Funmurphys: the Blog

Done With Coursework

Wow! After 4 years of graduate school I have completed all my coursework for the Master's Degree. This is amazing to think about! I took one course at a time, focusing on the journey rather than the destination. But here I am!

My thesis year is next. I plan to research my fingers to the bone and defend my thesis in Spring 2009. And then graduate! I enjoyed my classes, and now I'm looking forward to independent research on wind-driven storm surge. If I had started the Master's program earlier maybe I could have helped those folks in Myanmar to avoid getting clobbered by Cyclone Nargis. But I'm sure there will be other chances to save lives . . .

The University of Colorado web site has this nifty Grade-O-Matic feature that calculates your grade point average whenever you complete another course, and the Grade-O-Tron meter says my GPA is 3.763. I guess I'm not gonna flunk out of grad school after all! I even managed to pull an A- in Fluid Dynamics. Any course with "dynamics" in the title is tough.

My Oceanography class was neat because we used real data and analyzed all the layers in the world's oceans. Ocean water masses form in certain regions and retain those same properties even when they travel long distances. The Atlantic Ocean is most stratified. For example, here is a meridional cross section of the Atlantic Ocean at 30 degrees West:

http://acd.ucar.edu/~drews/AtlanticSection30West.jpg

That big purple blob descending from the upper left-hand side of the plot is Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). The AAIW water mass stabilizes at about 1000 meters deep and spreads all the way up to 10N. AAIW is cold and fresh from ice melt; cold enough to slide below the warm tropical salty water, but fresh enough to stay above the saline North Atlantic Deep Water. Way cool!

I took a couple of classes on climate and the human affects on same. From what I learned, the vast majority of climate scientists believe the earth is getting warmer, and a smaller majority believe that humans are a major cause of this warming. One of my classes was taught by Roger Pielke Sr., who might be considered a climate-change skeptic (and he's a real scientist, not like Rush Limbaugh). Dr. Pielke agrees that increased carbon dioxide is a warming perturbation, and that humans produced the CO2 increase. But he contends that land-use change (irrigation, urbanization, agriculture) is a bigger factor in anthropogenic global warming. When you water the desert and farm it, the decrease in albedo (brightness) absorbs more sunlight and warms the planet. Pielke showed some stunning examples of the changes humans have wrought on the land surface! Stunning in terms of the albedo change and the total percentage of the land surface we have have touched (40%). I carried out a simulation experiment on Aboriginal Australia with the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM) that supported Pielke's contention that land-use changes can be comparable in magnitude to CO2-driven changes, but my study region was too small to apply this finding to the entire globe.

In Genesis 1:28 God tells mankind to subdue the earth and have dominion over all other living creatures. Genesis 1:28 strongly implies that humans can have a very real affect on the planet's ecosystem, for better or worse. So from the Biblical perspective it's reasonable to conclude that human activities can indeed alter the global climate. We aren't big enough individually, but there are 6 billion of us, and we've been fiddling with the earth for quite a few years now.

I looked for evidence relevant to carbon dioxide forcing. Can human-raised levels of CO2 really warm the planet? Is there any historical analog to the current situation? The timing of CO2 vs. temperature changes in the Antarctic ice cores is a little hard to determine precisely, because CO2 has a nasty habit of diffusing deeper into the snow before compaction. A good scientific publication is: "Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III", by Nicolas Caillon et. al.; 14 MARCH 2003 VOL 299 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org, page 1728. They postulate the following sequence:

1. Time 0 years: Antarctica gets warmer due to orbital forcing (the trigger).
2. Time 800 years: Change in ocean circulation leads to global rise in carbon dioxide.
3. Time 5,000 years: Northern Hemisphere completes its de-glaciation, caused by CO2 amplification of the original orbital forcing.

Caillon states that "the CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation (Fig 3)." One might think that we have 5,000 years to wait before the Northern Hemisphere completely de-glaciates, but don't get cocky! - Termination III is not a perfect analog to today's situation. The point is that increased CO2 really can, and has, forced higher global temperatures.

On a final note: Science in action is really good to see! Conclusions really are reviewed, examined, and questioned by other smart people. We scientists are human, but we are committed to finding out the truth. Sometimes the scientific process includes disagreements along the way. I'm excited about my entry into the process!

