The forgetting continues...

Yesterday we went to Disneyland. I brought my office keys with me in case we needed to drop by for something. It was my attempt at being prepared. Little did I know that my preparedness yesterday would undermine my preparedness today. In my sleep-deprived state this morning, I forgot to get my office keys out of the other car. Here is a picture of this morning's work location...

Diversity includes the middle

With some demented intrigue I have been following the debates about gay marriage. I have posted before about why I think government should stop regulating marriage and leave it to churches to endorse marriage, so I'll leave additional commentary on that for another time.

Andrew Breitbart writes in his commentary "I fear the vicious and hypocritical path that the activist gay left is headed on will eventually be met with a backlash. If it already hasn't." For a self described "gay-friendly" person, this seems more than alarming.

I consider myself as a tolerant person, who wishes the same in return. I found a sigh of relief in his commentary. I have found that those who wish to embrace diversity have a rather narrow interpretation of what diversity includes. Diversity includes all positions along the spectrum from radically conservative ideas to radically liberal ideas. Diversity also includes traditionally held positions and values. If we exclude any of these positions, we cannot embrace diversity as it is. You may feel free to not include any of these groups, but in doing so, you cannot correctly claim diversity.

BONUS (from despair.com):

Scheduling

Today, I forgot an advising appointment. I wish that I could claim that it was an isolated event, but it isn't. Since I left consulting, I have not been able to remember the simplest things. I even have an iTouch that I use with Entourage (Mac version of Outlook). I think that I need a biomechanical device that records what I say and type, deciphers it into recognizable pieces, then schedules my life and work tasks for me.
*preproduction model schematic stolen from China*

Even with such a device I would probably disregard the prompts as malfunctions. But at least, I would have been prompted.

Easy controversy

I have been pondering how to improve the educational experiences of my students. Inevitably, I revert to planning a class that has more discussion and less lecture. I could start each class with a controversial topic from the readings and then guide discussion. The problems is how you evaluate such a class. Essay exams and writing assignments are a time consumptive proposition for me, and it would be difficult to write exams for general consumption. To exacerbate the problem, students don't even have to think critically and independently with all of the available information on the internet. Take for example ProCon.org which is a clearing house for quotes and information on controversial issues. Now even contentious issues have a Cliffs Notes online edition.

Great sites

In my internet meanderings, I have found three new time wasting sites.
WallStats
Indexed
and
Fail

I simultaneously love and hate the flexibility of my work.

Survey (part 2)

I have been having too much fun with surveymonkey.com. I am designing a bad survey to demonstrate the horrible things that you can ask. Feel free to participate if you wish. If you think that I am becoming a bigger geek than I was before, just wait for the regression results.
Click here to take a very bad survey

Rainbow Six

Pirates rock, but Navy Seals killing Somali pirates rocks even more. Congrats on a successful intervention! If I could only make that shot from that distance on rough seas, I would have beaten Rainbow Six long ago.

Work and pleasure

I am currently teaching a graduate class on research methods. While I should be grading one of their assignments, I have chosen instead to do some preparatory work for a future class on internet surveys. I decided to create a survey not on anything relevant, but rather, on a subject of my own interest. You will have to guess what question is important to me. If you would like to take the survey and help me pretest it, I would appreciate your help. It is an anonymous survey that has not gone through human subject approval, and the results will not be made public.Click Here to take the survey

Please make any suggestions on how to improve the survey as comments here.

Pirate quote

I have never been a big fan of Hilary Clinton... Bill maybe, but not Hilary. But I do love piracy (a long story for another post). Hilary finally said something worth quoting "we think the world must come together to end the scourge of piracy." It would have only been better if she would have said "methinks the world must join together in the scourge of piracy" with a pirate accent.

Facebook migration post

Since not all of my readers (the millions of you) are my facebook friends, I decided to migrate this post to my blog. Initially I had intended to place it here, but I got lazy and posted it there. Blogging is much better than using facebook, but most sites have facebook links readily available.

The narcotraficantes are seemingly running roughshod over the Mexican police. Earlier in the year, there were reports that Mexico was on the verge of collapse and the USA might have to rescue the government in order to preserve peace. I thought that it might be opportunism on our part to be able to literally control 75% of North America. "If you read through the article, it says that these assault rifles come in part from Los Angeles and San Francisco... two cities where it is already illegal to purchase these weapons. You can't trace the legal sale of these guns back to California when it is illegal to sell them there. I can see them coming from Arizona and Texas where gun laws are lax, but you can't say that more laws are needed to control cross border flow of assault rifles if the guns are coming from states where it is illegal to purchase them." How do you track illegally purchased guns? If you can track them, why not stop them?