Open Access Hat Trick

I'm this close--why not have one more post about open access?  So I just finished going through the "charge the author" buffet by Springer for my most recent article. I can confirm that the $3k fee for an open article is still in effect, and I also had the option of ordering a poster, re-prints in sets of 25, or paying $1500 for full color on my figures and I'm sure some other options that I'm forgetting.  So It's good to know that Spring is not stuck on a single method of charging authors for the taxpayer's intellectual property.

Then things took a turn for the completely bizarre.  Hopefully the link works for you.  If you do some digging you find out that Springer is actually happy to have you self-archive your work in pre-print form on say an institutional repository--which of course will be immediately harvested by google scholar with one lone provision. You have to wait 12 months after the print version comes out.

So what are we fighting about? If Springer wants to try charging people for their actual contribution to this process, copy-editing and making it look pretty I say go for it. I'm happy to provide a link to your version that costs money inside mine they've already downloaded that is free. I'm also happy to give Springer exclusive rights of distribution for 12 months, although I acknowledge that in some fields that time should be much shorter or maybe not involve a delay at all but in the case of my research, we're not going to lose any lives if there's a delay in wider distribution.

Am I missing something here? Why is the publishing industry paying for lobbyists and fighting this legislation as well as introducing their own when at least with Springer they're pretty close to seeing eye to eye already? Why not make this more public and promote some good will?

Can't go home in good conscience yet

So just saw this on FB via David Wiley, the publishers have decided to ramp up the crazy on open access.  Apparently their opposition to recent legislation is that it lacks "fair compensation to authors".

You know what system lacks fair compensation to authors? Oh right--it's YOUR system. It also lacks fair compensation to editors (of the non-copy variety) and reviewers. I think I know why you have the biggest profit margin, it's not just because you aren't paying any of us, it's because you aren't paying the right PR firm. If you can't get ahold of just how wrong you are, at least get someone who can put the right lipstick on your pig.

Research Works Act

I'm a little late to the party but recently heard about the Research Works Act. This is an effort out of the house to directly contradict an NIH policy that requires any research produced with government funding (e.g. taxpayer dollars) to be available for free to said taxpayers 12 months after publication.

Needless to say this is a horrible idea. It would constitute a bit of a blow to the open access movement. Now I've already established that I'm no fan of Springer so take this next bit with a grain of salt, but their statement about this legislation is cheeky at best. You want some measured, intelligent and constructive debate? Fine.

Your current value to the world of academic publishing is copy editing and typesetting. That's it. The research, the peer review, the editing--that's all done by academics who you don't pay. So in exchange for making sure our page numbers are in the right spot you have the highest profit margin of any US industry at 53% (or at least you did when I wrote this--looks to be an interactive dataset.

Now onto my favorite part. Your support for RWA in essence is that so called "green" open access is an unfunded mandate. That's really your position? That's your line in the sand? That NIH is requiring authors to do something when it's not clear where the money is coming from? Well your idea of "gold" open access is to charge me, an author, $3k to make my article free and open. I have a response to that:

I
gave
at
the
office

I guess in a way, I can see why you think it would cost too much--because you charge $3k and all, but USU is perfectly capable (and already has been for several years thank you very much) of hosting it's own repository and they do it for considerably less than $3,000 per article. In a measured debate, you look bad.

I'm going to go investigate buying futures in your demise. Stop selling ice, the refrigerators are already in the kitchen.

Flash is not dead (yet)

So I fell into the trap. The trap of thinking that Flash was dead. It started, for me with the war between Jobs and Adobe. I wondered, when the iPhone and iTouch first came out without flash support how long the war could last. Flash had a huge developer/user base but Apple had huge market share in the mobile market. Not on a per device basis, but on sheer volume of Internet throughput (still no excuse for AT&T).

