The Curmudgeon Speaks

I love coffee in the morning. Actually, I pretty much love coffee at any time of the day. I had a really great coffee maker. It was one of those complicated machines with a thermos rather than a glass carafe. Anybody who knows coffee knows you do not make coffee into a glass carafe that sits on top of a heating element. Do you want your coffee to taste like the boiled down Folgers they serve in gas stations?

I had to put my fancy coffee maker down. About once a month or so it would clog up in some way I could never figure out and deposite 8 or so cups of coffee and grounds on the kitchen floor. I would return to the kitchen after my shower and have to clean up a mess. Cindy does not like it when I yell an objects early in the morning and finally told me to throw it way. Evidently yelling at objects seldom results in a solution. I did throw the coffee maker away.

“I want a simple coffee maker”, I said. “Fancy coffee makers have too many things that can go wrong.”

So, she bought me a Black and Decker 12 cup programmable. Black and Decker – I thought they made drills and stuff. Anyway, I will ignore the progammable part. The programming is pretty much used to set the time your coffee maker should start working in the morning. Every good coffee drinker knows you do not grind your beans the night before and just let the poor grounds sit there awaiting their fate. It has a glass carafe. This is OK – I drink my cup and then leave for work (or to the campus bookstore where for $1 before 9 you can get a large cup of Caribou coffee).

I read the manual for my new coffee maker. I understand that reading the manual is not a very manly thing to do and it certainly is not the kind of behavior one would expect from a tech guy. However, I have a reasonable excuse. I was trying to find out what kind of filters I had to purchase for my Black and Decker. My fancy now disposed of coffee maker had one of those fancy gold baskets, but that machine will not be spoken of again. Anyway, I could not find the place where it explained what kind of filters I should buy. I decided on the size 4 malita (the grocery store did not carry the Black and Decker brand). We will have to wait until tomorrow morning to see if the filters work. I have already promised I will not raise my voice if I must purchase a different type of filter.

I did find something quite interesting while reading the manual. There is a section intended to help users solve common coffee brewing problems (I wonder if there was a section in the manual I did not read for my fancy coffee maker – not to be mentioned again).

Here is what I discovered from the manual.

Problem – Coffeemaker (is this really one word) does not turn on.

Possible cause – Coffeemaker is not plugged in.

Solution: Check to be sure appliance is plugged in to a working outlet and turn the on/off switch to “on”.

Problem: Coffeemaker brews clear water.

Possible cause: There may be no grounds in removable filter basket.

Solution: Add sufficient amount of coffee grounds to paper filter in basket.

There you have it – Making coffee for dummies.

I just realized this title is kind of ambiguous. Coffeemakers for dummies. bah…..

My workout alternatives now consist of Dr. Phil and Fox News. I save my energy for the stairmaster not wanting to spend my limited resources trying to generate the majority necessary to change the channel.

I cannot resist watching Fox.I think of it as similar to the fascination people must have with the Maury Povich Show (Maury, Maury – no disrespect intended). Anyway, the Fox pundits today speculated that the President was depressed and had given up hope.

The concept seems to be that the President is an intellectual and not prepared for the reality of the real world.

I just can’t get past the notion that being intelligent and a gifted communicator is a liability. Is that what people without talent want to believe? Historically, people used to believe that geniuses were on the verge of insanity (not true according to the intellectuals who study such things – but you are free to believe it if you must).

I am a Krugman fan and I agree with his recent assertion that the U.S. took actions in response to 9/11 that were politically motivated – we now know that linking 9/11 to Iraq, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction was a stretch at best and possibly out right, purposeful deception. I might have voted for Colin Powell for President at the time, but I can still see his presentation showing the diagrams of the semi trailers converted to serve as manufacturing facilities for the production of WMD – pretty much the end of his credibility.

Still couldn’t Krugman find ways to make the point without using phrases like “fake hero” and “marker of shame”. Is this the way to get attention? When did this “over the top” rhetoric begin and does everyone joining in advance any given cause? It seems so many are now focused on impressing their friends rather than persuading their adversaries.

