Fire, Stars and Dreams

(Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, and Walter Adams (l-r) in 1931 at the Mount Wilson Observatory 100" telescope, in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California. It was here in 1929 that Hubble discovered the cosmic expansion of the universe. photo: California Institute of Technology)

Tim Rutten has a thoughtful piece in today's Los Angeles Times about the Mount Wilson Observatory - it's part local history, often overlooked or diminished, part science lesson, part a larger meditation about what these fires mean.

An excerpt:

"On the other hand, if this "angry" Station fire has done nothing else, it has reminded us that we remain rather small and often helpless before the most basic of terrestrial elements -- fire, water, wind. Those huge pyrocumulus clouds looming over downtown L.A. on Monday were like monuments to a kind of heedlessness and vanity that flourishes with particular force in this city -- where a fantasy of control long ago took hold. How do you accept implacable nature of the sort that's been on display for the last week in a city where so many believe they can reinvent their lives, their looks and even their psyches?

The last time fire burned all the way through what's now the Angeles National Forest was in 1897, eight years before astronomer George Hale began work on the first phase of the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Dave Boucher, the L.A. County Fire Department's historian, and other local scholars of fire ecology believe that the Station blaze already has surpassed that conflagration in size.

Almost all of the largest fires in California history -- including the largest, the 273,246-acre Cedar fire in San Diego County six years ago -- have occurred in this century, products of urban sprawl, the thoughtless propagation of non-native plants, unwise fire suppression policies and, probably, global warming.

The dreams that propelled Hubble toward the world-altering discoveries he made atop Mt. Wilson may very well have had their origins in our ancestors' reveries beside their flickering fires. It's sobering to witness how easily it can become once again an element of dread."

To read the rest, click here.



"On a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena in 1931, Albert Einstein demonstrated his calculation of the density of the Milky Way. By using Mount Wilson's 100-inch telescope Edwin Hubble had recently shown that the universe is expanding." -from Science@Berkeley Lab:

VETS Center opens at Saddleback College

Bohrstein sent us this pic of Mt. Wilson last night

Recently, in the OC Reg:

New student center focuses on war vets (Niyaz Pirani)

MISSION VIEJO - Saddleback College students who are former members of the armed forces or on active duty and their families will now have a dedicated space to receive counseling, share experiences and receive academic and career help.

The VETS Center opened alongside the beginning of the fall semester last week and is meant to ease veterans into student life. The center will also provide referrals for on-campus and off-campus veterans' services.

"Our veterans have sacrificed so much for our country and it is only fitting to provide them with every resource they need to succeed as a Saddleback College student and beyond," said Tod A. Burnett, president of the college, in a release.

The center is located in the Student Services Center, room 207, and is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday. For more information, call 949-582-4252.

The troubling sentiment

I’ve been trying to locate the sappy patriotic video shown by Chancellor Raghu Mathur two weeks ago at his fall opening extravaganza. It presents a series of more-or-less patriotic images—including bald eagles and Americans experiencing hard times—and is accompanied by Lee Greenwood’s execrable “God Bless the USA,” a clumsy, bombastic anthem that seems to be “de Bomb” in Redneckville and environs.

I haven’t located the exact video.

I tried to remember the troublesome sentiment with which the video ends, and it appears that it is the following:

Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you—Jesus Christ and the American Soldier. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom.

That’s right. Jesus Christ. This inarticulate blather ("defining forces" that make "offers"?) is making the rounds among the usual suspects.

"Wildly unbalanced"

TONIGHT, I attended the August (but not august) meeting of the SOCCCD board of trustees.

Some faculty came to object to that seriously in-your-face Christian message stuck at the end of the Chancellor’s silly patriotic video for his Opening Session (nearly two weeks ago).

Jesus Christ, we were informed, died for our souls.

Some faculty said that that nakedly Christian message failed to respect the diversity of the community. (This was a highlight, not a lowlight.)

A few minutes later, Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur made a “brief statement.” “It was,” he said, “a diverse chancellor … who was not offended.”

Huh?

