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Saturday, September 20th [cjacobso] and I went to the open house at the observatory last night to see Mars. I was a little disappointed by the blurry off-white blob of Mars (viewing conditions weren't ideal), but we stuck around to see a pair of different-colored stars, a globular nebula, and a ring nebula, all of which were delicious. My favorite: ring nebula. Holy cats! [leopeter] joins [bealsada] and [schunaca], and 25% of my tutorial now writes column (usage as in "drives truck") for [newspapr]. Nice work! So who's next? It sounds like Wes Clark had a very bad interview with reporters on Thursday, then a pretty good day yesterday forcused on foreign policy. ([cjacobso] saw the Iowa City event.) In the former, apparently the General had to admit he didn't really know what the Brady Bill says, let alone whether he supports it. This from a guy who is supposed to be Clintonesque in his wonkishness? For his sake, I hope that moment was a huge aberration; Clark doesn't have time to cover the country, get a campaign going on the ground, and learn the basics of domestic policy issues. Some informed people don't think he even has time to do the first two. Oh, and he moved literally overnight from saying he would have voted for the Iraq resolution to saying he "would never have voted for this war." Surely these questions were not hard to anticipate. Thanks for the support, [likarish]!
Friday, September 19th(b) Wow, this has been a crazy and stressful couple of days. But it helps to know that my Pirate name is Black Jack Flint. Description: "Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!" This comes to you in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day. Duh. [rosenbe1]: thanks for the comments on the planning process. I do understand that the final decisions will involve a combination of elements from the different strategies. For whatever it's worth, I think you (and whoever else worked on it) did a nice job on the Student Experience strategy. My objection is that the faculty-focused strategy doesn't measure up to that one. Simply put, the faculty-focused strategy a) omits many of the most obvious concerns of the faculty, all of which were raised earlier in this process, and b) has a name that makes the only faculty-focused strategy into something about recruiting faculty rather than addressing the concerns of the present faculty. My concern, therefore, is that we can't get a good sense of the ways we could best manage tradeoffs between faculty priorities and others because many of the highest priorities of the faculty are invisible. Friday, September 19th I'm just popping in to post information about the peace event on Sunday--see the top of my plan, then see Bud Dixen speak! It should be interesting. I'll be back.
Wednesday, September 17th I know someone out there must need directions to Mordor. If any of you English alums who are writing to me ever doubt your decision to lean towards the humanities, take heart and read through the worst jobs in science. Nothing like a horribly slanted comparison to brighten the dark days! Wow, this does not pull any punches: a series of illustrations based on Al Franken's Supply-Side Jesus. [horowitz], I don't know about student involvement in the process. It may be planned or have happened or both. I looked for a quick minute for information and couldn't find any. Like [rebelsky], I think the Tuition-Free and Enhancing the Student Experience strategies look best. The faculty-focused strategy is badly assembled, IMHO. "Focus on Recruiting Faculty Who Will Enhance the College's Academic Reputation" is not parallel to "Enhancing the Student Experience." Why not "Enhancing the Faculty Experience"? Having participated in the on-campus conversation about this strategy, I think we've lost a lot in the translation. What we therefore miss is a way to consider how enhancing the student experience and the faculty experience overlap and how they don't. For instance, the Enhancing the Student Experience strategy involves fewer temporary faculty, more faculty-student interaction in and out of class, more faculty-student research, and fewer regular course offerings. And maybe six more faculty. That's a formula for faculty burnout--bigger classes and more extracurricular demands. If I had my druthers, I would extract a few points from the student-focused strategy and a few from the faculty-focused strategy and combine them, but both understate the number of people we need to pull them off. [rebelsky] again: this is a little late now, but regarding the average size of English vocabulary--this post from a linguists' list has some excellent information on the knottiness of the problem. (Basically, it all depends how you define "word," which turns out to be an awfully tricky process.) [dowd], your memory of "Chicken Fat" amazes and frightens me.
