Bierfaristo Blog

We went on the Buck Island tour -- our third time. The previous two times, we went on Flyer, but this time we went on Adventure -- their new glass-bottomed boat. One big advantage was that the seating is all under a roof, which provides welcome shade. Previously, you were basically spending 4 and a half hours under the direct sun. I didn't like the ladders on the new boat, however. They have a back to each step, which doesn't allow you put a flipper through them -- you pretty much need to get your flippers off in the waves, put them a few steps up, and then scramble onto the steps. I missed once and smashed my toe, which is sore. But that was the only missed note on the whole day. Daniel is nervous about snorkeling into the coral, so we stayed relatively close to the boat. But we saw a barracuda and lots of cool stuff.

After the tour, we went to the Fort Christian Brewpub, but it was full -- every table was occupied. I wondered whether they could open the upstairs for us and Daniel noticed there were people up there. We went up and they set up a bunch of tables for 16 and we had a fabulous dinner with an incredible view of Protestant Cay and the reef.

But we missed the green flash again.

Today, when we drove onto the refuge, I offered to get dropped off first. It meant a long walk to the end of the trap line, but it meant that that one of the students would get to spend more time on the beach. I don't really like walking on the loose sand, so I was happier just walking along the road.

At trap 11, I found a trap that had been dragged out of its usual place. There were a lot of dog tracks and the back of the trap had been opened. The mongoose was gone. Today, as it turned out, we'd also seen a video from one of the trail cams that showed a pack of at least 4 dogs running loose on the refuge. I took some pictures of the scene, replaced the trap, and walked the rest of the way out to the end of the trap line. It was a hot and dry walk.

At the end, I sat down in the sand and listened to the waves. It was beautiful, with the setting sun and the waves quietly rolling in. Tomorrow is another day.

We arrived in St. Croix for the 2009 field season on July 31. We all met at the airport and were together for the flight to San Juan. We discovered that some were on an early flight to St. Croix, while others were scheduled later. A few were able to switch to the sooner flight and arrived in the early afternoon.

We had arranged for a 12 passenger van, but it turned out to be unavailable, so the rental company gave us two smaller vehicles: a minivan and a Jeep. We checked in to Cottages by the Sea, met Mike Evans at the refuge (where the students were staying) and then split up: Buzz went back to the airport to pick up the rest of the team and I led an expedition to the grocery store (not only for groceries, but also beer and liquor.)

After a quick visit to the beach, we went to the Lost Dog for pizza and beer. Both Daniel and Jonathan had been keenly anticipating their favorite pizza restaurant in the world. We returned around 10pm and I was exhausted and ready for sleep.

We went early to the farmer's market to buy fruit and fish. I got genips, sugar apples, and a couple other odd fruits I hadn't seen before. My previous experience with sugar apples has been uneven, but these have been perfect: almost crunchy with sugar.

We finally went out to the refuge in the mid-afternoon to put out traps. Buzz led one team out into the scrub a bit west of the saltpond to put out a grid of 15 traps. I took the other team out to the end of the road and we put traps in pairs about 300 feet apart along the side of the road. We rejoined the other team and together laid out some mouse traps for a student project.

The following morning, we went out to the field early to check the mouse traps, but hadn't caught any. The next night, we reset the traps using a more attractive bait and caught several mice. We heard from Mike that Peromyscus have been observed on the island. The mice looked like Mus, but were brownish, which is unusual.

We've begun to settle into a routine: check the mouse traps early and close them for the day; check the mongoose traps before lunch; process mongooses after lunch; and return the mongooses in the late afternoon and open the mouse traps before dinner. In between each stage, we go swimming, have meals, and run errands. And run interference among the children.

On Saturday, Lucy and I did our usual routine. I rode my bike into town and met Lucy and Penny at the Farmer's Market. After getting some bread and strawberries, I got a cup of coffee at Amherst Coffee and sat outside with the bike and dog and my new netbook and browsed the web while Lucy went to the library. When she was done, we switched (although she declined to use the netbook). I picked out a new Paul Krugman book and decided to re-read Dune. I must have not read Dune since I was in high school -- it was quite interesting to re-read it: a great story that still holds up well. The most interesting gap is the complete absence of information technology.