Then came what I thought was the final nail in the coffin. Adobe cut the Flash player out of mobile development. I thought they had basically given up. Here's the thing that few people are talking about. Adobe had a solution months ago: Adobe Air. The ability to build native iOS Apps from within Flash, or Flash Builder, or Flex. Boom. iOS done right? But last April Apple went out of their way to shut them down.

Now it's back. Here's a screen capture of an app I built in Flash CS 5.0 (old school I know) during faculty senate in about 20 minutes. I wanted to make sure the integration was meaningful so I experimented with connecting to the GPS data received by the phone. It works. And presumably the same functions would work on an android or a blackberry.

What took considerably more time was setting up the certificate and provisioning profile so that apple could know who was writing code, what device they were writing for, and have a record of what the app name was. Keep in mind that all of this was purely for testing purposes--not for distribution either at an enterprise level or in the app store.

My takeaway from this experience is that apple is a much bigger barrier (did I mention it costs $99/year to even get on the testing ride?) to app development on iOS than Flash is but time will tell if that continues to be the case.

Note that the flash player is still dead dead dead, and that means no seamless integration with web browsers. No flash video players as the ubiquitous media wrappers. But as someone who uses an iPhone religiously I generally prefer native apps anyway.

I am now officially astounded at how long Flash has persisted. I've been teaching it for 9 years. It remains in my mind one of the best IDEs for people with no programming background, because you can engage in so much GUI development. I'll be curious to see when someone finally sticks a fork in it.

Disparate business models

I'm struck by the stark contrast between Comcast and Netflix. Without getting into a bunch of details I lack the time to provide I'll just say the following. My relationship with Comcast feels like an abuse cycle. We have a billing fight, they try to increase my rates, I threaten to leave, they cut me a deal for 6 months and we repeat the dance.

Netflix is all happy and chipper that I'm cutting back on services (going streaming only), customer service answers my question right away and even gives me the old rates until the end of my service cycle despite changing their rates on September 1st. Not because I asked for it, but because that's the way they roll. Comcast on the other hand happily charges me a higher rate for a reduction in services partway through my billing cycle. Who does that to their customers?

The really scary part is that they are now a conveyer of content and a producer of it--I'm sure I'll be able to trust them to push my Netflix streams as fast as the Today show because they're so magnanimous.

CPU bottleneck since 2004?

So there seems to be a 6Ghz upper limit on processor speed that we can't break through since clear back in 2004. How did I miss that? As a result we've moved to doubling down so to speak with dual or quad core processor machines but only a handful of applications actually take advantage of that by offloading processes to multiple processors.

This seems like it prefaces a day of the designer, in which software engineers will have to be even more lean and mean than usual. As a side note, STATA (my favorite stats package ever). Offers licenses that take advantage of this but they want to charge for it. Who wouldn't right? It also prefaces a day of computing really starting to suck. We're supposed to double capacity every 18 months. I'm looking at buying a new macbook pro with a dual core processor that's pretty similar to what I have now and is almost 3 years old. Am I missing some nuance here?

Sustainability

So I haven't been this excited about an alternate field of study in some time but just spent a couple of days with people who do work in sustainability. This would be things like designing urban renewal projects, fighting poverty or aids, or creating composting plans for a college campus. They are much more complex than that but that's the gist. They do a lot of work with teaching learners how to frame problems, design problem solutions, and execute problem solutions and they are using project and some problem based learning.

They deal with major complexity. They deal with almost any discipline under the sun. They are 10 years into being a field. They have so much energy they are their own renewable power source.

They make me tired. The oddest part is one of the big programs in this field is in Arizona. It would be like having the DNC headquarters in Logan Utah.

3k Washingtons, the price of open access

We've been asking about sustainability of open access for quite some time. Springer has the answer. If I pay a mere $3,000 my latest article (co-authored with Dr. Gulfidan Can) could be made available for non-commercial use via the creative commons license (with commercial use rights reserved by Springer).

They do allow for institutional reserve or personal web site productions of pre-print versions of the article . . . 12 months after it comes out.

