Tag: education

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Of principles and $$$…

So yeah, I got to thinking today… I use Linux and various other open-source programs instead of Windows for a variety of reasons, but one of those is that the information contained within is freely available to anyone who wants it. What does that mean? Well, it means that if you download the “source code” of the Linux kernel and other “open-source” programs, you can edit it and tweak it to your heart’s content. If you decide you don’t like the way a certain function of the program works, you can (assuming you know some programming…) change it to fit your purpose. The reason why this is cool is that it allows knowledge to travel freely between different groups; what one person starts with a program can be learned from and transferred to another application, allowing for the programming itself to improve over time.

Now, switch gears into science. My plan has been to get my Ph.D. and then work in industry for awhile, making some cash, and then maybe switch back into academia and teach for a few years to alleviate boredom around retirement time. The correlation is that academia is like “open-source,” where information is published and freely available for other scientists to learn from and take a step further, while industry is like “closed-source” where you work toward patents that can allow you to make money and prevent y our opponents from coming up with a solution to a given problem that’s better than yours.

So, the question remains: am I hypocritical in using open-source software, believing in what it stands for, and then getting a job and making a career in industry where I will work in a “closed-source” environment? I mean, I have relatively expensive hobbies (computers/electronics, etc.) and I’d like to be able to finance them, and to do so, I need a job in industry so I can afford that 1969 Shelby Mustang…but is it right to compromise principles in doing so?

I dunno…I guess there’s no simple answer to the question…but I’ve got 5 years to figure it out…

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Good vs Evil

You know, I tend to try avoiding preaching when I post on here…as in, trying to talk about Christianity as a religion in any way, shape or form…yet, the subject does enter into my opinions on things like teaching Intelligent Design in our public (non-Christian) schools. Therefore, let me digress from “the norm” a bit…and in light of that, let me quickly propose my definition of a “good Christian:”

One who believes not only that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that He gave His life for us, but also that this person lives their life as an example of what God envisions for His people.

If you have an addendum to that statement, please post a comment. Personally, I think it’s the latter part of that definition that gives people some contention, since many of us tend to disagree as to what “God envisions for His people.”

I, therefore, wish to put forth a statement from someone I consider to be a “bad Christian:”

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover (Pennsylvania): if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”

This statement is not an example of what a “good Christian” would say, for obvious reasons. A good Christian does not wish ill will upon others. As the Bible dictates, Jesus was all about living his life and being an example of what we should be doing, even though that may be difficult. At no point in my recollection of the Bible (and I could be wrong…and I’ll correct this if proved otherwise…) does Jesus ever wish God’s wrath upon anyone. Note: the statement written above does not explicitly express “ill-will,” but I think it’s implied…again, perhaps I’m wrong on that…

Pat Robertson, you are indeed a terrible Christian and a very bad example of what Christians are taught and seeking to accomplish. You are, however, doing an incredible job of putting lies in the heads of non-Christians who now, due to your innate stupidity, have no good reason to change their minds about the religion. Good job, you worthless, lying, bastard.

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Links and more…

The Kansas Board of Education has, again, voted in favor of Intelligent Design instead of Evolution in high school classrooms. Two-page article…don’t forget to click “next” at the bottom… A few good quotes from that article:

?This is a sad day. We?re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that.??? said board member Janet Waugh, a Kansas City Democrat.

…and…

In 1999, the board eliminated most references to evolution. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said that was akin to teaching ?American history without Lincoln.??? Bill Nye, the ?Science Guy??? of children?s television, called it ?harebrained??? and ?nutty.??? And a Washington Post columnist imagined God saying to the Kansas board members: ?Man, I gave you a brain. Use it, OK????

Also, Jerry shot me this e-mail with a note passed on by Dr. Lockhart at Truman, a Biology professor, essentially outlining “not-so-intelligent design” in humans…kinda amusing, really… Things like high blood pressure, colon cancer, etc…if we were so well designed, wouldn’t we have better defenses against such things? Who knows…not I…

Apparently, the Dover, Pa. school board members that were up for re-election have all been booted…and there were 8 of them… This is where the infamous Scope’s Monkey Trial took place many a year ago, and the site of a new trial where the board was trying to force ID on high school students…w00t!

And finally, there’s an essay in TIME Magazine this week written by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist that discusses his opinion on the issue…and I whole-heartedly agree… It tells us how ID does nothing really to forward scientific thinking and really hampers it by placing all of current knowledge in a box (with everything outside this box being in “God’s realm”).