Tuesday, September 16th If you like the language-scrambling bit, you can now make your own. Cleverness from the Onion: FDA Approves Prescription Placebo. I like the graphic. Wes Clark's decision to run is fascinating. I've read the competing theories about whether it's too late for him; I think it's genuinely unclear, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out. [laiu] (and thereby [parkerma]): yes, in some ways, "it's like being told how to assemble a home computer together, but being given technical specifications instead of 'put keyboard plug into keyboard hole.'" But for specialists--and 200-level students are on the cusp of that level--it's like getting the technical specs when you really need to understand how a computer works when you're done putting it together, in which case "put keyboard plug into keyboard hole" doesn't cut it. What I find remarkable about that article is that it's difficult to read not because of theoretical language (the more common cause) but rather because it employs so many old-fashioned approaches simultaneously: formal analysis, political history, religious history, a review of criticism. The most difficult words tend to be difficult because they're old rather than new. (There are exceptions.) Anyway, part of my goal in having you read a little bit of criticism in that mode is to show a snapshot of ways in which basic formal analysis (synecdoche, the ode form, etc.) really does create the base for cutting-edge cultural studies as well as more traditional approaches. Group thanks for the responses I've already gotten to the alumni--I'll also reply individually. I appreciate the help muchly. And thanks for the indirect assistance, [blancheb] and [rosej]. Thanks for the clarification, [vanwilli], and welcome! Mac is an interesting option, although switching would constitute a grave or final setback in the longtime PC-Mac rivalry that is my marriage. Is a Mac laptop one of our allocation options? Just idle curiosity, [cjacobso]. Idle curiosity. [wray], you're so right! Good eye. I don't know what grade level you'll be teaching gym for. Based on my experience as a student, the proper elementary school gym class should consist of an LP called "chicken fat" (as in what we were supposed to burn--an apparent euphemism for "fat kid fat," of which I had plenty) leading students through calisthenics on one of those burlap-covered turntables that isn't loud enough to fill the gym. High-school gym class, contrarily, requires the teacher to lay down the law: as Mr. Foltz of Olean High put it, "Sometimes a fight might break out during class. If that happens, I'm gonna let it go for a few minutes because I like a good fight as much as anybody. But then you have to go to the Vice Principal's office." Those were the days. I love [marzench] for sending Planlove to "[Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas]." It doesn't get any better than that. [sarafsau] and [wgemigh], the Tuition-Free Grinnell idea is publicly available, along with other potential strategies: go to strategic planning and click on the pdf file at the top.
Monday, September 15th(b) Oooooooh, too much to do. Hence, Planbreak. Dari Barn update: I tried the secret off-menu mint Oreo cyclone today, thanks to a tip from [kustritz], who caused the trip to Dari Barn by bringing a barely-touched Peanut Butter Cup cyclone into class this afternoon. Peanut Butter Cup remains my #1, but mint Oreo was close enough that I didn't regret my first venture away from PBC. OK, this is cool. I bet you can read the following paragraph without much trouble: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro. Isn't that wacky? For some discussion, see this page and its links. Hey, everyone! I'll give you 200 dollars to like my Plan! [rebelsky]: A) Feel better! B) I wish Flicker well. Aren't realistic vets intolerable? C) To be fair, "I learned a lot in this course" did get overwhelming support when push came to shove. But yeah, you were doomed. I really liked the new form--certainly a huge improvement on the old one. D) Why not institutional research? Uh, well, because this project and method were handed to me, and I assumed that something that obvious would have been tried first. But that's not necessarily so, now that you mention it. I'll check it out. The first batch of responses will at least show some progress and get the ball rolling. E) I'll be in the untenured humanities focus group for the strategic planning stuff. Like you, I love the tuition-free idea, and I think it's a lot more plausible than I first suspected, but it does sound like a whale of a stretch in the new document. [watts]: I might be one of the losers whose computer isn't secured. I had to leave school suddenly last week and didn't log off when I was supposed to. I have logged off and on since then, though, so maybe that did the trick. I secured my home computer on my own, and I tried to have MS scan my work machine, but of course that's blocked on campus. Oh, well. I do try to be a good cybercitizen. Regarding noonball: I really will try to make it soon. I teach at 11:00 and 3:15, with an office hour in between, on those days, so it will take some serious advance planning, which is hard to come by this term. And I know Wednesday won't work. But I do want to play. [brownj], sure--lunch would be fun. Monday, September 15th New note: I am now horribly afraid that I'm forgetting all kinds of obvious people in my off-the-cuff list of English alums with active Plans below. Please forgive me and help refresh my weary head if that's the case. [cumminsj], by all means, send me the information, and I'll qualify it accordingly. Oh, I forgot to respond to [brownj]'s question about A.S. Byatt. I haven't read anything like as much of her work as I'd like to--I think I would have read more contemporary literature if I had chosen any field but teaching earlier literature! I do think she's a fine writer, and I will try to rekindle my dormant efforts to read Angels and Insects. If you like Van Halen's "Jump" and/or early video games, check out MAME Jump!. That's Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. I tried the personality type quiz, and it seems to mimic the Meyers-Briggs test pretty well. As I suspected, I'm still INTJ, but my once-extreme introversion has softened: my numbers were 22-22-44-67. Hey there, [jansonp]! Nice to hear from you. You gotta save all that plan stuff about working in the theater. It's raw material for some sort of fine hunk of writing or other eventually. My reaction to the National Gallery was much like yours. I did some research across the street at the National Library years ago-it's a neat place, much more old-fashioned than the British Library. Oh, and see the alumni thing above. Hint, hint. That goes for [dowd] and [stutelbe] and [brant] and [neilsen], too! And [aswell] and [fagan]! Who else has active Plans? Hmm. (Twiddles fingers like Mr. Burns.) [brownj], I saw that same story about Des Moines yesterday. True or not, funny stuff!