You are working yourself out of having a respected journal. You will loose to publications that make articles available to everyone because they'll get more citations. You need a new business model. Think services, think access to full data, think high resolution graphics, partner articles with your textbooks about statistics (a link that says--do you want to know more about Cronbach's Alpha? or see other forms of reliability) or qualitative analyses (do you want to know how to do a comparative case study?). Think advertising for statistical or qualitative analysis packages. You can live off your current g index for a little while, and find some solace in the fact that academia moves at a glacial pace but the days of your current business model are numbered and the time to make changes is now. I don't think that adding a $3,000 check box for creative commons is going to cut it, although I respect that you are trying.

You want to draw a line in the sand for contributions via copyediting and formatting--terrific. Let us have our pre-print manuscripts from day 1. Or earlier for that matter. Our acceptance notification for this article came in July. We're going on 4 months of possible citations flushed away and the clock is still running. You want an edge on your competition--provide links to our pre-prints before the issue comes out. How about having citations for articles still in press as a way of pumping up the old g index?

First of all, call the $3k what it is, it's an opportunity cost--it's what you think you will loose in revenue from this one article because libraries may cancel their subscription to the journal as a whole if they can get the article for free. The actual cost of making this open access as opposed to making it available only to subscribers is negligible. In addition to providing services you could also lower your costs. Get it out of your head that your are in the business of printing journals. You are in the business of publishing journals. Drop the hard copy, kill the infrastructure, stop renting that warehouse, kill all your shipping costs, stop giving your open access competitors such a cost advantage.

Print based journals are uniquely positioned to dominate this landscape, they have the best editors with the best reviewers, their journals have the best reputations (for now). They need to leverage that in a way that puts them on top of where academic research is headed: open access.

Attenuation of Effect Sizes

So here's what I wanted to present at BYU last week but we hadn't finished our analysis yet. At AERA we're presenting a new meta-analysis about the quality of the research done in PBL. Quick rundown--still looking at student learning outcomes comparing PBL with traditional learning. We coded for research design, the degree to which the study reported validity of their measures, reliability of their measures, and the internal threats to validity present in each study.

The stand-out finding is reliability:

When studies report no reliability information on their measures, effect sizes are .20--a small effect favoring PBL that is pretty close to the overall mean for the past several meta-analyses done. When they engage in strong reliability reporting (meaning something along the lines of a cronbach's alpha for their actual sample rather than falling back on data from someone else's study) then effect sizes jump to .47, a medium effect.

True random designs show larger effect sizes that favor PBL over traditional learning too.

The consistent trend seems to be that we are hamstringing the PBL literature base with weak research designs and little attention to measurement. When we pay attention to those things, and presumably reduce measurement error and a priori group differences--PBL shows improved student outcomes. Almost double what we find as a norm.

Figure design shamelessly stolen from Brett Shelton.

Red air, red state, blue resident

Some of my favorite responses to our local newspaper's question about what Cache Valley residents intend to do toward reducing pollution with the cold season and inversion coming up. Some context: Because we live in a big bowl and have periods of almost no temperature change we get air that is neigh on unbreathable. Think NYC, or LA. We have "yellow air" and "red air" alerts when we're cautioned to not go outside and exercise because it can damage our lungs. We have University of Utah researchers doing breathing tests on our kids on red air days like we're the proverbial canaries in a coal mine. We've shot for the stars and obtained a level of air quality that requires federal intervention.

Here are the quotes:

"Absolutely not! First there was this huge hole in the ozone...Hmmm haven't heard much about that the last several years, huh? THEN they had us all believe that global warming was actually real.....as we continue to shatter cold records weekly!! Funny how that talk is ALSO starting to fade now, huh??

