Moving Day

I’m in the process of moving to Typepad; the new site can be found here. Many thanks to WordPress, a wonderful site, host, and supporter. The only reason for the move is to be with a platform that will let me explore the world of css/html with my blog. So thanks, WordPress, and I’ll see you on the other side…..

The Times: Are They A-Changin?

Via Gene Expression, an interesting look at trend-lines in academia. What is interesting is that he searched not Google but J-STOR…which is perhaps a more accurate indicator of the presence of the relevant ideas in the academic world.

I searched the archives of JSTOR, which houses a cornucopia of academic journals, for certain keywords that appear in the full text of an article or review (since sometimes the big ideas appear in books rather than journals). This provides an estimate of how popular the idea is — not only the true believers, but their opponents too, will use the term. Once no one believes it anymore, then the adherents, opponents, and neutral spectators will have less occasion to use the term. I excluded data from 2003 onward because most JSTOR journals don’t deposit their articles in JSTOR until 3 to 5 years after the original publication. Still, most of the declines are visible even as of 2002.

The search terms included terms such as social construction, marxism, hegemony, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism. The data reveal some interesting trends, as this example shows:

His point is that, in the academic world at least, ideas that are the hallmark of the progressive folks seems to be in decline.

It’s easy to fossilize your picture of the world from your formative years of 15 to 24, but things change. If you turned off the radio in the mid-late ’90s, you missed four years of great rock and rap music that came out from 2003 to 2006 (although now you can keep it off again). If you write off dating a 21 year-old grad student on the assumption that they’re mostly angry feminist hags, you’re missing out. And if you’d rather socialize with people your own age because younger people are too immature to have an intelligent discussion — ask yourself when the last time was that you didn’t have to dance around all kinds of topics with Gen-X or Baby Boomer peers because of the moronic beliefs they’ve been infected with since their young adult years? Try talking to a college student about human evolution — they’re pretty open-minded. My almost-30 housemate, by comparison, was eager to hear that what I’m studying would show that there’s no master race after all. What a loser.

Indeed….

Saving the World, One Text Message at a Time

A while back, I commented on the text-message generation. But this story caught my attention.

I have long understood that the cell phone/text message iteration of our culture is more broadly implemented in places other than our United States….indeed, countries like Japan and the European collection generally have more phone technology and use that phone technology more widely than we Americans do.

Examples (from the link above):

If you live in the United States it can be difficult to understand the role mobile phone technology plays across the globe. Here, you may use your phone for calls and messaging, perhaps for some computing lite, but likely little more. In Senegal, however, farmers are using phones to track crop prices, in Japan, writers are SMSing whole novels, and in Sweden, they’re texting to apply for instant loans. An app that lets you kill time on the subway, this is not.

Within a year and a half, half the world will use cellphones, predict analysts, and with the bulk of new users emerging from developing nations, the question of what phones can do for their owners has never before had such potentially world-changing answers.

…

Enter Nokia and Dean Kamen.

…

Kamen has recently completed a field test of two inventions that he hopes will change the world. Both are based on Stirling engine technology: one is a water purifier, the other an electrical generator. “Cancer, diabetes, all those diseases, that’s 50 percent,” says Kamen. “The other 50 percent of all disease is caused by bad water. Getting clean water to people would knock out 50 percent of all disease.”

Each purifier and generator provides enough power and water for a village; but, with one million villages in India alone, deployment is a challenge. In the past, Kamen has worked with multinational companies to launch his inventions, but the top-down approach of a big company doesn’t mesh well with the million-village scale of this project.

The developing world has a high number of cell phones per capita — the counterpoint to having very little in the way of landlines — and the idea is that software running on Nokia’s platform could be used to network and control a village’s small-scale power and water supply.

Hence the contest. Kamen is hoping to tap the expertise of mobile software developers — for instance, the three million of them enrolled in Nokia’s “Forum Nokia” community — to provide the infrastructural glue that will help get his inventions to the people who need them. Like Tim O’Reilly, Kamen hopes that developers, properly motivated, will pour some of their efforts into projects that help the world instead of endless widget toys and games.

It’s an inspiring idea.

Then there’s the revelation (already understood by pollsters) that 12% of the US population is available only through their cell phone, and that number is going to continue to go up.