Saturday, September 13th(b) Addendum: [rinneand] reminds me of the YGB concert, which I also wanted to attend but couldn't, and [brownj] says a handful of students made the second half of the concert. (I'm glad to hear the YGB concert was so well attended!) Like [rinneand], I do think the general communication issue still exists. I've heard mention of the lack of on-campus fliers before. Do other students share the sense that putting up some fliers would make a big difference for downtown events? If you do, could you describe the standard formula for placing flyers effectively? Some of us could pass this and other publicity advice to the people who set up these concerts and other downtown events. I'm sure they'd appreciate it. I wanted to go to the Klezmer concert but couldn't. I'm surprised to hear that there were virtually no students there, but that does fit with a pattern I've noticed: virtually no students attend off-campus performances that don't involve students or faculty of the College (such as the recent salsa concert and the Klezmer band). Students, are there ways of publicizing such events that community organizations are missing? I'm sure they'd love to know how to get the word out to you if communication is the problem. My assumption here is that communication is the problem, as I imagine that at least a couple of dozen students would have attended both of these events if everyone had known about them. [rebelsky], I agree that having good policies on virtual communities would be a great thing, and I like the idea of a third-party verification system for identities in VCs. I might be stating the obvious here, but I want to say this anyway: your concerns and ideas point us towards policies that could lead to more and better software development by giving developers reliable methods for securing their software. (I know some of my own projects have been slowed by the lack of good information on securing public applications.) You have helped me imagine a way that this reconsideration of policy could help encourage software development at the College, though only with a dramatically different approach to security issues than the one that underlies the present ACUP. What a happy ending that would be! Saturday, September 13th Off to Iowa City to celebrate [cjacobso]'s birthday with her family. I just wrote to the Instructional Support Committee support committee to endorse [stone]'s letter to them. I'm working on a longer version of my thoughts about the ACUP.
Friday, September 12th I went to Iowa State yesterday to be part of a panel for their "Preparing Future Faculty" program for grad schools. It was strange to address faculty life in a context where most of the students are engineers and such and are therefore thinking about what kind of faculty job they most want rather than whether (as in my field) they will ever be able to find any job at all. The usual structure of talking to English grad students and potential grad students about the academic job market is to give a catalog of horror and then say, "Given that, do you still think you want to give this a shot?" Anyway, it was fun. The speakers were from Central College, UNI, and DMACC (Des Moines Area Community College), and it was really interesting to hear about the different experiences and expectations of faculty. There were a bunch of Grinnell connections: the Central person, Mark Mills, knows the [timmerni] family, the UNI person, Helen Harton, knows the [walshjen] crew, and the daughter of Jim Stick, the DMACC fellow, went to Grinnell and met her husband here. Neato. I had never been to Ames before. I was disappointed that I was on a tight schedule and it was raining, as I would have liked to see more of the place, especially because one of the good buddies of my youth is coming to teach architecture there in the spring. Oh, well. [brownj], I love your comments to your students, and I'm mightily intrigued by your brother's work. A side note: your analogy between evolution and improvisation has at least some historical basis as well. My students will not be surprised to hear that I think it all goes back to the British Romantic period, when left-leaning thinkers were considering early theories of evolution (through Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and friend of the London radicals) and improvisation. Corinne, the book I mentioned yesterday, essentially created the English terminology for improvisation in 1807. After that, it was possible to think about both evolution and improvisation as metaphors for political and religious systems that didn't assume an endpoint in their development. On the biology front, this is also the period and place in William Paley put forth the famous "Blind Watchmaker" argument--in 1802--that Richard Dawkins refutes in his book of the same name. What Dawkins doesn't say, IIRC, is that the evolutionary-improvisational counterarguments were also developing in the early nineteenth century. Um, I didn't mean to run on like this. What I mean is that I'm interested in your brother's work from a lot of different directions, and I'd love to hear more about it sometime. That's lovely, [aswell]. No hoops for me today, [watts], but I appreciate the encouragement. I'll get out there one of these times.
Addendum [kenslerj]: If I create a Plan entry using multiple HTML-style links, a bug eats a bunch of my text. Everything from the first bracket of the first anchor to the first bracket of the last anchor disappears in the conversion. For instance, when I pasted in the entry below, the output read "Two cool sites for web developers:" and then the linked "table of contents." Do you see what I mean? This has now happened three times in the same way with different blocks of text, so I think it's a consistent problem with converting multiple HTML links. Thursday, September 11th It's hard to type "September 11th." Peace. Two cool sites for web developers: color schemes and Listamatic. This was a nice coincidence yesterday: I got the electronic news including my first article publication just as the Victorians seminar was finishing up Corinne, or Italy, the primary subject of the article and a book I hadn't taught before. I love teaching books in seminars that I've written about because I have to make the transition from focusing on parts of the text that I want to use to trying to read for any perspective anyone might want to develop. The seminar has done a particularly fine job analyzing Corinne; we have discussed a number of issues in the book that to my knowledge haven't made their way into published criticism. [brownj], which free calendar do you use? I don't know how I would make it through a week without Yahoo's. [watts], I didn't know you played noontime hoops. I've been wanting to make it over there sometime. On another note, I think your latest Plan entries have provided a remarkable illustration of Microsoft's institutional power: one day you have to explain that I can't switch away from Windows, and the next you lament the way MS's security problems complicate your life. I understand why you're in that position, and I'm not criticizing you or anyone here; this is hardly a Grinnell-specific problem. I'm just awed by the resilience of Microsoft's dominance in spite of its software's flaws.
