Bierfaristo Blog

I'm reading a book right now about Nazi Germany: Hitler's empire : how the Nazis ruled Europe by Mark Mazower. I would say its fascinating, but its actually fairly tedious and hard to read. I read a few pages and it puts me to sleep. One idea is interesting, however. In Western Europe, the pre-existing economic system and rule of law allowed the Nazis to very easily leverage the existing population into their war machine. In the East, by contrast, they just killed everyone -- or everyone they could. A lesson I haven't heard people draw from WWII is how modern society prepares people to be enslaved: once people are entirely dependent upon "the system", whoever controls the system can trivially direct its fruits to whatever ends they want. As long as the system provides what people need, they mostly don't seem to mind if the fruits of their labor are being used to overturn democratically elected governments in Austria or Poland or Chile or Nicaragua or Haiti. Once people have become dependent upon the system, it perhaps becomes much harder to get them to organize against its misuse. Scary.

At the MEES conference, I took some Eristalis larvae for people to observe. I've done this plenty of time with students and -- at least with Biology students -- it generally works really well as an observation exercise. I've used lots of stuff that can work really well -- almost anything can. I've used green onions and walnuts before. But Eristalis larvae are about the best, because they're so unusual.

After the presentation Kathy Davis asked if she could have the larvae to use with her pre-service teachers. I said, "Sure!". Today, she send me email to explain how they worked out. She thanked me for my presentation and then said:

my students in my Thurs class were not all that excited about the maggots...they seemed to have some biases floating around about what animals are acceptable and which are not...can you imagine that? WE had a bit of a conversation about garbage, etc. which led to boa costrictors and other animals usually marginalized from the in-crowd of critters. Anyway, they did look at them as long as the lids were on the little containers.

Here's my reply:

Thanks for your kind words about my presentation -- I had a good time.

Regarding what animals are acceptable, I had a similar experience with biology students. Each year, I identify a theme for the projects that were going to study -- I've tried leaving it open and constraining it and have found that constraints usually generate a better project in the end. So I usually pick some organism or theme for the class to study. Usually I've picked a plant -- or some plant themed project (like trees, garlic mustard or lichens) -- because plants are safe. You can find them reliably year round and you don't need to fill out 50 pages of paperwork to study them. But students say they hate plants -- they want to study animals. So last year, I decided we could study an animal you can find reliably in the Morrill Science Center: the cockroach! I thought it was a brilliant idea. Students could study an animal and I wouldn't have to fill out a mountain of paperwork. Unfortunately, even biology students don't seem to believe cockroaches are animals. Or they want to study animals, but will make a special exception for cockroaches. So last semester, I took some Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches to my first class for students to handle, but then suggested maybe we could study tardigrades instead. Only a few students complained about studying tardigrades after that.

Another animal I've thought we might be able to find in Morrill: Psocoptera (aka "book lice"). I'm not sure students would like them any better. I've thought it would be interesting to examine faculty member's books for psocopterans to see which faculty members have the most and the most diverse populations of psocopterans: you could think up all kinds of factors that might contribute to diversity in the population.

Anyway, sorry your ingrate students didn't much like the maggots. :-)

I got up early this morning and was on the road by 6:30 to go to Worcester. I stopped for gas, which used up all my money, so I stopped along the masspike to get money in case I needed to buy lunch or pay for parking. As it turned out, no unanticpated expenditures were required.

I checked in, found my room, and set up with plenty of time. A representative of MEES introduced himself and said that he would introduce the session for me. I had enough time to create a quick automatic slideshow of the images from the class for while people came in. I picked "Habitat, habitat" by Roger Tincnell to have some music. The song runs two minutes and I must have heard it 5 or 10 times while waiting for time to start -- I don't think I'll need to listen to it again any time soon.

My talk started just a few minutes late. The audience was enthusiastic and asked good questions. I spoke for a few minutes, did the activity with the Eristalis larvae, ran through the rest of the talk, and did the Google Earth activity. I ended up 5 minutes over. The last 10 minutes were just a bit rushed, but I felt like things wrapped up nicely.

For the Google Earth activity, I had selected 10 places around the world and printed out a screen capture -- all at the same scale. I gave each pair of people one place to look at with rules and a transparent overlay to measure area. I tried to pick areas that were relatively comparable: some housing and some surrounding land -- most with some agricultural land. It really amazing how striking the differences are between the giant agribusinesses in the Midwest and the tiny fields in China and Haiti. In Quebec, there are very long fields that reach way back away from rivers -- so that every land-owner had their own frontage once upon a time, I suppose. In some places you can see the radial design of early cities, with paths or small roads between villages, in some the old design with a newer grid superimposed, in others nothing but grid itself. The little slice of Japan was particularly interesting with intensive bands of agricultural land interrupted with satoyamas. I let each group report out and then highlighted any patterns I had observed that they hadn't mentioned and talked a bit about how I would use the activity if we had computers or had more time to actually collect measurements.

