Pitter patter — the beginning of the end

I have a mob of slavering students with pitchforks and torches demanding that I finish grading their lab final so that they can see what their ultimate grade in cell biology will be. I have a pile of papers to get through today. They are bracketed by a dentist’s appointment this morning, and a poetry reading by Chrissy Kolaya. My fate is predetermined on this day: sharp pointy things tearing at my teeth, followed by a long day of coffee and red ink, and ending on soothing poetry. I hope my students don’t track me down to the coffee shop where I’ll be wielding my cruel pen.

None of them ever read this stupid blog, I’m sure. I should be safe. I will get it all done.

And then…freedom! The light! Until late January.

Imagine how much the spiders hate it

I have to go pick up a colleague who is returning from a talk in California.

It’s -27°C outside. There may be a bit of transition shock.

Gosh, I sure hope the shuttle van has working heaters. I had to make that trip one time with no heat at all in the vehicle, on one of the coldest days of the year, and it was not pleasant.

On the optimistic side of things, this probably will not be the coldest day of the year here.

How to make your professor cry

This is the last week of the semester, and I have been buried in grading, nonstop. Term papers were due this week, lab reports, a quiz, etc., and they all have to be done by Thursday to clear the decks for finals next week. That doesn’t make me cry; it’s in the syllabus. This final surge of work for me was planned.

Here’s what kills me.

One third of the cell biology lab grade comes from a big final lab report, describing an independent project they’ve been working on for the past month. I spelled out for them that 75% of the grade on that report is based entirely on reproducing the structure of a formal scientific paper. You know the drill: an introduction that explains why you’re doing the experiment; a methods section that describes how you did the experiment; a results section that describes what you observed; a discussion that interprets your result; and a few other little things, like an abstract and proper citations, etc. I told them that 75 points come literally from just following the form, before I would even dig into the content of their work. (This is a sophomore class, with students who may not have even read a scientific paper, let alone written one, before this year, and simply mastering the structure of the scientific literature is a goal.)

I’ve gone over all this in class. I’ve given them a big ol’ handout I wrote, titled “How to write a scientific paper”, that spells out that structure. I gave them a talk on the subject.

One of the things I told them is that a paper is a text narrative with a formal structure, and every section of the paper is a tightly focused short essay, with rules. Your intro references prior literature in the field, here’s how to write a citation. Your methods are detailed enough that another student could replicate what you did in the lab. The results section includes your data, which may be in the form of tables, graphs, and illustrations, but it also must be a text narrative that summarizes that data and references any figures you use.

I emphasize that bit. I tell them that every year, some students will turn in a lab report that has a results section that is just a jumble of figures after the word “Results”, and that without an in-text reference those figures don’t exist as far as I’m concerned, and without any kind of narrative, they have basically turned in a major section of the paper as a blank, and they get zero points.

There is a section of my write-up on how to write a paper that specifies common problems. This is the very first one.

Missing results. I say it over and over again, but still students turn in a results section that is a jumble of figures and tables and contains no coherent narrative. Write a story about the results! Tell me what you saw, don’t make me try to extract it from a pile of data.

I pound the white board. I tell them “DON’T DO THIS”.

They turn in their lab reports. Most are fine. But again, there’s a group that turn in an empty results section, just a hodge-podge of disconnected charts.

I weep.

BONUS POINTS!

I give them so many opportunities. The week before it’s due, I set aside every day from 9-1 for office hours; I tell them, “Please stop by with your rough draft, I’m happy to look it over.” Some do. I caught one report with the cursed empty results section last week, and I was overjoyed to explain to them what they needed to do to fix it, and they did! Their lab report this week was lovely. Lots don’t. I spent many lonely hours in my office, away from my spiders, but at least I got some grading done then.

I even tell them that while it’s due at the end of the lab period this week, I am willing to look it over at the beginning of the lab period for any egregious problems, and they could patch it up and reprint it for submission. Curious fact: it’s the students who are fairly confident of their work who ask me to check it over. The ones who assembled it at the last minute don’t bother. Really, I don’t judge at that point! I just want them to get it right and do well.