I agree...an inversion does trap air in the winter within this valley, however, the inversion is not an automatic thing that happens each year. But when it does occur, no doubt some bad air gets trapped..but that is life! Too bad! "


" Yes, I'm going to buy corks for my neighbors' cows. "


" Yes, I plan to ask CVTD to discontinue operation so that we can eliminate the exhaust emissions from engines of empty and near-empty buses. " CVTD is our local bus system. It's a no-fare system supported by tax dollars, some of the buses even run on natural gas


" Limiting my contribution to air pollution isn't the only consideration. Far from it. I plan to drive my vehicles when I feel it necessary. Oh, and I don't pay much attention to those silly flashing signs that indicate red or yellow air day. It's such a trivial aspect to my overall decision to drive to where I drive.

I'd like to see the Nibley CVTD run eliminated. It seldom has very many, if any people on it, but it sure spews out a lot of exhaust. "


" HELLL NO!!!! "


" Because cows produce so much methane, I will eat as many steaks as I can to reduce the cow population. "


" In the interest of seasonal fairness, I'm committed to producing equal levels of pollution throughout the year. "


" Feedback has the right idea, spend more time at the beav and cut back on pollution at the same time, win/win. On top of that I will ride my bike on any weather permitting day, even though its more for exercise than helping the pollution since I don't think its all that big of a problem here. "


" While reducing air pollution for the sake of public health and comfort is a noble goal the cost of such reductions can be measured in the millions of dollars in time and productivity if it even costs on average 5 minuets per person per day.
Reduce pollution when you can but keep in mind the cost of your actions, don't use it as an excuse to reduce productivity. "


" I plan to warm up my diesel truck an extra 10 minutes every morning!

MAN CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!! "


" Inversions are natural and occur in many places. The idea that we cause Cache Valley inversions has no supporting data.

Human induced climate change is unproven. There is no evidence that human production of CO2 is driving the temperature. All we have, at the moment, is debate about the idea. "

How do you get to a place where your response to those personally working towards improving everyone's air quality is not only "no" but "no, and screw you for trying." How does that happen exactly?

A culture of inclusion

Just went to one of the Provost’s lecture series done by Mathew Ouellett. The topic was creating and maintaining a culture of inclusion diversity and social justice. I’m sure I’m going to misrepresent some of the thoughts/discussion so just keep in mind this is from my perspective.

He started off by talking about the admission requirements to Harvard University when it first started, having us all start off with hands raised and dropping them when we didn’t meet one of the criteria. First: Are we male? (I think over half the hands dropped, which is very interesting because I don’t think over half our faculty are women—this suggests that perhaps the topic or the lecture series as a whole is of differential interest). Second: Something along the lines of are we the sons of a minister which lost the rest of us. Later he summarized these slightly differently. 1) Male, 2) son of a landowner (meaning citizenship back then) 3) A Christian, being prepared for the ministry.

As an aside—this brings to mind something that we often forget about the way our country was formed. It was rule by the privileged not only in the sense that elected officials make the decisions, but that those doing the electing were not the population as a whole—only those who owned land. I remember being blown away by that back in high school history class.

Ouellett’s point was that we’ve all (even the White males among us) benefited from affirmative action. He then talked about the hierarchies that are in place within academia. We have a decided pecking order that starts with faculty vs staff, then pretunure vs tenured faculty, then whether or not you have grants and for what amount, then whether or not you have an endowed chair, etc . . . I have to confess that I take a lot of this for granted sometimes to the detriment of my interactions with others. In the last month or so I’ve had two doctoral students say something (one directly and one indirectly) about reacting negatively to my off-hand comments.

This is a new concern to me. I think in a lot of ways the doc students we have now are so much better than my cohort and I. They are publishing more, presenting more, know their methodology better. They have more grant writing experience, you name it and they’re doing better. But for some reason we seemed to have much more swagger back then than they do now.

The discussion then turned to a major theme and his buy-in for it was interesting. The theme is about collaboration and tolerance, and this worked into ways that you might not expect given the topic (see more below). The buy-in was brilliant. Collaboration is what we’re trained to do in the academy. None of us work in a vacuum, we’re the product of the people we’ve worked with and the people we’ve been mentored by, and I would argue, by the people we’re mentoring.

