Open Thread

by JanieM

Maybe we need a reboot. Here's a thread for talking about whatever comes up.

Ukraine?

Covid-19, which is by no means finished with us, even if most of us think we're finished with it?

The soon-to-be-rising price of flour?

The falling value of people's savings?

The fact that many, many systems are kind of raggedy around the edges right now?

Take travel.

I succeeded in making a plane reservation the other day despite two hour+ sessions on hold and a JetBlue software fail that was almost funny. (But not really.)

Preparing to make a reservation for a Covid-postponed trip, I gave in to Big Brother and made myself a TrueBlue frequent flyer account. The form asked for my full legal name. I included my middle initial even though it was labeled optional, because that's part of my legal name, and rules are rules.

Then I went over to the reservations page, where TrueBlue filled in my name for me and I filled in a bunch of other stuff. But when I clicked "Continue," it said I couldn't because the middle initial field was invalid. What's more, I couldn't correct it, because you couldn't type in name fields that had been filled in automatically.

I went back to the TrueBlue page to fix what I was pretty sure was the problem: I had put a period after my middle initial.

But you can't change your name once you enter it; federal blah law blah rules blah blah blah.

So -- Jet Blue accepts a bit of punctuation on one page that is invalid on another that it auto-fills, and there is no way to fix the problem without, you guessed it, another hour+ long wait on hold.

Before I tackled that challenge, I made myself a reservation without invoking TrueBlue, and without using my middle initial, because I was afraid that if I waited too long the plane would be full. It crossed my mind that I might regret this later -- having two versions of my name in the system and all, maybe Homeland Security won't like that. But I took the risk anyhow.

A very nice, very patient man on the help line fixed the name problem, and even merged my reservation with my TrueBlue account. The fact that he immediately understood this mess was only marginally less surprising than that I was also sweet and pleasant through the whole conversation.

First world problems. There are no bombs falling on my neighborhood. I wish there were no bombs falling on anyone's neighborhood, but I don't know how to make them stop, or prevent them from being dropped in the first place. So I'm donating $ where I can, both locally and for Ukrainians, and otherwise living the same pandemic-shaped life as I have for the past two years, almost to the day. (The NBA shut down on March 11, 2020, Disney World a couple of days later. That's about when a lot of people sat up and took notice.)

Comments

[wj]

The NBA shut down on March 11, 2020, Disney World a couple of days later. That's about when a lot of people sat up and took notice.

Not that I propose to speak to either. Rather, a hook for a comment (Open Thread notwithstanding) -- one demonstrating the breadth of our discussions.

Late last week, major league baseball finally achieved a new labor agreement with the players. Mostly involving points so small that it's not obvious why they didn't get it done in time to start spring training on sschedule. Ah well, in service of getting a full schedule finished on time we will get an unusually large number of doubleheaders.

The one significant change was extending the Designated Hitter rule to the National League. Personally, I'm sorry to see that.** I figure JDT, at least, may have an opinion on the subject.

** And not just because I'm in the process of writing a story where one segment revolved around the fact that the American League did and the National League, until now, did not. Rewrite time. But not the only reason to regret the rule.

[nous]

It's finals week, which means that I'm in the middle of reading and grading about 800 pages of student writing.

I wish it were more, not because I wish to read more of my student's writing, but because that's seven portfolios shy of the total enrollment and a few more that are missing some final work. It will be the most students I've ever had not passing the course.

This pandemic has been very hard on both teachers and students. It's not the remote learning or the masks that made it so, it's the constant shifting back and forth of requirements and demands. It's having state and local governments deciding what can and cannot be done with no consultation of any of the people involved, and then leaving all the details to be worked out on the individual classes. Teachers are left to seesaw back and forth in their demands and students are left with wildly varying demands as the teachers all have to juggle the individual challenges of their classes. Everyone ends up feeling overworked and hobbled with less to show for more work.

And all we ever hear is about how much progress we have lost to the pandemic, and all the ways in which we have not measured up.

No shit.

But no one is actually behind. We are all right where we should be, given the circumstances.

All this internalized Taylorism and attempting to systematize learning around a standardized curriculum has stigmatized our students and left them feeling like failures, which makes their teachers feel like failures, and leads to massive burnout and massive brain drain. 55% of educators are considering leaving the field.

I could retire as early as next year, as could my wife. Our pension would be tiny, but both of us could find other work and we are young enough and have enough professional skills that this would not be too difficult.

At the start of the pandemic we would have said that we were 5-10 years from being ready to retire.

As Indiana Jones says, it's not the years, it's the mileage.

