What is to be done

Ok, I leave tomorrow to go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and I have more small tasks than you can possibly imagine to get done before I leave. It is like this for every trip. I think if I only left to go someplace once I was completely ready to go, I would become completely immobile. I haven't even been able to draw up a to do list this time, because each time I start to, the items I list are so small, that I think I should just do one of them, since doing them would take less time than making up the list. But this leaves me with the sense that I am drowning in responsibility, and I feel sick.

I also have been literally feeling sick the last couple days. We are trying to get rid of some old lead paint in our house. Half the house is sealed off with plastic wrap, but you can still smell the crazy chemicals coming from the other side. When I felt sick yesterday, I decided to blame the chemicals, rather than the fact that I had three beers but skipped dinner. This morning I felt fine, after no beers, so I was all prepared to pronounce the chemicals innocent of my previous illness. But then I get to the office, and I feel woozy again. I'm a little nauseous, and my hands are shaking. I haven't been able to figure out what is going on, largely because I've been relying on everyone's favorite fallacious rule of inference: post hoc ergo propter hoc.

In any case, I'm am now going to share with you, the internet, my to do list. I think of this as profgrrrrl blogging, since she is the first blogger I saw doing this. I don't know why I feel compelled to read others' to do list, or share my own. It makes about as much sense as the gallery of grocery lists. But here it is.

• As many job applications as possible [answer, 4]
• 2 emails about the china course
• 2 emails about SOC
• 1 student email about grades--this requires actually tabulating some grades
• 1 letter of recommendation: at least set a deadline for yourself about it.
• Decide what work stuff to take on vacation with you
• Pack it.
• Do the grading that is sitting in your email inbox, so that it looks like you have less to do than you really do.
• 1 personal phone call.
  

Well, maybe this isn't so bad.

Update: is using the word "ecstatic" in a job application going too far? As in "I am ecstatic at the opportunity to work with the Alden March Bioethics Institute"

UCLA student repeatedly tazered for not producing ID while using the library

Mostafa Tabatabainejad was tazered by university police, after he failed to exit the university library quickly enough when he failed to produce the ID that is required of all students using the library after 11. He was tasered once when he didn't get out quickly enough, and then repeatedly after that for failing to stand up after being tazered the first time. Other students who asked the police for their names and badge numbers where threatened with tazering.

The whole incident is was caught on camera phone, and accompanies this article.

Update: the video from youtube


Update again: the link was from Bitch, the youtube link from a commenter at Bitch. Welcome Pharyngula readers.

Emergency Contraception for Students

Do any SLU students read this blog? Just in case you do, here is an important announcement from the health center:

As of today, Plan B emergency contraception will be available without a prescription in pharmacies across the country for women 18 and older.

Plan B emergency contraception (EC) is a safe and effective back up oral contraceptive; it can be taken up to five days after unprotected sex or sexual assault to prevent pregnancy. But EC is most effective the sooner you take it. Studies show EC can reduce the risk of unintended pregnancy by 89% if taken within the first 72 hours after unprotected sex – and by 95% if taken within 24 hours.

Plan B will continue be available in the Diana B. Torrey '82 Health and Counseling Center upon request. If you plan to purchase Plan B at a local pharmacy, you will need to ask for it at the pharmacy counter as it is classified as a "behind the counter" medication. You may also need to show proof of age so take an ID. Unfortunately, the price of Plan B has increased at local pharmacies to approximately $38- $40 per package due to the increased pricing by Barr Laboratory. The Torrey Center price will remain $20 as long as possible.

If you have any questions or concerns please call the Health Service at 229-5392.

I didn't even know the health center offered Plan B for $20, but then again, there is no reason I suppose that I needed to know. Still, it would be nice if amongst all the announcements about flu shots and mono, they put out more information about reproductive health. The quality of reproductive health is probably more sensitive to the availability of information than health issues surrounding germ-based diseases.

two points of scientific literacy

Some random parts of my scientific reasoning mid term. Questions are in bold. My answers are in regular font.

13. What are the basic elements of a Darwinian model of the origin of species?

Four point answer: Some reference to common descent

Five point answer: Common descent, random variation and natural selection.