In a spirit of collaboration he encouraged us to find teaching partners. Especially ones coming from a different background than us with respect to diversity. This seems like it has several barriers. Especially recognition and teaching load. What does that look like in your binder? I appreciate that he gave a nod to the fact that formal teaching may not be realistic and he encouraged us to find less formal mechanisms to inform our teaching. This was a contrast to Ken Bain’s statement that we need to change the licensure exams in our respective fields if the assessment doesn’t fit our pedagogical practices. There’s nothing more paralyzing than hearing a far away goal without short term strategies to get there. I left with a feeling that Ouellet was not pitching rhetoric by trying to facilitate change.

Another theme of the talk was about picking your battles (although he didn’t phrase it exactly that way). He talked about having an office above a dormitory and having to ride the elevators and hear “that’s so gay” enough that he spent an entire day doing interventions. It wasn’t effective. It didn’t work because he didn’t have a personal relationship with any of the students—but when things happen in a class, and he mentioned a couple of examples, then you do have a relationship with the students and you have an opportunity to facilitate change.

I also appreciate (again with the spirit of collaboration), that his primary advice on facilitating change wasn’t about making statements but asking questions. One of the faculty mentioned students saying race wasn’t a problem here but was a problem in the ‘Southern States.’ He said it was an opportunity to ask the students about their own race identity, and suggested a couple of specific activities to get them thinking along these lines. If I were thinking about this in Piaget terms he was really asking them to force a moment of equilibration, getting them to think about past events in their own lives that contradict the thought of race not being an issue. He also recognized that there is value in their existing beliefs, that it isn’t about growing up with bad parents or incorrect thoughts.

The other big theme in his talk was failing with grace. As faculty, we don’t make our practice public. Which is so true. When I’m struggling with a new analysis I don’t do it in front of my students. I figure it out, then tell them what I did. As if I magically knew it all along. This is not something we can practice privately because it happens a bit off the cuff. We’ve got to be willing to fail, and most importantly willing to move on from there.

One outstanding question I have: At Lehigh, one of the full professors mentioned that he never brings up politics in his class. I used to quite a bit but since then I’ve resisted (or tried to anyway) precisely because of some of the power relationships Ouellet started off discussing. Who am I to force my opinions on graduate students? So where do we draw the line? It seems like a culture of inclusion is not political to me, but for some that is extremely political. I guess that’s the genius of asking questions rather than making statements, right?

Exceptionally Brazen Sophistry

I think we're writing and reading total crap. Case in point: Medical reform. I was reading a conservative "news article" on this today at the National Review entitled Obama's Dirty Little Secret. At the heart and soul of the arguments expressed is the idea that private health insurance will be priced out of the market and we'll wind up with ObamaCare as the only option. The research for these claims is brought to you in part by the Lewin Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Health Group. That's right we get research about how bad it would be to change the private health care system from the private health care system. (I am staunchly resisting the temptation to make an analogy here . . . staunchly . . . and I might add, doing so with aplomb, decorum, and no small amount of class).

The really fascinating thing is that the article has a lot of .50 words. The phrase "exceptionally brazen sophistry"(1) is not something you hear on the street corner every day. This is clearly targeted at people who are smarter than the average bear--but it's incredibly easy to pull apart and dismiss. So why is a reasonably smart person trying to talk to reasonably smart people using "exceptionally brazen sophistry" of his own? I think it's a plot to lend relevance to Woody Allen movies and possibly high school literature like Catch 22.

Don't get me wrong, the National Review doesn't corner the market on ideological drivel. I get a regular helping from two facebook friends straight from the Huffington Post. I'd like to have news that is free of perspective thanks. I can form my own stinking opinions about who to vote for, I already know Glenn Beck is the most funny when he's trying to be deadly serious and frankly your attempt to explain it to me ruins the ride. I know I'm far from the first to feel this way--so where do I go for that sort of thing? Where do I get news sans commentary? Where do I get news about the system instead of from the system? Is there not a free market for that?




