The Blogg

February 28, 2009

Miscellany

Filed under: Music, Personal, Sports — chadhogg @ 10:50 pm

Last night I saw a vehicle with license plate “YTSEJAM”. How cool is that?

The Eagles front office has disappointed many times in the past, but by letting Dawkins go they have really outdone themselves. He basically got a two year, $9 million contract from Denver, with another 3 years that both know probably aren’t going to happen. With the cap space they have and obscene profits they have made over the last 10 years, the Eagles could easily have matched that. Instead, we give up a man who made every player on the field with him better. He did not have the coverage skills of a young man, but was still the difference maker on this team last year. They could have played most snaps with Dawk playing a second strong safety in place of a linebacker and still utilized those skills in which he remained dominant. In retrospect the team seems to have made a wise decision when they released team leader and fan favorite Jeremiah Trotter two years ago, but I do not think this will turn out the same. Will Dawk be inducted into the Hall of Fame as a Bronco? Ugh.

My local newspaper includes each Saturday a listing of the top 5 singles, albums, and concert tours. I do not particularly care, but I have noticed a trend. The vast majority of the top singles are in genres that I hate: hip-hop, so-called R&B, Spears/N’SYNC-style pop, etc. The top albums are equally mixed between these top-40 acts and rock, while the top concert tours are almost exclusively actual rock bands. I am not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but I think it pleases me.

February 25, 2009

Piled Higher & Deeper

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 2:59 pm

Last night I went to a lecture by Jorge Cham, author of PhD Comics at the University of Pennsylvania on “The Power of Procrastination”. His strip is a bit uneven, but particularly in the early years he really managed to distill the frustration of graduate student life into a few panels. My favorites include 28, 41, 113, 116, 124, 125, and 286. Given that he has been so successful in this art form, I assumed he would give a great talk.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. He had some good things to say and did a good job of integrating his artwork at the appropriate times, but he was one of the least engaging speakers I have ever heard. He … tended … to … talk … very … slowly … and … take … looooooooooong … pauses … for … effect. The only effect it inspired in me was boredom. Perhaps he was expecting the audience to be a bit more interactive, but if so he utterly failed to compensate when this turned out not to be the case.

The talk itself followed the major themes of the comic — that graduate students are overworked and underpaid, that most people’s research is so specialized that only a few people in the world will ever care about it, that the bureaucratic institutions of the University are silly, and that in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems anything can be a welcome distraction. Unlike the commiseration of the comic, he turned this around to a positive message that, essentially, everyone in academia shares your struggles, that we should stop worrying so much, and that a little procrastination can be beneficial.

The talk reminded me a bit of an essay that someone sent me the other day. (Link may not work from locations that do not have an institutional subscription to the Journal of Cell Science. If so, google “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”.) I think it is a good discussion of what graduate work is really like. The more educated you are, the more cognizant you become of your own abject ignorance in the face of all that is to be known. At this point I have it relatively easy — my advisor through his own insight and knowledge of the literature identified an unsolved problem, and all I need to do is come up with a solution to that problem, build and evaluate it, and explore its implications. Finding the problem is the really difficult challenge, and at this point I definitely do not feel up to the task.

********************

My hatred for the Schuylkill Expressway is never ending. My parents gave us a GPS-enabled navigation device for Christmas, and I decided to use it on this trip as I had only been to the apartment of the friends we were meeting in Philly once before. When we left our home at 3:35 it estimated we would arrive at our destination at 4:52. By the time we exited 476-S onto 76-E at 4:30 I had cut that time down to 4:48 through clever disregard of speed limits. After sitting in traffic for the most absurd reason (someone had a flat tire and, rather than pulling onto the shoulder, stopped directly in the left traffic lane to change it), we arrived at around 5:10.

We entered 76-W from University Ave. at 10:25 on the way home. One lane of 76 was closed for construction just before our exit onto 476, so that 14-mile portion of the trip took 65 minutes. We did not get home until after 12:30. These are not isolated instances; traffic seems to be at a standstill at least one way every time I go to the city. I may start exiting the highway system at the intersection of 476 and 276 and taking back roads from Conshohocken through red lights and stop signs. It can’t be any worse.

