Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

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?

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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!

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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.

By Thoreau

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?

By Thoreau

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.)