Talking about finches will not help you here. Mentioning adaptation doesn’t help much either. Adaptation is only a part of the model in that it is something that is to be explained. Adaptation is observed, and then explained using random variation and selection. In philosophical terms, adaptation is the explanans, variation and selection are the explanandum.


18. Why are special creation theories marginal science?

Because they do not make any testable predictions. Three points off if you say because there is no evidence for them. The real problem is that the theories are not developed enough that there can be evidence for them.

What's good for the goose...

Evangelical Haggard Claims He Was Molested By Republican Congressman

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO-Evangelical leader Ted Haggard, who stepped down last week after confessing that he purchased methamphetamines and...

And hey, The Onion now has a "blog this" feature!

Yipee!

Time is reporting that Rumsfeld will be prosecuted for war crimes in Germany.

Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Search string: "is habeas corpus a right"

Someone just got here from a yahoo search for the exact phrase "is habeas corpus a right." The answer is "You're damn right it is, motherfucker."

New Teaching Statement?

While trying to write an application letter for a job at this department, I wound up writing these four paragraphs.

I am committed to student-centered learning, informed by current teaching scholarship, and backed by innovative techniques. In designing my courses, my focus is on what would serve my students best, rather than the best way to approach a body of knowledge. The focus of my reasoning course is, thus, to help students be more rational; the focus of my ethics course is to help them be more ethical. The result in each case is an emphasis on virtue theory and real world situations, with a constant awareness that, as Samuel Johnson said, people “more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” I use for my ethics text James Liszka’s Moral Competence, which presents a theoretical outline of what it means to be a competent moral decision maker, including discussions of moral emotions, autonomy, virtues, wisdom, and moral knowledge. I then ask them to apply this framework in their own lives by engaging in service learning (or “community based learning” as the program is known here). I have students do volunteer work with the elderly and disabled, or at a local soup kitchen. During this process, almost all the issues involved in traditional theoretical ethics arise: questions about the meaning of autonomy or distributive justice, for instance. But they now come up in a context where students are reminded of their basic ethical knowledge (such as golden rule level maxims) and sound ethical habits (door-holding level altruism) in a way that reinforces these.

Something similar goes on in my reasoning class. The class uses a motley array of sources: Alec Fisher on arguments from authority, Edward Tufte on lying with quantitative graphics, along with standard textbook treatments of the informal fallacies. Mostly, though, the class is built around field projects, where students are required to go into the real world of the internet and news media, find real arguments, and analyze them using the tools they are given. I also strongly emphasize the epistemic virtues in the class. We begin by reading Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and watching 12 Angry Men. The students have responded very positively. One former pupil made “All St. Lawrence students should be required to take Dr. Loftis’s reasoning class” his thesis for a final project in a speech class.

All of this is backed by an engagement with teaching scholarship and innovative teaching techniques. As you can see from my CV, I regularly attend and present at the biennial conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. I already mentioned using service learning in my courses. I also use a variety of in-class exercises and games: small group work, free writes, the true-false surveys from Nils Rauhut’s Ultimate Questions, quescussion (the discussion that consists only of questions), fishbowl (the discussion where a small number of participants are in “the bowl” and others are on the outside and can tag in), and daily question card exercises. I also use travel: My course on Asian environmental attitudes next semester concludes with a two week long trip to China.

Your advertisement asks for technological experience; I am fluent with current teaching technology. I know the advantages and pitfalls of PowerPoint. I have worked with all three of the major courseware packages (WebCT, Blackboard, and Angel.) I grade papers using the comment feature in MS Word, but I am considering moving to Acrobat. I have had students keep blogs. So far this has not proven to be any improvement over the discussion forums in the standard courseware packages. However we are likely to ask students to keep videoblogs for the upcoming China trip, which should be extremely effective.

The letter has simply started to blossom into a teaching statement, and a teaching statement I like a lot better than my current one. In all honesty, my current teaching statement hasn't fully shaken off the ghosts of my St. John's education. As a result, it both comes off as fusty to most people and doesn't really reflect my current practice.

So now I've got these four paragraphs, which are really too many for the letter, but too few to be a teaching statement on their own. I should probably create a new teaching statement by folding some of the old content into this new framework, and then shorten the letter by simply referring in parts to the new teaching statement.