(1) As an aside, exceptionally brazen sophistry sounds like the height of stupidity. A subtle deception in argument that is in your face at the same time? Hmm subtle yet bold--sounds like we're describing a wine, possibly one that comes out of a box. How exactly does that work in argumentation? Well--I think we have two great examples here. Obama's claims about being able to keep your private insurer and this article's debunking of those claims as supported by private insurers.

Flash Video on OSX

So now that I'm on a Mac, using WinFF isn't quite as handy as it used to be. I was having a great deal of trouble figuring out how to use ffmpeg on OSX until a student in the Flash class, Peter Blaire, found the missing link.

I was using ffmpegX, a shareware utility to convert video using ffmpeg (like WinFF it's a gui front-end). But none of the video was encoding with any meta-data. This is all kinds of bad becasue things like cue points and the total run time are incredibly handy for streaming and vital for publishing the screencasts I do. Aparently you need to install a little ruby on rails app, which you can find instructions on here:

http://www.ffmpegx.com/download.html#metadata

Note that the readme file works better than what you see here, as you need to sudo in the terminal before the install command:

ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
sudo ruby setup.rb install

Works like a charm! Thanks Peter.

Are Faculty Just Plain Stubborn?

This is a figure from a meta-analysis that Heather Leary and I finished earlier this month. It's about tutor variables that moderate problem-based learning outcomes. I should add these are cognitive outcomes only for students (standardized tests, essays, etc . . . ). Each of the outcomes compared a PBL treatment with a "control" or "lecture" condition (although those can mean many different things). There's a lot going on here, the little (n=xes) need some attention as they show the number of outcomes. The very rough scale for effect sizes is .2 = small, .5 = medium, and .8 = large.

Many of these combinations don't have what you would call overwhelming amounts of evidence, but we do know a lot about faculty whether they received formal training as PBL tutors or not, and the difference in terms of student learning are non-existent. We have no causal data, which I can't emphasize enough--so maybe this is because faculty are immune to training, falling back on their lecture roots, maybe the training was poor, maybe it's because of Turkey burgers--but it's pretty shocking. My vote is for faculty resistance, other research points to epistemological beliefs being pretty stable by the time you hit undergrad. And for many, this kind of approach requires a fundamental shift in epistemological beliefs. There are documented cases of faculty tutors going into a small group PBL sessions and just lecturing, even after training. But research is not a democracy. Somebody could make a serious name for themselves figuring out why this is the case.

Nobody likes a hater

But I'm going to be one anyway. 10 pages probably isn't a fair shake for any book, but last night I was reading "Twilight" to my daughter Rachel and wow, just wow. Some parents might worry about exposing their children to the occult or to suggestive content. Forget that. I'm worried about exposing her to bad bad writing. It's never good when a character's voice is "attractive" or "like velvet." And I've got to know how a BYU grad comes up with the name of Coach Clapp for the PE teacher.

This book offends me as an English major.

Learning The String Bass

My daughter Rachel has been teaching me to play the String Bass lately. She started back in 4th grade so is going on her 3rd year. Me, I'm still stuck on "Ode To Joy." For those of you with children getting into the violin or viola (I'm thinking of you Jozanne) my deepest sympathies. No matter how bad you slaughter a Bass note it doesn't have that fingers on chalkboard sound that you can squeeze out of a higher pitched stringed instrument. So aside from having to schlep one around to various things I highly recommend the Bass.

I will also say Bass has made a huge difference in Rachel's life. Her confidence in other areas has taken a huge boost, she looks forward to orchestra each day at school and her private lesson each week. And of course she loves showing off and correcting my own attempts at technique (she even created a lesson plan for me).