You all know my opinion(s) on the matter, so I won’t rehash them… Actually, that last link is probably the best descriptor of my views on the subject that I’ve read yet, so if anything, check that one out… And if you go to school in Kansas, my apologies…start voting so that you don’t remain the laughing stock of the world, yo…

More on this later, I’m sure…this issue isn’t going away anytime soon…

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Oh, Kansas…

Excerpt from the November 2005 issue of Popular Science, where they reported their annual “Worst Jobs in Science” article:

#3. Kansas Biology Teacher
On the front lines of science’s devolution.

“The evolution debate is consuming almost everything we do,” says Brad Williamson, a 30-year science veteran at suburban Olathe East High School and a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers. “It’s politicized the classroom. Parents will say their child can’t be in class during any discussion of evolution, and students will say things like ‘My grandfather wasn’t a monkey!'”

First, a history lesson. In 1999 a group of religious fundamentalists won election to the Kansas State Board of Education and tried to introduce creationism into the state’s classrooms. They wanted to delete references to radiocarbon dating, continental drift and the fossil record from the education standards. In 2001 more-temperate forces prevailed in elections, but the anti-evolutionists garnered a 6-4 majority again last November. This year Intelligent Design (ID) theory is their anti-evolution tool of choice.

At the heart of ID is the idea that certain elements of the natural world?the human eye, say?are “irreducibly complex” and have not and cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Therefore, IDers say, they must be the work of an intelligent designer (that is, God).

The problem for teachers is that ID can’t be tested using the scientific method, the system of making, testing and retesting hypotheses that is the bedrock of science. That’s because underpinning ID is religious belief. In science class, Williamson says, “students have to trust that I’m just dealing with science.”

Alas, for Kansas’s educational reputation, the damage may be done. “We’ve heard anecdotally that our students are getting much more scrutiny at places like medical schools. I get calls from teachers in other states who say things like ‘You rubes!'” Williamson says. “But this is happening across the country. It’s not just Kansas anymore.”

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…oh, Pastafarianism…

So, Dr. Zassenhaus is teaching right now in my lecture class about basic Mendelian genetics. He told us earlier this week that he was making a presentation today in reference to Intelligent Design and Evolution, so I’ve been looking forward to this all week because I haven’t heard much discussion amongst Ph.D. scientists that I know and the sources I’ve read through discussing the subject rarely consult pure molecular biologists and biochemists…and I came away from the presentation with a few interesting points…

First of all, Zassenhaus began the discussion talking about the Kreb’s Cycle. For those who don’t remember, this is a pathway in mitochondria (an organelle in our cells) that converts relatively simple carbon chains into other forms, generating ATP, which is the “currency” that creates energy in our bodies. Since it is a cycle, the products begin in one state, are converted to another state, and are then returned to their original state to start the cycle once again. One of the classic Intelligent Design arguments is that this process is not reducible; one cannot remove a part of this cycle and still have it function, leading them to suppose that an intelligent creator must have created this pathway. The process couldn’t have simply “appeared” on its own, already functioning.

The problem with this assumption, as Zassenhaus further enumerated, is in the fundamental argument for Intelligent Design: that life is too complex to have just happened. The argument, as he states, is the classic “Watchmaker Analogy,” such that if you are walking in a field and see a watch, you know that it didn’t simply appear, but that someone had to make it. The problem is that all of Intelligent Design arguments stem from that one analogy. There is no evidence besides it. The one scientific study he could find that tried finding true evidence was carried out by a mathmetician (Dembski) who said that the chances of such a thing appearing is something like 10^-170 (that’s one time in 1,000,000[continue to 169 “0”s…]), which is unbelievably small…bordering on impossible…

As Zassenhaus concluded, these probabilities outline a huge flaw in the thinking: where Intelligent Design advocates believe such a pathway just sprung into existence, and was created by someone else, biologists for years have viewed the formation of proteins/enzymes/etc. differently, as individual subunits that are added on and removed to provide a different function that wasn’t there originally. Therefore, those statistics don’t apply to the way we know biology to work. Sure, it says that such a thing as the Kreb’s Cycle appearing out of a soup of random amino acids is really small…but the chances of a different protein forming out of that soup is very possible, and then that protein adding on other parts of different proteins is also possible…slowly adding together to form the pathway we know as the Kreb’s Cycle.

In short (’cause I wasn’t, overall…), the moral is: Intelligent Design advocates have yet to produce true, testable, scientific evidence beyond the flawed probability studies. Is Intelligent Design still possible? Of course it is! But, as Zassenhaus said, teaching it alongside Evolution on equal footing as a viable scientific theory is, quite simply, nuts. In that room of 20+ Ph.Ds., there were none that defended Intelligent Design in the way it has been portrayed as a science. They all believe it should be relegated to a philosophy class, not the science classroom. Unfortunately, the “powers that be” refuse to listen to the scientific community on what should be taught and what shouldn’t be.

