Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...

I've been fond of Monty Python since I was a teenager.  Looking back now at their television and film performances you can see the tropes that they now express regret about (stereotyping women, people of color) and that is off-putting. At the same time their sense of humor was incredibly subversive and many of the concepts are still stunning to folk who experience them from scratch. I feel that way about much of the alternative humor I enjoyed in the 70's: Firesign Theatre, Bob and Ray, and so on. Mixed bag but much of life is that way. I have read many of the writings of the members of Monty Python; they were all Oxbridge graduates and very literate. One point that several of them have made repeatedly has changed how I think of teaching. When they were first cresting in fame and popularity, Monty Python came to America and did many live shows. Occasionally they would do two performances, a matinee and an evening performance, with exactly the same material. One show would bomb,...

I have never served in the military, although family members have, as well as the paramilitary (police). I have been in academia most of my adult life. Because I have an interest in systems and how to make them work better I was drawn early in my career to committee work, and along the way I would have disagreements with folk. As long as I felt comfortable that we shared the same goals and values I have not been bothered much by disagreements over means, and I have frequently learned from them when I listened to someone who was more right than myself. Although I have done a fair amount of public speaking, primarily at faculty meetings as chair of Academic Council one year and chair of our University Curriculum Committee for a decade or so, I have rarely sought to resolve disagreements publicly. My experience, in person and in what I have picked up from listening to others, is that folk are much more defensive in front of a crowd (I know that I have been) and more likely to dig in on th...

Our daughter loves the TV show Leverage, and I've enjoyed it when I've seen it; we were just talking about it over breakfast. It's a redemption tale (about a talented group of lawbreakers who decide to stop powerful people from hurting powerless people), and I've always been fond of those---LA Confidential is probably my favorite. In any event, one of the principles of Leverage is that redemption is ongoing. One of the characters discusses that as a key part of Judaism; as an ignorant Christian I can't speak to that but it resonates with me.  Many folk think of redemption in terms of an apology, which is an instant in time and often does not involve much sacrifice or in any way make right the injury caused by the sin. Easy things don't really count for much in the big scheme. Redemption attempts to make right the injured party or parties' damage but it also attempts to make right the sinner. That in particular is why it is ongoing, because people don't c...

I grew up with a lot of symbols around me; most people do. I had a Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener; I had a miniature Liberty Bell.  Most of the symbols weren't physical objects that I owned but were large things that belonged to the nation. The Lincoln Memorial was always my favorite, in contrast to the Washington monument. The Lincoln Memorial gave priority to Lincoln's words about freedom, particularly freedom for all. The Washington monument is a big phallic symbol. Washington deserved better in my opinion but it's hard to be build a memorial to someone who kept despair at bay for many years of fighting losing battles against the British until his war of attrition paid off and they gave up. How do you build a memorial to someone who refused to be crowned king and then walked away from the presidency in order to ensure that liberty would outlast him? The White House is a symbol; its nickname is the People's House. It is a weird mix of really important offices and ...

 

Mathematics as a discipline teaches accountability. Every claim, whether it be a computation result or a statement (theorem) about how things work is accountable. We teach this accountability developmentally, with lower expectations at the beginning, and sometimes folk who study mathematics casually don't understand this. In my multivariable calculus classes, which I teach most frequently, I usually phrase my expectations as "give me a reason to believe your answer", citing my time working at an investment bank where my recommendations had financial repercussions and my supervisor never took my word for anything. In higher-level mathematics classes such as Abstract Algebra or Analysis I can be more explicit: these are the things we all agree to assume, these are the proof techniques which we understand; can you make an argument that convinces the community who have accepted those axioms and rules of inference that what you claim is true? We work hard to remove the ego fro...

Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before a Senate oversight committee yesterday and refused to answer questions she didn't like from the Democrats, casually accusing them of crimes without offering any proof.  It started me thinking about oversight. The US was founded in opposition to the notion of any leader being free of oversight; our three branches of government were set up to check the power of each other. It is failing now because all three of the branches are under the control of a party or politicians who have betrayed their oaths to serve the constitution. In my own professional life I have had oversight the entire time. As a faculty member I have often reported to a department chair; when serving as department chair I have reported to a dean or associate dean; when serving in our shared governance system, chairing a Task Force, the Curriculum Committee, and Academic Council I have had oversight from Academic Council. Oversight can be frustrating but almost all of my ove...

