physics and engineering) until you can write a grammatically-correct sentence and do simple algebra.  And if you put these students in my class, I will either fail them or I will have to teach the class at their level.

A strong ethical argument can be made that I should teach them at their level.  OK, fine.  However, in that case don’t put the college-ready students in the class with them.  If you do, I have to choose between teaching to the students who are actually ready for college, and teaching to the students who are barely ready for 8th grade.  Either way, I’m accepting tuition from all of the students but offering something that is woefully unsuitable for the educational needs of a great many of the students.  That is hardly ethical.  There is something broken, and I’m accepting money from people who should never have been allowed into the room.  I say that not to be a snob (though the bleeding hearts told me I am), but out of compassion.  I’m not doing anything useful for them, but I’m still taking their money.

The bleeding hearts, OTOH, don’t share my outrage at the system for letting these lost sheep into college.  When I observe the least-prepared, and contrast my attitude with some of the bleeding hearts, I start to question my commitment to Christianity.  They are happy that they are working with the lost sheep, the hopeless and broken.  Me, I hate what we’re doing.  I don’t know where these lost sheep should be, I just know that they shouldn’t be in my college physics class.  Not today.  They should either do something else, or they should take a few steps back to prepare.  I don’t believe that I’m doing anything virtuous by mixing the lost sheep with the prepared students, at least not in this setting.  Maybe this makes me a bad Christian.  Or maybe I can be a good Christian and hold these views, but only if I am willing to go and teach whatever remedial class these lost sheep need.  So, maybe I should go to where the lost sheep are at right now.

OTOH, you can only take that argument so far.  Why should I teach a 9th grade class to adults when I could be in a high school teaching that class the right way for 9th graders, so they are college-ready?  Or, why should I be teaching them as struggling 9th graders when I could be working earlier in the pipeline?  We can carry this all the way and conclude that the proper Christian thing to do is to become a pre-school teacher in a Head Start program, but the fact remains that eventually some of them will be college-ready, and somebody will have to be there to teach them when they get there.  Obviously there’s no shortage of PhDs who could teach them when they get there.  But, to be frank, I do a pretty darn good job with the ones who get there, including some students who had pretty rough starts.  I’m happy to share the statistics on the composition of my research group over the past 5 years.  Indeed, the most recent student to win an award in my research group started off in a Community College precisely because he wasn’t a terribly strong high school student.  But he worked past that and I was there to give him a chance once he was ready for the advanced stuff.

So, am I just rationalizing, or am I right to be upset at the system that has put these lost sheep in my class?

There are people on both teams who would like to go on about the (actual or perceived) religious beliefs held by the other team’s candidate.  There’s probably more on one team than the other, but you’ll find them on both teams.  It has been pointed out to me, however, that both teams have a strong incentive to not play the “Look!  Non-mainstream religious affiliation!” because the other side can totally Go There as well.  While there will certainly still be some sports bar denizens (of both jersey colors, though probably more of one than the other) playing that card, at least both coaching staffs will have huge incentives to work hard to contain it.

If there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that whipping up people to go at each other about religion is A Bad Thing.

I don’t usually try to find the cheapest thing possible.  I generally start shopping around and check a few popular vendors (in meatspace or cyberspace, depending on the situation) that are operating in (reasonably) competitive circumstances, and check a few info sources.  I know that when I check these obvious things I’m probably overlooking some deal-of-a-lifetime, but I don’t care.  My approach to saving money is (1) ask whether I should even be spending money on this in the first place and (2) if so, get something reasonably cheap but don’t hunt around forever.  That’s not to say that I don’t love a deal when I find it.  I still brag about the marble table I found on Craigslist for $15.  But I didn’t spend weeks hunting until I found marble for $15.  I did a few searches and took the best of what I found.  I just happened to get lucky that time.

I am discussing my habits to make the point that time and attention are finite resources.  I want to conserve money, but I also want to minimize my hassle and transaction costs.  Some people love putting every ounce of mental bandwidth into bargain-hunting, and more power to them, but if you’re not one of them, then just be reasonably prudent in your shopping practices.  I believe that skipping deals-of-a-lifetime will conserve my sanity and thereby enable me to keep on making decisions that are financially good (even if not deal-of-a-lifetime good).

