This is where I live.

Now that the local newspaper has opened up comments on articles, I get to read things like this.

It depresses me that everything in this country gets drawn along political lines. I can agree that college isn't for everyone, but where did all this "college students = liberal idiots" crap come from? It's definitely not apparent at UND, and it wasn't at SLU either.

Richard V.
Grand Forks, ND 07/11/2009 10:28 AM
That in itself is one of the biggest problems in this nation today. The libtards tell their kids to go to college so they can get a good job and be smart. Not EVERYONE is college material. Look at kids in high school barely passing and their parents insist on them going to college, They go to school rack up tens of thousands in debt to go out and manage burger king! Look at the statistics of how many kids actually work in the career they went to college for.A kid has a choice when the they are growing up...After graduating high school you can 1. go to college 2. Get a job. 3. Go in the military.and last but not least 4. (liberal) stay home till you find yourself and figure out what you want to do.Lets analyze these options. College,What are you going to study? Are you going to become a DR RN LAWYER? Somethign that actually requires a degree? Or are you going to FIND YOURSELF? You barely passed high school why dont you look at a trade school and actually learn something.Next on that note is how are you going to pay for it? Lib parent "dont worry johnny we will get a loan for you to attend your university". Conservative parent" well we can file for grants if you dont have a scholarship, you can get a job since we dont have the money to pay FOR IT, you can take out student loans. We all know what options there are for kids right out of high school for work, so that pretty much leaves your minimum wage jobs you libs so desperately need the gubment to dictate. Military..you can learn a trade, get your college paid for you, see more than your own little backyard, learn life skills, and give something back to the great country that you were blessed to be born in. I like GFG was born into a poor family. I graduated high school and didnt care to go back to school anymore at that time. I didnt really know any job that would support me due to the fact I wasnt going to live by my parents rules anymore i wanted out on my own. AND I WAS GONNA HAVE TO PAY RENT TO STAY HOME ANYWAY. I went in the US MARINE CORPS. I have been in 59 countries around the world, I have been to every state in the United States. I learned to sky dive, scuba dive,and many other things. After the military I became the national sales manager for an international publishing company. I decided to get my education in economics and finance. Opened my own mortgage company and have been self employed ever since. DO NOT TELL ME it can not be done from the poor to the silver spoon fed. It takes drive, determination, and self reliance. This health care issue is all on the individual it is not a RIGHT or and ENTITLEMENT! You have the right to live and breath and do for yourself what many others have done before you. Why do you liberals continue to insist the government do everything for you? Why do you insist on spending OTHER peoples money? I know the reason...LAZY SORRY WORTHLESS! I only wish your hero and founder of your so called planned parenthood would have gotten her way and advanced her plans for aborting you people like she originally intended! SHE WAS A SEVERE LIBERAL SPEAKING THAT WAY NOT A CONSERVATIVE! I could care less whether you live or die, BUT STAY OUT OF MY LIFE! AND OUT OF MY WALLET!

Someone who gets it

This guy gets it. Everything is searchable, so pay attention to what you type!

Why teach humanities?

The City Beat: The tension between art and science

Tran isn't arguing against the humanities, but it seems that some of the humanities professors at UND are worried about the new national focus on science and technology. The question raised is essentially "Of what worth are the humanities?" in response to interviews with candidates for the Vice President for Research and Economic Development.

I think Tran answered this question in his previous post: "The arts make life pleasant here." If it weren't for literature or art or philosophy, what would we do when we weren't working? If nearly everyone hadn't had at least some exposure to Shakespeare, would we find as much meaning in modern film (including movies)? I know philosophy helped me as a critical thinker, and even if I disagreed with someone's worldview, I could still recognize the beauty of their logic.

I know that not everything makes money for the university (aside from tuition), but there has to be more to life than that. Not everything is about economic development, and not everyone has grand schemes about the future of the country as a whole--most of us just want to survive, and it's the art and those other nonessentials that make the in-between times worth living.

There is more to develop here, but I have to eat breakfast*.







*Have you ever noticed those non-sequiturs when you write them? Here I am, throwing around grandiose ideas about the meaning and value of the non-sciences, and I mention eating breakfast. Not a particularly scholarly thing to do, perhaps, but certainly humanizing.

Importing XY coordinates to QGIS

I was having some problems yesterday trying to import some xy (latitude and longitude) points into QGIS using the Delimited Text plugin. It turns out that a) my Excel spreadsheet should have been exported as "Windows Comma Separated" rather than the default (Mac) "Comma Separated Values," and b) the last column in the file MUST have values the whole way down in order for the plugin to determine the number of columns (and therefore, apparently, which column has the x and y values). I was being lazy and hadn't input all the zero values that should have gone in; now I probably should go back and do that.

Hopefully this will help someone else.

P.S. If you'd like to fill in all the empty cells, you can follow these directions. You can just copy and paste into the selection, rather than doing the formula thing.

Newspapers

This was an on-the-fly comment I made to an editorial in the local newspaper:

I can agree with some aspects of this piece, and disagree with others. The Internet is a great source of news, but only if you learn how to think critically and to not believe everything you read. Unfortunately for everyone who is clamoring for the death of newspapers, they do remain the primary sources of new information in this country.