Figures…

So, in that vein, can anyone give me evidence to the contrary that isn’t based on “evidence by analogy?” I know that Andy S. already gave me information on another theory…hehehehe…

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Well played…

step up on soap box

From an article at ABC News regarding the most recent “Intelligent Design” trials in Dover, TN (which you all should be paying attention to…since the U.S. Constitution itself is being undermined and trivialized…), the following was quoted. “Miller” refers to Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University; “the statement” refers to a reading that the faculty at Dover’s public schools have to read prior to discussions on evolution in science classes, also offering an “alternative” textbook that was referred to by me in a previous posting…:

The statement read to Dover students states in part, “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered.” Miller said the words are “tremendously damaging,” falsely undermining the scientific status of evolution.

“What that tells students is that science can’t be relied upon and certainly is not the kind of profession you want to go into,” he said. “There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory,” he added. On the other hand, Miller said, “intelligent design is not a testable theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific community.”

During his cross-examination of Miller, Robert Muise, another attorney for the law center, repeatedly asked whether he questioned the completeness of Darwin’s theory.

“Would you agree that Darwin’s theory is not the absolute truth?” Muise said.

“We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth,” Miller responded.

Well played, Miller…well played… Indeed, the beauty of science is that things can be proven and disproven, including Newton’s Laws (and in some instances, they’ve been proven wrong…quantum physics, for example…). Intelligent design advocates, however, are unwilling to allow for proof/disproof (because what they advocate cannot be proven or disproven). Therefore, by definition, what they advocate is not science at all and has no place within the science classroom (except for mention that theories alternative to evolution exist…I have no problem with that…it’s just treating theories other than evolution as “just as plausible”…’cause there aren’t any…).

…I just love how the Constitution is being tossed around like it’s nothing by folks…it was written for a reason, protecting civil liberties and separating church and state. It was done for a reason. That’s the way it should stay, or we may as well rename our country as “Saddam’s Iraq: where you have to believe what I tell you or I kill you.”

step down from soap box

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Of exams and triumph…

So, I took my first exam today…and it wasn’t terribly difficult, but the section I was most worried about was Dr. Shilati’s… It was a 10 point question (out of 80…so relatively hefty…) asking you to describe the process whereby you would assay a protein for a given function, how you would purify it, and how you would observe if it works in vivo (i.e. in a living organism). So I wrote out my answer (took 1.5 pages…) and wasn’t terribly confident, mainly on the last part of that question… After talking to other students in the class, all of us were worried about that whole question…which means that, theoretically, the curve will work out fine with all of us in the same spot… The rest of the test was generally alright…I dropped the ball on one 4 pt question, but was confident on the remainder of the exam…

…well…then I was walking back to the lab from getting a soda and Dr. Shilati stops me in the hall…and says “good job on my section of the test”…

…score one for Dr. Andy Linsenbardt, Ph.D… 😀

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It all comes down to this…

So Thursday is my first exam in BBS 501, which is our basic biomedical sciences course that all 1st year graduate students take in their first semester… Thus far, it’s really just been a review of biochem class from Truman State… The thing I’m slightly worried about is the amount of material being covered. I’ve been through 16 lecture periods at 1 hr each…which translates to over 5 weeks of MWF classes at Truman… So yeah, when you think of it that way, 5 weeks of material in any science class is a decent amount…but at least it has been mostly review…

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve described how grading is done here. It’s all graded on a curve (such that, typically, a 70% is considered a “B”…) and you’re graded with your peers from previous years, so they’ve been keeping records of how students have done over the past 7 years of the program. Therefore, if the average of all those students (~50 – 60 people) on this test was an 80% being an “A”, then that’s what this will be… So yeah, it matters how well we as a class do…but it also matters in reference to previous years, not just ourselves… I’m not sure whether to take this as a good thing or not…probably, I guess… We do get 3 hours to complete the exam, so that’s somewhat comforting.