  What kind of nation lets its children go hungry?

The commander-in-chief today told all military commanders to obey his orders to attack American citizens he doesn't like or to quit. There is a third option, of course, the only honorable one. Not to obey an illegal order nor abandon your subordinates by quitting, but to resist.

Our university like many others offers programming for families who visit about a month into the Fall term. There are events intended to give families a feel for what the university provides; part of that has always included a time-slot on Saturday morning to meet with the faculty. There are two ways these meetings can go. During my first decade or so family members pressed for details about their student's class attendance, participation, grades, etc. At some point the university put its foot down (possibly before federal privacy laws required it) and said that those kinds of conversations were off-limits. It became easier to refuse those questions with the university making it policy and explaining it in opening ceremonies for the families. The other way, the fun way, is for us to give some sense of our classes to the families. I like what I teach and I like teaching it, so the word fun is appropriate. After all these decades I don't get tongue-tied and can go on at length ab...

Exams are stressful for students. This plays out in all kinds of ways. Compassionate proctors try to help rather than ridicule. I proctor my own exams as do most of my colleagues except for instances of illness, family emergencies, etc. I have a lot of students come up to ask questions during the exams. Occasionally an exam question really is worded poorly, although as I grow in experience this happens less frequently. Most often my answers fall into two categories: repeating something that I have said when handing out the exams (thus missing latecomers) or requests to help answer a question.  In both cases it is my responsibility to treat the question seriously and with respect, even if, as in the latter case, my answer is "I'm sorry but I can't answer that right now." Many years ago a number of my colleagues and I attended a talk at a conference wherein the speaker addressed the fact that most students by the time they reach us in university classes have been humili...

My university announced plans earlier this week to merge with another university in a different part of our state. I've been there, it's nice although less than half as big as we are. There are tons of issues to work out before it is approved but our community is trying to take in what our trustees worked on in secret over the summer. As with most colleges and universities we've seen for a while the demographics coming----the continual increase in students of age to go to university is finally backing off. Coming after the damage that the COVID pandemic did, a lot of schools are hurting financially. We are in a good position:  no unnecessary hiring, budgets cut, but no layoffs. The school we are merging with took a bad hit from the pandemic, and are trustees feel expanding into this part of the state and pooling our risk (both of us are heavily dependent on tuition) will keep us sound going into the next century. Right now all of the discussion has been about finances, lega...

Charlie Kirk made a career of bigotry and encouraging the targeting of people that he didn't like. He had many followers and in that sense he was very successful. He was assassinated this past week in the sense that he was killed (apparently) because the shooter thought that his views weren't extreme enough. I don't care to add much to the vast amount of reactions to this killing other than two points, one logistical and one deep from my heart. First: early news about assassinations is almost always wrong. Period. That is how it works. Consumers of information want that information immediately and many people who don't care about the truth are willing to make up stories that they think will satisfy that hunger, for (sick) fun and profit. If you care about the truth it is a right and moral act to refuse to consume inaccurate information about such events but to wait until there has been time for law enforcement and journalists to uncover the truth. Nothing, repeat, nothi...

As a teacher a large part of my job involves behavior modification, rewarding useful study habits and not rewarding useless ones. We don't talk about it much but I am aware how much I try to modify the behavior of my colleagues and superiors, and how they try to do the same with me. This is not evil; it is how we advance our priorities.  In academia we (truly or otherwise) tell ourselves that we achieve this through making arguments with merit based on research. We are also part of an organization with superiors and occasionally subordinates, where we attempt to modify behavior, nominally in support of the institution's mission. We are human and all fall short of the ideal. I am often wrong but having nothing else to work with I base my goals on my sense of what's right in attempting to modify the behavior of others. Every now and then I run into a colleague who does not think in these terms. They tend to be less successful. I think the key is to face it head on as part of ...

I have found it useful to act as if I believe what I am being told by people who are part of my life. I don't extend this to sales people, politicians, etc.; I am referring to folk who I will interact with over time and whose behavior I am capable of modifying. I do not always believe what I am being told by this group of people. That sounds cynical and I find cynicism to be incredibly lazy as an approach to life so I hope that my judgment is more than automatic rejection. I know that my memory of what I have said and done often improves with age as a fine wine or cheese does. Perceptions, particularly of one's own actions, are very doubtfully completely accurate in the aggregate. I aim to score in the high 90's in my life but I'm not the one who can do the grading. Sometimes there is evidence of intentional dishonesty. I catch students cheating from time to time, and denials fail in the face of clear evidence.  In every other context in my life strong evidence of inten...