Citing the purpose of newspapers as "to report the news" is misleading--newspapers are supported by advertisements, the same way television news is. Although many standards of reporting are still upheld by many reporters, I see a tendency (at least in the Herald) to give people what they want rather than the full story. Television or newspapers, people want the quick sound bite or quotation rather than in-depth reporting, which disappoints me. When was the last time you read a good long in-depth article in the Herald? When was the last time you read a well-researched opinion piece in the Herald that wasn't reprinted from somewhere else?

Rather than dumbing things down, why not give us readers some more depth? Why not double the average word count of a story and give us more information? Why not cite your sources and let us (as readers) decide who actually knows what they are talking about? If the Herald keeps pandering to the dumbest readers, they're contributing to the anti-intellectual movement in this country (okay, so maybe I exaggerate. Maybe.). An informed populace is essential to a Democracy, as the article says, but an incompletely informed one holds on to dangerous stereotypes and black/white views of the world.

Frankly, I like newspapers. I like being able to carry them around (when I get the time to read them). I like the sense (if not the actual truth) of objective reporting. I like that the reporters live here with the rest of us. I like being able to re-read parts of an article, something you can't do with television news--and re-reading brings understanding. But I refuse to be talked down to by news organizations that don't hire diligent reporters, that edit out background information that wasn't a sound bite, and that continue to say "you need us, because we're the only objective ones." If you want to be needed, produce a product that's worthwhile and worthy of being read by more than just the dumbest class of reader.

RIP Facebook

November 2004 - March 2009

Too much crap, too many people, and not worth it anymore.

"Research for America" and some responses I've seen

This recent New York Times blog suggests that we use the science stimulus money to pay "people without long-term aspirations to become scientists" who "could do much of the hands-on work," in the interest of creating jobs and furthering basic science.

This plan is not exceedingly horrible, but it is less attractive to me than one I've wanted to put into action for years (more on that below). I have to admit that I'm a geologist and invertebrate paleontologist, which should explain most of what I'm about to say.

First, I have a hard time reconciling the fact that people (at least in the biosciences) equate "science" with "the biosciences"--and all that comes with that name. So I assume when these people talk about "science," they're thinking test tubes and a great deal of disposables (pipette tips, etc.). Second, they seem to equate everyone's path in life with their own--undergrad, grad school, and then a long apprenticeship period that, for some reason, doesn't end when you get your PhD. My thoughts on that particular system are fairly harsh: if we have so many bioscientists that they aren't qualified to run their own labs, we either have too little funding for bioscience as a whole, or they aren't learning enough in grad school.

Back to "Research for America." The comments on that NYT blog (not a representative sample, I'm sure) are generally against the idea*. I disagree with some of the premises (those above) in addition to the one assumption that undergrads aren't smart enough to jump into a lab and do work. It's true that if you want these people to understand what they are doing with all the test tubes and pipettes, it will be a little while before they get up to speed with the rest of the lab. This is what the blog authors are saying: that laboratory technicians are glorified dishwashers (which I have no problem with, having been a dishwasher in my time). That doesn't mean that they can't learn or that they won't learn, just that they'll need some time to figure out where all the pots and pans go, when to change the water out, and how long exactly to blanch the broccoli rabe.

If your undergrads or graduate students aren't intelligent enough to follow instructions and understand what they are doing, you might have larger problems at your educational institution. Keep in mind that the people who will want these jobs are those who are already interested in the field, not those who wander in off the street (well, not until the economy tanks out a little more at least).

For those of us who don't need $2 million a year to buy little pieces of plastic and chemicals, science is a different animal. If you're working for an ecologist (look! bioscience without the test tubes!), you can apply mathematics and statistics and observational data (once you've been trained in on how to observe) to understand what's going on. If you're a geologist or paleontologist, you just need to understand basic principals of the rocks, organismal biology, and be able to understand what you're looking at. I'm not trashing my own disciplines here--I just want to explain that science is not all one thing, and it most assuredly is not all test tubes and trumped-up notions of self-importance because you use those test tubes. In my own department we have thousands of specimens that could be further prepped for study, and we have one undergraduate whose job it is to do that. He's a business major.

----------

Now, about my own idea. I know not everyone is destined to run their own research program (be it in a "lab" or not), whether they want to or not. For those who have the good ideas, however, it seems like it's especially hard to get into the running (and for those bioscientists out there, I do feel for you on the whole postdoc thing). I'd rather we took a large chunk of money and used it to fund young scientists (primarily Post-PhD) in whatever they want to do for a period of three to five years. This would include lab/office space, materials, and a staff. Let them get going on a project and see what happens--by the time they get out of the program they will either have enough experience and publications to make it on their own, or enough knowledge of themselves to choose their career path.

There would have to be a great number of these (let's call them) fellowships, based on geography and research area. I'm almost inclined to suggest that we distribute them randomly based on the applicants in the interest of serendipity, a sort of lottery for the beginning scientist. Whether they are associated with a University or private organization would not be taken into account. I doubt that true randomness would be taken into account, but at least dividing the awards into several fields would keep the biosciences from eclipsing all the other good science that's being done--geology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, psychology, astronomy, the list goes on.

I don't know what the outcome of this idea would be in the long run--I imagine the winners would get pretentious and the selection would become politicized. Every so often, though, we might get a breakthrough from a young scientist who just needed some time to figure something out.





*I've found this quite often so far: it's easier to tear down than it is to praise, which is why many online comments are negative.