Why American universities excel at research

I was on an airplane in India a few years ago and got to talking to the fellow in the seat next to mine. When he heard what I did for a living, he said he had something to ask me.

 "What is it?," he wanted to know, "that makes American universities so good?" The universities are not all that much better than those anywhere else in the world, I told him, it's just that American universities luck out in getting extremely motivated students. This explanation made no sense to him. "When all the good students in America go into finance and law," he insisted, "how can the science and engineering departments be any good?" I tried to tell him that intelligence is over-rated and that enthusiasm and persistence are usually the deciding factors in terms of what someone accomplishes. But he could not grok that -- the bias in India towards "innate ability" is too deep-seated.

The enthusiasm and motivation that the best students are capable of was on display this Saturday. We had been invited on a Nature Conservancy field trip to their newish preserve in Southern Oklahoma. Boehler Seeps and Sandhills Preserve is a marshland that is home to a surprisingly diverse set of animals. We gathered in a community hall just outside the preserve to listen to talk by a graduate student who'd spent the last couple of years doing research there.

A dam built by beavers in Boehler Seeps; home to chicken turtles

The research involved doing a survey of the animals in the preserve and studying in detail the life-cycle of the chicken turtle, an almost-but-not-quite-endangered species that made its home in the two beaver dams on the preserve. To do the survey, the student had to build the fences and the traps and check up on them several times a day. Every time he caught a turtle, he would drill a radio transmitter onto its shell, collect its feces (to see wha the turtles ate) and release them. He also talked to private land owners around the preserve so that he could monitor turtle movements into their ponds. He spent several weeks at a time camped out in the preserve so that he could build the fences, tag the animals and monitor them.

Notice the considerable range of skills needed here -- carpentry, electronics, field work, camping, neighborliness, statistics ... This sort of diverse skill set and can-do spirit is quite common on American campuses.

The result? This slide shows the amazing amount of data he had collected:

  

Nearly 8000 captures of 53 different species, including 1814 captures of 7 species of turtles.

Well, okay. That's the mechanics of research.  Did he understand the state of the science? Did he discover anything new?

Glad you asked. Turns out that there are three subspecies of chicken turtles. Two of them have bimodal estivation periods and it was assumed that this, relatively rare third subspecies of chicken turtles would too. He found that, on the contrary, they had a single estivation period.  Other chicken turtles of the species are purely carnivorous. But the ones in this marsh had diets that included lots of plants. A subspecies or a new species?  Turn into the News at 11!  Very exciting.  His advisor, sitting in the back, was beaming.  Body language speaks volumes and these guys were onto something.

Talk over, we moseyed over to the preserve.  He had an antenna and honed in on the frequency of the largest of his turtles which had burrowed onto land ("you don't want to see me wading into the marsh and catching a turtle") and quickly led us to where it ought to be.

And started digging.  All of a sudden, there was a note of the frantic to the effort. We soon discovered why he'd gotten so worried. The transmitter was there, but no turtle. A raccoon had probably gotten the turtle.  The heartbreak was palpable.  He would download the data, correlate it with temperature data from the lake and figure out when it had happened.  But this was sad. And this had been his favorite turtle.

So, I asked him, what he did plan to do after this?  He was going to finish his MS soon and apply to several other schools for a PhD in tropical biology because the college he was currently studying in doesn't have a PhD program.  Process that for a bit -- he was not in a big name college, or even a flagship university or a regional research college. He was doing a MS in a small, regional college with no PhD program. And yet, he was doing very high-quality work.

That is how deep the bench of American graduate schools extends -- all the way to teaching colleges that happen to have small research departments. The work done there is probably on par with "national  universities" elsewhere in the world.  And it all comes down to having great students. Of course, not all students are this good and this motivated. But enough of them are.

Preserving figs

We've suddenly discovered the drawbacks of growing figs in Oklahoma -- by the time it's warm enough for figs to start appearing, it's end of summer and frosty nights are here.

What do you do with 5 pounds of unripe figs? The internet to the rescue ... figs in sugar syrup!