Wednesday, September 10th [stutelbe], I love the "I'd like to be called the Grim Reaper" bit. It would be a great joke for a class--a class somewhere else--to have everyone prepare fake names for the first day's roll call. As in,
Molly?
Antonio?
Vincent?
Marcine?
Guadalupe?
And so forth. --- Here's the coolest page of optical illusions ever. --- Thanks to multibabel, I can now report that my paragraph below about Plans as a dorm conversation looks like this when translated into another language and back five times: [ gocac ]: I thought about which would have that to swallow I add to this celebrity my thought in PLogs: if as I can say, PLogs to look like like very good software of Blog. My objections that extreme PLogs does not have that to something to specify the Strohe nevertheless hardwired of the fact of software they indicate, because PLogs cannot very replace the EC, that we appreciated in the programs. I thought to an analogy, the end to try for the communication of the this. The greatest piece of the clean places of the total is like the traditional course of the conference: These go they who see that what must say to somebody and the interaction is a secondary target to the maximum. The discussion of Blogs base finished like the course of a professor of the university: the mutual effect takes place in the relation, but the basic structure of the interaction is asked for of blog of the author. The programs are when the discussions in current the alive creature of the dream in the university (the body of the information) to include: unit of cause of Planlove decentered, the shutdowns of the spontaneous discussions in the unexpected places, of that one the course, of which I discuss I generate her, all the types of the advantages to have, that are compare it with the discussions in the corridor of the dream: safer, they are rows to the fire, expectable more, better for the images of the distribution and therefore to traverse. But they are not discussions in the corridor of the dream and they cannot replace. That should settle the debate! [harrisle] and [schunaca] are fellow-travelers on the path of Spam literature. Excellent.
Tuesday, September 9th(c) Hey, nice work on making HTML linking acceptable on Plans! Is that [wellons]? (Update--no, it's [kenslerj].) I love it. [watts], thanks for the clarification. Regarding good riddance to sobig, I read today that some people wonder whether this version's expiration tomorrow is an indication that the next incarnation is set to bust out on September 11th, perhaps with much more malevolent intent. Apparently, the writers of sobig really know what they're doing, so that's scary. You probably know far too much about their talents already. Tuesday, September 9th(b) OK, I promised a more mirthful venture into Planland, and here it is: 1. Stealth Disco! Best viewed on high-speed connections. The "Best of" piece is outstanding, but the individual clips are sometimes even funnier because they have the original sound. 2. Remember this from the Simpsons? Homer: "I'm feelin' low, Apu. You got any of that beer that has candy floating in it, you know, Skittlebrau?" Apu: "Such a product does not exist, sir! You must have dreamed it." Homer: "Oh. Well then just gimme a six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles." Now the Crazy Engineer Network brings you the lowdown on Skittlebrau. Even non-drinkers, such as all of you who haven't turned 21, will enjoy the humor, I'll wager. Not that I endorse underage gambling, of course. 3. You may have seen Spam Haiku before. It's definitely worth a look. This is Spam as in the processed luncheon meat, not Spam as in unwanted email solicitations. Most of the haiku there do not include the traditional seasonal reference of the haiku form, however, so a few years ago I composed a seasonal quartet of Spamku. (On rereading them, I think they could be tightened a bit. Perhaps I should give it another go.) Anyway, I invite you, dear readers, to follow suit:
I Dormant grass peeks up, Sees Spam, long-awaited friend. Spam welcomes new life. II Summer frogs groaning You sip lemonade on ice Fool! Try Spam instead! III New air chills the trees Spam sits on a windowsill Spreading lush juices IV Spam on frozen lake-- Hmm, is the ice thick enough? Too bad I am huge. [schunaca], I can tell you how scared or not scared to be: if I survive my third-year review (now underway) intact, I'll be off one or two of your last four semesters. Your choice of my seminars might be a little constricted and you might need to have a different advisor for a year, but that should be the extent of the damage. :) [brownj], yeah, that was me--er, I--at the salsa concert. I had to prepare for class, but I really like that band, so I went and slunk to the back with my book. Mmmm . . . Wuthering Heights con salsa! Muy caliente! Welcome, [cjacobso]! Tuesday, September 9th I'll have some funny links later today. . . . [watts], I sincerely can't tell if you're joking or not in saying that I would not be allowed to migrate to Linux and/or OpenOffice. Thanks, [harrisle]!