I think he was referring to Opening Session guest speaker Michael Drake, Chancellor of UC Irvine. Raghu was saying, I suppose, that Drake did not tell him (Raghu) that he was offended by anything.

Oh.

Fuentes gangster Chriss Street, our county's beclouded Treasurer and Tax Collector, showed up to speak. He had nothing new to say. He gave me a handout.

As you know, in my preview of the board meeting, I noted the odd distribution of “basic aid” bucks among the colleges, according to the Chancellor’s “basic aid priority list.” According to the Chancellor's reckoning, ATEP should get $5 million, Saddleback College should get $8 million, and IVC should get—$650,000.

Evidently, board President Don Wagner had a similar reaction. He found the list to be “wildly unbalanced.”


Essentially, the board decided to put off approval of the list to the next meeting.

Tom Fuentes carped, as usual, about the “high cost” of the study abroad trips, including a trip to Spain. One of ‘em cost $7K, and another cost $6K, I think.

We can send kids to learn Spanish “in our own hemisphere,” he said, harrumphing.

At some point, Fuentes suggested ominously that the college presidents had better come up with some snappy stuff to commemorate 9-11. The sides of his mouth drooped southward hideously, as he leered about the room.

Later, Tom grandly requested a report on the salaries of OC college professors, including a comparison with professor pay in our district. Again, his mouth became hideous. Luckily, there were no children in the room.

Mathur started nodding: “Yes, yes, we’ll have that for you in a month or two.” Heads nodded all around.

Toward the very end of the meeting, a certain faculty leader, apparently referring to this blog, condemned its writing as “inaccurate” and “inflammatory.”

She bemoaned the fact that the “First Amendment protects” such scribblers. “But it does,” she said.

More nodding from the seven elders.

She used to call me, making similar claims. I always assured her that I sought to avoid errors, that I am always glad to correct them. I have done so in the past.

I would ask her, “exactly what is it that we got wrong?”

To date, she has not answered that question.

I am baffled.

Some, it seems, do not see the value of our little publication. They find it neither funny nor enlightening, an ugly thing, unredeemed by any virtue.

What must they think of you, dear reader?

The faculty leader also went out of her way to remark on the three faculty who spoke about the "Jesus Christ" video. These speakers, she said, do not speak for the faculty. Only the academic senate, she said (and, I suppose, the union), speaks for faculty.

As I recall, the three speakers did not claim to speak for all faculty.

On the other hand, not so very long ago, our academic senates passed resolutions to the effect that trustees should cease these public prayers. (See Faculty, students want to ban prayer at college events. See also graphic below.)

Those resolutions expressed essentially the same perspective expressed by these three speakers.

Again, I am baffled.

On Top of Old Smoky

Mount Wilson Observatory boasts the longest recorded history of the sun of any observatory - dating from 1906, two years after its founding in 1904 by George Ellery Hale.

Click here to access the webcam on top of Mount Wilson (elevation: 5,700 feet) and see its unsettling view of the approaching fire.

There hasn't been a fire burn over Mt. Wilson for over a hundred years - today's fire threatens to do just that.

update: Mt. Wilson webcam comes and goes - be patient and try again.

The real problem with distance ed

In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed (Going For Distance), Steve Kolowich debunks some myths about online instruction. For instance, one might think that faculty—especially senior faculty—are really dragging their feet on this kind of “distance ed.” Not so, it seems.

But there is a problem with it, at least according to faculty. It is the lack of support for the extra work involved in using and developing this kind of instruction. That's the clear message of a new study involving over ten thousand faculty.

One of the commissioners involved in the study opined that “The leadership of universities has been trying to understand exactly how [online education] fits into their strategic plans, and what this [study] shows is that faculty are ahead of the institutions in these online goals.”

How so? Well, more than a third of faculty who participated in the study had developed and taught this kind of course, but, they say, they aren't getting adequate support.

I suspect that faculty at our two institutions (Saddleback College and Irvine Valley College) are behind the curve on this. In my experience, senior faculty (including me) have been especially wary of online distance ed. (That's just an impression.)

In truth, research seems to show that, at least for many areas of learning, online instruction works.