Pundits are lining up on this topic in predictable ways. It would be interesting to cross reference complaints about the phrase “fake hero” with complaints about the phrase “ponzi scheme”.

A little history for the digital natives among us.

I heard on TWIT today that Byte was been revived. Gina Smith in describing Byte had to make sure that listeners knew the spelling.

So, here is a little question for you. At the time that Byte was on my magazine list I also received a magazine covering the Apple computer of the day. The name of the magazine might appear related in a pun kind of way to Byte. There was a kind of tech joke attached. The competition for Apple of that day made use of a 16 bit CPU (maybe 8088). The Apple used a 8 bit CPU (6502 if I remember). The name of the Apple mag, a half a byte, was ?????

I could not get anyone to come up with an answer on Google + .  Half a byte is a Nibble.

It is almost to easy to make fun of North Dakota and North Dakotans. I usually only resort to this low form of humor when I can think of nothing else. I feel, however, that this post had to be written. It was forced upon me.

From time to time I play with the app Hunch which is supposed to be a place-based recommendation engine. You make recommendations and you receive recommendations. It has categories like – coffee shop, places to eat, etc. and I tend to agree with the recommendations. I must say I have never remembered to try it when I am out of town.

Anyway, yesterday, I noticed that it had a category for “things to do”. I gave it a try and the response from the service is what made me write this post. Evidently, what the college students say is true. There is officially nothing to do in Grand Forks, ND.

There was kind of an interesting news phenomena to watch yesterday (it may have started a little earlier). National data were released providing the ACT test score means by state. It was reported that North Dakota scores were falling (at an average of 20.7) and were below Minnesota and South Dakota. The national ACT average is 21.1. These are the statistics.

I always tell my students that to interpret research you consider the statistics in combination with the methodology.

Here is the rest of the story or here is the methodology. North Dakota pays for students to take the ACT and expects eligible students to take the exam. I saw a report from Illinois that 10 states have such a requirement (or at least there are 1o states in which greater than 90% take the exam). Illinois evidently had the top average (20.9) among this group. As a comparison, 70% of eligible students in Minnesota took the ACT.

I watched the online posted stories change across the day. Later in the day the news sources were including the data concerning the percentages of students who took the exam. Evidently, the methodology was being explained to the news outlets.

There are always multiple possible interpretations possible when selection differences exists. Consider this as a possibility –  if you included the scores from many students not intending to go to college who also were forced to take this exam in which they have no real stake wouldn’t you kind of expect the group average to be lower.

There is a second version of this story one sometimes hears. ND has SAT scores that are far above the national average. For example, in 2010 the national average math score was 516, North Dakota students scored an average of 594. Of course, only 265 ND students took the exam and these students were likely interested in out of state schools which required the SAT.

Class dismissed.

The Princeton Review has come out with its annual lists of top colleges and UND again appears in the #1 position on one of the lists. The lists rank colleges according to various characteristics and UND tops the list for lowest time spent studying.

This recognition first came to my attention when UND achieved this rank last year and I checked yesterday to just to see if this was some type of fluke. Turns out I was out of town when the news broke locally ( I do see the university responded to this ranking in the GF Herald. ). Sure enough #1 again – a two-peat.

Just so we are clear, this review covers “the nations best colleges” and the University of Iowa and Florida State University appear a little further down the list of institutions with students who claim to study less.  This “honor” must be interpreted in this context.

As a UND faculty member, I started to think about whether I would be more bothered by my institution appearing at the top of the partying or lack of studying lists. I decided I would be more concerned with the lack of studying recognition. Perhaps I subscribe to the work hard, play hard philosophy.

Some of the other data are interesting. The reported average GPA at UND is 3.38. The Curmudgeon in me notes that the notion of a “gentleman’s C” must long have vanished. Perhaps now the default grade for showing up and giving it a try must be a B. However, again, it is important to keep things in context – the GPA listed for Florida State is 3.76. How are such “average” levels of performance even possible.

I really do not know what to make of this. Perhaps it is a kind of adolescent “too cool for school” thing – don’t act like you are really trying or really care. Perhaps it is a function of the sample of individuals willing to respond.

