Trump just plopped this one out.
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016
The world will have come to its senses when we get rid of nukes, and when we get rid of sabre-rattling assholes like Donald Fucking Trump. You don’t diminish the threat of nuclear war by strengthening and expanding your nuclear arsenal.
Also, this seems appropriate now.
It sounds incredible that we are even asking that question here in the 21st century, in a country that is one of the world leaders in research in science and technology, but Trump has made it scarily relevant. His pick for the office of management and budget is a guy who thinks the funding of science might belong on the chopping block.
President-elect Donald Trump recently picked Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina to head the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Like many of Trump’s other Cabinet nominees, Mulvaney seems to have a disturbingly low opinion of science.
In a stunning September 9 Facebook post (that’s since been deleted but is still cached), Mulvaney asked,
… what might be the best question: do we really need government funded research at all.
That was in the context of a discussion about funding programs to deal with the Zika virus. What Mulvaney argued was nonsensical and self-defeating: there had been studies that found the etiology of Zika-induced birth defects to be complex and variable (there have since been studies that showed a stronger and more consistent association), so he’s arguing that maybe we don’t need more scientific studies at all? This is a close-your-eyes-and-maybe-it-will-all-go-away approach. We don’t run away from complexity. We don’t expect that interactions in biology will be simple and clear and 100% reproducible.
This is also a matter of public health, rather than profit. We also don’t expect that the biomedical industry will, out of the kindness of their hearts, fund research on a low-frequency but tragically serious disease, nor are pharmaceutical companies, for instance, usually much concerned with public health measures to control disease vectors. This is exactly the kind of research that needs government funding — unprofitable, requiring multi-disciplinary approaches, with a need to work out basic mechanisms.
And that’s what compels Mulvaney to question the utility of government-funded research. I wonder what he thinks of Drosophila and zebrafish work?
Joe Soucheray has a few words on the recent UM football scandal.
No player involved appears to have risen to the moral or ethical clarity required of any man whose instinctive character would have compelled him to say, “Wait a minute. Stop. This isn’t right. This has gotten out of hand. Everybody clear this building.’’
Any man of character — we call football players men — would have not only cleared the building but would have helped the woman, taken her to the hospital, for example. Actually, if there were men of character around that night the bacchanal would never have happened and the woman would not have required a hospital visit.
There was no respect for anybody in that apartment. There does not appear to be any awareness of physical or mental health at stake. There does not appear to be any awareness of safety.
Exactly right. It’s not enough to simply say you’re not going to rape or harass or take advantage; you also have to refuse to turn your back when others do so. Our football team is full of cowards who’d rather avoid conflict than correct an injustice.
Soucheray has a recommendation for the football coach:
But what Claeys should have really said is, “I don’t want any of these players on the team. These players will never set foot in this practice facility again nor will they ever wear a Gopher football uniform as long as I am coach. If you don’t like it you can take your poorly formed idea of due process and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’’
Maybe our overpaid coach should be shown the door, and the next candidates should have their moral compass measured and calibrated before any are hired.
The wacky gomer with the azure blood and the freaky New Age beliefs actually said something reasonable.
“We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive to those who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s,” he said.
“My parents’ generation fought and died in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and inhuman attempts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.”
Citing UN statistics, he added that a “staggering” 65.3 million people abandoned their homes in 2015 — 5.8 million more than the year before.
“The suffering doesn’t end when they arrive seeking refuge in a foreign land,” he said. “We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith.”
I think what it means is that our situation is so perilous that it has cracked through the adamantine crania of privileged royalty.
I’m not!
Now we just have to deconstruct and destroy all that other crap I get inundated with at this time of year, and people will stop playing them.
The Intelligent Design creationist hit their peak sometime before 2005, and then plummeted rock-like into the depths of negligibility with the Kitzmiller decision, that made it clear they were just another gang of ignorant creationists with no scientific credibility. They still try to seem relevant, though, and go through the motions. One of their soft spots now is those other creationists — they try a little too hard to distance themselves from the more common breed of science denier.
An example: I relayed that creationist petition from Joe Hannon, something certainly fit for mockery. I did not mention the Discovery Institute, but David Klinghoffer is now castigating everyone who said anything about it, calling it “fake news” and a “phony petition”, and saying we “embraced a whopper”, because he couldn’t find anything about a Joe Hannon anywhere.