Monday, September 8th Whoa! Did the syntax for links just change?
Happy birthday to Carolyn.
It occurred to me this morning that I can use
"Advanced [heroldk], um, I don't know what I would do. I don't understand why some people expend energy worrying about professors pushing their own fields to tutees. It seems to me that such pushing would primarily involve displaying a passion for what we do--in that sense, I hope all my classes promote my field and others' do theirs. I would be irked in your situation. I probably wouldn't approach the colleague, but I think that says more about my shyness than about the appropriateness of the approach. And "irked" is the shortest word I know of that includes all the letters of my first name. [gocac]: I thought I should add this comment to my thoughts below on PLogs: as far as I can tell, PLogs seems like pretty good Blog software. My complaints about PLogs are not meant to point out inherent flaws in that software but rather to say why PLogs cannot replace much of what we love about Plans. I thought of an analogy to try to explain this. Most websites are like traditional lecture courses: you go to them to see what someone has to say, and interaction is a secondary goal at most. Blogs are like discussion-based courses led by a professor: interactivity is built into the interface, but the basic structure of the interaction is controlled by the author of the blog. Plans are like dorm conversations in residential colleges (which include faculty): the Planlove mechanism creates decentered, spontaneous conversations in unpredictable places. Discussion-based courses have all sorts of advantages over dorm conversations: they're safer, more focused, more predictable, better for distributing images, and so forth. But they aren't dorm conversations and can't replace them.
Sunday, September 7th I'm really, really happy for my father today. After spending the better part of a lifetime playing jazz saxophone, he has suddenly put together a very serious recording project in Los Angeles. The full researsal session is today and the big recording session tomorrow. I got a lot of the details for the first time yesterday; the rest of the band will include a lot of the best LA musicians from the Tonight Show, Maynard Ferguson's bands, and so forth. It's incredibly exciting, and I have never heard Dad sound so happy. I don't even know how or when the album will be released and distributed. For now, I'm just thrilled that he is so thrilled with this moment. [rebelsky]'s call for people to give PLog a serious and fair assessment deserves careful consideration. I admire the commitment to balance and open-mindedness that his request represents. However, without wanting to be imbalanced or closed-minded, I still do not see the point of devoting time to assessing the new system, for reasons that have nothing to do with resentment towards ITS, and I want to try to explain those reasons. The quick version of my argument is this: the technological advantages of the new system (if advantages there be) cannot overcome its communal disadvantages, most notably the exclusion of alumni. Since the presence of alumni alone is enough to persuade me to stay on Plans and not to contribute to developing any community that excludes alumni, all technical points are moot. Assuming for a moment that alums are allowed on the new system at some poine, I will entertain the claimed advantages of the PLog system from [rebelsky]'s valiant effort to list them. 1. "ITS staff participate." Great! Come on over, folks! This is not a structural advantage. [rebelsky], I hereby nominate the participation of hundreds of other people on Plans for inclusion on your list of PLog's disadvantages. The switching costs of moving to a new system would be substantial, whereas the ITS folks could easily jump right into our pool, as I sincerely hope they do. 2. "You can use a wide range of HTML. [. . .]" Although I know HTML and use it for web pages, I think it mucks up VCs, making them slower and lesswelcoming, since people who know the code do fancy things. I like the level playing field of plain text, and the long-term success of text-only incarnations of Usenet suggests that I'm not alone. 3. "You can include images." But I don't want them! We have web pages for that. Especially for those of us who have dial-up connections at home, the lack of images on Plans is a big advantage of the system. 4. "A virtual community should include a variety of interfaces." I think that "should" is debatable. Given that everyone on Plans more or less understands how to create a conversation by linking to other Plans, my initial feeling is that the common interface of Plans is more useful than the slight advantages one gains by switching interfaces. Ease of use and familiarity will trump slight technical advantages. In all seriousness, I would also nominate the last three "advantages" for inclusion on the list of PLog's disadvantages. I'm not trying to be contrary. I really don't want that stuff. I am left feeling that no technological advantages could overcome the established, more inclusive community of Plans and that I have not yet heard of a single convincing technological advantage of PLog, though I know that's a matter of opinion. I can imagine circumstances that would induce me to spend time evaluating the new system: the inclusion of alumni, collaboration with students (if they were willing) to incorporate the magic of Planlove, a commitment to simpler technology without needless design elements and images. But when Plans already offers me alumni, Planlove, and simplicity, and it adds a pre-existing community of users who know the interface, I simply do not see the need to explore PLog. I am trying to keep my mind open and to explain my resistance to PLog in a way that might be useful to the committee. At this point, however, the advantages of Plans seem overwhelming in ways that I do not need to spend time on PLog to understand. Thanks to [stone], [arnone01], and [rinneand] for advice on migrating to open-source software. I might not make the move quickly, but I'll make it.
