Monthly Archives: December 2005

More details

I hadn’t seen this bit before. This is very bad.

The Faculty of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering will be reorganized into two schools: the School of Liberal Arts and the School of Science and Engineering. A total of five programs—Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Exercise and Sports Science—will be eliminated. Students in these programs will have the opportunity to continue their studies at Tulane if they can finish degree requirements by May 2007. Otherwise, they will be offered assistance in selecting another major at Tulane or transferring to another institution.

Survival to Renewal: Tulane University

This leaves Biomedical Engineering ADDENDUM – and Chemical Engineering. I guess we’re “world-class excellent.”  Wow.

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New FeedBurner setup and location move

Today I created a FeedBurner account and did a bunch of tricky configuration hacks to make it so that most of you should now be getting updates through the new feed.  If you want to subscribe to the correct location it’s http://feeds.feedburner.com/virtuallyshocking; In a way, I’m perfectly happy for you to keep using whatever feed you have now. That way, if I ever want to move away from feedburner, I shouldn’t have much trouble.

I added a link on the sidebar today so that people can easily add my feed to their LiveJournal friends list. This is, I think, where most of my readers are.

I also moved the actual site files around on the webserver to a more sensible location, and you shouldn’t see any difference, but let me know if you run into problems.

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Bad news for Tulane

Tulane lost a ton of money during this whole hurricane situation. I’m sure renting cruise ships as residence halls isn’t helping to stem the financial hemorrhaging.  Now comes the belt-tightening.

If your department isn’t rocking the proverbial casbah, you’re out the door:

The university will focus its undergraduate, professional and doctoral programs and research in areas where it has attained, or has the potential to achieve, world-class excellence. It will suspend admission to those programs that do not meet these criteria.

Survival to Renewal: Tulane University

I’m now very curious about the definition of “world class excellence”…  Just how bad is it? Here are some numbers:

The financial recovery aspects of the renewal plan address the budget shortfall the university anticipates in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and will result in the phased elimination of approximately 50 faculty positions in discontinued undergraduate and professional degree programs. Another 180 faculty positions will be eliminated at the medical school as a result of the decreased population and changing health care needs of New Orleans.“I deeply regret that employee reductions were necessary to secure the university’s future,” said Cowen. “We have tried to make the reductions as strategically and humanely as possible, recognizing the hardship it places on those whose positions have been terminated.”

Survival to Renewal: Tulane University

Not very good at all.

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Running in a Winter Wonderland

I woke up this morning to find a steady fall of snow coming down, and I went for a run in it. It was great! It didn’t feel that cold out, I think mostly because it wasn’t windy, and it was a beautiful scene to run through. The snow was a little problematic though, for two reasons. The first is that it got in my eyes whenever I looked up while running. The second is that dry snow, as many of you surely know, slips and grinds a bit under your feet, similar to what happens in sand.  Despite my efforts to tread appropriately, it made my calves a bit sore as they had to compensate.  Nonetheless, a decent run, 2 miles at about nine minutes per mile.

Looky! Snow!

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The Scientific Method, and how Intelligent Design Doesn’t Fit It

If you’re not familiar with the scientific method, or if you need a refresher, please see the article linked below from Wikipedia.

Scientific method – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The heart of the scientific method is the multi-step, sometimes iterative process shown below:

  1. Define the question
  2. Gather information and resources
  3. Form hypothesis
  4. Plan experiment
  5. Do experiment and collect data
  6. Analyze data
  7. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypotheses
  8. Communicate results
From the wikipedia article linked above

Really, the whole crux of the Intelligent Design (ID) debate rests in step 3. Intelligent Design does not form a hypothesis.  A hypothesis is a statement of what is thought to be the case, worded in a falsifiable way.  I actually have a problem with the list above. Perhaps step 7.5 should be “Confirm or deny the hypothesis.” There are technical issues here involving what are known as “null hypotheses,” but I don’t remember them, and they’re not strictly relevant to the rest of my point. Here are some possible hypotheses:

  1. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen
  2. My shoes are black
  3. Things lofted into the air will fall back to earth
  4. I was a cow in my previous life
  5. Every object with mass bends spacetime
  6. The sky is green during the day
  7. The living soul of a human is established at conception

Can you pick out the ones that are not actually hypotheses? I’m having a really hard time with this. I’m focused on Intelligent Design, so I tend to come up with non-hypotheses that relate to ID.  I can’t think of many other non-hypotheses, as most things can now be tested and investigated to the extent of support or falsification. Appropriately, most of the non-hypotheses that I can come up with are politically charged. Do you see the connection? They’re politically charged because nobody can ever prove whether they are true or not, and so what you end up with is a bunch of arguing on a national and global scale, over things which can never be proven. By the way, the non-hypotheses are numbers four and seven. Even if the others are incorrect, they are testable — falsifiable.

This, as I see it, is the end of the Intelligent Design issue. ID has no place in science. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of money and politicking involved in the issue. If enough people bullshit, loudly and frequently, other people start to listen and believe. That doesn’t make what’s being said not bullshit. Try an experiment. Come up with some outlandish lie. Something that’s possible, but highly improbable about you or that could have happened in the news. Start telling people. See how many check it out, how many believe it at face value, how many call your bullshit. You won’t gain a lot of trust this way, but you might discover something interesting.

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