To help myself memorize the notation, names, and fingerings of the notes (just first position so far) I set up a little flash project. You can get the gory details here or click on the screenshot below to try it out yourself (Flash 9 player required). The gory details link has stand-alone versions for Windows and Mac OS X.

The Evolution of Politicians

I actually went to a local political debate between an incumbent Republican congressman and his Democrat and Libertarian opponents. It was sponsored by the ASUSU student organization and a terrific example of the concept behind a cross-sectional longitudinal research design when compared with debates on more of a national stage. You use this to get a look at development over time when you don't want to (or can't) spend the time doing so. Instead, you a snapshot of different phases of development and make the assumption that they are reflective of the normal process. So you might assume that politicians early in their careers are much more frank and willing to take a stand than they are later in their careers. Of course the analogy breaks down a bit because generally you'd be quantifying this and using much larger samples.

We'll start with the candidate (Libertarian) least likely to get elected. He was unabashedly forward about his beliefs, in fact at one point he talked about wanting the free market to prevail in three different things: business (he thought AIG should have been left for dead--as an aside, if we had regulated properly would we have a sole privately owned business with so much market share that it's going down would destroy the World's economy?), health care, and--here's the real kicker, he wanted to make sure the market could prevail on fighting terrorism. Now before you start thinking Blackwater I'm not sure that's where he wanted to go (because they're government contracted--or is it government subcontracted through the Vice President's former company?) but it does frankly strike me as out on the lunatic fringe. Mostly because a private company can't negotiate or engage in diplomacy on behalf of the US, and probably wouldn't have the kinds of incentives to fight poverty and other conditions that can lead to terrorism.

Next, the Democrat who in this year actually has more of a shot than you might think in Utah. He was willing to express his views, was a little more elegant, a little more educated (for instance he brought up the difference between radioactive and nuclear waste), but was still willing to be very direct at times, maybe to his own detriment. For instance, in that same question about storing nuclear waste in Utah he said we weren't currently, just radioactive but that he would be opposed to storing anything in our great state especially waste from overseas. He also called out the Republican for refusing to work with him on a bill to that effect and taking $26k from Energy Solutions.

Enter the incumbent. He's been to Washington, knows the ropes and his response to the
questions was this. In a slightly rough moment (that or massive hubris) he said it wasn't $26k but $28k, and not from Energy Solutions but from employees who "happened" to work at Energy Solutions (which makes all kinds of difference to me, let me tell you--that and the fact that 14 people gave him about half my annual salary for an election campaign makes him sound like a real regular Joe). Now it's possible that I missed what the bill was about or the framing of the original question, but when both of the other debate participants seemed squarely focused on what was happening in Utah this guy proceeded to do something you'll see more about below. He said he'd do whatever Utah wanted, but he refused to work on this particular bill because he saw it as a states rights issue. He was very elegant, he talked about Washington State importing waste from Vancouver and was concerned that the bill would limit the ability of other states to make decisions about what they wanted. My concern is that he never really answered the question.

Now let's take a look at the National stage where Obama and McCain have very close views on Abortion and Gay Marriage. This is a radical over-simplification but they essentially both refer to these as State's rights. It's not their role as executive to push federal law to ban abortion, but it should be up to individual states to decide. I went to WSU after the fact, but heard the stories about how the sovereignty of states creates really interesting consequences. Back in the day the Idaho legal drinking age was lower than Washington's. As a consequence the seven mile stretch of highway 26 between Pullman Washington and Moscow Idaho had no small number of legal/underage drinkers returning home and go figure some of them were driving. I may not be a political scientist but both of these issues have consequences for other states. I think people who fall on either side of these issues should be really mad that their candidate of choice refuses to make a choice (no pun intended).