Rather than riding straight home, we met again along the Swift Way to collect some cattails for lunch. Cattail flowers, when still green, can be cooked and eaten rather like corn on the cob. We collected maybe 10 or 15 and brought them home to eat. I got Alisa to take a tiny nip, but no-one else was even willing to try them. They're really quite tasty. In a weedy, starchy kinda way.

I bought a netbook for myself for Father's day and I'm using it now. I've wanted to get one for a few months: they're just so cute. I resisted for a long time, telling myself it was stupid to spend money for a computer that would be just like my Macbook only slower and with a smaller screen. But when the wireless card on my Macbook started to fail (I think the antenna is loose or something), I decided I could justify getting myself the netbook so I could have something when I need to take the macbook in.

I looked for a long time trying to find someplace that would sell me one with linux. You can find places to order linux ones online, but it's nearly impossible to find anyplace where you can put your hands on one. No place local that has computers will carry a model with linux: not the campus book store, Best Buy, Staples, or the litte place downtown called "Left Click". They seemed like the kind of place that carry something like that -- indeed there's a little place in Nashua, NH that will sell you a netbook configured to dual boot or even triple boot. I thought about driving the two hours to get one, but decided it was just too far away.

Instead, I went to Walmart and I bought a netbook with Windows. I was glad I did it that way, in fact, because the first one I came home with didn't work right: the keyboard wouldn't print k's or v's or a half-dozen other letters. So I exchanged it. They didn't have any more of that model, so I traded up and got a red Acer Aspire One D250. It's not a bad little computer. It's a great little computer for $300. However...

I can date when I started using Linux pretty completely by saying that I pretty nearly hosed my first system trying to update from libc to glibc. That would have been in 1997 or 1998. Since then, I've used linux frequently as a server, sometimes as a desktop, and I've tried 3 times to have a linux-based laptop that I could actually use to get work done. The laptop thing didn't really worked out the times before. I had a tibook with linuxppc and a special kernel that was pretty good. But there were significant limitations. To change my wireless configuration, I had to hand-edit a text file to comment out the name and password of one base-station, uncomment another, and then restart the networking. I also found that it didn't pay to spend much time trying to configure the windowing environment, because one false move and the setting would get borked and you'd have to start over. At least, that seemed to happen to me fairly frequently. For a unix geek, it was perfectly usable, but it was like using a wrench to open a valve and drinking from a hose, rather than having a sink with faucets and glasses -- and maybe even an icecube, like when using a Mac. Don't get me started talking about what it was like trying to use the laptop with a projector.

It's been three or four years since the last time I tried a linux laptop. I had seen that things were better when I went to Libre Graphics. It was a challenge for people to make their laptops work with the projector, but we succeeded nearly every time.

I made an ubuntu netbook remix installation thumbdrive, booted the laptop from it after a couple of tries (trying to figure out the byzantine BIOS interface -- whoever wrote that pile of steaming dog turds ought to be shot), and ran the installer. Half an hour later, I rebooted the machine and logged into my new laptop. Stuff mostly just worked! Mostly.

It turned out that the ethernet card didn't work. Well, that wasn't difficult -- I found a page that said where to download a driver. I downloaded it, compiled it, installed it and, voila, it worked. The same page warned that the microphone wouldn't work either and said where to get drivers that would work. I checked, got the drivers, but they didn't compile cleanly. I searched around, found another page that explained what other packages you needed to install to compile the sound drivers, installed them, compiled, installed. Then there were more pages for the choppy video, etc, etc.

I had forgotten how much time you can spend trying to get a non-macintosh all tuned up. It's actually rather fun -- I remember a TA who complained about Macs because you couldn't do stuff like that to "make them better". I said, "You don't like Macs because they just work?"

It's really quite functional. Just a few things that don't quite work like they're supposed to. And I think I can actually be perfectly productive with this laptop running Ubuntu. I don't really *need* anything else.

I could try installing MacOS on it -- making it a Hackintosh. But I don't really want to bother. If Apple made a netbook that was reasonably priced, I might buy that. But they don't. And I like using Linux. It's fun and cool. But it's not a Mac.

