16 April 2010 (noonish)

Workout notes 1.25 mile EASY walk (to the West Peoria Church), rotator cuff exercises, ab series, 5 minute headstand.
Then 2200 yard swim: 500 warm up, 5 x 100 fist on the 2:00 (1:45 each), 1000 in 16:52, 200 back cool down.

Injury: no knee pain last night AT ALL. It really is getting better; evidently the literally hundreds of wall push offs were taking a toll.

Shoulder: still slightly achy. Reason: my swimming is ALL swimming; I don’t have those side/kick drills as filler, and no gliding off of the wall. Hence the yardage will have to be dropped slightly.

Mathematics
If are both irrational, is ever a rational number? Note: the answer is more elementary than you might think; there are no sophisticated arguments and the result (and proof) is very, very, very short and easy to understand.

Polls: how you word the poll makes all of the difference, especially given that the public’s knowledge of civics is weak. Here is an example: in California, the state legislature must pass any tax increase by a 67-33 super majority. So there is a poll about people’s opinion on the law.

If the poll question is asked: “decisions should be passed by a simple majority vote”, most people are FOR this. But if the question talks about “raising of taxes”, then people vote to NOT repeal this law. It is weird; surf to the link for a conjecture as to why people respond in that manner.

Politics Being correct means nothing to the right wingers. President Obama pointed out that the vast majority of Americans paid less tax this years than last and joked “perhaps the Tea Party members should say “thank you”. ”

This, of course, infuriated the right wing. But as Paul Krugman says, if you correct their facts, they call you condescending.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some of us from pointing out those facts.

(photo at the Daily Kos blog and also here; there are many, many more)

Humor

I love Ed Current! Of course, it turns out that the tea party types are really more driven by economic issues than social religious issues.

More humor: at first I completely missed the point in this video:

At first, I thought that the butt slapping female was either trying to get the distracted male to pay attention or to get him in trouble. I then came to realize that the butt slapper was attracted to the woman in question! Assumptions…..

I suppose that I have an inner Republican…then again some Republican Senators….

Higher Education: I hope that there is more to this story…

I’ll admit it: I have less respect for an undergraduate college degree than I used to. Sure, there is a percentage of very intelligent, hard working undergraduates.

But the blunt fact is that there are some undergraduates who don’t perform up to their capabilities and need a push (and yes, some who really aren’t up to the standards of their program).

But what happens when a professor does his/her job and holds them to rigorous standards? Well, sometimes, they are undermined:

Dominique G. Homberger won’t apologize for setting high expectations for her students.

The biology professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge gives brief quizzes at the beginning of every class, to assure attendance and to make sure students are doing the reading. On her tests, she doesn’t use a curve, as she believes that students must achieve mastery of the subject matter, not just achieve more mastery than the worst students in the course. For multiple choice questions, she gives 10 possible answers, not the expected 4, as she doesn’t want students to get very far with guessing.

Students in introductory biology don’t need to worry about meeting her standards anymore. LSU removed her from teaching, mid-semester, and raised the grades of students in the class. In so doing, the university’s administration has set off a debate about grade inflation, due process and a professor’s right to set standards in her own course.

To Homberger and her supporters, the university’s action has violated principles of academic freedom and weakened the faculty.

“This is terrible. It undercuts all of what we do,” said Brooks Ellwood, president of the LSU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and the Robey H. Clark Distinguished Professor of Geology. “If you are a non-tenured professor at this university, you have to think very seriously about whether you are going to fail too many students for the administration to tolerate.”

And here is the real shame of it all:

Ellwood, the campus AAUP chapter president, said that his group had verified that no one informed Homberger of concerns before removing her from the course, and that no one had questioned the integrity of her tests. He also said that the scores on the second test were notably better than on the first one, suggesting that students were responding to the need to do more work. “She’s very rigorous. There’s no doubt about that,” he said.

Do you see the message? The students GOT the first message: they had better work hard, and they were rewarded when they did! But no…administration steps in and says “oh we are sorry you didn’t do well…it wasn’t your fault”.

The ones that needed the push now see that they can get away with slacking, and I’ll bet that the better students lost respect for their degree. I know that I would have.

Even more galling: this happened in a SCIENCE CLASS. My goodness….I’ve grown to expect this sort of nonsense in the soft disciplines. But SCIENCE????

Other articles here and here. This is also talked about at Rate Your Students.

Hat tip: Dr. Andy.