Later, I judge. Unfortunately, I tend to judge myself more, and a little tear trickles from the corner of my eye.

TRIPLE SCORE!!

This is student evaluation week. Also predictable — students will complain that I didn’t explain this essential component of their lab grade well enough, that I wasn’t available in my office when they needed help, that they didn’t get any guidance from me.

At least at this point there are no more tears, my heart just hardens a little more.

Next year…what do you think will work better? Getting down on my knees and begging, or breathing fire and rage, to get that one little point across? I would love to see one year before I retire in which every student pays attention to this one simple requirement.

Yikes, Silverman is SLAPPing some more

Look upon this document and moan.

It took me a moment to interpret this thing. OK, Silverman is suing American Atheists…isn’t that old news? Wait…this is about Silverman’s lawyer withdrawing from the suit, and substituting…David Silverman, who is now going to act as his own attorney.

Jebus.

This is not going to go well for him. I am almost feeling some sympathy for the guy, since someone seems to be ruthlessly and persistently fucking him over. It’s just that the someone is David P. Silverman.

Wait! The end of the semester isn’t all that bad!

There are a few good things going on right now — they’re all extra work, but it’s the kind of work I don’t mind.

We’re in the midst of a job search — we’re hoping to hire an ecologist. Last night, and twice next week, we get to experience the dreaded Job Seminar, where some poor candidate gets to suffer through a long day of meetings and then present their work in an intense environment where we’re going to judge them and possibly reward them with employment, or not. It’s utterly miserable for them, as I recall from the long ago days when I was in the hot seat, but it means I get to sit back and listen to cool, interesting stuff from a candidate who has worked long and hard on their presentation. Also, I’m not on this search committee, so I don’t have as many responsibilities. So I got to ‘work’ a bit late and be entertained by a fine seminar on prairie ecology and diversity.

Then, today, I volunteered to teach a course for a colleague who has a lot on their plate right now. This wasn’t just generosity — I’m a developmental biologist who rarely gets to teach developmental biology, because in these small departments we have to be responsible and teach obligatory courses outside our main discipline a lot, and this year and next year I’m all about nothing but cell biology and genetics…which is fine. I usually smuggle in a few lectures on developmental genetics in both. But today I get to talk to first year students about the philosophy and history of embryology! Easy, I can do it in my sleep, but I also hope I can inspire the new students to want to join a lab where they can explore development, too. Which is only my lab here.

Both of these things are additional work on top of a heavy load, but I’d rather do that than make students suffer through the grueling end of semester grind. How about if I just tell all my students to forget studying, I’m handing out free As on the final, and we just have to hang out and talk about cool science for the next week? (I don’t think the university administration would approve, unfortunately, and there’s also the obligation to make sure the students are prepared for the next course in our curriculum.)

I got a suggestion to have a Q&A on YouTube. Would anyone else be interested in just talking about science informally this weekend?

Everyone is on edge

I’m afraid this one doesn’t quite hit the mark for me.

This close to the end of the term, stress levels are sky high, but I always manage to avoid blowing up at the students, so politeness is a flat line.

This is Minnesota, so the students also maintain their equanimity pretty well, but I can see a few gritted teeth and beads of sweat out there as they struggle to retain the required Minnesota Nice. I imagine they have some angry words erupting back in the dorms and on phone calls to their parents.

Next week: last week of classes! Finals the week after that! Then sweet freedom for all until late January.

The perfect social medium

An interesting idea: what if using social media didn’t leave you buck-naked and exposed?

What would “internet realists” want from their media streams? The opposite of what we have now. Today, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to make users easy to contact. That was the novelty of social media — we could get in touch with people in new and previously unimaginable ways.

It also meant, by default, that any government or advertiser could do the same. Mr. Scalzi thinks we should turn the whole system on its head with “an intense emphasis on the value of curation.” It would be up to you to curate what you want to see. Your online profiles would begin with everything and everyone blocked by default.

