I think I've done a decent job of keeping myself from going back to my old discussion site. I want to participate, but I have to resist going back. It just won't work out in the end. A human brain is very good at tricking itself. You'd think that an individual actor can't deceive itself, that it'd be logically immpossible to con yourself into doing something, but it certainly does. I keep thinking, "I will log back on to see if there are any messages for me" or "Maybe they changed their minds" or "I should just go back and participate as normal". I went back once of twice to get particular, specific information from two threads from the past, without engaging in discussion or logging on. But the minute I did that I set about looking around. "Any mention that I'm not a mod" I'm thinking to myself as I search the recent discussion thread titles. Nope, none, which isn't surprising. Then I see that there is already a new interface, a totally revamped frontpage, which was in the works while I was still there, and a re-worked 'member page'. The intention had been for a while to make the member page, which had your profile, into something more like a myspace page, for social networking. So now it displays your recent threads, recent tags, etc, along with the ususal account information. There's also a comments section, where people can leave messages if you've activated it (which it isn't on mine), and a "Friends" list and a "Foe" list. I have to say I am surprised at who's on which. The Foes list, for one thing, I short. And at least two of the people on it seem to have taken it seriously, they're people that I know strongly dislike me. I'd've thought that people would take something like that in a tongue-in-cheek manner, but apparently some people are really wound up.
The friends list illustrates what was so great about that place. "I'm just this guy, see", just a normal, average dude. But on the friends list, there's a bunch of people that I either wouldn't know in real life, or that I wouldn't know in the same way. There's a proud muslim. Knowing muslims is hardly a rarity, but I'd've never had the conversations with that guy that I did if I knew him in real life. They're either socialy inapropriate, or simply the oppurtunity for them just doesn't come up. There's a Thelemite who's a master of occult practice. Maybe I do know someone in real life who is that, but I'd never actually know that they were. There's a hard core brother who doesn't take no shit from nobody. Again, not a rarity, but how much interaction would we actually have had just passing on the street or working in an office? Most people my age already have a set of friends and they're not looking to bring many new people in. And who can really have anything other than a superficial discussion while inside of an office or in the lab or at class? There's a fun and fiesty chick from puerto rico, which I knew before she said she was because she even writes in an accent, so occurs thats where she's from. There's a mason who's simply a master of arcane knowledge, taking tributaries from all the underground streams and traditions. There's shriners, conservatives, the irreverent, the pious, black nationalists, pan-arabists, jewish nationalists, rude bollywood gyals, jews, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. And, again, this is just the tiny list of people from the board that actually marked me down as 'friend', rather than 'foe'. In other words, its a small sampling of the types of individuals that you'd encouter and engage in dialogue with there.
It sure was fun while it lasted.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Second Day of Prep
I arrived at Dr. Farmer's Paleoceanography Lab at Hofstra this morning to start a second session of specimin prep. All went well enough. There were still a few samples that were either lost, or that seem to have too little material in them to be useable. I went back to the first day's worth of prep and collected the ones that also looked like problems. Between tomorrow and the next day I will finish the normal picks, and then also re-do the problem samples. With all that, I should have around 36 samples crushed and ready for the final day of preparation.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
New York City Teaching Fellowship
NYC has a programme in which people who have academic degrees, but no teaching certifications, can get those certifications. If you're accepted into the programme, you're put quickly to work in a NYC school, teaching a subject you are qualified for, getting paid as if you were a regular hire, and after about a year you get the certification needed to be a teacher.
I applied to the program, not expecting to get into it. Infact, I applied on the very day of the deadline. There's only a limited number of positions, and thousands of people try to get them. By some miracle, I've been able to advance to the Interview stage. Their website has some paperwork that I need to fill out, and I'll have to decide what category and grade level I'd want to be considered for. I need to schedule the interview for early next week, I think, if I'm going to hope to have any chance. Even then, it seems unlikely that I'll be accepted, its the end of the process, they've certainly filled most of their positions, and might just be interviewing a large number of people, in part to find a small number of the best applicants to fill in the final spots, and probably also to keep a 'buzz' up about the program.
I applied to the program, not expecting to get into it. Infact, I applied on the very day of the deadline. There's only a limited number of positions, and thousands of people try to get them. By some miracle, I've been able to advance to the Interview stage. Their website has some paperwork that I need to fill out, and I'll have to decide what category and grade level I'd want to be considered for. I need to schedule the interview for early next week, I think, if I'm going to hope to have any chance. Even then, it seems unlikely that I'll be accepted, its the end of the process, they've certainly filled most of their positions, and might just be interviewing a large number of people, in part to find a small number of the best applicants to fill in the final spots, and probably also to keep a 'buzz' up about the program.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Thesis Proposal
Part of the process of doing a Master's Thesis is proposing the project. It is an odd requirement, since by the time you're presenting the propsal, you're already heavily invested in the project. That goes double for me, since I've proposed my project in the middle of the same semester that the thesis itself has to be completed.