Fig preserves turn out to be quite easy to make.  A little time-consuming, but easy. You start by almost quartering the figs and washing the milk off them:

And then you immerse it in water, boil it and drain.

Rinse and repeat.

The last time around, you boil it in sugar syrup that has lemon peel, lemon juice and cloves. Amounts are to taste. I used half the sugar of the recipes I found on the internet, and it is sweet enough.

Let it cool, and bottle it up:

I got three big bottles of fig preserves.

Something tells me the kids are going to be sick of fig preserves by next week.

Harmonic mean

Math can be cruel.

So, let's say you have a strong wind.  Oklahoma-strong.

On your bicycle, you ride a tailwind and zip along at 20 mph. Unfortunately, you have to come back home fighting a headwind all the way.  You manage to grind back in at 10 mph.

What was your average speed?

15 mph? You wish.

Answer: the harmonic mean of 10 and 20.  This works out to 13.3 mph.  Grrr.

Rehabilitating Neville Chamberlain

The magazine Slate is infamous for their counter-intuitive arguments wherein they argue that every expert is wrong on something because of one minor detail.  However, this reads true:

Chamberlain's story is of a man who fought for peace as long as possible, and went to war only when it was the last available option.

Hitler was not Hitler before 1939.  Before that, there was little to distinguish him from, say, Mussolini. And the world could have lived with another Mussolini.  Britain declared war on Germany on Chamberlain's watch, not Churchill's.

Even as the war-mongers throw around "appeasement" and "peace for our time" as naive pronouncements, historians are coming around to a more balanced and sympathetic view of Neville Chamberlain.

A late fee for paying early

Can you get charged a late fee for sending in your payment a month early?

Citibank seems to think so.

The wife said that her credit card got rejected yesterday. I looked up the account online and discovered that the payment was overdue. That seemed curious and sure enough, on checking my bank account records, I found that I'd paid the bill in full on Aug. 13.

Time for a call into Citibank.

The Aug. 13 payment was for the bill that was due Aug. 14, I was informed.  I had missed the payment that was due Sep. 14.  But what about my July 20th payment, I asked.  That, too, was for the Aug. 14th date.

I started laughing at the logic involved here.  So, I owed $176. I paid it on Aug. 13. The bank closed the billing cycle that day but credited the account for the period that ended before, charged me a $20 late fee for missing a payment on what should have been a zero balance, and then said that my account was $20 overdue ..."

But the phone representative didn't see the abuse of common sense. She kept going on and on about how I'd paid in the previous cycle.  She's probably paid not to understand logical fallacies. Finally, I asked to speak to her supervisor who did agree to remove the charges.

A late fee for paying early.  Who would have thought American banks could be this innovative?

Ambiguous Hand Signal

I was bicycling in the sparsely populated section of East Norman and had stopped to swap out water bottles.No traffic. Rolling hills. Lovely countryside. It's some of the best bicycling around in these parts.

Seeing me stopped on the side of the rather desolate road, a passing big, red truck started to roll to a halt. I gave the driver a thumbs up, the universal sign for "It's okay; I'm fine". It was only when I saw the quizzical look on her face that I realized that the thumbs-up is also the hand signal for when you need a ride.

Was I okay, or did I need a ride to town? No wonder she was confused. I smiled and waved and made happy faces and she drove away.

No traffic. Rolling hills. Lovely countryside. And to top it off, SAG vehicles.

Making Syria safe for Al-Qaeda

The lack of any sense of history in this whole debate about Syria is astounding.

All those people talking about "red lines", whether they are Obama's or America's or the world's ... answer me this.  Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-80s.  For thirty-five years, until Assad did so, no one in the world used chemical weapons.  There is no need, in other words, for the world to police the use of chemical weapons -- the most despicable thugs know that once they use chemical weapons, they cease to have a country they can govern.  So, why should America enforce any kind of red line here?

Look also at what has happened in Libya -- the last place we provided air support and trained the rebels.  Gaddaffi is gone, but the place is now overrun with jihadists.  Syria will be no different.

All that we are fixing to do is to make Syria safe for Al-Qaeda.