Addendum [stone], I read the article on OpenOffice. I admit it: I still use Windows and Office on both of my computers. Can you give me any sense of how difficult it would be (next summer, probably) to make the big switch to Linux and OpenOffice? I confess I've hesitated because I fear messing up the formatting in my book manuscript and other documents that I need to use repeatedly. Are my worries just the result of Gatesite progaganda? I want to use the Force for good! Others are welcome to weigh in on this, too, of course. Saturday, September 6th I've been away; my aunt and uncle from Vermont visited Iowa for the first time. It was great to see them. I saw some of the Democratic debate as I was doing other stuff a couple of nights ago. I thought Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, and Moseley-Braun did especially well. Gephardt was massively more convincing than in the Newton forum I went to. I saw Moseley-Braun on PBS a few months ago, when her answers (in a health care segment) were scattered and hard to understand. She is a different candidate now; as I watched the debate, she overtook Kucinich as my favorite Quixotic long-shot candidate. I thought Dean was fine--not great, not bad--and Lieberman shaky. Graham beat out Lieberman in the contest of middle-seeking new Dems, IMHO. By the way, people in the movement to draft Wesley Clark into the race are now citing a statistic routinely that the number of undecided Democrats shot up over the summer. Their conclusion is that Democrats have looked at the field of candidates and decisively determined that they are newly dissatisfied with it. The idea sounded strange to me, so I checked it out a little bit, and I think it's based on nothing. "The Wes wing?" includes the following line: "'This year the Democrats need some kind of military credentials,' insists [Professor Rogan] Kersh, who also notes that the number of undecided Democrats has doubled over the summer." I wonder how Kersh has come to that conclusion. I suspect that it comes from Amy Sullivan's pro-Clark Washington Monthly piece. Sullivan's analysis has now become the basis for a number of other pro-Clark articles, including Joe Conason's recent Salon.com piece, which praised it as "excellent." Here is the key source text from Sullivan: "Today, there are actually more undecided Democrats than there were just a few months ago. The number stood at 15 percent in May and 30 percent in early July. In a late July Zogby poll, almost half of those Democrats polled--48 percent--said they wish they had other candidates to choose from." The "late July Zogby poll" does indeed give the 48% figure, but it is separate from the percentage of undecided voters, which was 39%, "up slightly from 37% in the March polling." That is, in a straightforward comparison by the same polling service on the same question, the difference in undecided voters is well within the margin of error of the two polls, which fact flatly contradicts a doubling of undecided Democrats. More evidence comes from Detroit Free Press polls, which found a *decrease* in undecided Democrats from 20 percent to 15 percent from late May to the end of July. I cannot find the source of Sullivan's claim of a move from 15 percent to 30 percent undecided Democrats. Presumably, Kersh uses Sullivan or Sullivan's source to say that the number has "doubled." If Sullivan and Kersh stand by those numbers, however, at the very least they are choosing results that support a Clark run for the Presidency while ignoring other, contradictory results. [andersok], that's a good point about local money equivalents, of course, but I think straight dollar conversions are interesting and important, too, because they give an indication of the mobility of wealth. $PPP are much better for describing local situations in terms of income and cost of living--which are indeed the primary considerations for most people, and certainly for Peace Corps workers--but individual and corporate mobility is constricted or expanded by straight conversions. The importance of both kinds of conversions, and the gap between them in different places, dictates individuals' ability to maintain capital as they move and companies' incentives to operate in different economic environments. Obviously, your point holds that straight conversions alone are misleading. I would just add that $PPP alone would not tell the whole story, either.
Wednesday, September 3rd globalrichlist.com puts one's annual income into a world context. I know that some of you don't really have incomes right now, but even the most pessimistic assumptions about your future might produce results that will make your head spin a little. A Washington Post article titled "Genes' Sway Over IQ May Vary With Class" reports on a study that has come up with interesting results that might explain some of aspects of the old Bell Curve debate in a way that justifies Head Start-style interventions. Oh, well. Just when I had figured out a way to back up Plan entries, something went wooky with the Word file and prevented me from FTPing it. Therefore, I didn't have one day backed up. And that's the gone day. Therefore, what follows is vaguely similar to some stuff that was here yesterday. I like this miniature journalistic manifesto that surfaces in a Garrison Keillor interview on salon.com, where he used to have an advice column in the character of "Mr. Blue":
What do you think Mr. Blue offered his readers that, say, Dear Abby or Ann
Landers did not?
