Archive for the 'Passing thoughts' category

A hole inside where my optimism used to be.

Mar 06 2012 Published by under Academia, Ethics 101, Passing thoughts, Teaching and learning

I have discovered that whatever patience I may have once had for students who think it's a reasonable strategy to try to deceive their way through "meeting" requirements in an ethics course has completely eroded. There's not a bit of it left, just a gaping hole where it used to be.

What's more, I think I came to the mistaken impression that I still had some patience in reserve largely due to my lack of inner shout-y-ness* about these students.

It turns out the inner shout-y-ness is gone because the part of me that regulates it has concluded that it's wasted energy. I cannot save adults who have decided to cheat at ethics for a grade. This is not to say I believe they cannot change -- just that I cannot change them. At least, not with the tools at my disposal.**

This realization leaves me feeling kind of sad.

Also, I think it has changed my strategy with regards to setting explicit expectations (for example, specifying that students are only allowed to use class readings and notes, discussions with classmates, and their own wits on certain assignments, and that using any other materials for these assignments is forbidden), and then enforcing them with no wiggle-room. At this point, if a student specifies (in writing) that he or she understands the rules and agrees to follow them else fail the course and face administrative sanctions, I am going to treat that as an enforceable contract.

Because honestly, with a critical mass of students who do seem willing to conduct themselves ethically in an ethics class, it's probably better for everyone if I can remove the few who are not.

I only wish removing the bad actors didn't leave me feeling dead inside.

_____
*Shout-y-ness is so a word.

**This is not an oblique request for a torture chamber. That's not really my scene.

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Pursuing your goals in a world with other people.

Mar 01 2012 Published by under Ethics 101, Passing thoughts, Politics, Social issues

Apropos of the discussion here, I offer some general thoughts on pursuing partner, career, family, or other aims one deems important:

  1. Knowing what you want can be handy. Among other things, it can help you identify when you've found it. If you have no idea what you want, recognizing it when you have it can be harder.
  2. On the other hand, being able to specify exactly what you want is not a guarantee that you can or will attain it. It could be, for example, that your desired simultaneous combination of partner-career-family-other aims does not exist.
  3. Hypothetical people that meet all our desiderata may be easier to get along with in our imagination than are actual flesh-and-blood people who embody those desiderata. Happily, it often turns out that actual flesh-and-blood people who significantly depart from some of the desiderata we set a priori are wonderful to be with.
  4. It's possible that there's something creepy about choosing a life partner on the basis of an a priori list of criteria (as opposed to, say, getting to know hir and deciding zie is a person whose companionship you value), especially if those criteria tend to specify services that imagined life partner will provide in advancing your aims. It kind of sets you up to be a self-serving creep who doesn't care about your partner's needs or aspirations.
  5. If your aims matter to you -- if they're really worth pursuing -- sometimes this requires that you sacrifice other aims.
  6. If you, personally, are unwilling to sacrifice aim X to pursue aim Y, that probably means that, push come to shove, you value aim X more. That's fine -- but it might be a good idea to make your peace with the possibility that you can't have both X and Y.
  7. If you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X, you might have to adjust your expectations about the level of attainment that will be possible. (Depending on values of X and Y here, this might involve ratcheting down career aspirations to something slightly less competitive, lucrative, prestigious, and/or time-consuming, scaling back on the projected number of your progeny, ratcheting down your expectations for a spotless home, what have you.)
  8. On the other hand, if you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X and you therefore make it someone else's job to pick up the slack on one of these two goals, it strikes me that you ought to make damn sure that this someone else (a) values the goal you are asking hir to pursue on your behalf and (b) that zie is not being forced thereby to abandon the pursuit of some other goal that zie values more.
  9. This is a good moment to remember Kant's insight that treating others as mere means to advance your goals rather than recognizing them an setters of their own goals is thoroughly assy behavior.
  10. In some circumstances, the least exploitative way to achieve the goal that matters to you but not so much that you'll sacrifice pursuit of your other goals to attain it is to pay someone else to do it. After all, money can be exchanged for goods and services, which might make it useful to the person whose assistance you are getting in pursuing some of hir goals.
  11. Institutions that stack the deck in favor of some classes of people being expected to sacrifice their own aims in order to accommodate (or actively support) other classes of people in the pursuit of their goals suck big bags of crap.
  12. When you recognize that institutional structures support your pursuit of your goals by limiting the options of others to pursue their goals, it would be a real show of humanity (and of not being an entitled ass) to do what you can to increase the potential for those other people to pursue their goals. It would also be cool to examine the institutional structures that stack the deck and figure out how to start dismantling them. (If you need a self-interested reason to do this, consider that fate may conspire to make you care greatly for the happiness and well-being of someone on the short end of this institutional structural stick.)
  13. In an environment where some people's goals are presumed to matter more than others (because of what class they are in rather than anything to do with the particulars of their goals), or where certain goals are judged in advance to be more appropriate (or "natural") to members of some classes of people, it is hard as hell to identify "freely chosen goals" that are actually free of the influence of various institutional structures. But, people who don't live in vacuums can't set goals that don't assume the persistence of certain features of our background environment.
  14. Sometimes taking your own goals seriously may require imagining -- even working for -- the non-persistence of certain features of our background environment. This may also be required to take seriously the goals and aspirations of other people who matter to you. It doesn't mean changing those features will be easy, but few goals worth pursuing are.