I do think there are serious matters here that should be considered (the previous comments were not really intended to be serious). Academically Adrift was one of the books I read this summer (my public Kindle notes and highlights). This book finds fault with higher education in general feeling that the system often does little to advance higher order thinking skills in students. Again, note that I am being careful with my words. Increasing subject area knowledge and developing higher order thinking skills can be different things. Both faculty and students (and perhaps others) are at fault – students study far too little and faculty are not motivated to do much to change this (my short version). Students understand college to be about socializing and obtaining a credential – a competitive system based on achievement is resisted. The average effort level of students per week is 12 hours. So, to be #1, one might assume many UND students study significant less than this total.

UND has been highly interested in the assessment of various skills of late. The focus is on demonstrating student change rather than establishing enabling conditions students must meet. On the surface this sounds great (demonstrating change), but doing this in a way that is valid with sophisticated cognitive skills is extremely difficult. Perhaps more accurately, it is easy to do this poorly, but very difficult to do at the level that would meet conditions that would be satisfactory to the research community. I have begun to think that the position of expecting each instructor to demonstrate actual change in student advanced cognitive capabilities rather than assuring that certain conditions of instruction have been met is simply the wrong approach. Perhaps we should allow the researchers with the resources to establish quality dependent measures (valid instruments of a given skill) and use these measures with large numbers of instructors and institutions to investigate factors associated with change do their thing. Individual faculty members and most institutions cannot function at this level. We might then use this type of quality assessment work to establish factors that appear to matter. Let the research community squabble over whether such research has really established something of value. Finally, we might encourage others to implement the factors that seem to make a difference.

Despite what  you might think, concrete recommendations do appear. Academically Adrift identified several course characteristics that seemed associated with improvement in higher level skills – reading assignments that averaged 40 pages per week and a writing task resulting in a product of 25 pages or more. Both characteristics in the same course generated even more positive consequences.

I admit that neither of my courses meet these requirements. I beg off the writing standard because, if done well, evaluating 200 and 75, 25 page papers would be an immense task. Failure to meet the reading expectation cannot be justified by my capacity to put in the necessary time. However, I can tell you that expecting students in service courses to read “600” pages results in a very negative reaction from students. Most instructors back off and this is probably the type of complicity on the part of faculty members that the authors of Academically Adrift are describing. As more and more courses reduce the level of commitment that is required, the pressure on the hold outs increases.

Look at it from the perspective of what the Princeton Review seems to describe as the typical UND student –  if you have four or so such courses and have decided you have about 10 hours a week to spend, you might decide you are being abused.

I am looking for some support here. My wife contends I am a poor model for those learning about technology because I am easily frustrated when I can’t get things to work. While she may be describing my behavior correctly, I think there are circumstances in which I have a right to be frustrated.

So, I have finally figured out the source of my frustration. I have a two fold problem. First, I believe what it says. Second, I tend to try to fix things that don’t work. Sometimes I do this before I understand the nature of the problem and this does make things worse. Sometimes this is not my fault (see problem # 1).

Check the two images at the top of this post. The first is the signin for Apple’s MobileMe site and the second is Apple’s signin for the iTunes site. You see in both images where it says sign in with your Apple ID. Wouldn’t you think that your Apple ID was your Apple ID as in there was one of these things? Not so – it turns out the IDs can be different. How was I suppose to know? I kept changing my ID and password, but one or the other of these accounts would not work. It seems I can change the ID and password for iTunes, but only the password for mobileme. Now I realize I must simply treat these accounts as if they were provided by two different companies and enter a different Apple ID for each. I have given up on things being logical.

I rest my case.

I had surgery yesterday morning to repair a hernia I have had for about ten years. It ended up being an easy procedure and I am functioning pretty well today – no heavy lifting. I opened my Gmail account this morning to do some work and happened to glance at the ads. Evidently if I am willing to fly to California I can take advantage of the services of a hernia specialist. No need, I had a great surgeon.

I have been trying to figure out how Google would know to feed me an ad for an online hernia site. I wrote a short email to my brother telling him the surgery went well. I might have used the word once in that email. Of all the words I have written, how would a system know to select this word to post an ad? Isn’t that kind of spooky?