There are very few lives and even fewer that are satisfying that don't place a person in the context of a group, whether it be work, family, friends, etc.  My childhood had a great deal of stability and so the first group I was conscious of was my birth family. Later friends in the neighborhood and school classes extended that. Many of us assimilate what it means to be a part of a group at an early age, with adjustments as our social networks evolve in the teen years and then the workforce, etc.  I played in a school soccer team for two years but I never really considered that to be formative; I wasn't very good at it and so I avoided a lot of relationships on the team out of shame at my lack of coordination. On the other hand, 56 years ago, I started performing in music ensembles. While many males (the expectations are different for the genders despite the prevalence of excellent female athletes) do and are expected to learn group dynamics in athletic contexts, it was musical...

Yesterday was the first day of classes for the Fall Term at my university. I've been doing this for a long time but I am always surprised by the rush of adrenaline that comes with the start of classes. I enjoy teaching and the sight of students in the classroom directly triggers the accumulated feelings I've amassed.

Long before I arrived at my university in 1988, the week before classes was set aside as Planning Week for returning faculty. (Staff planned all summer long.) I've had various leadership roles over the decades and more often than not I was responsible for leading one or more meetings during this week.  My routine for leading a meeting was to remind people of the date with some lead time and ask for suggestions for the agenda with a firm deadline, write the agenda and distribute it, and annotate the agenda with specific goals that I did not so much hide as leave out to keep the agenda from being too verbose. At the meeting I would take notes of the discussion on my copy of the agenda for follow-up details, try to make sure that everyone was participating, nip in the bud separate conversations among subsets of the group that excluded others, point out when the group was repeating itself, and articulate draft consensuses (consensi?) for the group to revise or object to. While it was i...

The procedure went well as far as I can tell. My knee was and is a bit tender; icing helped but I did intensive PT this morning (part evaluation) and I'm feeling it now that I'm in my office. My physical therapist suggest six more weeks of PT once a week, and that makes sense; I could bend more this morning for having had the procedure but there's still room for improvement. I struggle, again, with the process of general anesthesia. For all my failings I have been able to rely on being observant and having a good memory for what I bear witness to. General anesthesia goes directly against that: I have experiences and at least in the beginning I converse with people with no memory afterward. There was a period of time when I co-chaired a university task force on alcohol use, misuse, abuse. That's a story for another post. But there was significant overlap between our work with alcohol and the incidence of regretted sexual experiences, a phrase which I've learned cover...

My right knee was replaced on May 22. I have had physical therapy regularly in the intervening (nearly) twelve weeks. I have recovered most of my flexibility but not as much as I and my health care team want. The most visible symptom is that when I walk down stairs my right foot catches regularly on the step, my knee not bending enough to avoid it. Less visibly I am aware of the small (five or ten degrees) deficit in flexibility whenever I walk. When my left knee was replaced in 2021 and I was at a similar stage I had a procedure known as Manipulation Under Anesthesia performed as an outpatient procedure. I was given a general anesthetic and the surgeon bent my knee enough to rip the scar tissue. I am scheduled to have the same procedure first thing tomorrow morning. While there are no guarantees about tomorrow, four years ago the MUA worked perfectly. I had no pain after the procedure (the scar tissue not having a lot of nerve tissue) and my knee acquired the necessary flexibility. It...

I've spent a half week in Sacramento attending MathFest, an annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America. I joined the MAA in 1978; I was a high school student taking upper level math courses at nearby Ursinus College, and one of the department members, John Shuck, taught most of my classes. I still consider him to be one of my best math instructors, finding ways to explain and motivate difficult mathematics concepts. He was an MAA member and invited me to use one of Ursinus's student memberships. I continued when I went on to university myself and now have been a member for 47 years. Hard to believe. Side note: I ran into Shuck at a math conference years later and had the opportunity to thank him for the help he gave me at the start of my career. He remembered me. Sometimes life's like that. The MAA focuses on faculty and students, primarily at the undergraduate level but also at the graduate level. I have found regional and national service in the MAA to be i...

