Spaghettification and the problem of scientific jargon
Can’t use jargon, because people don’t understand it. It sounds like advertising mumbo-jumbo, so they don’t trust you. But if you explain the jargon, it sounds like you’re trying to con them.
Short version: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Short, short version: we’re effed.
I think it means we have to attack the problem from another direction — raise the level of scientific literacy. (Or if you’re James T Kirk, rig the system)
Nothing like a little scandal to perk one up.
Just got an email pointing me toward a “travesty” that is occurring, and hoping to enlist my aid in the fight. Somebody named Art Robinson is screaming about his kids being a victim of political retribution. I felt obligated to look into it, and found a WorldNet Daily article (no, this is not starting out well), written by Art Robinson himself (continuing along the path of not going well). I’d heard of him before, in the context of being a global warming denier extraordinaire, but there’s more, unless you think all of his bad press is conspiracy.
He ran for congress and lost, and is now accusing Oregon State University of kicking his kids out of the nuclear engineering program as retribution for running. There’s really no corroborating evidence and other than denial of the allegations, the university can’t comment on the details because the students’ privacy is protected by law. But after reading
OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon
I wondered if the emailer realized that I went to grad school at OSU. I also can’t help but wonder why his kids would go there if it was such a horrible, nasty, smelly place.
More blips on my BS detector make me wonder how much of this is fabricated.
Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley’s husband, Steven Reese. Reese, an instructor in the department, has stated that he will use these things for his own professional gain.
Once you get past the smearing, what’s there? Any apparatus that is built by a graduate student belongs to the university, and would be controlled by the student’s advisor or the department. Of course they are going to use it for “professional gain,” i.e. further research. Grad school isn’t camp, where you make something in arts and crafts and take it home to give to the folks.
Lots more smearing and innuendo (it is also rumored that…) which may play to his audience but makes me tune out. If you have to lead off with ad hominem, I have to think you don’t have much in your hand.
Robinson also makes a point of revealing his kids’ GPAs (all around 3.9), but doesn’t mention that in grad school, any grade below a “B” is considered unacceptable. There is no curve, so a 3.9 GPA is not the indicator it is for undergraduates.
The department is now controlled by ideologues, most of whom do not have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering.
Slander and misleading; it’s the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, so you might expect some radiation health physics-realted faculty as well, and the mix depends on what the department does. They all have PhD’s, and the claim is actually false as 7 of the 13 have PhDs in Nuclear Engineering. The last time I checked, more than 50% counts as “most.”
Forgive me if I don’t step up to fight alongside Mr. Robinson.
Added: (It occurs to me that if this is all a fabrication, OSU does nothing, and Robinson gets to claim victory. All because there is innuendo and no evidence.)
How “CSI:NY” Most Definitely Didn’t Steal My Story
When I first saw this, I was relieved it was not the original CSI, for that would have implicated my friend Naren (who is no longer with the show; rumor has it he’s working on a reboot of the Wild, Wild West TV series. That’s TV series, not movie. It also buffers the realization that the show has jumped the shark, which has become blatantly obvious in recent weeks)
The comparison to the Cooks Source plagiarism, and the whole “web is public domain” fiasco of an attitude resonates with me at some level. I’ve seen my cartoons show up on websites stripped of their attribution, and declarations of “reproduced by permission” when no such permission was requested. I have only registered some of my cartoons with the copyright office, so I have no real legal recourse for unregistered works — I can’t show monetary damage for cartoons I’m not selling to anyone. (Registering the copyright allows you to sue for statutory damages. Were I being ripped off more than epsilon of the time, I would be more diligent about registering)
But this case turns out to be different. I don’t have nearly as much sympathy for the author as I did from the set-up of the article, and here’s why: the material that was used was a hoax. That is, it was originally presented as being the truth, not a work of fiction, by an online publication that prints news stories. OK, it’s a tabloid, so “news” is Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, but the point stands. If the hoax were obvious it wouldn’t be much of a hoax, and by the accounting, it was pretty successful at taking people in.
Facts, as the article points out, aren’t copyrightable — they’re in the public domain. It seems to me the author is complaining that people were duped by the hoax, but it raises the question of whether you could sell the story in the first place, if nobody would be taken in by it. I don’t know what the legal standing would be, but it seems like the author wants both of those conflicting circumstances to be true.