Cost To School Doesn't Equal Value To Society

I could ramble on at great length and venom on this subject, but as time is short I'll let Captain Capitalism handle Why Social Sciences are Pushed More Than the Hard Sciences in College:

The school I was at needed equipment and gear to teach the kids. This would have required a new building and new equipment. However, somebody got the ingenious idea that they would rent some nearby cheap office space and require the students to get "general ed requirements." Then in shifts the kids would come in and take their general education requirements while the other students used whatever lab equipment they needed. They more or less doubled enrollment without having to spend twice on the gear.

What We have Here Is A Failure To Teach Math

Life is busy busy busy these days. Just not with blogging.

But don't worry, Tim's got a great post about how American schools are failing to teach math - and I have to agree from the experience of my own two lovable fruit whose elementary school math program was english in drag and suffered from the whole 'here's a buch of ways of doing math if you ever, someday but not in this math class, actually do math instead of just talk it to death" approach.

If I Kill Diablo, Can I Skip 4th Grade?

So it's official now: the Federation of American Scientists has come out in favor of using video games for education. Who am I to argue with that?

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars christened them "serious games" four years ago, mobilizing a loose-knit collection of game developers, educational foundations, grassroots organizations, human rights advocates, medical professionals, first responders, homeland security consultants, and assorted others around a common cause. Together--the experts provide the facts, the game developers the technological know-how--they've created a nascent industry. Their goal: To convince nonbelievers that games teach just as well as books, film, or any other medium.

"Games let us create representations of how things work in a medium that's built to do exactly that," says Ian Bogost, an assistant professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. "If you want to explain how a nuclear power plant works in a textbook, you have to demonstrate it with a logical written argument. But with games, the player can literally interact with the model of how a system works."

They felt it was imporant enough to hold a Games Summit. No word on their vote for game of the year.

The Science of Diversity

Does a diverse student body matter to a school? Has there been any study on its effectiveness at changing attitudes among students? OK, a study at long last a study has looked at this question and determined, that yes, "Children's racial attitudes may be related to ethnic composition of their school":

"These findings inform our knowledge about the role that contact with members of different ethnic and racial groups plays in children's intergroup attitudes," said Dr. Killen. "This contact, under the right conditions, can foster positive attitudes towards 'outgroup' members."

Larry Summers

The firing of Larry Summers as President of Harvard is just one more symptom of the death of Universities as institutions of learning and inquiry. A sad, sad day. Larry, you should have stood your ground when you raised the question about gender difference.

Getting Paid for Grades

Back in high school a few of my classmates got paid by their parents to get good grades. I remember some guys said they would get $5 for an 'A' and $2 for every 'B'. Then I heard much higher figures from some non-honor roll students: 20 bucks for every 'A' and $10 for every 'B'! Wow! I would have cleaned up at the end of every marking period! I coulda had that ten-speed bike in no time, instead of painting our house that summer (Of course, if I hadn't painted the house I would never have learned the words to "Road to Shambala", by Three Dog Night, listening to my transistor radio up there on the scaffolding while slapping white paint against the shingles.)

The odd thing is that the rates for good students were a lot lower than for the kids that rarely made the honor roll. "Biff" might earn 20 clams for every 'A', but he rarely got one. So the net payout from the parents was pretty minimal, whether their kids had high GPAs or low.

Now that I'm in graduate school, I realize that I am getting paid to get good grades. And it ain't no small potatoes, either! My company has an educational assistance plan that pays for tuition, usually about a thousand spondulicks for a three-credit course. I also get 5 hours per week to attend class during the day, which is a good benefit! But here is the catch: "To continue in the Educational Assistance Program, you must receive grades of "C" or higher for undergraduate course and "B" or higher for courses taken in a graduate degree program."

I took my final exam on Saturday night. I think I was between an 'A' and a 'B' in the course; not bad for a guy who four months ago would not have recognized a partial differential equation if one had fallen into my lunch! I think I did okay on the final. But if I blew the final, and I get a 'C' in the course; I am out of the Education Assistance Program. Sudden death! One strike, and you're out!