I hope I can be forgiven the Xs and Ys in the discussion here, as I think what's at stake ranges far beyond the traditional work/life balance issues about how to divvy up housework and parenting, whose career advancement to prioritize, et cetera. I think it cuts to the core of treating other people as fully human.

And, for some reason, it seems an awful lot like politicians, policy makers, and pundits are having a harder time with that lately than they should be. It feels like the rest of us have to pick up some of that slack.

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On being asked a question to which I did not have a ready answer.

Feb 23 2012 Published by under Academia, Passing thoughts, Philosophy

After my "Ethics in Science" class today, one of my students asked me a question:

"What is philosophy?"

My immediate response was, "That's a good question!"

I didn't have a course catalogue handy from which to crib a pithy description, nor my department website (although it turns out that describes instrumental reasons one might want to study philosophy rather than pinning down what exactly it is that you'd be studying).

I could have gone the Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" route, but I have too many memories of people doing this in my graduate department -- and in a way so narrow that is seemed often to put everything that was not logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, or old school philosophy of science on the "That doesn't look like philosophy to me!" side of the line.

What I ended up saying is that philosophy tends to take things we take for granted -- justice, right and wrong, friendship, time and space, knowledge, science, beauty, what have you -- and interrogate what we think we know about them.

Do we have a coherent concept of (say) cause and effect? Do we have a consistent view? Is it a view that corresponds to actual stuff in the world, or just to the structures of the human mind organizing the information we can get about the stuff in the world? Do we need that concept to do other stuff we care about? Would we be better off without such a concept (and if so, how)?

What comes out of these efforts at interrogation varies. Sometimes we come away with a better understanding of the concept or practice about which we've been asking questions. Sometimes we come away with a lot of unanswered questions (some of which may even leave us without good strategies for trying to nail down answers). Sometimes we piss people off, upset the social order, and get handed the cup o' hemlock.

Maybe this means that philosophy is less a unified subject matter than a set of habits of mind, "question[ing] everything ... except your intelligence," as the Philosophy Talk guys describe it in their tagline. Or maybe it means I need to be sure I have a concise answer at the ready the next time this question comes up ... except that I had a real Suzanne Farrell moment* thinking about the question: I didn't know the answer to the question, but I love that my student made me think about it again.

_____
* Let the record reflect that this was a Suzanne Farrell moment that did not involve an affair with the parent of one of my students.

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Things to do instead of grading that first stack of student papers.

Feb 14 2012 Published by under Academia, Passing thoughts, Teaching and learning

  1. Staple any papers held together by paperclips, folded corners, or sheer force of will.
  2. Print out papers turned in by email, stapling if necessary.
  3. Alphabetize papers by students' surname.
  4. Divide papers into sets of ten and paperclip together.
  5. Create a grading rubric.
  6. Create a spreadsheet in which to record the grades.
  7. Find a supply of appropriately colored grading pens.
  8. Try to locate your drawing board.
  9. Double-check that the state and county correctional facilities will not, in fact, correct papers, not even those from state university courses.
  10. Leave papers, grading pens, and rubric on kitchen table overnight to see if elves will come to grade the papers.
  11. Write a blog post about ways to put off actually getting started on grading those papers.
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Passing thoughts from Casa Free-Ride in Exile.

Feb 14 2012 Published by under Passing thoughts, Personal

This week has been (and I daresay will be) sort of discombobulating.

Late last fall we discovered that we had hardwood floors hiding under the ratty wall-to-wall carpeting in Casa Free-Ride. We also found out from our friend who refinishes hardwood floors that if we were to refinish ours in February, we could get a deal on it. February, being part of our rainy season (to the extent that we have anything describable as "seasons" in the Bay Area), is part of the slow season for floor refinishing.

Given that we have held the carpeting in contempt for some time (did I mention that it was ratty?), it sounded like a great idea to us, even though it would mean completely clearing all the rooms in which carpeting would be pulled up and floors would be sanded and finished. Yeah, it meant boxing a lot of stuff and moving a lot of furniture, but we'd have time to get on that ...

After the holidays.

And after the kids went back to school.

And after ScienceOnline.

And after my semester got going.

