Close of the day: 19 February 2009

Humor: surf to Evolved/Rational’s blog for a line drawing showing the difference between ordinary logic and fundie logic.

Coolness: Hat tip to Sandwalk for alerting us to this gem of a science ad

(click for a larger version)

Speaking of drawings and cartoons: the New York Post recently ran this cartoon:

This cartoon caused a bit of an uproar in liberal circles. (note: recently New York police officers had to shoot a pet chimp that had turned on its owner).

Frankly, I saw this as a “the stimulus bill was so bad that even a chimp could have written it” and nothing more than that. But others saw this as a racist slam on President Obama.

Ok, fair enough. But someone on the Daily Kos said that the outrage was a bit too much (and I agree; it was) and he got slammed for saying that; he was accused of living in “white privilege”, etc. But the guy who said that is African American!

Anyway, I feel this guy’s pain; from time to time I’ve been accused of “acting white”, “selling out to the man”, etc. for not being sufficiently outraged enough by a perceived slur, insult, etc. or for not making excuses for my lack of real accomplishment.

In fact, I was condemned for saying that my race has never held me back!

Oh well; we (liberals) are far from perfect.

Giving the Conservatives a Voice:

Here is a conservative video talking about the need for West Virginia to define marriage as being between “one man and one woman”.

Never mind their use of “god” is undermined by the fact that Biblical marriage was often plural and often included concubines.

Get a load of the sniper screen and of the whining about this issue somehow undermining religious liberty! (The liberty to do what: push your warped morals off on others?)

Hat tip: Right Wing Watch.

Denmark’s Novel Approach to Speeding « The Legal Satyricon (NSFW)

You have to love it….in Denmark they use “boobs” to help stop “boobs” from speeding.

Note: the “video warning” is because they show women with no shirts on. It is nothing most of us haven’t seen before.

more about "Denmark’s Novel Approach to Speeding …", posted with vodpod

19 February 2009

Workout notes yoga with Ms. V. (I was distracted) followed by my Sprindale/Glen Oak course in 1:08:51. I had made it a goal to do the upper loop (Adams to Adams) in under 30 minutes and I got 30:45.
Weather: 14 F with a moderate wind; needless to say it was cold though the footing was excellent.

Even though it was cold, it was sunny and pretty; this still beats the treadmill! I cooled down with a 1 mile walk….ok “froze down” would be like it.

Of course, when I drove home, all of the frozen “stuff” on my face started to melt; that was gross beyond words!

Other odds and ends:

Michelle Bachmann:

Science: birds have the ability to move their bodies while keeping their heads still:

Academia: There is some truth in this article: too many students expect to be awarded for effort rather than for results:

Prof. Marshall Grossman has come to expect complaints whenever he returns graded papers in his English classes at the University of Maryland.

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement.

“I tell my classes that if they just do what they are supposed to do and meet the standard requirements, that they will earn a C,” he said. “That is the default grade. They see the default grade as an A.”

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

“I noticed an increased sense of entitlement in my students and wanted to discover what was causing it,” said Ellen Greenberger, the lead author of the study, called “Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors,” which appeared last year in The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Professor Greenberger said that the sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety.

Aaron M. Brower, the vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, offered another theory.

“I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences,” Professor Brower said. “They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.” [....]

In line with Dean Hogge’s observation are Professor Greenberger’s test results. Nearly two-thirds of the students surveyed said that if they explained to a professor that they were trying hard, that should be taken into account in their grade.

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying, “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

Here is how I attempt to handle such things: I ask them: “when you go to choose a product to buy, what factors do you consider?” They tell me things like “quality and price”. I then ask them: “you don’t take into account the amount of effort that went into the product”?

I also ask them that if an engineer designed a bridge that collapsed, did it matter that he/she tried hard? Or, if the patient dies during surgery, does the surgeon get an “A” for effort?

Of course, since I teach mathematics, there isn’t as much subjectivity in my grading; when I tell them that “no, the derivative of e^x is not x*e^(x-1)” the usually believe me and don’t argue.