Why do I bring this up?  I bring it up because I read this article about how the poor get trapped in a system that rains shit down on them.  No, I’m not here to offer the poor advice on how to find good prices.  They know far more about that than I do.  Rather, I do this to point out that good decision-making depends in part on having the time and space to make a good decision, somethign that is harder if you are caught in Catch-22 situations, things that pile one nasty consequence after another onto the smallest of mistakes.  Are there poor people who make cataclysmically dumb decisions without anybody getting in their way?  Of course.  I’m no dummie, I’ve worked in shelters, I know that some people are the authors of their own misery.  But there are even more who make bad decisions because the world rains shit down on them.  When you sell your car to bail yourself out of some mess and now you’re taking the bus for 3 hours/day and your internet access at home is limited at best (i.e. you don’t have a world of information at your fingertips) and you have 3 fires to put out at any given time, should we be shocked if at some point you make a bad call or wind up taking a loan with outrageous interest rates?  I mean, I get overwhelmed when I have 15 student emails coming in and 2 things due tomorrow and a pile of bills that require me to do paperwork to verify that there were no errors by the vendor.  Mental bandwidth has a cost.  I can’t imagine going through my stack of bills to find the erroneous charges under far more onerous circumstances.  At least I have a wife whom I can delegate some of this to, and she can delegate some of it to me.  What if I didn’t have that?  What if my wife was in jail for missing a court date for a late payment?

There are plenty of poor people who are just bad at making decisions, but there are plenty more who could probably make perfectly fine decisions if they weren’t in Kafkaesque situations that sap their time and attention and make it harder to trouble-shoot every dilemma and decision that they face.

A federal judge has blocked enforcement of the detention provisions of the NDAA.  What’s most chilling is that the  judge was willing to rule that the plaintiffs (writers and activists who had  not been detained under the NDAA) had no standing and dismiss the case, but only if the Justice Department would concede that their journalistic activities would not be grounds for detention under the NDAA.  The Justice Department declined to do so.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to also make this a First Amendment case, when it’s already a case for the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh amendments.

The judge who issued this ruling was appointed by Obama.  Before his delusional fanboys and fangirls pat themselves on the back too hard, keep in mind that Obama signed the NDAA, and that some Bush appointees ruled against him in War on Terror cases.  (Also, before Team Red crows too much, the NDAA was sponsored by McCain.  No matter which major party candidate you voted for in 2008, you voted for one of the players in this.  The game is rigged.)  What we’re seeing here is the value of judicial independence, so that even an appointee of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner can rule against him without (too much) fear (though, as the use of drones expands…).

Anyway, this is as good a reason as any to give some money to the ACLU.  AFAIK, they aren’t yet sending drones after people who give to the ACLU, so give while you still can.

OK, enough griping about my salary and my sub-standard students.  Now the good side, and also a response to the torch-and-pitchfork brigade of a few months ago.

So far my involvement in a local professional society has resulted in 3 students making contacts and receiving job offers from local companies.  One of the students is a graduating senior starting a full-time job in summer, another is a junior doing an internship, and the third will graduate in December and is in the midst of negotiating a job offer for December.  All of these students are interviewing with people whom I know, on my recommendation.  All of these students have attended a number of meetings of this group, based on my advice, and prepared resumes and learned to network there with guidance from me.

It is sometimes asked why professors put so much time into research, networking, and professional development, and why institutions base so much of our evaluation on those factors.  This is why.  When we are active in our fields, we know people, we know what is being done out there, and we can help students.  I might note that things that I see in presentations at these meetings have been known to show up as midterm questions in my classes.  Nobody can accuse me of not offering courses with relevance to cutting-edge technology.

Also, I’m working on an invited article for a Glamour Journal.  This is a direct result of my success in my research program, a program that has netted resume-building publications, scholarships, and awards for students working under my mentorship.  Being invited to write this article is a feather in my cap, but it is also a direct consequence of the work I’ve done with my students.  Yes, students need good classroom teachers, but they also need good senior projects.  It is thus quite appropriate for faculty to be evaluated (in part) on their ability to conduct a successful research program, because that’s the best way to offer cutting-edge projects and other opportunities for students.

I’m going to quote a lab report verbatim:

REDACTED BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN SOMEBODY WILL GET NITPICKY IN THEIR INTERPRETATION OF FERPA

You don’t have to know any physics to see the problems with these sentences.  This student doesn’t get spelling, parts of speech, punctuation, and other basic things.  Also, I should note that this student is fluent in spoken English.

Now, I am a virtuous person.  I realize that it is unrealistic to tell somebody that they can’t get a college degree simply because they are lacking in basic skills.  That would be unfair, and it would jeopardize our funding model.  Instead, I propose a new government program to solve this problem.  The government shall create a series of educational institutions that teach people how to spell and how to produce grammatically correct sentences.  These institutions shall be called “elementary schools.”  Attendance shall be subsidized. In fact, for qualifying student we’ll even have free lunch.  In order to graduate, a student will have to be able to write grammatically correct sentences.  Furthermore, successful completion of this program will be a prerequisite for enrolling in a university.