We all need to find it within ourselves to afford ourselves and the people in our lives a measure of grace in these hard times. And we need to start looking at adjusting our view of the future to allow for building livable societies that can make more happiness out of a lot less stuff because we have seriously overshot our ability to sustain our planned future.

[Girl from the North Country]

Case numbers climbing here. I know several people who have got Covid in the last couple of weeks, but so far, thank God, nobody has been worse than medium flu, and some better than that. One person who tested positive today, and negative yesterday, was with me on Sunday, when we hugged affectionately. Today I feel a bit snotty (technical term), but it could be my imagination...

[GftNC]

Kyosai at the Royal Academy review — catfish and fart battles in 19th-century Japan

I'd never heard of Kyosai, but this sounds like fun:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kyosai-at-the-royal-academy-review-catfish-and-fart-battles-in-19th-century-japan-czg9tcsjf

[Hartmut]

Covid is surging again in Germany too but the goverment thinks aloud about ending mask mandates (and possibly silently burying vaccination mandates in healthcare jobs).

The states for the most part are not happy about that and have already announced that they will keep both. And although my fellow teachers for the most part are fed up with wearing masks all day (and have Covid-testing 3-5 times a week together with the kids), they'd not be happy either with the disease rampaging through school again unhampered.

[nous]

Returning to the subject of my grading travails and my students... The portfolios that they create are online, so they can continue to work on them after the deadline for the assignment.

And they have.

48 hours after the deadline and the next 10% of the students who were on the pass/fail bubble have uploaded additional materials. Only a couple of them will need to repeat the course.

These are not bad students. They are only "behind" in that they are economically disadvantaged, and that creates a more complex set of challenges to navigate along with all the extra stress that the rest of the students are having to face. It's going to take them longer to get through because they are having to do more to get through.

The university's answer? To discount summer credits. So now the students are overloading themselves with courses and trying to do even more in an attempt to get through quickly. And in the process they are getting less for their money.

Education should not be a high-stakes race to the finish.

Our path forward is going to be high-stakes enough. We will need everyone's ability to adapt and to chart new paths to a livable future.

They will get there, but we have to give them time and we have to stretch out their windows of opportunity as much as we can. They are getting there, it's just taking a bit longer.

[GftNC]

Further to Donald's recent "There are no good empires", with which I pretty much agree by definition, this is rather inspiring (notwithstanding the caution at the end of the article):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/15/volunteer-hackers-fight-russia

Given what I understand to be Russia's extreme strength in cyber sabotage, hopefully this will level the playing field a bit.

[JanieM]

discount summer credits

Does this mean courses taken in the summer count for less toward graduation/major requirements?

If so, wtf!

[wj]

discount summer credits

Back when I was at UC, the university changed from 2 semesters and summer school to 4 quarters a year. In the unrealistic expectation that they could get equal numbers of students in all 4 quarters, and so effectively increase their capacity without having to build, and staff, another campus. It was a bad idea, which anybody could have predicted wouldn't work.** But senior executives make unrealistic assumptions in every organization, I suppose.

In which configuration, all quarters were equal, with the same courses over the same number of weeks. In short, no way to "discount summer credits." Has the university gone back to semesters? If not, how do they rationalize giving less credit to essentially identical work? Inquiring mind want to know. Thanks.

** I should perhaps note that personally I loved it. I got a lot more courses in during the 5 years I was an undergraduate than I could have otherwise. But then, I was working year round, so I didn't need to get a different, full time, summer job.

[JanieM]

If not, how do they rationalize giving less credit to essentially identical work? Inquiring mind want to know. Thanks.

Yes, that was my basic question, too. Which is a little different, I suppose, from saying they're going to give shorter courses in the summer, so the credit per amount of work wouldn't necessarily be different, but the amount of credit you could earn over the summer might.

[nous]

Does this mean courses taken in the summer count for less toward graduation/major requirements?

No, they just cap the number of credits that a student can be charged for in summer courses, so a student can take a higher credit load at a lower rate.

Meanwhile, they pay their contingent faculty less for teaching those same courses, even though those courses carry the same credit as the courses taught during the regular school year, and tell the faculty that if the individual instructor is concerned with workload, they should just try to require less work during the summer.

I've literally heard representatives of the university administration say this to faculty representatives during contract negotiations.

What a mess.

And the consequences of all of this land on both the most at-risk students and the most contingent faculty.

[JanieM]

Thanks for the explanation, nous.

What a mess.

[wj]

What a mess.

Definitely sounds like it.