Their columns were terribly constricted by space, which is hard to
understand. People love to read about other people's problems. Everybody
knows this. But newspaper editors are complete dolts when it comes to
understanding readers. We read because we love to, and newspaper editors
edit the papers for people with serious reading disabilities. So Abby and
Ann had to write postcards. Everything was shrunk. A few scant details and
then some blithering generality. (Wake up and smell the coffee. Talk to your
doctor. Let me know what happens, I care.) This is why magazines have a
future, including online ones. This is why I subscribe to the New York
Times -- because, unlike most local newspapers, it assumes that the reader
is interested.
[archerda]: I don't know if you saw my answer to your now-deleted library journals question. The short version is that the faculty do have some say in what journals we buy, but we end up taking responsibility for our own narrow fields, and even then we mostly do so as part of big cumbersome departmental reviews. English talked about the process last semester, and we felt that we aren't due for another review yet. I add today, having thought about it further, that I'm not sure who has been looking out for more literary journals in the past decade, since responsibilities and personnel have shifted a lot. Pretty much all the decisions in this area were made before my time. I'll therefore stop talking now, since I really don't know anything. Warning: the balance of this entry comprises really nerdy points about baseball analysis. Enter at your own risk. When [archerda] linked to me, I saw the argument on his Plan for Tim Hudson to win the AL Cy Young award. Although I ended up thinking that I would probably vote for Hudson based on the facts presented in that argument, I want to pick on a couple of the points in the argument because they touch on things I used to read about a lot. 1. "The most important indicator of pitching excellence is undoubtedly the ERA." This is true to a certain extent, in that among the more commonly cited stats, ERA is one of the best at isolating important information. It has serious limitations, however. It's a lousy stat for relief pitchers, for one thing. It's pretty good for starting pitchers, but there are two limitations. The first one is easy: excluding unearned runs relies on decisions and circumstances that are too arbitrary. In an extreme case, a pitcher could start the first inning, get two outs, allow an error, give up seven straight home runs, and leave the game. Aside from a severely understated effect on his WHIP, that pitcher would not be punished for the dismal outing in your accounting of ERA or winning percentage. The scoring of errors also doesn't support the significance of unearned runs. I would therefore argue for the merits of runs allowed (RA) rather than ERA as the baseline measure of starters' performance. 1a. There's a convincing case to be made for getting even more radical about RA. The logic for favoring ERA or RA over W-L records, of course, is that W-L records unfairly consider run support, which is largely beyond a pitcher's control. About three years ago, Voros McCracken extended the argument. If we want to look at what pitchers control, he asked, can we separate the parts of their performance that result from skill and the parts that result from luck or defense? He found, to the surprise of pretty much everyone, that Major League pitchers basically control three factors: walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed. Other events--the balls in play that aren't homers--become hits or outs randomly; the results of such events appear to be a function of (more) luck and (less) defense rather than the pitcher's skill. If you accept those results, you can make a case (again, following the logic that pitchers don't deserve credit for stuff they don't control) that a weighted combination of walk, strikeout and home run rates is the purest measure of a pitcher's effectiveness. I think that argument is fascinating, and after raising a lot of objections initially, I now basically buy it, but RA is plenty for present purposes. 2. I respectfully submit that your "winning percentage" number unfairly favors Hudson's situation. Your stat erases the effects of no-decisions, but for the very best pitchers in the league, a no-decision is an undesirable result and should count as such. I'm not arguing for devising a new and better stat, but if we're going to throw in team-dependent measures such as W-L, we need to use all the available information. 3. Hudson's unimpressive walk rate and his impressive BA against can be combined (with the addition of slugging) into one comprehensive weighted stat for a more meaningful comparison. OPS (on-base plus slugging) against would combine everything neatly--it's basically WHIP with a good adjustment for slugging. There are some more nuanced measures of this sort of thing, but OPS is good enough for most purposes. Again, though, I agree with your conclusion, and I hope my nitpicking is more interesting than annoying. As long as Barry Bonds gets another MVP, I'll be happy. :)
Monday, September 1st Well, August is gone, and we're starting the first full week of classes. It's time for some comic relief:
1. This 2. Here is a remarkable AP photo of President Bush accidentally dropping his dog at a Little League Softball Word Series game yesterday. (The dog was fine.) This is not just a bit of mean-spirited fun at the President's expense; the wonderful part of the picture is the range of reactions on the faces around him, from the obvious horror of the players to Laura Bush's appropriately composed concern. Again, no animals were harmed in the process of bringing this link to my Plan this morning. 3. A cool word from my Forgotten English desk calendar: "chin-pie." Definition: "A rubbing of a boy's chin by another boy's hand until glowing hot, said to make the hairs grow. Another way to promote the growth was bearding, or rubbing the chin with a man's stubbly beard." Sunday, August 31st There was an amazing, big group of people at the Presbyterian(ish) students' lunch today! [adamsc] said he's thinking of setting up a Plan for the group, which I think is a great idea. Consider that a nudge, Carter! :) It was cool to see [thorsons]'s new book, which I hadn't seen yet. I haven't posted in a few days for three reasons: 1) I was bummed about losing a lot of writing with the rollback, 2) I was busy as all get out, and 3) I was thinking a lot about the Plans/ACUP business in the aftermath of Friday's open forum, which I attended. [stone] has posted his compelling comments and linked them to his Plan, which also contains a summary of the other participants' remarks. The administrators' explanation for their actions in taking down Plans was good to hear and generally convincing. I was disappointed that the other panelists said almost nothing about [stone]'s critique of the new ACUP, although Dean Swartz did emphasize the temporariness of the changes. I'll share my thoughts about the specifics of the issues with the appropriate people when I have finished putting them together. For now, I'll just say that this controversy strikes me as an early sign of a huge tension that will only get worse (not just here--worldwide) between emergent systems that rely on bottom-up information gathering on one hand, and on the other the interests of administrators (who rightly fear responsibility for unpredictable behavior) and corporate software designers whose desire to build closed proprietary systems happens to blend with the administrative desire for predictability. I'm not saying anyone's wrong here, just that the two sides have incompatible interests, and both sides are gaining a lot of momentum. My mother and I are thinking of co-writing a piece about this based on her fascinating experience caught between the two camps at a community college; my prediction is that the Microsoft-Linux showdown will prefigure a similar struggle in academic institutions.