After the Google Earth activity, I presented my acknowledgments and then had a black slide. I put that up and then said, "So. Do you want to know where those places are?" There was an enthusiastic roar of approval. But I pointed out that from a teaching perspective, its really something to consider. Once you tell people "the answer", they often quit trying and my goal as an instructor is to keep them motivated to figure things out for themselves. But I had prepared an extra "secret" slide at the end with where each of the places was from. It worked well as a rhetorical trick and if I hadn't told people, I might not have made it out of the room alive.

After my presentation, I visited the exhibits and hung out for a while to decompress. After lunch, I decided to just head home. There was a presentation about invasive species that had sounded interesting, but it had been canceled. And I was feeling tired and a bit out of sorts.

Tomorrow, I'm presenting at the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society conference at Holy Cross in Worcester. I've spent a good bit of time over the past few days putting together a presentation that includes two hands-on activities and an overview of the projects I used for the BIOL597B class. I should probably add one more slide to talk about Free Software.

I'm not sure quite how long it will take me to get through the presentation. I have an hour and fifteen minutes. My goal is for the introduction to last 5-10 minutes, the first activity 15 minutes, the overview for 20-25 minutes, and the second activity roughly 15 minutes. That should give me 10-15 minutes for questions plus a little slop. I could easily spend an hour on any of the parts.

It was fun to go back and look at all the work my students did last semester. They posted more than 1300 images. And great stuff! Some of them I had missed when they went by the first time. The on-line format has some advantages -- some students might otherwise not be able to participate -- but I'm always struck by how unsatisfying I feel afterward about the relationship I had with the students. I don't feel like I really get to know people, like I can in a face-to-face class.

In Biology, we've set up a new server to provide radmind and a variety of other services in the new ISB. It's a Sun T5220 -- a fancy new server with a really fast processor. The tradition in the Biology Department is to name servers after fish -- and big servers are named after big marine fish. We have "marlin" and "snapper". The new backup server is named "mormyrid" (a kind of cool electric fish that is known for swimming backward -- for a "backup" server? Get it? We're geeks -- get over it). We decided to name the new server "wahoo" -- its the fastest fish in the world.

Since we named the server "wahoo", I figured we might want to have a good image of a wahoo to use for icons and graphic identity. So I looked around a bit. There are some nice images of wahoo, but the good ones were mostly not free. I found a public domain image from NOAA that might be OK, but it was too small.

So I grabbed it and ran it through the line-art tracing program in Inkscape. A few minutes later I had a scalable SVG image. I love free software.

It didn't really get the rays in the tail and anal fins right, but who cares -- it looks cool anyway. :-)

I took a few minutes last week and updated the version of Drupal for my blog. It's been kinda broken -- and is still. I should probably start over from scratch, but at least it's sort of working. I feel like my blog is like the shoe-maker's children, running around barefoot.

I've been angry reading the commentary about the stimulus package -- everyone's coverage, but especially the coverage from the right. A bunch of the right-wing people talk about the stimulus package as "stealing from our children and grandchildren". What about the last 8 years, when the Republicans ran giant deficits that went directly into the pockets of the wealthiest? I could more easily argue that letting anyone make more than, say, $400,000 a year is stealing from society. Anyone who does well in our society does so only because they've been provided by a framework of laws and rules that makes that possible. I think we should have much, much higher taxes at the highest levels so that the wealth that our society generates can be used to promote the common good. At least, the stimulus package has been passed. It's not enough, but it's a good start.

Here's the letter I sent to our chancellor about the proposed reorganization at UMass Amherst:

I would like to thank you for your candor in addressing the faculty at the General Faculty Meeting. Few top administrators have been so forthcoming with the faculty about the rationale for their plans during my dozen years at the University. I particularly appreciated your response to my question about your goal to use the reorganization to help make a case to external constituencies. Your response, that a reorganization may offer new opportunities that our existing structure makes difficult, is a key point. Moreover, I believe that is what any successful reorganization must have as its raison d'etre.

Rather than beginning with "reorganization" as the goal, I believe we need to begin with a vision for what we wish to achieve. Reorganization may be a means to that end, if it best serves the purpose. Unfortunately, that is not how the discussion regarding reorganization appears to have begun on the campus. Instead, all the public discussion has been about what the pros and cons of various reorganizations might be. This is putting the cart before the horse. If there are goals to be achieved, like reducing barriers to collaboration or streamlining the curriculum, it seems like those goals could be addressed directly where possible. A reorganization may be the best way to achieve our goals, but so far, the discussion I have heard has not centered on any specific goals as an end -- only the reorganization itself.

In the Biology Department, we have practiced this philosophy. I was co-chair of a two-phase "learning goals" process shortly after my arrival in the department that we used to think about our major. The first phase identified goals and secured faculty buy-in. A second phase, reviewed the curriculum and proposed changes to allow our students to achieve the goals. The learning goals statement we developed 10 years ago continues to have relevance today in the department as we develop new courses and think about curriculum.

I would also like to express my serious reservations about the nature of the dialog you have undertaken with the faculty at large. By seeking out only those whom you identify as "distinguished faculty" and the deans, heads, and chairs to consult with, I believe you run the risk of creating resentment among people who perceive themselves to not be part of the "in group". Furthermore, your statements to the effect that those who resist change will do poorly was perceived by many to sound like a threat.