Well, whether it is a good thing or not, it is developing all around us. It's a tsunami. Sooner or later, we'll be on board. And it won't be easy:

Almost two-thirds of the faculty said it takes more effort to teach a course online than in a classroom, while 85 percent said more effort is required to develop one. While younger professors seem to have an easier time teaching online than older ones, more than half of respondents from the youngest faculty group agreed it was more time-consuming. Nearly 70 percent of all professors cited the extra effort necessary to develop Web courses as a crucial barrier to teaching online.
…
Given the extra work, more than 60 percent of faculty see inadequate compensation as a barrier to the further development of online courses. “If these rates of participation among faculty are going to continue to grow, institutions will have do a better job acknowledging the additional time and effort on the part of the faculty member,” said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and the survey’s lead researcher….

Yeah, when you teach online, you're pretty much on call all of the time. Sheesh.

I can just see the likes of trustee Tom Fuentes grinning over this.

“Let’s make the lazy bastards work for a living,” he’ll say.

And, who knows? Just maybe that hateful fellow will be our next board president.

Won't that be swell?

See also Challenging Microsoft With a New Technology (New York Times).

PART TWO: Has student writing ability declined over time? (YES.)

Two things.

First, when, yesterday, I posted about the increase in writing abilities of American students from 1998 to 2007, for some reason, in my haste, I read “1998” but thought, um, “1970.”

Don’t know why I did that. Getting old, I guess. D'oh!

Had I been aware that we were looking at this recent and puny 8-year span (from '98 to '07), I would not have declared, as I did, that the “Teeth Gnashers” were likely in error (in their view that student writing ability has seriously declined in recent decades).

Second, I briefly researched further and I’ve come across what would appear to be much more relevant data: it tracks student verbal performance from 1967 to 2006. Yes! (It might be the closest thing to definitive data that we are going to find.)

More on that in a minute.

That's the good news. The bad news is that those data tend to support the perspective of the Teeth Gnashers (and undermines the perspective of the "oldsters always be carpin' about youngsters, so forgetaboutit" perspective).

I came across a site called the “Humanities Resource Center Online,” which is “a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences” (AAAS). That brought me to their Humanities indicators (for charting trends). That, in turn, led me to their data for “primary and secondary education in the Humanities.”

I clicked on “Indicator I-2 Writing Proficiency.”

There, the AAAS states that

NAEP findings are mixed….
…
Twelfth grade performance slipped between 1998 and 2002, with the percentage of students scoring at the basic achievement level or better declining from 79% to the 75% figure mentioned above. In 2002, fewer than one in four soon-to-be high school graduates were assessed as writing at the proficient level or higher. Students scoring at the proficient level demonstrate a grasp of writing skills that are essential for success in most walks of life; these skills include the use of transitional elements and the ability to select language appropriate for the intended audience….

Again, those data concern the brief period between '98 and '02—hardly the basis for conclusions about long-term trends.

But something caught my eye: “Indicator I-5: Performance on SAT Verbal/Critical Reading & Writing Exams.” There, the AAAS states

Although controversy over the SAT [i.e., the "Scholastic Aptitude Test"] persists on a number of fronts, the verbal portion of the SAT (renamed “critical reading” in 2005) is a valuable measure of college-bound seniors’ linguistic skills because the test has been administered for several decades and thus permits comparison over a fairly extended period of time. The SAT data reveal a steep decline between 1967 and the early 1980s in mean verbal scores, followed by a leveling off, with mean scores ranging between approximately 500 and 510 ever since ….

That's right: 2006 "verbal" scores can be compared to 1967 scores. The SAT is an imperfect measure of verbal abilities, but I suspect that it has significant validity. (No doubt some disagree.)

The trend in verbal SAT scores ain't pretty. The AAAS folks present the chart below. Check it out. That's some serious decline, baby.*

Click on image to enlarge

So, I’m back to being a Teeth Gnasher. Bigtime.

*SAT math scores were the same in 2006 as they were in 1967, although these scores dipped precipitously in the 80s and then rebounded.