[nous]

I am fortunate enough to have a 100% academic year appointment (as DINKs) and can afford to be unemployed for the summer quarter. I refuse to take on a course where I am teaching the same material as in the regular academic year for less pay and no retirement benefits, while looking at a roomful of students who all need me to be as committed to their learning as I am during the other terms. It's not an ethically supportable situation.

[GftNC]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/03/15/joro-spider-facts/

I'm not an arachnophobe, but palm-sized spiders, no matter how pretty, are not my idea of welcome immigrants. YMMV.

[wj]

palm-sized spiders, no matter how pretty, are not my idea of welcome immigrants

On the other hand,

[They] may provide important ecosystem services, including biological control of crop pests such as brown marmorated stink bugs or spotted lanternfly, with which they have an ancient association in their native range in eastern Asia

I'm willing to cut an immigrant some slack if they help control other invasive species. That's a big part of the problem with invasive species after all: their natural predators didn't come with them.

Alternatively, I suppose, one might craft a virus (or something) which kills the invasive species but not native ones. Alas, I don't think that the technology is up to that level of precision yet.

[byomtov]

Quarters make no sense to me, based on my limited, but not non-existent experience as an academic.

Compared to semesters they add overhead, both for administrators and instructors, and the course itself feels rushed.

Is the point just revenue?

[wj]

Is the point just revenue?

Not precisely. The thought was that, if graduation takes 8 semesters per student, that's 4 years per student. But if it takes 12 quarters per student, that's an average of 3 years per student. Put another way, it's a 25% increase in capacity. You may have to hire 25% more faculty to cover, but you avoid the cost of land, new builds, etc. which that other capacity would otherwise require.

The university has, in theory, a requirement to educate a certain fraction of the state's (rising number of) high school graduates. So no particular increase in revenue per unit of output. But definitely a reduction in required expenses.

Neat solution. If only the students had been willing to enroll in equal numbers across all 4 quarters. Which, predictably, they were not.

[Hartmut]

The question with introducing predators to get rid of invasive species is, whether those will keep to their traditional diet or switch to easier local prey (the locals being at a potential disadvantge since they are unfamiliar with said predator).

[hairshirthedonist]

I DO NOT like spiders (or at least being around them - they're really interesting in an academic sort of way). But my part of the world is beset by stink bugs and lanternflies, so maybe I'll learn to share my space with these very large (f**k me!) spiders.

[JanieM]

With you, hsh. I figure one of the fairly likely ways for me to kick the bucket is running into a 3-inch fuzzy black spider...I won't say where.

Ew.

I don't think those new big ones are supposed to come this far north (yet).

[JanieM]

PS, i mean to say, running into a monster spider...and having a heart attack. ;-)

[CharlesWT]

I have always liked spiders. It's the insect world that bugs me.

[wj]

I can't say I'm particularly fond of spiders. But I vastly prefer them to flies. And, in the environs where I was raised, those were the main options.

Oh sure, we had flypaper. But it was far from adequate to the task -- except, perhaps, for a moderate sized room. Far, far better to suffer occasionally walking, unaware, into a web.

[CharlesWT]

My earliest memory of spiders, when I was about 2 to 3 years old, was watching a spider stalking a fly on a windowsill. Being on a farm in the '50s was to be constantly plagued by flies.

[russell]

I sort-of like spiders, although they also kind of freak me out. They're one of nature's more ghoulish killing machines, but everybody's gotta eat one way or another. In general spiders and I have a live and let live relationship.

All of that said, palm-sized yellow striped spiders that fly through the air on silken parachutes pretty much peg the "freak me out" meter.

Just saying.

[Girl from the North Country]

I approve of spiders, and try not to kill them (whereas I am a terminator with flies), but I'm not keen on going to bed with one in the room. So I do the trick of trying to trap one under a glass, then sliding cardboard under to make a floor, and then depositing them gently out the window. Smallish ones don't bother me at all, but big ones do a bit. And any spider under any kind of magnification that shows their eyes, and the way they move under slomo, kind of freaks me out. And I'm not crazy about walking into a web either - it probably makes me think of Shelob.

[JanieM]

I lived for several years on a bluff above Lake Michigan north of Milwaukee. Gorgeous house -- graced with centipedes the like i had never seen before and have never seen since. Two-three inches long inch-wide fuzzy legs, i detested them. They showed themselves mostly in host weather, once, for me, in the shower. Freak-out doesn't come close.

We talked to an exterminator at one point. He said, why do you want to kill them? After all, they don't bite, they're not dirty, and they eat other small animals, like spiders. :-)

[CharlesWT]

A couple I use to know was once driving through west Texas. The guy was dosing in the passenger seat while she drove. He wakes up to screaming tires from the brakes being locked up.