Imagine a culture where everyone is available through their mobile phone/device/pda, and that important personal activities are able to accomplished via text-messaging (or whatever it evolves into), as the first link states. Mortgage applications, loan applications, voting, shopping, school, all processes and institutions that require a physical presence, a physical location, block and mortar. A truly mobile society, connected to each other not by roads and physical addresses but by ip addresses. Available all the time, from anywhere in the world.

Could it be?

Killing Babies

Cross posted at Agricola

In this morning’s statistics class, when Professor J*#^% asked someone for a value, a student answered with “.4” The response prompted the professor to note that he (and most statisticians) likes values taken to at least three places… .4257 being a much preferred answer to .4.

The incident prompted him to tell us a brief story about precision.

Seems that our professor was in a Differential Equations class way back when. The class was discussing the results of a test when one student protested a 10 point deduction for placing a minus (-) in a section of his answer when none was called for. The (since deceased) professor responded with this:

Son, I was in school with a boy that eventually went on to become a pharmacist. He was pretty good, too. Well, one day, a customer came to him with a prescription, and he set right to work on filling that prescription. He performed the necessary calculations, measured out the correct proportions, and mixed that prescription for the customer. Only thing was, he put a minus (-) in his equation that shouldn’t have been there. The customer took that prescription home and gave it to her baby. The baby died. I took those ten points off your grade because I don’t want you killing any babies.

So, Professor J*#^% and his classmates embraced their professor’s sage advice. From that moment forward, whenever they compared grades, the question became: “How did you do?” and the answer was: “Oh, I killed two babies” or “Killed one baby”, or on a really bad test, “Killed 4 babies”.

Now, whether you, dear reader, are appalled or not, rest assured that every one us in that statistics class knows (forever) the value of precision.

My First Experiment

Last week, I attended my very first lab in Biology. Or, the first one since 1968, if you want to be technical about things. In that introductory lab, the instructor laid out the rules and procedures that MUST be followed for the rest of the semester. One of those rules is that ‘open-toe’ shoes are not allowed. She went around the room and looked at our feet, noting the number of flip-flops in attendance. She stated very clearly that anyone showing up in flip-flops would be sent out and not allowed to return until properly shod.

There are 25 students in this lab, about equally distributed between the sexes.

Yesterday was our first real lab. Sure enough, students entereing the lab and shod with flip-flops were turned around. After two turnarounds, I began counting.

The results, 0 girls turned around. 9 guys turned around.

What does that say? Stay tuned for my hypothesis and predictions…..

HTML/CSS/XHTML (Behind the Curtain)

As a blogger, the terms above have long been familiar, but never really understood. For sure, as a user of Blogger and TypePad and WordPress I’ve had to learn a tiny bit of HTML just so I could link to the output of other bloggers. But anchor tags were about as technical as I got.

So, this semester’s load includes a class called “Internet Development”, wherein we will learn the details of html, css, xhtml, and a few other goodies like javascript that should make us functional operators and creators of websites.

One of the benefits of WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad is that non-techies (like me) can create professional looking blogs without having to master the technical details. But, like many others, I’m sure, as I have gone along there has developed a yearning for a more individualistic blog. This class will allow me that opportunity.

But, more importantly, peeking behind the curtain serves to demystify the huge world of the internet. One can appreciate the levels of sophistication of design, the simplicity of the structure of html and css, and the foresight of the masters who have created the guidelines for operating in this new world.

Slave To The Groove….

Heard while watching Almost Famous….

“You’re a slave to the groove…”

Yep……slave to the groove…….

Math Wars…Resumed

Before I resumed my education and began this journey in Discovery Informatics, I did as much research as possible. Among those efforts was a meeting with the Assistant Chairman of the Mathematics Department. I disclosed my dream, my background, and then got to the point: Could I, at my age and with my lack of  background in math, possibly get through the DI program? His response was brief, brutal, and very honest. If you struggle with pre-calculus and algebra, you probably shouldn’t be in the program.

Fair enough. The A in algebra boosted my spirits, but the C+ in pre-calculus scared me. Then it was on to Calculus I…….a mightly battle from which I emerged scarred, and, to a certain extent, wiser.