Think of it as a more robust, comprehensive version of privacy settings, where news and entertainment would reach you only after you opted into them. This would be the first line of defense against viral falsehoods, as well as mobs of strangers or bots attacking someone they disagree with.

Right now, the system is set up so bad social media can sell your information if they want. That’s all they’re in it for, is monetizing you. I would be so there for a site where you weren’t public by default, where you could control what bits and pieces of your life that you want to share, and where the hosting service didn’t assume that they owned everything you published.

Of course, you’d need a different model for funding it, unless it was nationalized somehow.

Here’s another idea that appeals:

Trying to keep up with this torrent, media companies have used algorithms to stop the spread of abusive or misleading information. But so far, they haven’t helped much. Instead of deploying algorithms to curate content at superhuman speeds, what if future public platforms simply set limits on how quickly content circulates?

It would be a much different media experience. “Maybe you’ll submit something and it won’t show up the next minute,” Ms. Noble said. “That might be positive. Maybe we’ll upload things and come back in a week and see if it’s there.”

Yes, throttling would be good, as long as it were fairly applied. I could imagine a system at Freethoughtblogs, for instance, where all the bloggers would submit their posts to a system-wide queue, and the software would post for you when a slot opened up say, once an hour, and publishing would be prioritized for who entered the queue first and for people who hadn’t posted in a while. It might also lead to longer and more substantial posts from us kneejerk fire-hose wielders if we knew our stuff was likely to be delayed to give less prolific bloggers the next available publication slot.

Not going to happen, though. Blogs here are independent and autonomous, so that’s a scheme that probably wouldn’t be favored. We’d also have to implement it, which would take considerable tinkering with the guts of WordPress.

Machinists & engineers over machines and MBAs!

For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of news about Boeing lately. Are you, too? Is it just that the company really is in the news right now, or is it some weird algorithmic quirk where the web notices that I grew up near Seattle, therefore I must be obsessed with Boeing? I was, once, because growing up in a place or time where one employer thoroughly dominated your family’s welfare was a worrisome experience, but really, I moved away and got better.

Anyway, I ran across two bits of Boeing news that were interesting and had nothing to do with my upbringing.

  • The day the machines take over may have been delayed a little bit. Boeing tried having robots assemble these finicky curved metal panels that make up the fuselage of an airplane, and discovered that human machinists did a better job and didn’t entail all the development costs of making the robots work. This makes sense: humans are incredibly flexible general purpose machines, numerous and cheaply made, and I suspect that there will be niches in the future Robot Economy where skilled labor that can execute diverse tasks will flourish. We’re not obsolete yet! Also, there are real labor skills that ought to be more highly valued.

  • There are also cases where human greed is the grit that wrecks a company. This is a sad story, where Boeing might have once been a capricious giant that tormented the Pacific Northwest, but at least it had an impressive engineering culture; now, the Suits have taken over, and useless MBAs run the show and are in the process of running it into the ground. I’ve been away so long, I hadn’t realized that Boeing management had taken flight and moved their executive headquarters to Chicago, where the people who run things are completely out of touch with the daily reality of a company that builds things.

    As the aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia recently told me, “You had this weird combination of a distant building with a few hundred people in it and a non-engineer with no technical skills whatsoever at the helm.” Even that might have worked—had the commercial-jet business stayed in the hands of an experienced engineer steeped in STEM disciplines. Instead McNerney installed an M.B.A. with a varied background in sales, marketing, and supply-chain management. Said Aboulafia, “We were like, ‘What?’“

    It’s horrifying how the obsession with shuffling money around has taken over the actual business of being productive. It reminds me of the catastrophe that killed Sears, which was, in a nutshell, capitalism run amuck. It’s happening again. They should pay more attention to machinists than MBAs, but those MBAs will run off with personal fortunes carved out of the carcass of the company they should be managing, so they’ll be the ones thriving.

Uh-oh. Now that I’ve actually used the word “Boeing” a couple of times in a blog post, those nefarious web algorithms are going to slam me with even more news about the company, aren’t they?