Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Haven’t had much science blogging in a while, so I bring you this:  Argentine ants control large territories on 6 continents and have a peace treaty amongst themselves, ensuring their global dominance without a descent into civil war.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

I think we all need to watch a video of Panda the Miniature Assistance-Horse:

Sunday’s text is from Karen Pryor:

I have heard professors of behavioral science, who should revere positive reinforcement, boasting about how tough they make life for their graduate students. As if that would help them learn better. Oh, come on folks! I have watched the highest officials in my government bickering about different forms and degrees of torture, still relying on the primitive tools of fear, dominance, and injury without any recognition of what any dolphin trainer knows: that aversives stop behavior, they don’t start it; and that fear and pain produce completely unpredictable and usually highly undesirable side effects, including being both exciting and reinforcing to the punisher.

From Reaching the Animal Mind. Bolded text added for Ultimater-UO-validation purposes.

By Thoreau

Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and now infomercial pitchman Billy Mays.

Somewhere right now, the Sham Wow guy is looking at the job openings with a grin on his face.

By Thoreau

The university is likely to give us all a “furlough”, in which our work is allegedly cut by 10% and so our pay is cut commensurately. There are logistical issues here (eliminating 10% of class sessions poses an obvious problem for accreditation), so they’re searching for some way to decrease our workload. They know most people will still want to do a good job on teaching, so we probably won’t reduce the amount of prep we put into our classes, even if they order us to. (Although I will note that my best teaching evaluations ever were in a class where lectures got written about an hour before class, I got into this vibe where it just kind of worked.) Research doesn’t fit into nice little time increments. Nobody mentions committee work, either because it’s just a given that we’ll blow it off, or it’s just a given that we’ll have to continue producing thick stacks of dead trees to feed the beast.

Department chairs are still faculty, despite having administrative duties, so some of them are actually sincere about wanting to reduce workload. Not so much out of a humane consideration for my well-being, but rather to find a way to demonstrate consequences. If we do the same work for 10% less money on an allegedly “temporary” basis, guess what they’ll decide to do? Exactly.

I understand all of these tactical considerations. I get that it is not in our long-term interests to simply suck it up and do just as much with less. But in the long-term we’re all deadwood with no recent publications. In the short term, I have bills to pay. I can’t slow down, I can’t hold back, even though I wish I could. There ain’t no rest for the untenured. An untenured person cannot afford to put less effort into teaching and get bad evaluations. An untenured person cannot afford to not publish; indeed, with the word “layoff” floating around I need to publish ASAP so I can get a job somewhere else. And while committee work is not the main criterion for tenure, being on a college or university committee is a way to develop working relationships with administrators, members of the college and university tenure committees, etc. When merit fails, there’s always political gamesmanship!

So, bottom line: I am unmutual. If you cut my pay and mutter something about “possible layoffs” I will work twice as hard as before. In fact, I might even take a financial risk and go to more conferences on my own dime to present my work. However, there’s a good chance that in a few years I’ll be working somewhere else, in part because I bit the bullet and went to all those conferences and did the networking game. Yes, this is an incredibly tight job market, but there’s always somebody somewhere hiring for something, and if I bust my ass I might just be the one that they hire. I’m doing awesome optics research so somebody at another school, somebody willing to pay me a decent salary, can bask in the reflected, refracted, and diffracted glory.

EDIT:

I want to emphasize that I actually like my school.  I like my colleagues, I like my students, and I like the things I’m doing.  I would be happy to make a career there.  I’m not one of those prima dona academics who is always threatening to bolt.  When I do something cool, my first thought is not “Now somebody else will hire me!” but rather “Now we can build on this and do something awesome here!”  Leaving would be painful for me.  However, I do have a few non-negotiable demands, primary among them a steady paycheck that covers the rent.  It’s looking like I won’t be able to rely on the school to continue to provide that.  So, I must look elsewhere.