February 21, 2009

Concert Review: The Toasters

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 12:13 am

This was my first experience in the basement of Crocodile Rock Cafe. Unlike the more spacious venue upstairs, it is a corridor about 20 feet wide and perhaps 300 feet long with the stage at one end and a bunch of couches at the other. Although that means that fewer people can be very close to the band, I kind of liked the setup. It is a terrible situation for the bands though; after its set each one had to lug its equipment through the crowd as the next band was trying to bring theirs up through it. Even with this, they did a much better job of quickly setting the stage and getting the next act playing than any concert I attended upstairs. The biggest annoyance is that there is a constant rumble from the band playing above. Usually it is drowned out, but you can definitely hear it when the downstairs band is trying to play softly.

I arrived around 7:15 in the middle of the second opener’s set. Sneaky Sea Lions had trumpet/vocals, trombone, guitar, bass, and drums. The rhythm section was just adequate, but the horn players were tight and the vocalist was good. They played until around 7:45.

At 8:00 the second band, Victor’s Lament, came on. They had alto sax/keyboards, tenor sax, trombone, guitar, guitar, bass, drums, with almost everyone singing lead at some point. They were not as tight as the earlier band, but I suppose that is to be expected with so many musicians. I enjoyed the music, but they all seemed to be really straining to get the vocals out. They finished up around 8:30.

The headliners started playing at 9:00. The ever-revolving lineup currently consists of Buck on guitar and vocals, a saxophone player, a trombone player, a bassist, and a drummer. Their blistering set lasted only an hour, which was disappointing considering how early they started, but did include pretty much everything I wanted to hear. Before the encore the drummer came out and told us the volume and length of our screams would determine how much more they would play, and told us we did “pretty damn good”, so I thought we might get three or four tunes. Apparently, “pretty damn good” merits only two.

They sounded great, but I think I enjoyed the show two years ago at the Sterling Hotel a bit more. At that time they had a bassist who could legitimately toast, and they played a lot of music that featured him doing so. Buck does great on the more straight-ahead vocals, but it just isn’t his thing and the interplay between them was quite good.

Every few years I find myself drifting away from ska towards more sophisticated styles of music, and I need a show like this to make me again glad that I have been part of this subculture. There is no artistic pretension in this music, and even when the lyrics are overtly political the message takes a back seat to the groove. It is music for a party, and it can only really be experience live. The crowd tonight was pretty typical of the scene: about 10% diehard fans in their 50s, 70% kids who look like they should be in or only recently graduated from high school, and a smattering of us in between. Some are skinheads by choice, others by the ravages of time. We’ve got the serious two-tone fans in their plaid sportscoats and derby hats next to the punks with pink hair and spiked leather and the nerds, all here to see a band that was formed before most of them were born. There were half a dozen people at a time rotating through the pit, but hardly anyone in the place could stand completely still. I mean, can you listen to this when they really get cooking at around 1:55 and not at least tap your foot? And that’s a crappy recording where you can barely hear the very important bass line. Live, it’s practically the definition of happiness.

I can’t think of a better way to spend $12 and a Friday night.

February 19, 2009

Book Review: The Grapes Of Wrath

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 11:12 pm

It is too soon to see if it will be true of me, but this is the kind of book that changes lives. In my pursuit of literature thusfar, I have found nothing else like it. The characters are real, the writing effective, the story compelling, and the sociological context heartbreaking. I was well aware of the circumstances of the depression and the great migration from the dust bowl on an intellectual level, but Steinbeck’s art makes me understand it in a much more visceral manner.

Although some are more fleshed out than others, none of the Joads seem like stock characters. I am far removed from their experiences, but Grampa’s stubbornness, Uncle John’s psychological issues, and Ma’s determination are entirely familiar. The only characters with whom the reader cannot sympathize are the sheriffs and city folk, and even their actions in their own self-interest are understandable.

Steinbeck is not prone to florid prose; most of the book is written in language that would not be overly difficult for his barely literate characters to understand. I do not know whether or not this is intentional. Unless I am missing them, Steinbeck does not make much use of literary devices, but simply tells the story. The exception, the title’s allusion to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and, through it, to Revelation, is quite clear to even the casual reader. In between those chapters of the novel relating the saga of the Joads and their acquaintances are short vignettes showing a different or wider perspective on the phenomenon, and while the story could have stood on its own, I find them very helpful in drawing the reader into the totality of the experience. I generally am annoyed when an author attempts to write out dialogue to mimic the accent of the speakers, but in this case it draws a stark contrast between the rural sharecroppers and many of the people that they meet.