"What?!...What?!...What happen?!"

"There was a spider in the road! As big as a plate!"

[Michael Cain]

"There was a spider in the road! As big as a plate!"

Tarantula range is slowly spreading in Colorado as the climate warms. I worry more that warming means the elevation at which snakes can survive will increase enough to reach some of the lower passes, at which point some snake species will spread rapidly.

[wj]

I'm not crazy about walking into a web either - it probably makes me think of Shelob.

It may influence my (lack of) reaction to webs that I had a couple of decades experience with them before I encountered Lord of the Rings.

[nous]

I'll save the other thread for Ukraine stuff, though this has implications for Ukraine buried in it as well.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things

The more data sets that Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings. They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking: if we had to transition to avoid calamity (and obviously we did), we should go as slowly as possible. Bill Gates, just last year, wrote a book, arguing that consumers would need to pay a “green premium” for clean energy because it would be more expensive. But Emily Grubert, a Georgia Tech engineer who now works for the Department of Energy, has recently shown that it could cost less to replace every coal plant in the country with renewables than to simply maintain the existing coal plants. You could call it a “green discount.”

[wj]

This is precisely the opposite of how we have viewed energy transition. It has long been seen as an economically terrifying undertaking

Think of it as intellectual stickiness. Once upon a time, early on, it would indeed have cost more to switch to renewables than to just keep on. (At least, if you ignored the costs of climate change. Maybe because nobody could persuasively quantify them.)

Now, renewables are as cheap, and rapidly becoming cheaper. But most people's world view is stuck on the old view. To the point that, when the actual prices are shown, they rush to talk about the cost of, for example, installing electric recharging stations to replace gas stations. Without actually quantifying that either, of course, since nobody has a good handle on the real cost.

Not the only topic on which intellectual stickiness is a problem. (After all, what else is Putin's view on Ukraine's proper place as part of Russia. Especially the assumption that Russian troops would be welcomed as liberators.)

[CharlesWT]

It won't matter much how cheap renewables get if there's no way to cheaply store and release on demand vast amounts of energy. And renewables may become more expensive as they make greater demands on finite resources.

[nous]

Where in the article do you see a conflict with or a failure to account for the things that you are addressing in your response, CharlesWT?

[Hartmut]

But all that saved money will be lost profits for a very influential (and highly subsidized) industry.
At least in the US I see no way to get around that before it's too late (at least none not involving lanternizing, which should be avoided).

[Pro Bono]

In 2015, Jacobson wrote a paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that, on the contrary, wind and solar energy could keep the electric grid running...
...Time, however, is proving Jacobson correct: a few nations — including Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway — are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources...

This part is wildly misleading, or you might just say wrong.

The main source of renewable electricity in those countries is hydro, so this says nothing at all about the practicalities of running a grid on wind and solar. (And the statement is untrue anyway as regards Namibia.)

Wind and solar require storage on a huge scale if you're going to rely on them for most of your electricity generation, whereas hydroelectricity comes with its own storage.

[Hartmut]

A highly interconnected and very robust (and in most places transnational) grid is also a pre-condition, so natural fluctuation can be compensated. That's also a famous target/victim of NIMBYism.

[russell]

It won't matter much how cheap renewables get if there's no way to cheaply store and release on demand vast amounts of energy.

The fossil fuels we rely on as a way to store and release vast amounts of energy on demand begin life as a pile of black rocks, liquid goo somewhere between maple syrup and tar in texture, or flammable gas. Trapped in the ground.

What turns them into a way to do the "store and release energy on demand" thing is industrial and public infrastructure developed over 100+ years at great public and private expense.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"a few nations — including Iceland,"

That would be geothermal, not hydro.

LOTS of storage, but not exactly 'renewable'.

The energy storage vs. generation issue is exactly the same as supply chain "just in time" vs. "inventories".

Which can work great, when everything is in sync and behaving as it should; but with extra disruption when things go pear-shaped.

I blame the MBAs.

[wj]

Which can work great, when everything is in sync and behaving as it should; but with extra disruption when things go pear-shaped.

And that's whether they go pear-shaped due to natural causes ("acts of God") like covid, or deliberate sabotage (either acts of war or "normal" terrorism).

[byomtov]

The thought was that, if graduation takes 8 semesters per student, that's 4 years per student. But if it takes 12 quarters per student, that's an average of 3 years per student. Put another way, it's a 25% increase in capacity.

This is like claiming you can make the pizza bigger by cutting it into eight slices instead of six.