Speaking for myself, I am extremely skeptical of any reorganization during the budget crisis. The on-going cost savings are small when compared with the one-time costs of reorganizing. Faculty and staff will already be overburdened with extra work as positions go unfilled. Reduced funding is going to create a lot of inefficiency with people spending time to avoid spending money -- or justifying their expenses, as with the new travel requirement. The last thing we need is the increased uncertainty and stress a reorganization will bring.

As a member of the life science community, I was a supporter of the College of Life Sciences when it was proposed years ago. It failed at that time for the two things that threaten the current reorganization: a lack of resources to accomplish the reorganization and a failure to sufficiently articulate the specific goals the reorganization would achieve.

Since that time, the structure of the discipline has changed considerably. Interdisciplinary research -- especially with the physical sciences -- has become ubiquitous. The new Integrated Science Building brings Chemistry, Biology and Biochemistry together. We have current research clusters with groups in Engineering and Computer Science. (I am a co-PI on a $1.2 million National Science Foundation proposal with Computer Science to use sensors to track mongoose movement). The Physics department is rapidly developing a strong presence in biophysics. To split the life sciences from the physical sciences now seems like constructing new barriers where none exist.

Furthermore, it's not clear to me that the existing structure necesssarily presents significant barriers. Last semester, Jeff Blanchard, a faculty member in Microbiology (NRE), taught a Computer Science (NSM) course in bioinformatics, using the on-line and computational resources provided by the Biology Department (NSM):
http://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/courses/fall2008/cmpsci/cmpsci691k

Where there are barriers to collaboration, let's work to reduce the barriers. And let's discuss the other goals and how to best achieve them openly. Let's work together to make the best case we can to external constituencies that we're using our resources wisely -- and are not using a reorganization as a public-relations gimmick.

The first week of the semester has come to a full stop in the middle with a snow day today. It's fun to watch the snow coming down when you don't have to go out into it. I have many memories of having to go out into cold and snow. It's more fun to just watch through the window. If it changes over to freezing rain and we lose power later, that might put a damper on the fun. But the snow is pretty, even though I don't look forward to the shoveling to come later.

It's the first semester in years when I haven't had to teach. I enjoy teaching and I will look forward to being back in the classroom next semester, but for a change its great to have time to focus on technology. I've been trying to learn the ins and outs of ldap for the BCRC and department computers we support. I spent a lot of the day yesterday trying to get ldap over ssl working and, by the end of the day, I think I have a working set up. Now I have to figure out how to make the MacOS part talk over ssl to the server. There are a lot of things I really like about MacOS, but -- from a unix standpoint -- its really frustrating when you find perfectly functional and transparent parts of the system replaced with an opaque black box. My ldap connection works fine in plain text and doesn't work over ssl -- even though the command-line ldap tools work fine on the same computer. Argh.

The Governor has released his budget projections. The University has taken a $27 million dollar cut from this year's budget -- this year, that's already half-over. Next year isn't going to be any picnic. Tomorrow there is a General Faculty Meeting where the chancellor seems likely to lay out his plan. I am hopeful that Obama's economic stimulus package will help the state and the University. The University has been cut so much over the past ten years that there really isn't much spare to cut.

After getting a new hard-drive and RAM module, my macbook is happy once more. They even managed to rescue all my files. They did a fresh and up-to-date install of the OS and ran a disk-recovery program on the old drive. The only damaged files evidently were temp files in the OS -- all of my documents and data were fine. Amazing. It was inconvenient to have to lose my laptop for 5 days, but it was a relief to get all my data back.

It was an incredibly busy week at work getting ready for the start of the new semester. We are trying to bring up a half-dozen computer labs in the new Integrated Science Building. Little by little, issues are getting resolved and we take two steps forward and one step back. Yesterday, I discovered they'd installed crappy projectors in the labs, rather than the high-contrast projectors we'd specified. I ran a test today to confirm that the projectors are inadequate: they are. In biological imagery -- especially micrographs, the details really require dynamic range. Cheap projectors can't display enough range for details to not be lost through clipping at the high or low end of the brightness range. We had specified projectors with 2000:1 contrast, but they installed 1600:1. You can really see the difference. But tracking it down was just one more thing I had to do today on a day when I really didn't have the time.

Today, I watched as Barack Obama was sworn in as President. I stood in the Cape Code lounge of the Student Union and watched the coverage on CNN with a hundred other faculty, staff, and students. People clapped and cheered when Obama spoke. There was subdued boos and hissing when George Bush was shown. I turned my back on Rick Warren, although it appeared that most simply tolerated his invocation. There was huge emotion when Barack Obama took the oath of office and gave his speech. Most notable for me was his specific acknowledgment of non-believers, along with Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. I think Bush thought that non-believers should be waterboarded. I also noticed that Obama mentioned that people of all languages shaped the US. I thought about writing a blog-post for E-USA about how that meant that also Esperanto shaped the US (since it is a language, after all).

Later in the afternoon, I took my laptop to ACW to get it repaired. Hopefully, I will hear tomorrow how bad the damage is. Hopefully, it is just the hard-drive and I'll have it back quickly.