Next up:  A radical proposal to create a series of institutions called “middle schools”, to teach students basic mathematical skills, e.g. percentages.  Students who wish to attend a university shall also have to attend one of these institutions.  I know that long prerequisite chains pose problems for completion rates, but I think that a certain level of preparedness is an important thing.  Let’s create the institutions to give them the skills that they need, so that when they enter college at age 18 they aren’t getting their first exposure to writing and math.

UPDATE:  Oh my god, I’m not the only person to think that fluency in written English is important for college success.  Even the eye-talians are getting into it!

A new study finds that:

We find that teaching a wider variety of courses and devoting more time to teaching results in a significant wage penalty, even when research productivity is carefully controlled.

I might add that, if you were to look at salaries among the past several hires in my department, higher research productivity also results in a significant wage penalty.  There’s an additional wage penalty for actually doing your assigned service tasks.  Come to think of it, there’s a wage penalty just for being useful.

There are things I could say about why that is, but there are certain things that even I won’t say online.  However, those who know which school I’m at can go to this database and  see if they notice any anomalies among the associate professors in my department.  The correlation between pay and productivity (in teaching, research, and service) is a perfect -1.  (Note that I referred to Associate Professors rather than Assistant Professors, even though I’m just an Assistant Professor, because the Associate Professors each got raises upon promotion, and those raises were supposedly based on some sort of evaluation of the merits of their work.  Thus, their pay allegedly reflects what the institution thinks about them and their work at the school, whereas my pay reflects when I was hired.)

Emergency Mathematical Hologram advances the evil, uncivilized, unenlightened view that colleges, even those that “only” provide the first 2 years of a 4-year college program, should not have to teach students how to add fractions.  I propose immediate deportation to Siberia for this heathen.

What warms my heart is that this evil, unenlightened, politically incorrect heathen is even younger than me.  It lets me know that my similarly wicked views are not merely the product of age-related neurological degeneration.

I’ve encountered some people who were unimpressed by Obama finally announcing his support for gay marriage.  Me, I think it says something positive about how far we’ve gone that giving a speech in favor of gay marriage is considered an unimpressive, tepid, and not-courageous thing for a general election candidate to do in an election year.  The haters might yet win some battles, but it’s pretty clear which way the issue will go in the end.  (To be clear, this is a defense of our culture, not the guy who gave the speech.)

Also, I echo Dave Weigel:

I was thinking about the phenomenon of desperate adjuncts living on food stamps in the US.  This is a direct consequence of having too many PhDs chasing too few jobs.  You might argue that this wouldn’t be a problem if faculty salaries were higher, and I certainly wouldn’t object to raising the pay for adjuncts.  However, the fact that jobs get 3-digit numbers of applicants suggests that there are also just too many people relative to the amount of work that needs doing.  At least in the US.  Also, the problem is particularly acute in humanities and social science, which is where I want to focus my attention in this blog post.  I’m not saying that there isn’t PhD over-production in natural sciences and engineering, and I realize that some humanities and social science specialties are very employable outside the academy (e.g. economics, certain areas of psychology), but overall it’s clear that your non-academic employment odds are better with a PhD in physics than with a PhD in history.

Does Europe have this problem?  On the one hand, my understanding is that most European higher education systems are sufficiently different from ours that there might be even less demand for humanities and social science instructors (part-time, full-time, or otherwise): They tend not to have as many general education classes in their curricula (i.e. if you aren’t a humanities or social science student you probably aren’t taking many humanities or social science classes).  Also, I understand that their educational systems have more tracking than ours, so there won’t be as many students attempting college.  (Please correct me if I’m wrong on this.  The Europeans whom I interact with most frequently are largely academics, i.e. people who were on the academic fast track.)

So, what’s the deal with European PhDs in humanities and social science?

Really, it is.

This is why we’re bidding on a condo.  The combo of mortgage, interest, HOA fees, insurance, and taxes will just about match the rent we’re playing on an apartment that isn’t even as nice.  And all of this is before we take the mortgage interest deduction.  Also, it’s biking distance from my job, making this even more financially prudent.  Why should I give money to loathsome, corrupt, backward states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, or Texas?  Bonus:  It’s a short sale, so banksters will lose money!

I don’t know if we’ve found the bottom of the market, but we’ve found a fairly low point with low interest rates.  Doing this makes good financial sense.

Most importantly from a UO perspective, we’ll be able to buy a dog!

Hat tip to Kevin Drum.

I echo just about everything that the Dean Dad says here.