Uh, it’s a real petition. You can sign it and everything. It’s also a real (and very bad) argument of the kind made all the time and all over the place. It’s fairly typical of the popular and profitable kind of creationism sponsored by groups like Answers in Genesis — perhaps Klinghoffer would like to pretend the $100 million plus Ark boondoggle in Kentucky doesn’t exist? These are very silly arguments, but people do make them — and Mike Pence made them on the floor of Congress — so it’s weird to berate people for refuting them.
As for “Joe Hannon”: real person, fake name. We (the recipients of his email) had a brief conversation about it, and are convinced that it’s a fairly well known crank, atheistoclast AKA Joseph Bozorgmehr, on the basis of the style and nature, and also because he sometimes posts as Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr.
It’s actually pretty easy to figure out who “Joe Hannon” is — he’s notorious for his bad arguments, and for his frequent fake identities. I’ve banned him multiple times, and Larry Moran, as well as everyone at the Panda’s Thumb, knows exactly who he is.
Atheistoclast is Joseph Esfandiar Hannon Bozorgmehr from Manchester, United Kingdom. He infected other postings on Sandwalk under the name “Reza” [Darwinism and Junk DNA].
He’s been banned from Pharyngula and was banned from RichardDawkins.net except that he created 95 new identities in order to get around the ban.
He is a holocaust denier. He used to run a business “selling components – just nuts and bolts – to the Iranian nuclear and missile industries” but it was shut down because of sanctions. Now he rants against British conspiracies.
Bozorgmehr has even been cited by…Evolution News & Views, the online propaganda organ of the Discovery Institute, claiming that he had disproven the efficacy of gene duplication in evolution (he hasn’t; it’s a very bad paper). Will EN&V admit that they “embraced a whopper”?
Klinghoffer’s only argument is that Hannon’s email and petition reads like a parody to me
. That’s not a good argument against rebuttals, though, since everything the Discovery Institute publishes, including Klinghoffer’s ridiculous opinion pieces, sounds like a parody to me.
If you saw this video of a man being thrown off a Delta flight for speaking Arabic, you’ve probably been had. That video has sparked calls to boycott Delta Airlines, and while I have very little sympathy for that crappy airline, it seems to be unwarranted. The guy starring in and responsible for making the video is a known youtube prankster, who has staged racial profiling events in the past.
This is contemptible. There are real examples of bigotry and discrimination going on, and Adam Saleh has found a way to profit from fake racism while also discrediting genuine problems.
I was just busily transcribing all of the scores from the final exam onto the grading site, when Evil Cat decided that prowling my desk was exactly the right thing to do, and she flung all of the papers in my tidy stack into a scattered mess on the floor.
I got my revenge, though. She’s usually pretty cunning about avoiding photography — probably to make it difficult to identify her in line-ups, or to get her photo on wanted posters — but for once I acted quickly while she was gloating atop my wrecked work, and got a closeup.
So now you know. Beware. If you see her, contact the FBI, Interpol, and Homeland Security.
I got interviewed for an article on all us scheming left-wing zealots on the Professor Watch List, and this is what I get? The Minnesotans on the ‘Professor Watchlist’ are disappointingly unthreatening.
Oh, well. “Disappointing” and “Unthreatening” are going right onto my CV.
And yes, I have to agree — it’s a buncha mild-mannered Minnesota professors, dontcha know!
How do you design a new course?
First message: don’t. It’s a lot of work, and we professors are already underpaid and overworked. You do not get a bonus for teaching more, you are a salaried worker and you get paid whether you teach one course or five courses. You should be compensated for your labor, but you won’t, and in fact many of the institutions of university governance will conspire to discourage compensation for taking any initiative.
For instance, my university has a precisely defined formula for calculating workload: we plug in the number of lecture hours and lab hours we teach, and it spits out a number of credit hours we’re teaching, which is supposed to be right around 20 (different universities will have different expectations). We all know each other’s number. We strive to keep everyone’s workload equal, because that’s only fair, right? Of course, there are many assumptions built into the formula — the weighting of labs vs. lectures, for instance — and there’s nothing about the difficulty of courses. I could teach nothing but introductory freshman courses with no labs, while someone else could be assigned a set of new, advanced upper level lab electives, and we could have exactly the same number, but you know which of us would be working much harder. We informally try to balance that kind of load, but that magic number is really only a rough guideline.