Also, we aren’t taught by one professor. We have a rotating group that teaches each section. This time, we had 4 different professors. Each professor gets 5 points-worth of questions per lecture period so, for example, Dr. Shilatifard taught us for 2 lectures…meaning he can only write 10 pts for the exam. So if I really didn’t understand his stuff, then it’ll account for 10 points out of the 80 possible… At least I know generally how many points each day is worth going into the exam…it’s a little easier to pick out the key points of each day this way…I guess… We were also encouraged by our advisor to seek out old exams so that we know how each professor words their questions…and, supposedly, these questions don’t change much from year to year…

Therefore, this week has got me studying for my first exam of graduate school. It’s especially difficult to study knowing that a). I get a full day off on Wednesday to study for the Thursday exam, b). it’s all been review material thus far and c). lots of shows are premiering this week, so I want to watch TV instead… 😛

I’m not sure whether to be worried, though. There are a few things going for us and a few things going against us… I guess, in the end, it all comes down to how much effort I put in over the next few days…

…and how many beers I have… 😀

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Of Paltering and People

So, a “palter” is a lie, for the record… Secondly, I refer to a book that is being pushed in Kansas and other states/communities that masquerades as a science “textbook” known as Of Pandas and People.

I only bring this up because I’ve been watching “The Daily Show” this week while they’ve been doing their “Evolution shmevolution” series, looking at the “evidence” for or against evolution, intelligent design, etc. Overall, there’s been something of a liberal bias (…not unexpected…), visiting sites like Dover, TN (the side of the Scope’s Monkey Trial) and talking to the conservatives there (they’re like those crazy townies that live in the trailer park on the other side of town…freaky, yo…).

Anyway, last night, Lewis Black brought up this book…and actually showed it to the audience. He showed the cover…and then slid it around to its side… The stupid thing is only 170 pages long!!! How much “science” can you learn anything from a book like that? There are some classes in college where you read that much in a night! I also found this website (web hosted by the Kansas Citizens for Science) by a professor at Brown University and he points out some serious flaws, places in this book that the author (Percival Davis) refuses to acknowledge (like extinction…something we know to be fact, but it isn’t mentioned in the book). An excerpt:

“When I first opened the pages of Pandas and read the fine words presented by its authors in the name of free and open inquiry, I expected a text that might genuinely challenge students to examine the assumptions of what they had learned and evaluate scientific theory in an objective manner. To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly. What I found instead was a document that contrived not to teach, but to mislead. The many errors and misrepresentations that inhabit the pages in Of Pandas and People will, quite honestly, serve to hinder teachers as they attempt to cover the stunning range and diversity of contemporary biology.”

So yeah, let me line this out… Scientists and most teachers don’t agree with the book. The politicians are pushing it on teachers. Can’t we trust the teachers and scientists to know what to teach in their classes? Do we want politicians coming into our classrooms and teaching? Do they even have a right to dictate what teachers are supposed to teach their students? It’s bad enough that teachers are having to teach their classes based on standardized tests and can’t teach what’s really important…

…important like…oh…I don’t know…real scientific studies and evidence rather than dogma? 😛

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This is it…

Yeah, very shortly, I will be attending classes at Saint Louis University, “officially” making me feel like a graduate student (the summer thus far hasn’t been much besides a “job,” of sorts…now I actually have to study and such…). This is both exciting and rather scary, the former due to the fact that I get to finally delve in to my chosen profession…the latter because…well…it’s graduate school… Likely this will be my largest challenge to date. The really odd parts follow:

    — I am going to school at a new place with new people and new professors.
    — I am at the bottom of the food chain again, much like I was five years ago at Truman.
    — I don’t have as many friends/bar buddies in this town, so I won’t be as socially active as in recent years.
    — Along with that, I’m married now, so my roommate won’t be able to help me in my classes as in recent years…on the other hand, it’s easier now that I don’t have to make time to go to my girlfriend’s place to hang out with her once and awhile…she’s conveniently at my place all the time now… 😛
    — I no longer have “responsibilities,” such as attending AXE meetings, Wesley House functions, or working for ITS. It’s school and home. That’s it.
    — I have to drive to class every morning. Snow or not. And fight for parking.

So yeah, completely new shenanigans to deal with. Really, I’m the same old person in a completely new environment…making me wonder how I’ll deal with the situation. Will I study as much as I should? Will I make it to class on time? Or at all? Will I be able to manage money better now that I’m married and on my own? Will my personality remain the same, or should I expect another paradigm shift as what occurred in college? …or will I wake up tomorrow and still be in my bed at the old apartment in Kirksville?

…as Spock once said: “Life…is not a dream.” And as he also said, in a different movie, I “will perform as according to one’s gifts.” Hopefully I’m as prepared as I can be for the flames I am to be thrust in to….’cause it’s going to be close to five years that I’m roasting in them…

“Sounds like fun.” (…that was Kirk, this time…)