I have heard that professors will bend over backwards to give their students at least a B-. Other sources say no - their profs are strict that an 'A' is 90 or above, a 'B' is 80 or above, and so on. I don't think I'm a slacker, but I did sign up for the Atmospheric Dynamics course a little weak on the prerequisites.

So I'm getting paid a thousand dollars for every 'A' or 'B'. If I get anything below a 'B', I'm out of the program. Maybe I can still try to get a Master's Degree on my own, but it will be a lot more difficult.

The stakes are high. This game is for keeps.

Hey Wait a Minute, That's Me in the "Before" Picture

In Adding Value -- but at What Cost? Marshall Goldsmith distills a useful prescription out of a recent conversation:

In my experience, one of the most common challenges that successful people face is a constant need to win. When the issue is important, they want to win. When the issue is trivial, they want to win. Even when the issue isn't worth the effort or is clearly to their disadvantage, they still want to win.

Research shows that the more we achieve, the more we tend to want to "be right." At work meetings, we want our position to prevail. In arguments, we pull out all the stops to come out on top. Even at supermarket checkouts, we scout other lines to see if there's one that's moving faster.

In Jon's case, he was displaying a variation on the need to win: adding too much value. It's particularly common among smart people. They may retain remnants of a top-down management style even if they don't want to. These leaders are smart enough to realize that most of their subordinates know more in specific areas than they ever will, but old habits die hard. It's difficult for them to listen to others disclose information without communicating either that they already knew about it or that they know a better way.

The problem is, while they may have improved the idea by 5%, they've reduced the employee's commitment to executing it by 30%, because they've taken away that person's ownership of the idea. Therein lies the fallacy of added value: Whatever is gained in the form of a better idea may be lost six times over in the employee's diminished enthusiasm for the concept.

It can be painful to see yourself in the "before picture" of an advice column, and this one points how you can fool yourself by cleverly reframing "winning" as "adding value" and be just as obnoxious and counter-productive. I guess that's the difference between my 20's and my 40's. In my 20's I believed that I was held back by the people around me (typically managers) and situations I found my myself, now I see that it's mainly my own actions/inactions that hold me back.

Lone Voice, Meet Wilderness

John Kekes paints a sad picture of higher education in a speech delivered to the North American Philosophy of Education Society. The problem is that its also a very true one. I'd love to excerpt some of it, but it flows so well that it's hard to do, so read the whole thing.

Via the Instapundit

A Day You Won't Soon Forget

I've thought one of the problems with public schools is that the legal relationship between the student and teacher is the same one as between the citizen and the police, and that discipline suffers accordingly. Well. I still think that's true, but it seems that a principal in Charleston went off the deep end with a misguided drug search, and the police went right along with him with a mishandled drug search. Here the problem is that the police violated the rights of citizens; not the teachers violating the rights of students. And it will be completely counterproductive for future anti-drug efforts since they'll be discredited by this bone-headed raid. You have to hope that, to quote Zell Miller out of context, "heads will roll!"

St. Louis Public Schools: Better Than The WWF?

Archpundit at Blog St. Louis has the continuing controversies in the St. Louis Public School system covered like a blanket. The short version is that a majority of the board became tired of ongoing failure of the SLPS to educate the children of St. Louis and decided to hire a business turn-around firm instead of extending the contract of Cleveland Hammonds as superintendent. This was a pretty radical move, but they felt justified by the slow at best progress under traditional superintendents. Personally, I find the logic impeccable from the standpoint that (as related to me by Edgar Denison, who was a hatchet man at Union Electric as well as famed amateur botanist) nobody likes a hatchet man, and the company wants to get rid of you as soon as you've finished chopping. Consequently, no superintendent who wants to stay with the school district would attempt the required reforms - closing schools, laying off employees, outsourcing non-core functions, and in general treating the SLPS as something other than a jobs program.

Attention has turned from the "secrecy" of the initial hiring of the firm and its planning leading up to the first day of school to the (failed) boycott called for by some members of the community to the ongoing insane (and I use that term in what I believe is a clinical sense) behavior of some members of the school board. If you have a strong stomach and a morbid curiosity, you'll be thrilled by the complete accounting at Blog St. Louis. And don't forget to read the comments for my own penetrating insights into the complex situation.