No matter what you do there is only so much instructional time available. Plus you're cheating by giving the quarter system three full years but giving semesters only 8/3. You can obviously get two semesters out of three summers.

[Michael Cain]

But if it takes 12 quarters per student, that's an average of 3 years per student. Put another way, it's a 25% increase in capacity.

Also posits that the summer quarter can be used productively. I've only attended one school on the quarter system. Calling the summer catalog lean is to be generous. For the graduate program I was in, there were zero classes. I suppose if I worked at it I could have found a professor willing to sign off on a self-study class, but that's not a full load for the quarter.

[wj]

This is like claiming you can make the pizza bigger by cutting it into eight slices instead of six.

Not quite. It's saying that, if you are using your facilities 9 months out of the year ("summer sessions" being tiny compared to attendance the rest of the year), you can use those facilities all year and get a capacity increase without building new facilities.

You could, I suppose, get a semester's worth of classes across the two sessions on offer each summer. But essentially nobody, me being an exception, did so. And, in my experience, doing a 1 semester class in a 5 week summer session results in poor learning. That may have been, in part, because it was second year calculus. But I ended up having to do an additional year of differential equations in grad school as a result.

[nous]

As the person having to plan those classes, I can assure you that the quarter is going to be less satisfying than the semester in terms of what an individual instructor can do. The average college course has, I would say, about eight to nine weeks of essential content. Trying to get someone to understand that content and rearrange their world to make room for it takes the rest of the time. Two weeks is not enough time for that, so a lot of the content from a quarter class never gets properly integrated and never transfers into long-term memory.

Students love information dense lectures presented in engaging ways that seem clearly organized and that make intuitive sense. That is the form that the quarter system dictates. The problem is that students actually learn less from those courses than they do from a sixteen-week course that is messier and that spreads itself over the edges of its knowledge domains into other areas.

The extra six to eight weeks of context and reconsideration and being forced to actually reckon with the subject are the ones that actually make the knowledge *yours.*

Good teaching makes bad business sense. Modern universities make bad teaching out of good business sense.

[Pro Bono]

"a few nations — including Iceland,"

That would be geothermal, not hydro.

Not so. Iceland uses a lot of geothermal energy for heating and hot water, but its electricity generation is mostly hydroelectric.

[wj]

So, nous, is UC still on the quarter system? Or did sanity return at some point?

[nous]

UC is a by-campus calendar. Berkeley and Merced are on the semester system, as are most of the Law Schools (to stay competitive for internship and clerking). The rest are still on the quarter system for the most part.

It’s a bureaucratic mess, but UCOP likes it that way because byzantine systems put power in the hands of the professional management class..

[Michael Cain]

Iceland uses a lot of geothermal energy for heating and hot water, but its electricity generation is mostly hydroelectric.

With lots still undeveloped. If the EU is going to get off of Russian fossil fuels, I wonder if they'll revive Icelink.

[wj]

It won't matter much how cheap renewables get if there's no way to cheaply store and release on demand vast amounts of energy

At the moment, driven by the arrival of a serious market (i.e. electric cars), battery technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Will it ever reach the point that it can store adequate amounts, to compensate for the intermittent nature of renewables? No idea. But given how technology improved unimaginably in other areas,** I wouldn't bet the ranch against it.

** To take one obvious example, I have a thumb drive plugged in to my computer. Actually, except for the plug, it's about half the size of my thumbnail. And it has more storage on it that could be held on a couple of floors of a large office building when I started my career. "Orders of magnitude" understates the size of the change.

[nous]

In the Sierra Nevadas there are people starting to build communities off-grid, using their electric cars as part of the backup system for their houses' power. A lot of them have had more power than they can use themselves while the people literally across the street have had their power throttled by weather related brown-outs.

In some ways that dynamic reminds me of the moment in microcomputing when people realized that a lot of slow, little computers working together could handle the same tasks faster and cheaper than a gold and liquid nitrogen super computer working by itself.

Time will tell.

[Michael Cain]

At the moment, driven by the arrival of a serious market (i.e. electric cars), battery technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Will it ever reach the point that it can store adequate amounts, to compensate for the intermittent nature of renewables? No idea.

With my old technology forecasting hat on, my intuition is that all of those car batteries will eventually play a significant role in grid storage.

I am -- or will be -- a poster child for it. A 50 kWh battery, the smallest Tesla sells, will run my 11 kWh/day household for four days. For the proper incentive, I'll happily take my grid usage to zero, or even be a provider, for a day. By myself, insignificant. A million of me, and it matters.