Today, I walked into my Calc II class. Yes, there stood my old friend, the Assistant Chairman. He began the class with a brief slide presentation; the last dozen or so semesters of Calc I students whol earned either A, A-, or B+ in the class. Know from my Statistics classes that they represent a sample of sufficient size so that we can assume a normal distribution, aka, the bell curve, in the grade distribution. Note, too, that he did not include in his sample population those students who earned a grade less than B+ (like me). He then showed a grade distribution of those students in Calc II.

The median was a C+. There were plenty of grades worse than that (I know, and you should too, the median is the 50th percentile). Some freshman whippersnapper, fresh off his AP SAT score, and thus placed in this class, and heretofore considered by his high school classmates as a genius, stated to the professor that he would, without doubt, get an A. The prof begged to differ, stating that half of us will drop or fail, and of the rest, only 2 or 3 will get an A. Added the prof, You might get an A, and I hope you do, but numbers don’t lie.

Whatever sangfroid I might have felt disappeared completely during this exchange of data, to be replaced with that old familiar sensation….gut wrenching fear. Pulse racing, blood pressure elevated, the room suddenly became too warm and I struggled to breathe. I thought that I had trained myself to suppress these periods of anxiety (that primarily arrived just before any tests), but NO!

So the battle resumes. Visits to the math lab, visits to the professor’s office, Sundays spent studying, and anxiety like you don’t know in the days before each test (4 and a Final that is cumulative); these will be my routines this semester.

Wish me luck, I’m gonna need a lot of it……..

Not A Good Day

Like an anxious teenager, I have been planning and thinking about the first day of the semester from the moment summer school ended. Ordering books, gathering supplies, plotting parking strategies, fine tuning the schedule; yes, I have been thinking about this day for awhile.

Of the six classes I’m enrolled in, the two that I know the least about fall on Tuesday, which also happens to be the first day of this semester (why not Monday, I ask?): the Biology lab, a 3 hour humdinger that starts at 10:30 AM and rolls through the lunch hour, followed 90 minutes later by my Spanish conversation class (an option, apparently, but not for me).

As an enthusiastic, motivated student, I was parked at the locked door of the lab 15 minutes early. Gradually, the hallway collected a large number of fellow students also waiting on this class. A scientist friend of mine told me, weeks ago, that when she (as a grad student) taught the lab they did not start until the second week. I received no notice or advisement of any kind in regard to that notion, nor, apparently, did the other students. And so, 30 minutes later, we disbanded until next week. Back into the heat I went.

With 4 hours to kill, it was back to the house, back to the calculus review, and back across the river.

At 2:45 I was, again, parked in front of a locked door. So were some other students. Again, a 30 minute loiter, until, in disgust, I departed the building. 0 for 2.

After a walk from literally one end of the campus to the other, I arrived at the Spanish department. The department secretary haughtily informed this (stupid, old) man that the conversation class never meets in the first week of class. Again, in my scouring of ALL pre-class communications, schedules, et cetera, NO WHERE was this information disseminated.

These two classes apparently operate on long established customs that pre-date even my decades long, storied academic life.

Back into the heat of a now unbearable afternoon, facing yet another trudge across campus to a parking spot carefully selected so as to reduce the possibility of a neighborhood parking violation ($25, no appeal if you are a student, PERIOD!), thinking about all the time wasted by my attempt to be a good student wanting just to get the semester started on the right foot.

Instead, I got a bellyfull of frustration, a near attack of heat stroke, and wasted about 4 hours that I could have spent on calculus. Outraged, I tell ya, outraged!!!!!!

Gulp…

Vacation complete, summer over, and now it’s time to begin the fourth semester (not counting summer school) of the adventure. On the schedule: Calculus II, Biology, Spanish, and Computer Science. Friends, there ain’t a slide among them. Two are 4 hour classes, which means more class and lab time and thus less time for daydreams, spinning yarn, and (sigh) Google Reader. Time management will be a critical element of a successful semester; with 4 classes back to back on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I am struggling to devise a plan that provides study, food, and other commitments in correct proportions.

The Google Reader subscription list has been whacked from about 125 feeds down to (seriously) the 20 or so that I consider critical.

Lunch will be a sandwich wolfed down on the walk between classes.

Exercise will be problematic, depending on my ability to arise early regardless of weather and other circumstances.

There will be a renewed commitment to day-time study, with no distraction, part of a commitment to go to bed at a normal hour. Got to get out of the student habits of late to bed, late to rise……….

Focus, discipline, planning…..sounds like the real world.