By the way, users and fans of Wikis might enjoy
this
And also by the way, there's a great
Lawrence
And also also by the way,
here
Oh, now, in addition to cutting veterans' benefits and military pay, the
Republicans are outsourcing [much stuff lost and not backed up here] Saturday, August 23rd(b)
Think of the coolest stick-figure animation you can imagine. Now make it
five times cooler. I bet it's still not as cool as
this [rebelsky], reading back over my comments on the potential freedom and authority course, I want to emphasize the end rather than the middle of that paragraph. I mention the logistical difficulties to let you know what we'd have to work around, but I bet they could be surmounted, and I find the idea of the course more exciting the more I think about it. [weimerda], the professor is Peter Murphy, I take it? (IIRC, you're citing his book title verbatim, so it would be a whopper of a coincidence if it's not!) Though I haven't met Murphy, I do know and like the book. I've cited it more than once, in fact. I didn't realize he was at Williams; that's a neat connection. Saturday, August 23rd
Update on the Fox-Franken case: Fox was laughed
This is a really good Slate This is a pdf file and therefore a little annoying to load, but it's worth it: a clever fake ad that does a MasterCard "priceless" bit on the California recall. See the lower right corner of the page. Wholesome non-partisan humor, this. [rebelsky]: No, see, the idea is that Freedom and Authority on the Internet is a great course for someone else to teach! Seriously, I would love to be part of teaching such a thing, but I would have to think (or talk) about what it would require to pull off pre-tenure. Another potential drawback of involving me is that I'm at the worst possible stage for predicting leave time: I could be a) off next year, on the following; b) on next year, off the following; c) on next year, off the following fall; or d) on next year, off the following spring. And the only part I have any control over is the choice between c) and d). If there's a way to go ahead under those circumstances, however, I would love to do so, and I could start thinking about drawing on people I know who have built important VCs in the humanities. Welcome, [brownj]! Nice to share the Japan seminar with you, too. (My students will, I trust, be utterly unsurprised that I was the one to point to the name of Dick Hardy.) I will probably add a Godzilla-in-Japan unit to my Frankenstein tutorial next time around, but it's hard to deal with postwar Japan in my other courses. We did talk a little bit about course changes before you arrived, and there was a big range from people who already teach units on Japan to people like me who are just starting out. I, too, am a minor league baseball fan: I used to follow NL prospects pretty closely, and I still love going to games. Thursday, August 21st
This takes me back to the masculine-feminine mind bit from the spring: the
gender-genie
The Onion has a clever piece on a
factoid-finding
Hey, 120 students! Check out this excerpt [weimerda], that's an interesting choice. I'd go with the big class, for two big reasons: 1) you have less time at Williams than most of your peers, so it's a good idea to connect with the standing faculty quickly, and 2) you are good at taking opportunities to talk about coursework with professors and peers, so you will not feel the drawbacks of a bigger class as acutely as you otherwise would. [andersem], you have hit on the only food I named that I haven't bought myself in London. A friend of mine found good ramen, but she may well have been shopping at an Asian food store. I was just assuming that it was among the U.S. standbys that would translate. By the way, that thing about how to "assume" makes an "ass" out of "u" and "me" is a big fat lie. In my experience, when I make incorrect assumptions, I make an ass of only myself. The proper verb could be "assme" or "assmeme." Contrarily, when "u" assume something, it's no skin off my back. Perhaps, therefore, you "assu" or "assuu." [stone] and [rebelsky]: Would not Virtual Communities and the Free Internet make for a great "Freedom and Authority" seminar? Is anyone planning anything along those lines? Right on, [cumminsj]. [likarish]: excellent point and even better Simpsons reference. |