Educational measurement doesn't work and shouldn't be called measurement. The reductionism and worship of quantification in our society is twisting education as a mantra of "improving scores" drives every decision in the schools. We should make decisions about education based on what makes sense, not merely on what improves test scores.

The premise of educational measurement is that, if you can't measure things directly, you can find indicators that vary in the same direction as as what you want to measure and you can aggregate those together in a "construct". In other words, we can't measure how good something is, but we can measure other things that contribute to what make it good and use those together as a measure of quality. The problem is that while these so-called measurements may work reasonably well with a natural population, they don't substitute for a prescription. Let me give you an example.

Let's develop a measure for how good cookies are. Let's say we look at a hundred different kinds of cookies and decide that the biggest and sweetest cookies are the best. We could develop a measure that uses the weight and percent sugar as indicators and aggregate those as our construct. Our construct is simple to apply. It might work great with real cookies. But you could also make cookies with mud and sugar -- they might score really high, but I'll bet they wouldn't taste very good.

What do you do? Well, the standard approach is to try to add more dimensions as part of the index. You can measure fat, starch, hardness, etc, etc. Your measure gets more and more complex to apply. But no matter what you do, you're still not going to have a measure of how good cookies are. For one reason, because it isn't possible to know all of the dimensions that make cookies good. People invent new ways to make cookies good every day. People thought Oreos were good until Doublestuff cookies came out. The second reason is that there's no agreement about what makes a really good cookie. Some people like chocolate chip and others like vanilla wafers: its stupid to argue about which one is better.

Here's the worst problem: Even if you measure a hundred dimensions, it still won't tell people how to make a good cookie. Once you start applying the "instrument" (that's what the educational measurement people call a test) people start using the scores to decide what makes cookies good, rather just trying to make good cookies. This is how disasters like the melamine contamination happen. They were using a test for quality in children's milk that included a test for protein. It turns out that adding melamine to products makes products test higher for protein and is really cheap. When the tests drive school policy, schools are compelled to start look for anything like melamine: something that improves the scores on the tests, regardless of it's actual value.

Just like we all know what a good cookie tastes like, we all know good education when we see it. Education should be about engaging children in interesting work that requires them to construct knowledge in meaningful ways. We need to return to a model that uses common sense to improve education, and not be slaves to measures that don't really measure what we care about.

I sent a quick letter to secretary of the faculty senate and the president of the MSP this morning:

I would like to call your attention to this article which describes how Clemson has been trying to game the rankings (and jumped from 38th to 22nd). It includes such chicanery as artificially limiting class sizes to below 20 (while allowing larger classes to get much larger) -- because "below 20" is a magical cut-off in the rankings. Student admissions are determined by how the SAT numbers will make the institution look. And there was a push to get large numbers of alumni to donate just $5 (because it makes the number of donors look good, even though the money itself is financially insignificant).

This kind of chicanery is exactly what I was warning about in my response to the Chancellor's Framework for Excellence.

These kinds of changes do nothing to actually help the research, service, and teaching of the University. They do not benefit -- and actually undermine -- the students, faculty, and mission of the institution. They represent diversions of funding that could be used to actually advance the institution, but are instead being spent to "influence" the rankings only.

Moreover, whatever benefits might be accrued by such changes in the rankings are bound to be short-lived. The rankings are artificial and contrived -- and will probably be changed as soon as it becomes apparent that institutions are gaming them.

I hope the Faculty Senate and Union will hold the chancellor accountable for his plan and work to ensure that this kind of game doesn't get played here. We need to look critically at our actual needs and devote spending to solve the problems we actually face. We must not engage in magical thinking that by gaming the rankings we can actually improve the institution.

The administration, apparently in conjunction with the faculty senate, decided to construct a survey about reorganization on campus. Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask the questions in a way that will provide much insight into what's actually happening on the campus. I wrote the following comment:

I believe the questions in the survey are not the right ones to ask: The University has embarked on a dramatic reorganization with careful consideration of neither the goals nor the consequences. Reorganization may be one effective means of achieving various goals, but without a thoughtful consideration of the goals and the range of potential ways for achieving the goals, I believe that the institution is lurching erratically into the future, without being unified or deliberative in our actions.