All this makes it hard to do what I actually should be doing, though, which is getting the damn stuff in the mail. Also, I'm not sure how much of my current teaching practice really isn't just a product of being at a rich institution now that can fund all sorts of cool stuff with trips and computers and community placement programs. Hrm.

Amnesty USA petition against torture

Here.

The Effect of Age, Gender, and Hotness on Student Perceptions of Teacher Quality.

Molly, in the comments my post where I publish my complete SLU course evaluations, notes that two of my female colleages have chili peppers on Ratemyprofessors.com, but so so teaching ratings. This needs to be put in some context, and should even be a springboard for an important discussion.

It is folk wisdom in the faculty lounges that there is a causal interaction between age and gender on student evaluations. Roughly, being young is a plus on your evaluations for men, but a minus for women. I hypothosize a futher age by gender by hotness interaction, such that being young and hot is an extra strong negative factor on student evaluations for women, and at worst a neutral factor for men. My proposed mechanism here is the same as the mechanism that is standardly used to explain the age by gender interaction: the problem of establishing authority. The folk wisdom of the faculty lounges says that young women have trouble estabilishing authority because of the prejudices of their students (both male and female.) I would extend this mechanism further to cover young hot women.

So here is my first question: Where can I find the actual data on this--either the claim of folk wisdom or my claim about hotness.

Another point of context for the chili pepers on ratemyprofessors: ratemyprofessors is not even a valid measure of student perceptions of your performance, let alone your actual performance, because of self-selection bias and incredibly small sample sizes. This is probably obvious to the professors on ratemyprofessors, but less obvious to the students.

This leads me to my second question: can anyone recommend a general resource for contextualizing the information on student evalautions? I am interested, first of all, in their validity simply as a measure of student perceptions. I am also interested in how to bridge the gap between reports of student perceptions and actual measures of quality.

Is there a lawyer in the house?

I'm trying to put one of the Guantanamo cases in perspective by considering a bunch of hypotheticals. Suppose for a second, that there is no war on terror and no war in Afghanistan. The existing conflict is over and something like the current Karzai government is in charge.

Case 1: A Canadian national kills an American national on Afghan soil. Where is the trial held?

Case 2: A Canadian national kills an American soldier on Afghan soil. The soldier is stationed lawfully in Afghanistan. Where is the trial held?

Case 3: Just like case 2, except we now remove the assumption that there is no war in Afghanistan. Instead assume there is combat, authorized by congress, but no declared war, and still no bullshit rhetoric about a war on terror. Where is the trial held?

Case 4: Just like case 3, except add that the Canadian national is believed to have been working with the enemies of the US in Afghanistan. Where is the trial? Is the Canadian now simply a prisoner of war, to be held until hostilities are over?

Links to Publications

This post is a table of contents for my online academic publications.

Means, Ends, and the Critique of Pure Superheroes in Watchmen and Philosophy ed. Mark D. White (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2009)

"What a Strange Little Man" in Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy ed. J. Eberl (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2008)

“The Theragāthā Model of the Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Environments” accepted, subject to revision, at Environmental Values. This version is a draft only, not for citation.

“The Other Value in the GMO Debate” In Ethical Issues in the Life Sciences, edited by F. Adams. (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, Forthcoming).

“Germ-Line Enhancement in Humans and Nonhumans” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal Special Issue on Justice and Genetic Enhancement 15:1 (March 2005).

“Three Problems for the Aesthetic Foundations of Environmental Ethics,” Philosophy and the Contemporary World 10:2 (Fall–Winter 2003).

My reviews at Metapsychology Online

Listen to Captain America.

This panel is taken from here. Apparently there is a tradition in Captain America comic books of having the real Captain America face off against a fake Captain America. In the comic this panel is from, the *real* CA announces that flags are nothing: only the values behind them count. Via pharyngula.

The satisfying "kerchunk" of democracy

Have you voted today? Molly and I voted this morning, and did you know? Here in the North Country we are still using the old fashioned mechanical lever machines. I know optical scan combines a paper trail with great accessibility, but I just love the satisfying "kerchunk" of democracy.