For those about to accept graduate school offers, especially in non-STEM fields:  Don’t!

The good Professor Yoo is immune from legal consequences for his role in torture. So be it.  And, given that he is tenured, I certainly wouldn’t want Berkeley to try to terminate his employment.

However, where does it say that the Chancellor of the University lacks the inherent power to be flexible in teaching assignments?  I propose that John Yoo be assigned to grade freshman lab reports.  Moreover, where is it written that the university is obligated to pay him in cash?  I propose that he be paid in freshman dining hall coupons with a cash value equal to his salary.  Alternately, he can be paid in Ramen.  Prof. Yoo himself, in some of his most renowned scholarly writings, explained that it’s only torture if it inflicts suffering comparable to a fatal injury.  And years of observations on college campuses have shown that a person can easily survive for 4+ years on the all-Ramen diet without suffering fatal injury.  Unless we say that majoring in Recreation and Leisure Studies counts as a form of brain death.  Anyway, to avoid the risk of brain death, we will specifically not transfer him to Chico State.  Nor will we transfer him to UC Riverside.**

Furthermore, I think we can all agree that the University is within its rights to exercise some discretionary powers over office assignments.  Put him in an office near where the pre-meds study, and assign him to teach their freshman lab classes.  He’ll never know a moment of peace.  However, I want to emphasize that even if they do keep him awake for 48 consecutive hours, it still isn’t torture.  Finally, while he is of course entitled to all of the privileges of a faculty member, the University Administration must have the inherent power to flexibly construe those privileges.  He should only be allowed to use the athletic facilities adjacent to the cheerleaders’ practice field*.  Or transfer him to UC Davis and let him exercise next to wherever the College of Veterinary Medicine keeps the cows and horses.

*This might sound lecherous, but trust me, it isn’t.  In grad school I lived in an apartment down-wind from the field used by cheerleader camps every summer.  The screeching noise is so damaging to the ears that even the Honorable Judge Jay Bybee would consider it torture.  However, I think that we can all agree that the Executive of the University has the inherent power to over-ride the judicial rulings of Judge Bybee, and furthermore has the inherent power to bar Prof. Yoo from wearing earplugs.

**I keed!  I keed!  I know some people doing great, decidedly-not-brain-dead work at UC Riverse.  And I certainly wouldn’t want them to have to put up with John Yoo.

Via Schneier, I came across this article chronicling FBI efforts to monitor and infiltrate domestic extremist groups.  The most fascinating part is near the end, when somebody is finally arrested:

He and other CMA members discussed plans to bomb the FBI office in Birmingham as well as a plot to raid the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. Posey believed the plant had an armory stocked with the high-powered weapons he coveted.

The FBI had heard about the raid idea in 1990, but it went nowhere. After Waco, it was back on the table. In the months after the end of the siege, Posey allegedly began crafting a plan to bribe or overwhelm the plant’s security guards and break in using a five-man team.

With the plot apparently moving toward fruition, the FBI finally arrested Posey and several other CMA members, just days after the Soldier of Fortune convention. But after years of infiltration — including multiple informants and undercover operations by both the FBI and the Army — the only charges brought against Posey stemmed from the theft of the night-vision goggles.

The article describes a culture in which a lot of people buy and sell weapons from each other and talk big, but plans that move toward fruition are vanishingly rare.  For that, we should all be grateful.  Mind you, I’m glad that arms dealers go to jail for stealing military hardware, but I’m also glad that most of them are just big talkers when it comes to what they’d actually do with the hardware.

One thought comes to mind: I kind of wish that we had “movie plot cops.”  You know, the sorts of undercover agents who are so hyper-competent that they can let the evil plan go to the final seconds of the timetable and then halt the villain just before he can hit the button on the detonator.  Besides my moral interest in giving people every possible chance to change their mind and not do evil, the last thing you want is to purge the underground of big talkers.  It’s far better if the underground is populated by people who talk big but never actually finish what they start.  (Insert faculty meeting joke here.)  We routinely hear about countless “senior Al Qaeda leaders”, but it’s never actually clear what they do.  I’m kind of happy to live in a world in which Al Qaeda holds meetings but rarely does anything.  It’s far better than the world in which they get shit done.

Not being a particle physicist, I can’t say definitively that this wouldn’t work, but I’m skeptical as all hell.  Two reasons:

1) Detecting neutrinos is hard.  The infamous search for superluminal neutrinos worked over a distance of a few hundred km, and they got a small number of events over a long time frame.  So I’m dubious on the ability to quickly produce enough neutrinos for a detector on the other side of the globe to immediately register a statistically-significant signal.