The story of the Joads is, if the foreword to my edition of the book is accurate, based on the lives of real migrants with whom Steinbeck lived while doing research for the book. Thus, it is no surprise that their sad lives are so very human. Ultimately their story differs only in the details from those of their many fellow travelers and the “little folk” of all times and places. The way the novel ends with a climactic moment while leaving the entire story unresolved, just like the underlying realities of the Okies, is a stroke of genius.

The foreword to my edition was written in the midst of a deep recession, when the rich continued to enhance their wealth and everyone else suffered the cruel bludgeoning of the Invisible Hand. He wisely pointed out the similarities between his time and the setting of the novel, but what was true then is moreso today. Steinbeck seemed to be optimistic that in the near future a change would be a-comin’, and the oppressed of the world would rise up against their oppressors. While there has certainly been progress and few people in the United States are literally starving in today’s weak economy, I must imagine that he would be rather disappointed.

February 14, 2009

The Needle And The Damage Done

Filed under: Personal, Politics — chadhogg @ 11:20 pm

If you have been a regular reader, you know that I think the War On Drugs causes more harm than good. This morning I played at the funeral of a man my age who overdosed on heroin. I did not know him, but apparently he was a fairly typical, happy person who first turned to the drug to cope with chronic back pain, tried rehabilitation, then relapsed hard. I don’t think that longer mandatory sentences and cameras on every street corner could have prevented his death; rather, the ability to seek a “safe” source of the substance or manage his pain with another opioid under the supervision of a doctor might have done so. But that is not my point today. I’ll never understand the thought process that leads people to take that first dose.

While I don’t personally get the appeal of getting high, I can at least see what causes people to smoke marijuana. You get to “stick it to the man” without actually doing anything productive, you get high if you are into that sort of thing, and the affair poses almost no non-legal risk to yourself. But heroin? Seriously? According to The Lancet, it is significantly both more addictive and more physically damaging than any other substance studied. It is very expensive, the symptoms of withdrawal are reportedly excruciating, and you have to inject it into yourself. (Or at least this seems to be the most common usage by far.) If what I read is true, many users quickly develop such a tolerance that no quantity of the drug produces euphoria, it just alleviates withdrawal and, if high enough, kills you.

The examples of people whose lives were destroyed by this scourge are numerous and high-profile: John Belushi, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, Layne Staley, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, … Sure there are people who seem to have been able to keep their lives together long enough to get help, but it seems there are only two classes of people who began abusing heroin more than a few years ago: those who are recovering from addiction, and those who are dead. You would have to be living under a rock to not see this. How is it that this keeps happening?

February 5, 2009

Student Assessment

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 1:41 pm

I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to attend a series of seminars on teacher development at Lehigh University. All of them have been useful, but I was particularly interested in today’s discussion of assessment because I have thought a great deal about what system would be fair to everyone.

I do not believe that assessment is the primary responsibility of the educator; actually teaching the material is much more important. Nevertheless, we do have a responsibility both to future employers or other organizations that need a way to select the most qualified candidates and to the students themselves who need an accurate understanding of their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. The practice of grade inflation, at least in my experience, has made this quite difficult.

I learned today that Lehigh has short textual descriptions of what each letter grade assigned should mean in the course catalog. An “A/A-” represents excellent work, a “B+/B/B-” good work, a “C+/C” competency, a “C-” continuation competency, and “D+/D/D-” passing. In practice, of course, this system is not followed by most departments at Lehigh or elsewhere. Rather, a student who has done what is expected and an exceptional student both receive an “A”.

The typical counter to this grade inflation is to use norm-based assessment, in which the students are first given objective numerical assessments and then compared to the mean across all students. A typical system might give an A to scores more than 1.5 standard deviations above the mean, a B for 0.5-1.5 above, a C for 0.5 below to 0.5 above, a D for 1.5 to 0.5 below, and an F to scores more than 1.5 standard deviations below the mean. This has the advantage of separating the exceptional students from the “average” ones, but it has plenty of problems of its own. In a class of all good students, some are likely to receive failing grades simply because they were not quite as good as their peers. Similarly, bad students may be rated as excellent when they are actually only better than a class of terrible students. Furthermore, this fosters a cutthroat environment in which students compete with and may actively sabotage their peers. These flaws seem significant enough to make this system unworkable.