The presentation went well, started at 4:30, with the process of doing a power point presentation and then a question and answer period lasting a little more than an hour. In the week prior I had written up the thesis proposal itself, which ended up being only 5 pages of actual text.
I presented to Dr.'s Christensen, Farmer, Coombs, and Russell, who together make-up my Thesis Committee. I'll have to defend the thesis before them at the end of the semester. Dr.'s Christensen and Farmer of course I am working with, and Dr.'s Coombs and Russell are professors from the department. They did seem genuinely curious about the project, which isn't to surprising. The details of my project are barely within the normal confines of biology, at least here. It seems like everyone else here is doing a genetics project, running PCRs, gels, etc. And then I come in with what looks like spoonfuls of sand 'but I assure you, they're fossils'. True enough, these professors have heard of Foraminifera, and surely are aware that they're marine protists that extend pseudopodia outwards to pick up food particles. But be damned if I've got to deal with actual living ones. These things are dead as dirt. Literally, they've accumulated as dirt. Most biologists tend to think of biology as involving things that were at least relatively recently living.
This idea actually seperates biology into two overly wide domains. Pale-ontology, and Ne-ontology. Everyone in the department here is a neontologist. If they haven't killed it themselves, or known the guy that did kill it, they don't want any part of it.
Fortunately they looked past any of that, I was genuinely concerned that there would be objections to it for being too much of an environmental studies programme sort of project. Dr. Christensen prepped me well for the presentation, I was at least able to prevent myself from trying to speculate too much and rather just admit that I don't know the answer to a question. Speculation, it seems, can be too easily received as bullshitting.
I suspect that the actual thesis defense will be a much more rigourous process. I don't expect to have the thesis accepted right off the bat; that's relatively rare. Equally rare is to have it completely rejected. What normally happens, or so I read, is that revisions are requested, and the degree is awarded sort of 'conditionally'.
One of Dr. Christensen's previous students, from another University, infact has been through many revisions. He defended his thesis before I was even in my Master's programme, and he's been going back and fort with revisions ever since. This is while already being accepted into a PhD programme.
I can't really even consider thinking about the revisions at this point, I just have to work on actually finishing the data collection and writting the initial, pre-defense, draft, first.
The presentation went well, started at 4:30, with the process of doing a power point presentation and then a question and answer period lasting a little more than an hour. In the week prior I had written up the thesis proposal itself, which ended up being only 5 pages of actual text.
I presented to Dr.'s Christensen, Farmer, Coombs, and Russell, who together make-up my Thesis Committee. I'll have to defend the thesis before them at the end of the semester. Dr.'s Christensen and Farmer of course I am working with, and Dr.'s Coombs and Russell are professors from the department. They did seem genuinely curious about the project, which isn't to surprising. The details of my project are barely within the normal confines of biology, at least here. It seems like everyone else here is doing a genetics project, running PCRs, gels, etc. And then I come in with what looks like spoonfuls of sand 'but I assure you, they're fossils'. True enough, these professors have heard of Foraminifera, and surely are aware that they're marine protists that extend pseudopodia outwards to pick up food particles. But be damned if I've got to deal with actual living ones. These things are dead as dirt. Literally, they've accumulated as dirt. Most biologists tend to think of biology as involving things that were at least relatively recently living.
This idea actually seperates biology into two overly wide domains. Pale-ontology, and Ne-ontology. Everyone in the department here is a neontologist. If they haven't killed it themselves, or known the guy that did kill it, they don't want any part of it.
Fortunately they looked past any of that, I was genuinely concerned that there would be objections to it for being too much of an environmental studies programme sort of project. Dr. Christensen prepped me well for the presentation, I was at least able to prevent myself from trying to speculate too much and rather just admit that I don't know the answer to a question. Speculation, it seems, can be too easily received as bullshitting.
I suspect that the actual thesis defense will be a much more rigourous process. I don't expect to have the thesis accepted right off the bat; that's relatively rare. Equally rare is to have it completely rejected. What normally happens, or so I read, is that revisions are requested, and the degree is awarded sort of 'conditionally'.
One of Dr. Christensen's previous students, from another University, infact has been through many revisions. He defended his thesis before I was even in my Master's programme, and he's been going back and fort with revisions ever since. This is while already being accepted into a PhD programme.
I can't really even consider thinking about the revisions at this point, I just have to work on actually finishing the data collection and writting the initial, pre-defense, draft, first.