I arrived in Sacramento today for MathFest.  The name MathFest always feels a bit inward-facing to me---only my tribe seems to find math festive. The conference hasn't started yet; traveling three time zones I wanted to arrive before things started to allow for travel mishaps; sure enough my first of two flights today was delayed enough to make connecting to the second flight impossible. Big up's to the Delta phone app; it offered me alternatives and I found one with a different connecting city that had more of a layover (I had been nervous for the original layover being too short, which it turned out to be). I did arrive quite early though. Second, big up's to Hyatt for letting me have a room at noon when check-in time is 4 PM. In times past when this has occurred I have checked luggage and wandered a bit until my room was ready but this is much nicer. I am a bit wearied, having started my day at 3:00 AM EDT (early and paranoid about there being flight problems, said paran...

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My son flew in from Denver on Saturday and it's been wonderful having him around. My family (wife, son, and daughter) went to a beach trip after a few days in Delaware with my sister-in-law and nephew. I have a lot of pre-cancerous cells on my face that get scraped off once a year (I think my dermatologist is building a mask of my face) and I do not go to sunny locales any more.  My family took beach trips once a year to the Jersey shore as I was growing up in Southeastern Pennsylvania for many years, then switched to the North Carolina beach. I enjoyed riding the waves with a raft but moderately so. I did not enjoy the heat and sun so much. I enjoyed the boardwalk stores and pizza places in both locations but the enjoyment faded with each passing year. I brought books and whenever I could holed up by myself (as an introvert) and read. My family was prim in many ways; no alcohol (we have alcoholic relatives and that pained my parents) and not much partying. Insofar as my sister enj...

I have many reasons to despise Donald Trump. As someone who lived in the Northeast for a couple of decades prior to 1988, he was regularly in my media feed in the 1980's, as a promoter who spent all of his time telling other people how great he was. I have more reasons than his being obnoxious: his refusal to pay the electricians and other workers who renovated his Atlantic City casinos unless they settled for 10 cents on the dollar (threatening to bleed them dry in court with his army of lawyers if they sued); his scam university; his sadism during his first term; his attempted coup on January 6, 2021; his treason with documents stored in Mar-a-Lago; his much more efficient sadism in his second term. It's a long list that he adds to daily. But, here is the trigger when I hear his voice: I would never want him alone in a room with my daughter. It's patronizing---she can defend herself, I know. But when he owned Miss Teen USA he bragged about going into the dressing rooms to...

Our politics are broken but I dream of a day when free speech has one more restriction beyond yelling fire in a crowded room or claiming to want to kill the president. We need to stop people (particularly in politics or the media) from using the concept of average (or as we say in the math business, mean). The mean is useful when working with various probability distributions, i.e., in restricted technical settings. In common situations it is almost always misleading. If I am teaching a class and Bill Gates walks in, our mean wealth goes up by many powers of ten. Without mentioning Gates's entrance the mean is entirely misleading. It is often used by politicians and pundits to intentionally mislead about similar situations such as tax cuts that go primarily to the ultra-rich. The median is a far better measure. If you sort the data it is the middle value. If Bill Gates walks into my classroom the median wealth would shift by a couple of bucks. The mean is the average of a set of da...

It's been a rough few weeks of news. ICE continues to act without check. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is showing off his new cages for immigrants to MAGA sadism tourists. Primarily our Republican legislators have agreed to take money from helping the needy and given it to the wealthiest at Trump's behest.  As is often the case NC Representative Virginia Foxx summarizes a lot of the MAGA hatred, throwing a fit when Representative Maxwell of Tennessee pointed out how fundamentally anti-Christian her actions are in demonizing immigrants.   To my knowledge none of those leading us into savagery are of Native American heritage and seem not to pause at all to be grateful that there ancestors were treated better. Not giving up, but it's been a rough few weeks trying to remain hopeful.

Just a quick note. Even though I have had my right knee replaced five weeks ago driving seems to be working out. I do not feel pain using the pedals; the main difficulty is getting in and out of the car.