I think what Tyler Cowen implies is correct. To get meaningful cost control and expanded coverage and high-quality care means expanding the pool of people allowed to perform medical services (and get paid for them). Some of this already happens – our kids’ pediatric practice employs a nurse-practitioner who meets appointments – but we’ll need a lot more of it. Drastically expanding the primary-care provider pool doesn’t entail complete deregulation, allowing everyone who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night to hang out a shingle. But it does mean making fuller use of people in the existing system whose skills are probably under-utilized – nurses; paramedics; pharmacists.

One model might be eye care. I see an optometrist every year about my glasses prescription, but he (by regulation) gives me tests to see if I also need to see an opthalmologist (M.D.), MDs are overkill for a lot of everyday health problems, but every important for serious ones.

UPDATE: The above is call to, in practical terms, raise the status of a less powerful class of health-care providers (nurses, paramedics and the like) at the expense of a more powerful class (physicians). It clashes with the Democratic-Party establishment’s default concern to satisfy existing power centers (insurance companies, doctors’ organizations, drug companies) while somehow increasing the public good. The Democratic-Party establishment’s apparently greater mind can see past the seeming impossibility of this to the sunlit upland where all circles are squared.

Wall Street Journal reporting backs up my anecdotal impression: the Great Recession seems to be intervening decisively against brick-and-mortar retail in its long, rearguard struggle against internet marketing. I am old enough and set enough in my ways that my first impulse, faced with a need to purchase something, is to go to a store or two and see it, and buy it if I like it and the price is reasonable. The problem is, these days stores don’t have anything in them. I go to Best Buy for a simple pair of clip-on headphones, only to find half the pegs on the headphone display empty. Borders is just depressing any more. I couldn’t find pancake rings at freaking Williams-Sonoma. (I did find a nice set at The Old General Store in Donegal, mind you, along with the most eclectic collection of candy I’ve ever seen. But that’s a bit of a drive from the DC suburbs.) The odds of finding anything in a brick-and-mortar retailer have become so poor that internet shopping starts to win by default.

Via joe in comments, a modicum of good news from the Obama administration. The US government will “phase out funding” for opium-poppy eradication in Afghanistan. Part of the replacement strategy will involve funding crop-substitution efforts, and Richard Holbrooke promised to increase funding for crop-substitution programs by an order of magnitude, from 10s of millions to hundreds of millions.

Holbrooke also promised, alas, to step up “interdiction efforts” and raids on heroin production facilities. That means heavy-handed US military efforts in a foreign country with no national-defense rationale that passes the smell test, and excellent conditions for fostering continued corruption in Afghanistan’s security forces. It’s not like the Obama administration thought up a cruel and unworkable drug-war paradigm on its own, but it’s one of many issues – civil liberties; military spending; health care – where I wish the current White House were in thrall to their progressive base in reality, and not just in the fevered imaginings of conservatives.

Meanwhile, the poppy move counts as better than nothing.

By Mona

By Thoreau

1)  Obama is going down a very wrong path on civil liberties:  He’ll give suspects a trial, but only if he thinks he can get a conviction.  Haven’t had some good Obama-bashing over civil liberties for a while.

2)  Comic book writer detained by brave defenders of the rodina because he had a draft story describing government abuses in the name of fighting terror.  Comics + TSA Hate = Doubleplus UO!

3)  Chad Orzel laments pitiful high school math requirements, and links to classic post on how it’s somehow OK to not know math and science but it isn’t OK to not know history, literature, philosophy, art, etc.  Fiziks, education, it’s all there.

4)  I’m thinking of grilling some cruelty-free chicken on July 4 and serving it with grilled organic eggplant, asparagus, and pepppers.  I need some marinade ideas for the chicken.

By Thoreau

Yesterday’s tragic loss of a great musician was a preventable tragedy.  It’s being reported that Michael Jackson was addicted to oxycontin.  If drug abuse were illegal, there is simply no way that he would have been able to abuse drugs.  And if, somehow he had managed to flout drug laws, he could have been locked into a cage and surrounded by criminals and government employees.  It’s simply inconceivable that he could have obtained contraband in an environment like that.

If you want to save lives, there’s only one thing to do:  Simply pass a law forbidding people to abuse drugs, and then enforce it as stringently as possible.