LifeItself

Has anyone heard of foreigners clamoring to emulate the U.S. K-12 school system?  I certainly haven't.  I do receive, however, foreign delegations that want to learn how we organize academic research and graduate programs at UT Austin.  This happens at least once a month.  People around the world correctly perceive that most Tier 1 academic institutions in the U.S. are second to none and worthy of emulation. And how about premier U.S. corporations?  Do they come to UT Austin or to the local community colleges to hire their top engineers and scientists?  Do they set up research campuses and incubators around UT or the Austin Community College?  (Please do not get me wrong, ACC is a very fine and vastly underfunded institution, which treats the most difficult cases of acute high-schoolitis and online-learnatis .  My youngest daughter, a BS graduate in premed from UC Santa Cruz, is a nursing student at ACC, and I am pleased with the quality of her ...

Here are two other questions related to the title: What unique benefits are given to students at all levels - from freshmen to PhD candidates - by a good engineer and scientist, who also happens to be a decent teacher?  How are these benefits different from those delivered by a credentialed, but scientifically incompetent teacher? We keep on hearing the loud and stubborn voices that call for a strict separation of teaching from engineering practice and research. I think that these voices are tragically mistaken. By the way, when I say "tragically," I am thinking of Euripides , Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Shakespeare. In a good Greek tragedy the audience knows the inevitable fatal outcome, but the protagonists don't. For 22 years, I have been a teacher at two top public universities in the U.S.: UC Berkeley and UT Austin. Over time, I have taught some pretty large classes, so my statistical sample is sufficiently broad to justify the statements I shall make next. ...

Yesterday I was in Dallas.  I participated in a panel discussion: "What Cost Gas Drilling?" at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) that took place in the beautiful Collins Executive Center at SMU. The participants of my panel included Mr. Calvin Tillman, the Mayor of Dish, Texas; David Pool, Senior VP and General Counsel of Range Resources; Elizabeth Souder, a Staff Writer for the Dallas Morning News; and Andrea Gabor, a Professor of Business Journalism at the Baruch College - the panel leader. Mr Tillman's deep anguish and fear for his children made the largest impression on me.  Mr. Tillman was demonized by the industry sources as an unreasonable person, who made crazy demands on the well-meaning companies producing natural gas in his community.  Mr. Tillman says that he is quitting the mayor's job, and is moving away from Dish to protect his children from what he fears are real health threats. It was real...

When I talk or write, people often tell me they are depressed with what I tell them.  These people crave for a more palatable approach that belongs to Bokonon: I wanted all things To seem to make sense, So we all could be happy, yes, Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all  fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise Bokonon's Calypso , Kurt Vonnegut, " Cat's Cradle ," p. 127. Bokonon's true power is in imagining other people's dreams before they realize what it is that makes them happy. Bokonon's approach is commonly applied in all mass media, including advertizing and some of the major science journals. It has also been the standard operating procedure in all religions since times immemorial and in politics. In short, Bokonon's Calypso reflects human nature and my creations do not. Therein lies my problem in communicating with the public.

The December 27, 2010, WSJ Opinion piece, "Ag Department Uproots Science," is full of fantastically uninformed thinking so characteristic of medieval alchemists. The piece takes to task the Ag Secretary and the Obama administration for being insufficiently warm towards the genetically modified (GM) plants and insufficiently lax in regulating them. The nonsensical argument that a genetically modified plant is "substantially equivalent" to an unmodified one, because a few different genes weight almost nothing, flies in the face of the very science the opinionator invokes so often. These modified genes express themselves differently in different circumstances, and may cause significant changes in chemical reaction pathways at cellular level. In other words, the modified plant may, and often does, produce chemicals that disrupt the human endocrinal system or are downright poisonous. A good example are GM potatoes. What irks me more than anything is that this roa...