It has been 27 days since my right knee was replaced. I've had some good milestones---transitioning from walker to cane to doing without my cane. My sleep is beginning to improve (with the dull ache of my leg still hurting but not quite as much) and so I have started weaning myself from narcotics. Once they are clear of my system my wife will take me to a parking lot and we'll see if I can drive yet given my right leg is my driving leg. Once we are satisfied she will ride shotgun with me for a while before I drive solo. My work commute is an hour long each way so that is a ways off driving solo. One low point:  a week ago my blood sugar dropped quite a bit and I was incoherent. My wife called an ambulance and I was taken to a nearby ER to bring it back up in a controlled fashion.  No episodes since then, thankfully. My pain medications had killed my appetite---I lost 25 pounds in three weeks---but I had not stopped my diabetes medication and had failed to check my blood sugar ...

I had my right knee replaced on Thursday, May 22. My activities since then have been very limited, doing PT, elevating my leg, taking painkillers. I have been catching up on my reading a bit. In anticipation of my downtime I have accumulated a number of e-books in my Kindle account that I have been rotating through as my whim takes me. Here are some short descriptions of my current books: The African Trilogy by Chinua Achebe.  Many years ago, upon the recommendation of others, I used Things Fall Apart as one of my readings when teaching our university's first-year Global Experiences seminar. It covered a lot of good themes and not just the prominent colonialism. Recently I saw a reference to the fact that Things Fall Apart was only the first book in a chronological trilogy and have enjoyed rereading it prior to getting to the next two books. The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. It has been many years since I last taught our university's first-year Globa...

I guess I should be glad to have outlived the cartilage in my knees; it would be sad if it outlived me. I had my left knee replaced in 2021. The arthritis crossed a threshold where I could no longer ignore it and limped painfully, eventually swallowing my vanity and using a cane. This happened in the Fall of 2020 and I had no desire to enter a hospital during the pandemic until there was a vaccine to provide me with some kind of immunity. I received the vaccine during the 2020-2021 academic year and then it was a matter of deferring the surgery until classes ended for the year and my grades were in. The phrase "bone saw" kept running through my mind but I knew that knee replacement surgery was a well-established procedure and had many friends who had had the surgery so I knew my odds were extremely good. It was unknown but made sense on some level. Now that threshold has crossed for my right knee; in September 2024 I was stepping off of a curb and my knee went ping, audibly. ...

Joe Biden has been on my radar for many decades. The start was back in 1991-2 during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. It was not a good start; I felt that Anita Hill was treated horribly by the Senate collectively and Biden chaired the Judiciary Committee at that time. (Side question:  what was there in Thomas's resume that made sense of his nomination? Long before I heard Anita Hill's name that question bothered me.) Biden kept popping up on my radar, particularly when he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Over time I found that in interviews his opinions were the most nuanced. That was probably when I learned a bit about his personal tragedy, losing wife and child in a car accident. He tried a few times for the Democratic party nomination for president; it didn't go well.  Long-term senators often lose the ability to speak concisely that is so important in campaigning nationwide. At some point he gave a speech that plagiarized another politician and his pr...

The period between the end of classes and final exams is often filled with students requesting special treatment, for the rules to be bent for them (and possibly for others, but definitely for them). There are often extenuating circumstances but the wiggle room for me as an instructor tightens up considerably at this point. If extensions are needed waiting to ask for them until after the end of classes is pushing it. But:  our president asks for special treatment. But:  politicians advocating on behalf of religious groups who want to be freely able to discriminate ask for special treatment. But:  two of our supreme court justices demand special treatment for their bribes. Our students have too many examples right now of powerful people demanding special treatment because of their power. As my students have very little power over me at this point in their careers I can freely say no but for many of them the no's will fade over the years if they persist.

 

I will be getting my right knee replaced in thirteen days. I have met with the surgeon to discuss the surgery; met with his assistant to go over my pre-operative steps; discussed with a hospital nurse which of my medications to stop before my surgery and when.  My wife scheduled her Family Medical Leave months ago. But I have life to get through before then. Final exams occur next week. I have a couple more class meetings before then. I'm still meeting with students for office hours and by appointments. The cortisone shots that have allowed me to function (walk without pain on flat surfaces but still needing the elevator to avoid painful stairs) are wearing off and I can't have any more this close to surgery. So I am beginning to limp. I think I can make it through final exams without using a cane. I have good health care through my employer. I am affluent enough to pay for the co-pays. Why do I merit these when so many of my fellow citizens don't? Why does our economic sta...