18 February 2009: Final Post of the Day

Humor, intentional and unintentional

I resent the implication!

Auto Security

see more pwn and owned pictures

Academic Deans: do they really moonlight as bicycle thieves?

Seen at a Michelle Malkin event (she is a wingnut)

Now is this clown saying that Nazis back Obama? They’d be surprised. Or is he calling Obama a Nazi? Perhaps he is a Clayton Bigsby fan?

What an idiot.

Other topics:
Did you know the following:

Here’s one excerpt:

So, I saw this U. of Minn. survey that came out a while back. Perhaps you saw it as well. It asked Americans, who do you trust? And they broke it down into categories: Do you trust a Christian? Most said yes. In fact, Christians were at the top of the list. Do you trust a black person? A Muslim? A homosexual? etc.

The group that came out at the very bottom of the list — and I’m talking about below terrorists, below sexual predators, below the guy who skins babies alive and wears the skin as a mask and then dances in the moonlight while gargling the blood of his infant victim — after that guy, was atheists.

The blog article I linked to gives some suggestions at how atheists might improve their image. What I find funny is that the vast majority of people do trust atheists (as most elite scientists are atheist or agnostic); they just are unaware that they trust them.

And speaking of atheists: did you know that there are still laws on the books in some states (mostly southern…what a shock) that require office holders to “believe in god”? Of course these laws are unenforceable by means other than that of the ballot box.

A state legislator in Arkansas is trying to get that changed in that state. I wish him luck; I’ll be very surprised if the woos don’t come out of the wordwork on this one.

Evolution and Creationism
This is how you respond to creationists who ask for a debate (I am reproducing a small part of the letter, which was written by a scientist who was asked to debate a creationist

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

Politics
Robert Reich warns us to not confuse American Companies with American jobs:

Do not confuse American companies with American jobs.

The new stimulus bill, for example, requires that the money be used for production in the United States. Foreign governments, along with large U.S. multinationals concerned about possible foreign retaliation, charge this favors American-based companies. That’s not quite true. Foreign companies are eligible to receive stimulus money for things they make here (as long as the nations where they’re headquartered have signed the WTO procurement agreement). [...]

I’m not arguing against an auto bailout. But it ought to be focused on helping American auto workers rather than helping global auto companies headquartered in America. Why pay the Big Three billions of taxpayer dollars to stay afloat when, even after being bailed out, they cut tens of thousands of American jobs, slash wages, and shrink their American operations into small fractions of what they used to be?

That’s backwards. The auto bailout should help American autoworkers keep their jobs or get new ones that pay almost as well.

In the same article, Reich also warns against protectionism.

Stimulus Bill

This is Recovery.gov.

So, what say the Republicans? Well Dick Morris says that, well, Obama should lie more?

It’s rare to criticize a politician for being all action and no talk, but that’s one of the big things that’s wrong with Obama’s battle against the economic crisis. One of the key variants in any stage of the economic cycle is what the president says is happening. If he talks down the economy, it drops. If he is bullish and optimistic, the markets are likely to listen. Particularly early in his term, when his credibility is high and the spotlight is shining on him, a concerted effort by Obama to inject optimism into his economic commentary could have a very positive effect.

Unfortunately, the president is so anxious to use the bad economy as an excuse to get every last little bit of government spending in the budget, he has pushed the markets down by a nonstop drumbeat of bad news and harsh predictions. When the president says that we may be entering a downturn from which there is no ready escape, investors, consumers, producers and businesspeople tend to listen and avoid any spending or risk. Obama has spent so much time warning of the disaster ahead that he is doing little from his bully pulpit to avert it.

Pessimism comes naturally to the party in opposition, and it takes a while for its members to get the message that they need to embrace optimism once they take power.

Actually, I’d rather a politician tell it to me straight. We’ve had 8 years of “its going to be ok” even if the signs showed otherwise.

But that’s just me.