It might be that I under-estimate the capabilities, but that’s my hunch.

2) In order to get an advantage of tens of milliseconds, you need a source that can receive the “go” signal and immediately fire off enough neutrinos in a small fraction of that time.  The fiber between the trader and the reactor is not my concern.  It’s more that I don’t know whether the machine can be maintained in a state of readiness such that it can respond in a fraction of a millisecond, and, related to concern 1, produce a sufficient number of neutrinos in a fraction of a millisecond.  I know that high-precision timing of neutrino production and detection was done for the OPERA experiment, but I don’t know if they did their timing off of the “go” signal that started the reactor or off of a signal indicating that the reactor had fired.

I suspect that problem 2 is solvable, but I would not assume that it will be easy to go from a research technology to a technology that has to work in the field on a time-sensitive schedule.

1) Is there a liquid in the outer core of the earth?  If so, do you know what sort of liquid it is?

2) True or false: The expansion of the universe, and the associated red shifts of distant galaxies, is due to the expansion of space itself.

These questions are motivated by things said by an actual cow-orker in the past few months, in public.  And these are just the ones that I’m not sworn to secrecy on.  If you knew what I know, you’d support the ACADEMIC* Act too.

*Accelerating Course Advancements and Demonstrating Effective Methods of Intellectual Contribution, a bizarrely-named bill that enables the conversion of deadwood into Soylent Green when deemed necessary by the Decider.  It was passed 99-1 by the Senate after a major scandal.

As a child, I loved Charlie Brown.  Come to think of it, I still love the musical “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”  Consequently, my grandfather gave me a nickname based on Charlie Brown:  Charlie Brownguinea.  He still uses it.  Since my grandfather likes to be silly and sometimes makes up words, I just assumed that the “guinea” attached to the end of “Brown” was a silly nonsense word.

It is only very recently that I figured out that my dark-skinned Italian grandfather, who grew up in a community of immigrants in the 1920’s (and, for the record, is still very much alive, giving me hope for my genetic fate), is probably making affectionate use of a slur that somebody used against him.  I would ask him about this, except his hearing is almost gone.  His memory is great, but his hearing is kaput, and he’s too old to understand email.  So mostly we just listen to him tell stories, and if we have a question we yell at the top of our lungs.

I was unaware that the Coptic Christian Church has a ban on its followers traveling to Israel.  I’m opposed to travel bans as a solution to political problems, because I think that people visiting and mingling with each other is the best way to find solutions.  Still, since a sizable portion of the US population approaches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of religion (whether a religious belief in a property deed awarded atop Mt. Sinai or a dislike for Muslims), it is interesting to learn that the leaders of a major Arab Christian denomination are also not big fans of Israeli policy.  For those American Christians who side with Israel for religious reasons, have they given any thought to the Palestinian Christians and how they feel about things?

For that matter, given that George Bush claims to have gotten a divine go-ahead for the invasion of Iraq, have hawkish Christians given any thought to how things worked out even worse for Iraqi Christians?

The Economist surveys commentary from the right and its detractors, and sums up with this insightful bit:

Good luck with that, Mr Norquist. Voters shy from hard choices. Lexington’s bet is that Americans will never give the Republicans a clean mandate to drown the sort of state they have now. Like voters everywhere, they want many impossible things before breakfast, including low taxes and all the things that high taxes pay for. They will expect their leaders to muddle through.

Pretty much.  Norquist can succeed in replacing tax-and-spend with borrow-and-spend for a while, but at some point taxes will go up.  In fact, ostensibly “small government” proposals like use of contractors just increase the odds of that.  It’s one thing to have a program whose political base of support is composed of beneficiaries.  It’s quite another to have a program whose base also includes the business leaders that get the contracts to run it.  When things have gone as far as they can go and a hard decision can truly be deferred no longer, the contractors will get paid.  That is as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.  Consider this exchange from The Rock:

Captain Darrow: Excuse me, general… but what about the fucking money?
General Hummel: There is no fucking money. The mission’s over.
Captain Frye: Bullshit it’s over!
Major Tom Baxter: You’re talking to a General, soldier! Maintain discipline.
Captain Darrow: I’m not a soldier, Major. The day we took hostages, we became mercenaries. And mercenaries get paid. I want my FUCKING money!

Indeed.  Unless you plan to send Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery after every angry contractor out there, taxes will go up to keep contracted programs going.

(To be clear, I’m not just talking about military contractors.  I’m saying that when you replace the public sector, with its mix of people who seem to actually believe in service and people who just want something secure and not too demanding, with businessmen looking at the bottom line, you aren’t exactly creating an environment that’s more hospitable to budget cuts.)