I don't have particularly good memories of my childhood; I'm a strange person with little interest in the things most people care about and fervent geekdom about obscure topics.  It took me longer than most I think to find a place where I felt that I fit in. Once I did I then had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I schooled at a research university and knew that research was not my passion so much as understanding and explaining things. Eventually I landed at my current job and have felt very supported with it. This is to say that I am happier on a day-by-day basis now than in my youth and that nostalgia has never really had a hold on me. Things in the world are bad now; a sadist is president and our country's support for people in need dwindles further each day. But I know as a white male that things have been bad for women and people of color for quite some time. It is hard to think of a golden age when all of God's children were treated with ...

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...

  “I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ―  J.R.R. Tolkien,  The Fellowship of the Ring

This afternoon I'll sing in a (short) concert of South African songs as part of a choral ensemble of twenty-one singers. I've been in concerts several times a year for about fifty-five years now and I'm okay with being in front of an audience. It's easier when I've rehearsed the songs often enough to have them be muscle memory as with today. I won't claim that my pronunciation is perfect but it's not bad and I think I've got the tunes down. My current choral ensemble is tied to my work (it is a student-group at my university that they kindly allow me to sing with) and with my commute it probably won't continue after retirement. There are some very good local choral ensembles and barring physical infirmity I intend to continue singing as long as I can. I've never been very athletic, and insofar as I was once in good shape I ran long-distance, by myself and not as part of a team. I started musical ensembles in my childhood and I credit them with wh...

I've had three conferences in two months and so it's been a bit hectic, but now that I'm back we have about five weeks left in the academic year. This is the home stretch. Everyone I talk to sounds weary, which is what they always sound like in early April, they being folk on the academic calendar. I've tried to encourage some students to try to cross the finish line at a sprint for whatever a sprint looks like to them; we'll see. I've cleared my schedule a bit for after classes end so that I can have my arthritic right knee replaced and do rehab before my next conference in August.  I have some class prep for this term yet to do but I'm up to the first week in May with it so I'm not too stressed. My Fall schedule includes classes I've taught before so getting ready for it will be a familiar process. Hoping my students can hold it together for a bit longer---

I will be leaving in less than a week to go to a training course on the basics of being an ombudsperson. I have done the job at Elon as Faculty Ombudsperson for going on six years now, with another three-year term ahead of me. I don't feel insecure about my performance in the job but I am aware that I see far fewer cases per year than other ombudspeople, and it is good for me to refresh on the basics periodically. For such a course I am going to Miami for the first time. It is the nature of the trip that the days are very full with training; I have seen the agenda for this trip and there are no surprises. I will try to get away from the hotel for breakfast and dinner (lunch is provided) to see some of Miami but in my sixties I lack the energy to explore much after a day of work.

Our different experiences provide us all with different ways of assessing probabilities that are not axiomatic. (Axiomatic probability tells us that a fair coin comes up heads half the time. It is theoretical and not based on our experiences.)  If I know someone from work then I will have a sense of how likely it is that they will complete a task they have volunteered for. Their partner and children will have different estimates of the likelihood based on their different experiences with them.  We don't often discuss this nor do we often quantify our probability assessments but living in a world with other people requires that we make them. When someone tells me something happened that I deem (imperfectly, subjectively) to be unlikely I don't immediately believe them.  (Nor do I call them a liar to their face.)  I await evidence to shift my estimation.  If someone tells me that the sky is pink with green polka dots I will disbelieve them (and wonder what the jok...

Meta's AI used a pirated database (i.e. without any permissions) of writings for training. The Atlantic has broken a story about this that included a link to search the database. I'm in there at least twice ("Derivative Sign Patterns" and "Forgotten Statistics", the latter with Doug Downing).. I feel validated as a writer to have been plagiarized by an evil billionaire to further his social media empire.

The Memory Palace podcast often finds ways to articulate values about how we use history in our lives that I feel very strongly about but can not put into words. This is a heartfelt defense of keeping the T in LGBT with respect to the Stonewall riot. pca.st/episode/6506...