Monday, March 05, 2007
De-modded
I ended up being de-modded today. I had been participating on a discussion board since July of 2004, and had be selected to be a moderator on it a while into it. It was a great old time. Wonderful discussion that you just can't have anywhere else. And a variety of people that I'd've never met in my lifetime. I had been getting heavily invovled in a series of conversations about Holocaust Denial on the board, these kinds of conversations aren't, to say the least, dispassionate. One of the peopel running around promoting the nazi propaganda that the holocaust didn't happen/wasn't that bad/or that the jews themselves did it, sent me a long private message, through the board system, attacking me and picking a fight. I send him/her back a short, to the point, beautifully vulgar response. Hey, if they want to pick a fight, I'm not one to dissapoint. But it was one of those moments when you realize right afterwards that it wasn't a good idea. Some of the other nazis that had swept onto the board, and this sort of thing does tend to happen in waves, and it does tie into the Iran Holocaust Conference which at least brought up the idea in the public spotlight again, had been complaining that I was too 'mean', both in the complaints section and also just openly in the threads. Apparently, these people aren't 'sensitive' enough to not rant that the jews were the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the holocaust, but are 'sensitive' enough to bitch and moan when someone frankly disagrees with them. So not too long after having sent the private message I get another one, from one of the three board administrators, quoting my vulgar reponse to the member and informing me that I wasn't going to be a moderator anymore.
What could I say, they were right. As a moderator I represented the board's administration. I thanked the administrator for even letting me a mod for the time that I was. But I can't continue on on the board now. I really loved the board, but I can't even justify to myself anymore spending that much time on it without being 'on staff'. True enough, it sounds silly to refer to a discussion moderator position as a staff position, but we, as mods, were part of the organization, and we did help it move along and advance, outside of normal moderation duties. THe board had grown a lot in the time I was there, and I at least like to think that I contributed to it. Everyone participating on the board did contribute, but I like to think that those of us working as moderators were a part of it, in addition to being contributing participants.
It was great to have all those intruiging interactions with completely different people, to learn from their nearly alien worldviews (infact, a person or two would occasionally claim to be an actual extraterrestrial alien), and to have my own ideas challenged. Thats not something that you too often get in regular life. The people that I personally know aren't, in the end, all that different from me. They're mostly from the same region, living similar lives, and operating in similar manners. But there, you'd be mixing it up with someone who's family was in the Iraqi Insurgency one moment, debating UN policy with people in post-communist era countries the next, or listen in on a debate between a master mason and a Thelema devotee before getting a good lecture on US monetary policy. And usually one of those guys or gals would also be trying to explain a paranormal event that had happened to them, or posting a possible (if improbable) UFO sighting photo that they had taken.
Alas, thats just going to have to be a stage that's over for me now. If I go back to participating as a member, I'll allways be wondering about whats going on in moderation and administration. And in all honesty it'd be almost too painful to watch from the sidelines as the board continues to grow and expand, as it certainly will. And while I was a moderator, I held my tongue. I held back, because we had a certain amount of responsibility in that position. Without that responsibility, who's to say how long it would be before I was booted off altogether? That'd be a bad experience, and it'd, in a way, make at least the time between being demodded and this hypothetical future booting, something of a waste.
All good things come to an end.
What could I say, they were right. As a moderator I represented the board's administration. I thanked the administrator for even letting me a mod for the time that I was. But I can't continue on on the board now. I really loved the board, but I can't even justify to myself anymore spending that much time on it without being 'on staff'. True enough, it sounds silly to refer to a discussion moderator position as a staff position, but we, as mods, were part of the organization, and we did help it move along and advance, outside of normal moderation duties. THe board had grown a lot in the time I was there, and I at least like to think that I contributed to it. Everyone participating on the board did contribute, but I like to think that those of us working as moderators were a part of it, in addition to being contributing participants.
It was great to have all those intruiging interactions with completely different people, to learn from their nearly alien worldviews (infact, a person or two would occasionally claim to be an actual extraterrestrial alien), and to have my own ideas challenged. Thats not something that you too often get in regular life. The people that I personally know aren't, in the end, all that different from me. They're mostly from the same region, living similar lives, and operating in similar manners. But there, you'd be mixing it up with someone who's family was in the Iraqi Insurgency one moment, debating UN policy with people in post-communist era countries the next, or listen in on a debate between a master mason and a Thelema devotee before getting a good lecture on US monetary policy. And usually one of those guys or gals would also be trying to explain a paranormal event that had happened to them, or posting a possible (if improbable) UFO sighting photo that they had taken.
Alas, thats just going to have to be a stage that's over for me now. If I go back to participating as a member, I'll allways be wondering about whats going on in moderation and administration. And in all honesty it'd be almost too painful to watch from the sidelines as the board continues to grow and expand, as it certainly will. And while I was a moderator, I held my tongue. I held back, because we had a certain amount of responsibility in that position. Without that responsibility, who's to say how long it would be before I was booted off altogether? That'd be a bad experience, and it'd, in a way, make at least the time between being demodded and this hypothetical future booting, something of a waste.
All good things come to an end.