Note that the FERC has started laying the groundwork for this by allowing local utilities to sell demand reduction into the wholesale electricity markets ("negawatts"). The marginal generators, who were making a killing coming in when wholesale prices were spiking, are incensed. I seldom have nice things to say about FERC, but they got this one right.

[liberal japonicus]

The average college course has, I would say, about eight to nine weeks of essential content.

My graduate degree was at a school on the quarter system and I remember bitching about how poorly quarters were, but some friends who were in science suggested that for a lot of science courses, a quarter was just the right length.

Here in Japan, there are almost totally only 2 semesters and there is no way to squeeze in a summer term because various chunks of holidays are distributed across the year and a lot of admin tasks (like entrance exams) demand that the campus be cleared out.

However, in keeping with the good business=bad teaching motif, Right now, the various Japanese accreditation agencies
https://www.niad.ac.jp/english/unive/cea/organizations.html

demand that we enter teaching themes, content and goals for every lesson, which, in the uni schedule is once a week. I remember that the year this came down was also the year of the Tohoku earthquake, and all unis in Japan had to conduct earthquake drills. I mentioned in the faculty meeting that coming up with a weekly schedule is a bit foolhardy if I have to go out with my students and stand in a open field for disaster preparedness.

[wj]

My graduate degree was at a school on the quarter system and I remember bitching about how poorly quarters were, but some friends who were in science suggested that for a lot of science courses, a quarter was just the right length.

It's been a long time since grad school. We were on the quarter system, too. I don't recall any noticable difference in effectiveness between the Anthropology classes and the Mechanical Engineering classes. (But perhaps science and engineering courses differ from each other in this....)

[wj]

For the proper incentive, I'll happily take my grid usage to zero, or even be a provider, for a day. By myself, insignificant. A million of me, and it matters.

In that regard, California has long mandated that the utilities buy surplus power back from home (and perhaps other) solar arrays at market, i.e. retail rates. So I sized my array to get net zero cost across the whole year. Incentives work!

[Nigel]

Local distributed storage is one part of the solution, but there’s also a top down element.
A fully continental electric grid in the US and Canada, utilising long distance HVDC interconnects, would reduce the need for storage massively.

There has been a very large amount of work done on the feasibility of 100% renewables (mostly solar and wind) for energy generation. Even with existing technology, it is possible (though would take quite some time).

Europe has a harder job to do, as it doesn’t have as good renewables potential, but long distance interconnects with North Africa would solve that.

[byomtov]

You could, I suppose, get a semester's worth of classes across the two sessions on offer each summer. But essentially nobody, me being an exception, did so. And, in my experience, doing a 1 semester class in a 5 week summer session results in poor learning.

I think you still have a pizza problem. You're giving quarters the whole summer, and semesters five weeks. Why not a semester over ten weeks?

Now you have three extra semesters where maybe you take a light load.

Anyway, the problem seems to be, as you acknowledge, that enrollment is smaller in the summer quarter. Among other things, that means that some classes offered will have too few takers, which exacerbates the problem.

[Michael Cain]

But perhaps science and engineering courses differ from each other in this....

I remember a number of advanced math classes where the last three weeks of the semester were a slog for both the professor and the students.

[Michael Cain]

A fully continental electric grid in the US and Canada, utilising long distance HVDC interconnects, would reduce the need for storage massively.

That's part of the results in the DOE's Interconnections Seam study, overseen by NREL. Interesting that Trump's DOE held release of that work back until the House Democrats leaned on them. A smaller part is that even without long-haul HVDC, it appears that bulk transmission can substitute for a lot of storage. Plus more intelligent dispatch of generating resources.

[nous]

I remember a number of advanced math classes where the last three weeks of the semester were a slog for both the professor and the students.

Project based learning would alleviate most of that. The last part of the class should be taking the material and creating realistic scenarios that test the limits of understanding and force the student to apply the material in new, less straightforward ways.

That's where all the real learning and "transfer" happen. Everything up to that point is preparatory.

For science, it would also help to integrate some philosophy of science into the material in order to help the students think through the human implications of whatever is being studied.

I can already sense a number of my imaginary engineering students starting to fidget uncomfortably in their seats at the notion of these two suggestions, but I'm an old school liberal arts kinda dude.

[wj]

The last part of the class should be taking the material and creating realistic scenarios that test the limits of understanding and force the student to apply the material in new, less straightforward ways.
...
I can already sense a number of my imaginary engineering students starting to fidget uncomfortably in their seats at the notion of these two suggestions, but I'm an old school liberal arts kinda dude.