I'm always nervous using the phrase "old friends" because of how the ambiguity is often used to joke about the age of the friends. I am in my sixties though and have some friendships that began in my twenties so I think the phrase is the best descriptor. One of the members of my department who retired some years ago was the chair when I was hired and I count him as one of my mentors. I know me and how things happen by inertia and decided that I didn't want to drift apart from him as a friend when he retired and asked if he would like to meet for a lunch on a monthly basis to keep up. Both of us being morning people we quickly moved it to a breakfast meeting.  My friend and I started meeting monthly in 2008 and have yet to miss a month. Some of the things that made my friend a good mentor also make him a good friend; he is attentive and remembers things I have said years later. He is good-humored even in times of adversity, and we share a lot of values that make it pos...

My wife and I discovered years ago that it was a useful preventative for us to compare calendars on a regular basis. We both have active professional and personal lives, and particularly with hour-long commutes for both of us and two children and their scheduling it was good to double-check that we weren't missing anything.  Our children have moved out but it is still helpful to compare calendars. My wife and I have noticed thought that in our fifties and sixties the majority of events seems to be shifting toward medical appointments; thankfully most are preventative. My wife had retinal surgery last month and visits related to it; I go in for a colonoscopy today. There are many pleasures to aging; I do find more joy in things, find people easier to understand and accept with each passing day. My children have turned out to be people that I not only love (pretty much a given) but also respect greatly and like a whole lot. That was not a given. Still, at this point more and more of ...

I recently lost an election. It was for a position in a professional organization and I felt that it was a good fit with my background. I don't know much about the candidate who won, just their short bio that was included with the ballot. Seems like a good person to have the job overall. I've had more than my share of opportunities to serve in this organization, and so I am sad but I do not feel that I have earned much of a right to complain. It does make me reflect on the leadership positions that I have held throughout my career. It's been more than a few, with many of them being appointments rather than elections or resulting from elections from within a small group. As an introvert I suspect that I am not good at presenting myself to a general audience for their backing, but that folk who know my record are willing to give me more responsibility. There have been two leadership positions that I have held of some responsibility that came to me when I thought that opportun...

I arrived today in San Diego for a conference. I love the look of the city and the drive from the airport to the hotel was glorious.

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...

One of the core principles of mathematics is that the validity of an argument depends not on the status of the person making it but rather on its inherent worth. We have bigots as do all disciplines but we've been better about treating people the same way we treat arguments in recent years. Trump's opposition to DEI, to valuing people for what they are and not who they love or the color of their skin, is, on top of everything else, bad mathematics.

My university expects faculty to work two Saturdays each academic year. In the Fall we have Family Weekend to try to help family members have a sense of what students do. The faculty side of the programming is for us to be available to meet faculty members during a fixed window. It is usually a pretty cheerful event, although afterward I have always felt the long week and crashed a bit. In the Spring we interview scholarship candidates. The incentive is to help find the students who will be most successful here which is a win-win for everybody, but again it makes for a long week and I crash afterward. I was very nervous with my admission interviews so I go into it knowing that it is a stressful time for the students I meet and that they will not always be at their best. I enjoy engaging them in conversation and encouraging them to display the quality of their thinking processes; the worst-case scenario is when out of nerves a student just clams up, because then there's nothing to g...

Even though staying current and sharing with my professional community is part of my job description, I have always felt that attending conferences was a perk of my job.  Travel is more wearying than when I was in my twenties but I love walking around a campus (regional meetings) or a big city (national meetings). Lately my attendance has clustered in the Spring and in August. I have a regional meeting coming up next week. It is a quick meeting but it is full of people I have worked with over the decades; I'm not sure if seeing old friends qualifies as networking but I do love it. The week after that I go to a national meeting to present a talk in San Diego, one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to.  A month later I go for Ombudsperson fundamentals refresher training (which I have done at the start of each of my three-year terms) in Miami, a city I have not yet been to. That training is intensive, centered in the hotel hosting us so I won't get out much but I will ...

Our children had service expectations when they were in school as kids. Both of them volunteered at a local food charity providing food aid to any local children that asked for it. My wife and I have paid attention to the charity, deemed them one of the best uses of our charity budget, and have supported them for many years. We love children. We don't think children in our country or specifically in our school district should go hungry. We don't use a filter on who we want to keep from going hungry, because we were raised in faith traditions that teach that our god loves everyone and does not discriminate in that love. Our nation's majority of voters have installed a leadership that does discriminate in ways loud and proud. There are many details to their cruelty. One small detail is their opposition to showing love to small children unless they have citizenship documents or at least look like they do according to some color scale similar to choosing a household paint. The ...