The other alternative is criterion-based assessment, in which students’ work is compared against a standard set ahead of time. This is what is used in most classrooms, and what has allowed grade inflation to flourish. Of course, the criteria used in such an assessment need not be designed such that a typical student will be able to perform up to the standard of excellence, but this seems to be the case much more often than not. It seems that the best approach is to use criterion-based assessment, to set the standards such that competency really does earn a student a “C” grade, and to revise those standards each year to make sure they are still accurate.

Even this is not without its problems, however. If a “competent” student has the option of taking a course I am teaching and earning a grade of “C” or taking some other course and receiving an “A” and he knows someone is going to care about his GPA, there will be a strong incentive to take the course with the lax standards. Being up-front and honest with students about expectations helps, but it still seems unfair to enforce different standards on them than are used for others. Even if you can convince your entire department to agree to a more sensible grading scheme, your students will be perceived as less qualified than those from other schools until you get a reputation otherwise.

I am left with no clear option. What would you do?

February 1, 2009

Heroism, Advertising, And Other Super Bowl Musings

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 11:24 pm

First, the game itself. What a crazy one. This morning I was thinking the perfect game would be close until the very end, when Polamalu would seal it with an interception return. That didn’t quite happen, but if you replace the end of the game with the end of the half and Polamalu with Harrison’s amazing 100-yard run I sort of got my wish. Besides, the game did effectively end on a key Steelers defensive play when it really mattered. Of course, after playing a great game Harrison has to show his true colors by holding down a Cardinals player and punching him. I have to agree with Madden; Harrison should have been ejected from the game. This is a physical, violent game between the whistles, but there is absolutely no place for that.

On that note, a ridiculous number of penalties in this game, most of them deserved. The officials usually give players the benefit of the doubt and “let them play” in important games like this, but the teams really did not give them the opportunity to do so. If not for Harrison’s violence, I would have called him the MVP. With him out of contention, I think it has to be Ben Roethlisberger. He made big plays to Holmes, Washington, Ward, and Miller, and several of them after shrugging off a few would-be sackers. I cannot argue too hard against the official selection of Santonio Holmes either.

**********

Next, the advertisements. None of them really stood out to me this year, although I did enjoy the insects colluding to steal and open a bottle of coca-cola and hulu as a conspiracy to enslave the human race. Reusing a clip from the previous night’s SNL was strange. I have read several newspaper articles about NBC setting a new record for Super Bowl advertisement revenue in spite of the weak economy, but I think at least 1/3 of the commercials were for NBC shows. Perhaps I am reading something into that that is unwarranted, but it seems an indication that the advertisement market was not very strong at all.

**********

Now, on to what my friend Chris Cocca would call the “meta-narrative” of the game. I did not hear it explicitly in this broadcast, but the pre-game festivities were full of the implicit “football players are not heroes; look at some real heroes” message. Although I agree with that sentiment, I think we still throw the word “hero” around a bit too liberally. It started with the crew of U. S. Airways Flight 1549, who have roundly been hailed as heroes, walking onto the field. Yes, their cool heads saved the lives of the passengers from what could have been a tragic death, but did they do something exceptional? If my understanding of the event is correct, they did what they were supposed to do, and the same thing that any reasonable flight crew would have done in similar circumstances. Are they heroes because they were (un)lucky enough to be in that situation while others were not?

After the September 11, 2001 attacks the entire police and fire departments of New York City were called heroes. Certainly, some of the members of these forces did go above and beyond their duty, and are largely nameless. But most of the police officers and firefighters simply did their jobs. Those jobs require a willingness to put oneself in danger, and in New York that danger came. If the attacks had happened in Los Angeles or Chicago or anywhere else, however, I am sure emergency services there would have reacted the same way. Unless we want to say that all policemen and firefighters are heroes simply due to their career choice, the heroism of the New York workers is again a function of luck rather than character or ability.

We could call all police forces heroes, and all military personnel. But then we had better add inner-city teachers, and social workers, and … pretty much everyone. Almost everyone takes some risk for the benefit of someone else at some point during their lives. Historically, heroes were highly unique individuals, revered for generations before another might supplant them. Often when society crowns someone as a hero they respond by saying “I just did what anyone would do”. Just as often, this is true. So what does heroism mean? I am not sure I have an answer.

Powered by WordPress