I rather think you do your engineering students an injustice here. Indeed, my class in Ideal Fluid Flows (i.e. assuming zero friction within the fluid) was structured exactly thus: the first half of the quarter devoted to the philosophy and equations involved. And the second half to a "project" involving using a computer to implement the equations and generate the streamlines from a combination of linear inflow and various sources and sinks.

Nobody seemed particularly distressed by this.

[nous]

To be clear, some of my best and most favoritest humans have been engineers, and several of those have been my students. But there is a subset of engineering students in particular that cannot think outside of any box without being given instructions for a larger box.

I get them during their first two years in college. Some get pat it. Some find work that requires less abstract thinking. Some don’t make it through.

But this particular group most certainly has representation in the classroom.

[Michael Cain]

Project based learning would alleviate most of that. The last part of the class should be taking the material and creating realistic scenarios that test the limits of understanding and force the student to apply the material in new, less straightforward ways.

I admit that I'm stumped about how to do that when the class is Real Analysis. Oh, there are uses for real analysis, but laying out the background may be too involved. I'm thinking about things like "derive the conditions under which this category of nonlinear optimization problems has a solution." (I ruined Nonlinear Optimization for the other students one semester because I had enough real analysis to drag the professor off on tangents.)

Just as a humorous -- for some of us -- anecdote, one professor had laid out his class to do what you say. The project assigned was to take everything we had learned in the first 13 weeks and write a program that implemented one of the key algorithms, dealing with the real life problems of finite precision, etc. Students would take turns talking about problems they were having during the classes for the last three weeks. Teams of two. My partner and I ruined it by recognizing that the problem was a perfect match for an obscure programming language we both knew, so we knocked the code out over the first weekend.

[nous]

I admit that I'm stumped about how to do that when the class is Real Analysis. Oh, there are uses for real analysis, but laying out the background may be too involved. I'm thinking about things like "derive the conditions under which this category of nonlinear optimization problems has a solution."

Yes. A lot depends on the instructor's ability to listen and to consider what the student needs to know about both the material and the world in which that material gains its meaning.

Faculty can always bring in some people to talk about their use of the skill in the real world to put the work into the human context of working on teams in professional environments with human constraints affecting how things get solved. Or the faculty member could focus on the sort of "habits of mind" that lead to success in whatever is coming next in the students' lives. I try to include a bit of that sort of "things I wish I had known as a first-gen college student" information along the way.

For many of my students that is more important than the material. They are already adept at teaching themselves (a habit developed by many coming from disadvantaged backgrounds), but they have a really hard time learning how to face struggle and failure productively.

Those things need to be given space in every classroom.

[wj]

But there is a subset of engineering students in particular that cannot think outside of any box without being given instructions for a larger box.

In my observation, there is a subset of human beings who can hardly function without a clear external structure. If one is not to hand, they will desperately seek out whatever cult, political movement, fundamentalist religion, etc. will provide it for them. (Once, they were common especially in the military. But the current military requires as much innovation and individual initiative as the outside world.)

These, too, are the population most upset with changes, whether to technology or society. They need external, and stable, structure to be comfortable. With time, most of them (although, alas, not all) can adapt to changes -- that is why, for example, gay marriage has move from a major culture war topic to, essentially, a non-issue. But it seriously upsets them to have to do so.

It is, as I say, a subset. Unfortunately, a rather large subset. College students tend to have a smaller portion than the general population. Whether engineering is closer to the norm, I cannot say. I suspect it depends, in part, on which kind of engineering. For example, I would be unsurprised to discover that civil engineering attracts a more consevative student body.

[nous]

I agree with your observations, wj, and in this particular case I was thinking of the hard quant algorithmic materialists. These are students adept at calculation and intrigued by particular types of tightly defined puzzles with known and knowable solutions. They are smart and clever, but not at all good with ambiguity, and a bit OCD about it. They are attracted to engineering because they really love the groundedness of it. And they absolutely freeze up and cease to function if asked to imagine anything that lies beyond their domain of things. They are like Socrates' giants that only believe in things they can squeeze.

Not a judgment, just a description.

There are plenty of other types that are antipathetic to imagination and hostile to ambiguity, but they tend not to land in the sort of math/science classes we've been talking about because they choose majors (business, some social sciences) that let them dodge it.

One does not get these types in the humanities, generally speaking, but then they end up being more untethered and too imaginative to work within practical parameters.

No need for a defense of engineers.

[liberal japonicus]

I don't recall any noticable difference in effectiveness between the Anthropology classes and the Mechanical Engineering classes.