Yesterday was the day of reckoning. The rooms were not quite cleared by 7:30 AM, but we had the last one emptied by 11:00 AM. By the end, we pretty much abandoned organizational principles in favor of getting it done, which means some of these boxes will be ... interesting to unpack.

We are lucky enough to have a place to stay within a couple miles of Casa Free-Ride (which is especially convenient given that the rabbit is still holding court in her backyard run, and demands regular water, kibble, carrots, and watercress stems as tribute).

I keep hearing how going carpetless leads to a remarkable decline in airborne allergens. I expect I'm likely to experience our return to Casa Free-Ride this way whether or not it's true; the place we're staying for the duration has enough residual cat in it (possible in time-release form) that my eyes have been scratchy and my throat itchy for the 30-odd hours we've been in residence. When I get that stack of papers today that will need grading, maybe I'll take them to the cat-free cafe. However, the cafe has wifi, which our current lodgings do not, which might make the grading harder.

In any event, I'm hopeful that the sock-skating we'll be able to do when the floors are finished will make the trouble of being dislocated totally worth it.

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Risk assessment with a stuffed-up head.

Dec 29 2011 Published by under Medicine, Passing thoughts, Personal

I have succumbed to what I hope is my last cold of the calendar year. (If I manage to fit in another after this, I will be tempted to claim it as a testament to my efficiency, rather than the capriciousness of my immune system.) And, seeking relief of my symptoms, I have returned to using my neti pot.

However, since last I used this handy device for nasal irrigation, I saw this news item:

Louisiana's state health department has issued a warning about the dangers of improperly using nasal-irrigation devices called neti pots, responding to two recent deaths in the state that are thought to have resulted from "brain-eating amoebas" entering people's brains through their sinuses while they were using the devices.

Both victims are believed to have filled their neti pots with tap water instead of manufacturer-recommended distilled or sterilized water. When they used these pots to force the water up their noses and flush out their sinus cavities — a treatment for colds and hay fever — a deadly amoeba living in the tap water, called Naegleria fowleri, worked its way from their sinuses into their brains. The parasitic organism infected the victims' brains with a neurological disease called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAME), which rapidly destroys neural tissue and typically kills sufferers in a matter of days.

OK, first thing? Every neti pot user I have spoken to since seeing this story uses tap water. I no longer have the box for my neti pot (on which the instructions for use were printed), but I cannot recall the instructions stressing -- or even mentioning -- that the neti pot only be used with distilled or sterilized water.

Not that I don't routinely ignore recommendations or void warrantees. It's just that I generally do so consciously, rather than accidentally.

Anyway, a headcold sucks. Brain-eating amoebae would probably suck even more.

Commentary I have seen on this story suggests that the real danger is not so much nasal irrigation with tap water as the questionable quality of Louisiana tap water. The quality of the tap water in the San Francisco Bay Area is pretty high. So, probably I could safely continue to use tap water in my neti pot.

But, now that I have the possibility of introducing brain-eating amoebae into my brain on the brain (as it were), the magnitude of the bad outcome (amoebae eating my brain) is big enough that I'd rather reduce the risk of that happening to zero. And, I'd feel like a fool (in the moments of self-awareness that I had before my brain got eaten) if I did fall victim to this bad outcome, as unlikely as it is, by betting wrong.

Which means, I'm now boiling my tap water first before I use it to irrigate my nasal passages. And, as I get used to this new protocol, I'm risking the discomfort of applying saline solution that has not cooled down quite enough.

But so far, I haven't seen any news items about brain tissue denatured by using a neti pot with too-hot saline solution.

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The perils of streaming movies while sleepy.

Dec 26 2011 Published by under Passing thoughts, Personal

I know I should be better about recognizing when it's time to sleep, regardless of what the clock says. But darn it, there are only so many waking hours in a day, and now that I don't have hundreds of papers in front of me to grade, I want to do fun things. Like watch movies with my better half.

Streaming video is, of course, a great boon for us (not least because I hate nodding off in the middle of a movie I've paid ten bucks to see).

But.

Sometimes, I end up as engrossed as possible (given my sleep debt) in one movie, then I drift off for what seems like just a moment, and I encounter something on the screen that seems like it might be the same movie ... until it doesn't.

And then I'm left having to double-check with my better half that the Benazir Bhutto assassination plot did not, in fact, involve zombies.

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Holiday repost: words of advice about caroling mice.

Dec 24 2011 Published by under Critters, Passing thoughts, Personal

This was originally posted in December of 2007, when the elder Free-Ride offspring was eight years old. How the years fly.

Today I stumbled upon a story the elder Free-Ride offspring wrote. Possibly intended to strike a Charles Dickens-like tone, I think it ended up a bit closer to Dostoevsky.

Of course, I have to share it:

MiceTitle.jpg

When Mice Go Caroling

MiceText1.jpg

MiceCaroling.jpg

When mice go caroling, you better watch out.
When they're done, they will ask for cookies.