Some of the questions that should have been asked, therefore, are "Do you feel that the process for reorganization has provided enough time to ensure that the university is moving forward appropriately?" and "Do you feel that questions raised by faculty about the reorganization process were answered appropriately or largely ignored?"

I believe these questions would provide a lot more insight into whether we're moving forward together than the questions that have been asked in the survey.

On Thursday and Friday, the content management system selection committee saw two presentations, one from Hannon Hill about their Cascade Server product and the other from Lucidus, a small web development company in New Hampshire about Drupal. I felt that there was greater enthusiasm for Drupal and am cautiously optimistic that drupal will be ultimately chosen.

Cascade Server is a proprietary software product that is a "push server". Essentially, it is a content management system that pushes out static webpages for deployment. Content developers and managers connect to the system and see a file-system like view (in a web browser) with a number of tools to edit pages and workflows for content approval and vetting. The pages that are actually deployed don't have any directly interactive components. Things like RSS feeds and lists of headlines are all pre-generated on the system and posted (e.g. by cron) on the actual site as static pages. This means that if any real interactivity is needed -- ie, any kind of response to user input -- it needs to be accomplished by other kinds of one-off packages or php scripts, rather than being an integral part of the system itself. This seems like a serious shortcoming to me.

Given that we've been working with Drupal, I don't need to describe what Drupal is or how it works. The presenter offered a presentation about Drupal and then showed how it could be used to address the three scenarios that he had been tasked with. There was intense interest on the part of the selection committee and many questions -- many more than when the cascade server was presented.

The presenter for Drupal made a persuasive case that the system selected needs to be able to grow and adapt to the changing needs of the campus. He argued that commercial companies need to focus on the key features that people know they need now, whereas an open source system, by encouraging the participation of the user community, has a "long tail" of additional add-ons and modules that only a small fraction of users want now. Not all of these might be ready or needed immediately, but some of them undoubtedly represented features that the University was going to want in the coming years -- we just don't know it yet. In the end, that was the key difference between the two approaches.

Using the Cascade Server, would be like the Red Queen -- running as fast as we can to stay in the same place. It would allow us to continue building websites as static pages, but would not provide transformational change in the kinds of services nor prepare the campus for the future. Drupal was hands-down the winner if the goal is to revolutionize the kinds of services available to the campus community.

I believe the process still has a couple of steps, including opportunities for the selection committee to actually use the products. The Drupal presenter encouraged the committee to contact a webmaster who had overseen the implementation of the Cascade Server at Plymouth State University (I think), but who was now someplace else in New Hampshire. One got the impression that she would not provide a favorable perspective of the Cascade Server.

The House budget has proposed to increase the contribution that state employees make to their health insurance from 15% to 30%. I've drafted a letter to my state senator and representative to ask for their support in stopping this from being implemented.

I hope we can count on both of you to oppose the draconian increases currently being proposed to our health insurance. Most faculty at the University have not had their salary keep pace with the rate of inflation for years. A few years ago, I found that the difference between my salary and the salary of a new assistant professor was greater in absolute value then than it had been when I arrived. New faculty get hired in with salaries that are competitive with the rest of the world. With our pay increases consistently running below the rate of inflation (nearly every year I've been here -- this year, our cost-of-living adjustment is "0", you know), the rest of us lose ground every year. I've always felt that one trade-off I could point to was that we were covering less of our health insurance, which has consistently increased faster than inflation.

The same pattern is true of other University benefits. For example, our families don't have to pay tuition, but tuition has stayed nearly constant for a generation and all of the increases have been for fees -- to the point that this benefit is nearly worthless.

I believe the real solution needs to be some kind of single-payer health care. Nickel-and-diming the state employees isn't going to fix the problem -- and, in fact, just masks the symptoms. Instead of covering up the symptoms by reducing the impact of spiraling health-care increases on the budget, we should be trying to fix the core problem. (And this shouldn't be controversial, because I seem to recall that support for single-payer health care is part of the platform of the Massachusetts Democratic Party... Maybe when Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the corner office, we'll finally see that happen. Oh, wait.) In any event, until that happens I would be VERY disappointed not to see my elected officials make EVERY POSSIBLE EFFORT to keep our contributions where they are.