Even Optimists Can Be Presented With An Undeniable Vision of Impending Doom

One of my favorite short stories is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger--the easiest way to grab a copy is in a collection titled "Nine Stories" and I highly recommend it. It's not a spoiler in any way to say that one of the big themes is a deeply disturbed character (Seymour Glass) who is seeking refuge in part in the innocence of children (but not in a creepy way, I promise). To make a short story long, he finds out it's not as much of a refuge as he thought it was. Even though I've always loved the story--I've never quite believed it. I get misty-eyed when I hear the song "you are the new day" (especially when coupled with a public television ad and b-roll of Sesame Street and children playing). I tend to think the best about people and about future events, but now I can see why Salinger has cut himself off from the world. For me it's not the lack of childhood innocence. I’m not ready to give that up yet. For me, it’s the train wreck that children are walking into.

Last weekend I cleaned out the garage, which included three different items for the dump: A computer (desktop & monitor), some flooring tiles, and some scrap metal (an old vent for a swamp cooler we had removed). I knew the computer and monitor had to go there for proper disposal, I knew the metal could be recycled, and I was hoping they could recycle the tile too. We also had a bunch of stuff for DI (the local "goodwill")--which happened to be my first stop. I'm unloading there and I pull out and set aside the scrap metal to get at some other stuff, and one of the helpful workers decides he's going to do me a favor and throw my scrap metal in their dumpster--which also happened to be full of cardboard. This is my first sign of our impending doom, a guy trying to do me a solid by sending my recyclable waste off to the landfill. After rescuing my scrap metal out of the dumpster along with other recyclables I decide that individuals can still make a difference--and got pretty jazzed about taking so much to the dump, none of which is actually going into the landfill. As a further boost, the woman at the scales says I can toss my flooring tiles in with the concrete, so I guessed right and they can be recycled too (side note: Jen wanted to try gluing them down again--so not such a great thing after all).

Still, I'm on a high note. Until about 12:30am. We live across from a park that has a dumpster right next to it. I wake up to someone tossing in a truckload of something or other. The next morning I take a peek and it's mostly construction waste--including a good bit of recyclable scrap metal, and some wood and sheet rock.

The amount of green waste we see go in that dumpster from otherwise nice, friendly, and intelligent neighbors is astonishing. What's more astonishing is that they will pick up green waste at your curb if you pay $4/month for a green waste bin. $4/month for weekly pickup! This town makes it incredibly easy to recycle everything from leaves to plastic and we still can’t pull the trigger.

These are pragmatic pressures (proximity of a dumpster vs driving to the landfill or spacing out your tree pruning over a couple of weeks). Imagine the financial pressures faced by big corporations. Heck, I remember a few years ago insurers wanting to know if employees were bike commuting because it presented additional risk that companies either had to pay for or pass on to their employees.

We’re doomed.

Somebody give me some good news. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me you stopped a baby seal from getting clubbed to death (metaphorically speaking).

Thompson Reuters needs to rethink their life

After taking a bit to update their plug-in for Word 2008 (maybe a bit understandable given that it's supposed to be a different structure). The folks who make the End Note software have opted to not make CWYW ("cite while you write") available on Word 2008 for older versions of End Note--namely version X.02 which I use right now. Not only that but they'd charge me $91 to "upgrade" to version X1! To really let this sink in the build date on my version is 2007! That's right, it's a year old and no longer capable of doing what I need it to do.

This isn't even remotely acceptable behavior on their part. As a result, I've now downgraded to office 2004 and I'm anxiously awaiting an alternative bibliographic option. It looks like my best bet so far is Zotero (thanks for the referral Melynda!) which is an open source alternative to a program that I refuse to even mention again by name. There are times when a small part of me feels a little sorry for niche software developers when an open source alternative comes along. Then something like this happens . . .

My favorite facebook ad

I'm sure there will be others, but this one is my first love.  I don't really own a bikini but if my swimsuit had unwanted hair I would definitely want to have it removed (the bikini too).  Not only does it remove unwanted hair from swimwear, but it also removes it from your "etc . . . " which is just dang helpful.  Of course, ever since I first saw Buck Rogers I always wanted to own a personal laser, so the fact that it can remove hair from my etc is just a bonus.