It’s also a fiction for another reason: we fudge it to keep from breaking the system. For example, we have a whole course and other workload obligations that are not plugged into the formula, because to do so would increase the number, and require us to stop teaching other courses that we require. Or for the administration to hire more faculty to distribute the load, and we know that is not going to happen. We can’t break our obligations to students, and the administration can rely on our sense of responsibility to compel us to do more work with no extra pay.
Which brings me to more terms of art, ones the students know well: required courses vs. electives. We have a set of core courses in the discipline which every student in biology must take in order to graduate, which means we must teach them. If we just declared that we don’t have enough faculty to teach cell biology this year, for instance, it would hurt the students, because it would basically add an extra year to their graduation time. Which would make their parents unhappy. Which would make the administration unhappy. These courses are required in more ways than one.
These required courses also tend to be standardized across all universities. The cell biology course you take at Harvard is going to be very similar to the one we teach at UMM. There are pedagogical variations, of course, but the content is a kind of shared understanding among biologists everywhere. There isn’t a lot of latitude in what you teach in these courses, but there is space for revising how you teach them, which makes them fun. However, you’ll only rarely have the opportunity to design a required course. Most likely, you’ll be assigned one and then the challenge is to teach a known quantity well.
Electives are more complicated. Some also have a fairly standardized body of content — anatomy is an elective in our department, but it really hasn’t changed in a century or more. Others are about more recent innovations, or reflect the instructor’s research interests, or synthesize different areas. These are the courses we live for! Teaching a course is more than just a way to pass on known knowledge to younger people, but also a way for us to learn. The discipline involved in learning how to teach a new course requires us to stretch our brains and master new material.
That leads us to our dilemma. We don’t get monetary rewards for teaching new classes, but there are great intellectual rewards, and it’s good for the students to learn what’s new and exciting in our discipline. So we inflict this extra effort on ourselves.
This is my situation. I identify as a developmental biologist. I was specifically hired as a developmental biologist, with a focus on evolution. But I haven’t taught either of those things in years! Due to the usual inevitable faculty changes, retirements and departures and so forth, I’ve had to take on two major courses that eat up most of my allotted work load: in the fall, every fall, I teach cell biology, a required core course in the major; every spring, I teach genetics, another big lab course, a standard elective, but one that is required for our pre-professional students. We can’t stop teaching either one, and in a very small department we don’t have the slack to swap in an alternate instructor now and then. My developmental biology course is a lab course, and simply adding it to my load would bump me well above our magic workload number, as well as leaving me exhausted and drained and unable to teach well. So I’ve found myself in a rut of cell biology-genetics-cell biology-genetics, etc., etc., etc., with a few low-credit supplemental courses around the edges.
I decided last year to put together a new course in developmental biology with a twist, that I could wedge in the scant space in my workload. But I’ll write about that tomorrow.
P.S. A few hints for you brand new academics applying to enter the professoriate. We don’t get permission to hire new people because we tell the administration we’d like to offer an exciting new elective. We get permission because we tell them we need the support to teach a required course or courses. That means our job ad will say we’re hiring someone to teach Course X, which is a necessary part of the curriculum, and which is typically a common course taught at many universities. If you don’t have teaching experience in that course already, you damn well better do your research and figure out precisely what kinds of things should be on the syllabus for it. We always ask questions to probe whether you understand what the obligations are (and we also like it if you have creative ideas about pedagogical innovations to make it more interesting to teach). We also want to know that you’ve thought about what is appropriate for the students — one big mistake we see all the time is when we ask about how the candidate would teach a second year course and they enthusiastically gave us an outline of a graduate level course in their specialty.
We also typically ask about what kinds of electives they would like to teach. Again, an outline of a graduate level course is not what we want: we’d like to hear about a course you find exciting that would integrate well with our existing courses, and extend them in new directions. That means…do your homework and find out what electives we do teach and propose something that fills a gap in our curriculum and also goes one step beyond what we offer. For instance, we have core courses in ecology and molecular biology — think about what we teach already, and propose something that an undergraduate who completed molecular biology would want to take, or something that would be a natural progression from our ecology course, or something that related the two. And show some passion and enthusiasm, and that you’ve actually thought about what you’d love to teach.
Also, we try not to throw new faculty directly into the challenge of designing a course from scratch in their first semester, so don’t panic.