OK, so at this point I'm expecting a plot arc of the sort found in the classic book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Likely there will be some unforeseen consequence -- or some elaborate chain of unforeseen consequences -- following upon this innocent act of generosity. Hilarious hijinks will ensue.

Right?

MiceText2.jpg

If you don't give them cookies, they will kill you and eat you and eat your cookies.

Uhh ... I'm guessing, then, that the smart think to do would be to give the caroling mice your cookies?

MiceBackSmall.jpg

If you give them cookies, they tell other animals.
Soon you'll be dead broke and starve.
The end

Reading between the lines, I'd have to say the very best thing to do if you see or hear caroling mice approaching your door would be to kill the lights and call animal control.

Don't say we didn't warn you.

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In which too much grading plus Mel Brooks leads me to ponder the nature of crowd reactions at scientific presentations.

Dec 20 2011 Published by under Academia, Passing thoughts, Pop culture, Tribe of Science

Fair warning: I have been grading for the last several days, and grading makes me silly. This post may give you a sense of just how silly.

Last night, during a brief break in grading, I caught the last half of Young Frankenstein on TV.

Dr. Frankenstein's presentation of the Creature to the public, under the auspices of the Transylvania Neurological Society, is one of my favorite parts of the movie, not least because Dr. Frankenstein is so very quotable. "Please! Remain in your seats, I beg you! We are not children here, we are scientists!" and "For safety's sake, don't humiliate him!" are just two exhortations that I can imagine getting some good use in scientific presentations.

Also, when Dr. Frankenstein's presentation of the Creature goes off the rails, members of the audience start pelting both scientist and monster with what look to be cabbages.

Which led me to notice that there are not too many scientific presentations nowadays at which audience members throw fruit or vegetables at the presenters.

Possibly this is a reflection of the current direction of scientific work -- focused on findings so unsurprising (at least in a global sense) as to be unlikely to elicit strong reactions from those hearing them. Or, maybe scientists are channeling their disbelief and outrage to private channels, say, by fuming about presentations in lab meetings when they've returned from the conferences at which they're presented, or saving the worst of their aggressive outburst for when they are the third reviewer.

On the other hand, maybe it reflects the limited supply of fruits and vegetables available at most venues for scientific presentations.

Your better complementary continental breakfast spreads can be counted on for apples, bananas, and oranges, but not so much for cabbages or overripe tomatoes. And, some conference venues (like the San Diego Convention Center) don't really have free food so much as places to buy snacks -- snacks which tend to be pretzels or muffins or cookies, items not traditionally hurled to register one's disagreement with a research presentation.

Are warm pretzels too delicious an item to hurl at one's fellow scientist to register one's disbelief? Do muffins not fly well enough, nor generate sufficient force at impact? Or is it primarily a matter of the cost of these items that makes them unappealing as instruments of peer review?

Maybe this calls out for an economic analysis?

In the event that you had a cabbage handy, given the relative scarcity of cabbages at scientific meetings, would you tend to keep it rather than throwing it just in case the next presentation turned out to be even worse? And wouldn't there be something like an opportunity cost associated with holding onto the cabbage, given how much room it would take up in the conference tote bag?

Really, someone should investigate this. But not me, because I still have grading to do.

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From the cave of grading remote base: apparently stable patterns.

Nov 04 2011 Published by under Academia, Passing thoughts, Teaching and learning

I'm one of those people who is rather less confident about the existence of universal regularities in our world (and this has at least as much to do with the research component of my misspent scientific youth as it does with Hume and Popper and the whole problem of induction).

Nonetheless, if I had to bet money on certain patterns being stable features of my world, here's where I'd lay my chips:

  • Not coming to lecture more than three times in the part of the semester preceding the midterm will be highly correlated with not doing well on the midterm. (My lectures seem to add value; who knew?!)
  • Not actually address the question that has been asked will be highly correlated with earning very few of the available points.
  • Using many, many words in the space available to answer the question (especially if they don't engage with the question) is less likely to earn points than using fewer words that present a clear answer.
  • The ability to use a sanctioned cheat-sheet on the midterm means I'll see a sizable proportion of papers (maybe 33%) where students have simply recopied on to their test papers every single thing they put on their cheat-sheet about philosopher X, regardless of what a question is asking them about philosopher X. This strategy seems to make it hard for the students using it to notice when they have "lost the plot" in their answers.
  • In at least 10% of the papers, I will encounter the phrase "solve science" and will need to pause for a facepalm or a headdesk.
  • That rascal DrugMonkey will put up a post to which I want to respond before the end to my grading is anywhere in sight. (Seriously, am I the only blogger with grading who has an angel on one shoulder and DrugMonkey on the other?)
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