Well, the program I was on was pushing people to finding a job in academia (though it is possible to get a job as a 'linguist' in other fields, you aren't going to find many job announcements for linguist), so when we took a graduate level class that wasn't expressly introductory, the aim of the class was to generate a paper that could be some day turned into a publication. 10 weeks is not a lot of time to get an idea of the lit in that area and develop an idea that can be turned into a paper that could someday be published.

This was 30 years ago, so take with a requisite measure of salt, but any program that seeks to have students go into that field to teach, I think you would have that problem.

[Pro Bono]

No need for a defense of engineers

Humanities students, generally speaking, have no clear idea of what constitutes good evidence for a proposition. The most dangerous are the highly educated ones who think their uncomprehending analysis trumps actual science.

But no need for a defence of humanities.

[nous]

Humanities students, generally speaking, have no clear idea of what constitutes good evidence for a proposition.

Heh.

And this is the reason why I remain an old school liberal arts dude.

My heart belongs to the well rounded generalists...at least at the undergrad level. Specialization is fine after that.

[...] any program that seeks to have students go into that field to teach, I think you would have that problem.

The absolutely dire academic job market being the other major problem. Academia really needs to be outward facing and publicly engaged in all of its pursuits.

[Michael Cain]

I know I'm explaining this badly. There are classes whose purpose is to prepare you to take more advanced classes. Real analysis, at least the way I took it, is one of those. Half the students in the class when I took it were graduate students making up a deficiency. Spend three weeks doing a cursory intro to, say, nonlinear optimization and looking at how that gets applied in real life, or finish the core material? Suck it up, buttercup, and slog through Rudin's measure theory material. You'll be better served in the long run. Doesn't make it fun.

Explanatory note. I took real analysis using Rudin's blue book. First published in 1953, most recent edition published in 1976, still in print and still used to teach classes. There's a certain cachet to having taken real analysis using Rudin. (I also survived a graduate semester of Moore method topology.) My copy of Rudin will be on my bookshelf when I die, even if I haven't opened it for decades. I looked this afternoon and the publisher makes a point that they now print it on acid-free paper -- ie, a new hardcover copy will last a century.

[wj]

My heart belongs to the well rounded generalists...at least at the undergrad level. Specialization is fine after that.

Amen, brother, amen!

[byomtov]

nous,

As a long ago math major, I'm going with Michael here. I don't see how you do "project-based learning" in, say, abstract algebra, or in a philosophy class in symbolic logic.

These things just go that way. Now, some math classes do lend themselves to practical application. But the problems and exercises in something like differential equations or stochastic processes usually at least hint at how the methods are applied.

[nous]

byomtov - two of my close friends have Ph.D.'s in applied math. Whatever lack of qualifications and experience I have in planning such a class, they more than cover. Both of them have always been full of ideas of how to emphasize mathematical thinking through hypothetical applications.

[hairshirthedonist]

I find that proving that irrational numbers are uncountable helps me really get back there around my wisdom teeth when brushing.

[Michael Cain]

nous -- I'd love to hear your friends' take on the question. Lots of my classes at all levels had applications that could have been used the way I think you're describing. I'm picking on one class in particular as representative of a small set.

Over the years I've skimmed multiple books titled something like "Real Analysis With Applications." The applications inevitably turn out to be proving the foundations for other math that's much more obviously real-world practical. Does that count in what you're describing?

I've had people ask me, "Why do we have to do the theory? Why can't we just jump into the algorithms?" And I tell them that theory is important, it tells us where the algorithms are likely to fail. Maybe that's an answer to my own question :^)

[wj]

theory is important, it tells us where the algorithms are likely to fail.

And, in particular, where the limits of the theory are. That is, where we know we don't know what is going on and should acknowledge that we are just guessing. (As opposed to the theory failing because we simply cannot support the measurement precision required by the theory.)

[wj]

I found this fascinating. As a way to address wealth mal-distsribution, it is an unexpected approach.
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2022/03/22/class-traitors-why-rich-bay-area-millennials-are-getting-rid-of-their-wealth/

a growing group of young, affluent, predominantly White Bay Area residents embracing wealth redistribution – a radical practice of giving that encourages people to disperse all of their inherited [wealth] or excess income. The idea is to spread that extra capital among people who don’t have enough, particularly in indigenous communities and communities of color.

These self-described “class traitors” are taking on the massive wealth inequality in the Bay Area, where thousands live without homes while others swim in tech-industry wealth.

Giving away inherited wealth will never catch on with the Kochs and the Mercers. So more will be needed there.

And isn't "class traitors" is an interesting self-description? Guess they know how the older generation will see what they are doing.