Sarah Palin, Tea Party and other Entertainment…

Tea party in Peoria. Yeah, it is 18 minutes of your life that you won’t get back; pretty boring. My first reaction to this: “I hope someone that had a defibrillator”.

Sure, a new poll came out about the tea party demographics. I had to chuckle at the oft repeated claim that they are “more educated” than most Americans: in fact 37 percent have a college degree (25 percent for all Americans) and 14 percent have a post-graduate degree (10 percent of all Americans). Meh. Someone with an ACT of 22 who cobbles together a business degree and perhaps a MBA from a degree mill would be “more educated” than the average American and also have an inflated opinion of what they know about the world, the Constitution, etc.

(video: hat tip to Billy Dennis)

Sarah Palin: if you didn’t get tickets to hear her speak near Peoria (Washington, near East Peoria), you can get your own quotes right here! Yeah, I am a bit depressed that I live in such a hick-village that a visit from Gov. Palin is front page news.

Humor
Some people should NOT be parents:

15 April 2010: Late Afternoon

This will mostly be a bunch of interesting links:

Peoria: Peoria Pundit points us to one of those “how good is your city surveys” which ranks Peoria 69 out of 200 cities in terms of “best places for business and careers”. The survey is from Forbes.com. Billy notes that these surveys are often dismissed, unless the rankings are favorable.

Science
A large fireball was seen in the sky over some midwestern cities. Follow the link to see the video and to read the article; meteor shower perhaps? Hat tip: Dude Spellings.

In the field of medicine (via 3-quarks daily): scientists are now able to transplant the genetic material in the nucleus of a fertilized human egg into another fertilized egg, without carrying over mitochondria. This is good news for those who might be prone to diseases caused my mutation of the mitochondria DNA. Source article: here (Nature).

Scientists have also made a recent advance in cancer research:

Researchers say they have discovered a new molecular player in determining whether breast cancer cells will spread through the body: long strands of RNA known as lincRNAs that turn off tumor suppressor genes. The finding may lead to a test for predicting metastasis as well as drugs for preventing it.

(via: 3-quarks daily)

Dr. Andy has also contributed a couple of interesting links, one of which is here (the other will get it’s own post):

One of these links talks about a type of bacteria found in the gut of Japanese people: it helps them digest foods like seaweed. But this bacteria is not generated from the human body itself; rather it came from what Japanese people ate and, yes, it can be passed from a mother to her infant. The whole article is interesting; here is a part of it:

Hehemann began with Zobellia, whose genome had been recently sequenced. This bacterium turned out to be the proud owner of no fewer than five porphyran-breaking enzymes. This group was entirely new to science, they are all closely related and they clearly originated in marine bacteria. Their unique ability earned them the name of ‘porphyranases’ and the genes that encode them were named PorA, PorB, PorC and so on.

They are clearly not alone. Using his quintet as a guide, Hehemann found six more genes with similar abilities. Five of them hailed from the genomes of other marine bacteria – that was hardly surprising. But the sixth source was a far bigger shock: the human gut bacterium Bacteroides plebeius. What was an oceanic gene doing in such an unlikely species? Previous studies provided a massive clue. Until then, six strains of B.plebeius had been discovered, and all of them came from the bowels of Japanese people.

Nori is, by far, the most likely source of bacteria with porphyran-digesting genes. It’s the only food that humans eat that contains any porphyrans and until recently, Japanese chefs didn’t cook nori before eating it. Any bacteria that lingered on the green fronds weren’t killed before they could mingle with gut bacteria like B.plebius. Ruth Ley, who works on microbiomes, says, “People have been saying that gut microbes can pick up genes from environmental microbes but it’s never been demonstrated as beautifully as in this paper.”

In fact, B.plebeius seems to have a habit of scrounging genes from marine bacteria. Its genome is rife with genes that are more closely related to their counterparts in marine species like Zobellia than to those in other gut microbes. All of these borrowed genes do the same thing – they break down the complex carbohydrates of marine algae.

To see whether this was a common event, Hehemann screened the gut bacteria of 13 Japanese volunteers for signs of porphyranases. These “gut metagenomes” yielded at least seven potential enzymes that fitted the bill, along with six others from another group with a similar role. On the other hand, Hehemann couldn’t find a single such gene among 18 North Americans. “We were trying at lunch to think about where you might see patterns this clean,” says Ley. “You’d have to find another group of people with a very specialised diet. Because this involved seaweed and marine bacteria, it might be one of the cleanest demonstrations you’d get.”