Bruker Training

Bruker training went well. I was able to confirm that we can trust the results we're getting for Dr. Li's silicon spheres; they're not too rough of a surface. Though I should sample from the side facing the x-ray detector just as an issue of general practice.

They also recommended shutting the PC running the detector each night, or at least every once in a while, to 'purge' the memory, that might undo our scale bar problem, where the scale bar is correct in the first image, but that first bar is carried through to all other images. They also suggested making sure that a particular checkbox for communication between computers was checked. Indeed it was.

I got to see a lot more of the features that we have with the machine, especially the reports writing feature, which looks like it could be useful, and the quantification feature, which looks pretty powerful, much more so that I suspected before. I had really thought of the machine as especially useful for mapping and qualitative analysis. So this was a real eye-opener.
The course of course also was very informative on the physics of x-ray analysis. It combined lecture and lab work. There was an interesting set of people attending the program, one guy who is an art preservator from the Smithsonian, two guys who work for Bosch out in Michigan I think, and a researcher from VA Tech. Interesting range of jobs that are using x-ray analysis and the SEMs that they operate along with.

The class was in Ewing, NJ, which apparently was right next to Princeton, but I didn't get out to see the campus. The other people did and they seemed to have enjoyed it. I ended up in Trenton one or two nights, but the area I was in one night looked pretty sketchy, so I had to bail out on dinner there that night.

I did get to eat some good indian food (chicken tikka masala and somosas) for takeout one night, and some good hungarian/polish (chicken paprikash and perogies) food another night too. The weird thing is that my GPS device sent me to two different locations for indian food where there weren't any restaurants at all, before I finally got to one.

Funding Came through

Funding came through for the Bruker training and the OSM, Dean DiLorenzo's office had the funding and was able to give permit its use for those trips.

So I will be attending the Bruker X-ray analysis training in Ewing NJ, this month.

I am also attending the 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) in Orlando Fl, this year. I will be giving a presentation on our Middle School Students Ocean Science and Technology program, our Oceanography Summer camp program. The meeting looks like it will have many other talks about outreach and education in addition to plenty of research talks.

Prof. Christensen and Cathi are doing a poster on the Deep Earth Academy (formerly Joint Oceanographic Institutes) classroom activities.

CollegeNow Meteorology

The issues with CollegeNow have been cleared up and I am teaching Meteorology to around 25 high school students. I say 'around' that many because the first day only 14 showed up, today, the second day, only 20 showed up, and the roster has 25 on it. The classroom wasn't unlocked today, and I was caught in traffic so the students were waiting outside for about 25 minutes before I showed up. Had to get people in the office to open it up. I filled out a card for keys after class. There aren't any textbooks for the students yet either and we won't meet again until the 11th of March. They have off for a week for Presidents Day, and then I am at training and a conference until then.

Apparently there is a problem with the course code or section, so they haven't been able to set it up on blackboard yet. I don't think I am going to bother with that anymore. The school has a license for a wiki, so I am going to have the students try that out. It could make for some interesting assignments for them too (create or edit the page on Tornados, edit the page on Dew point, provide citations for the page on weather maps) as well as allow them to coordinate their projects with one another.

Mr. Li's Silica Spheres

We've been fortunate enough to have someone from industry come in to use our SEM. Mr. Li has set up an account with us and I've been operating the SEM for him on a set of samples that he's made. We've had two sessions so far and it seems to be going well enough, he seems to be happy with the results we've been getting. We're actually scheduled to meet again next week on the 19th.

Mulitple Events

Funding for a Bruker training session in Feb and the OSM in March may not be available, which is disconcerting since I've spent $400 to register for OSM. I had been told that it would be acceptable by the department chair, and at the same time was going for SEM training from JEOL. For that training, I filled out an expense report and applied to have it refunded. Apparently I should have applied to encumber funds before doing anything. So I didn't encumber funds for OSM, thinking I would apply for reimbursement, and now there are no more funds available in the department.
Fortunately, there are external funds (from the college still), that had been encumbered for another person to use, however they were unable to use them. There was enough in that deal to cover both of my trips, IF it can be switched over to them. Hopefully it can. They are checking with Dean DiLorenzo to find out of this is workable.

Earlier in the day I received a phone call regarding CollegeNow. They were checking to see if I could be ready for a Meteorology class on Thursday. The problem was that I hadn't talked to my Chair about it, and it seems to me that any instructions regarding something like that need to come to me through him, since this is his department. I didn't think that there would be any problem, but still, I'd need to talk to him before actually starting it. Especially since we're in a wintersession, and the college class wouldn't start until afterwards, in the spring session. However, the Chair asked if I'd like to do the class when I met with him today, so that clears all that up. They're going to get off to an odd start however, since I have those two trips to go on in the beginning.

I also made contact with Mr. Li. He had originally be one of the candidates for the position that I have. He know works for a plastics company. They have some material, apparently its a plastic with silica grains embedded in it that they'd like to look at using the SEM. I was able to speak with him today and he'll be stopping by at around 11 on Thursday.


As a further note, I just started receiving payment in the last two weeks for the KECSS Astronomy class that ended last year. At least they are coming through now.

SEM Issues

I was working on our SEM the other day I decided to look at an electron-mirror image of our machine. I had an uncoated fossil specimen in the chamber that was charging, so I magnified tightly in and let it charge up some more and moved around to built up a big charge while at 50 kv, and then dropped down to 2kv. I didn't get a great electron mirror image but it was there at least, looking like as if I had been shrunk down and was standing in between the teeth of the fossil specimen, looking around at the specimen chamber. One that that was particularly neat was that I could see parts of the charged specimen, and the other specimens on the multi-sample holder. The image of our Backscatter electron detector was severely warped however, I was actually worried that it might've actually been warped at some point, but later on when I exchanged specimens I could see that it was perfectly fine.

The problem is that when in Backscatter imaging I should be able to see all parts of the detector as bright objects, however, half of one of the halves of the main chip (not the shadow chip) was dark. This must indicate a problem. I am going to have to contact JEOL to try to find out what can be done.

Porphyritic Basalts without Coverslips

I've been looking for the above for use in both traditional light micrscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes. I had some difficulty finding vendors when searching under 'geological thin sections', but someone in a google group suggested searching for petrographic thin sections, which has yeilded some good results. So far I've emailed

mineralopticslab.com - minoptic@sover.net
nationalpetrographic.com - npsinc@flash.net
tulsasections.com - samples@tulsasections.com

I'll hold off on contacting any others until I get some responses.

Attempts at Organization

Today I attempted to organize S302 a little better, unfortunately I still don't have permission to move around too many of the larger items in there. I had hoped to get to assemble the lap-table today too, but there is some question of whether or not I should be doing that or standing by for any SEM issues. Clarification is pending.

Spoke with Prof. Ericco a bit today, seems like he has pretty much got things handled in terms of his EPS38 lab and Astronomy lab. I mentioned the Enrichment Cluster Astronomy course, he seemed bemused by the idea of inductive learning.

I was able to sort through the five overhead projectors that we have in the prep room, and pick out one new-ish and functioning one to set aside for our section. I don't think that anyone actually uses overheads in the department anyway, no one that I've talked to does. I'm just waiting now on confirmation that I can get rid of the remaining four. There's a lot of wasted space in the prep room, it could become pretty functional with some effort. Apparently the person here before me went through a real herculean effort to get it to this level, so I can be thankful for that.

SEM 'school' has become a priority, so I will definitely be going to that. Should be interesting. I think that starting next week, since there's a long break in classes this week, I will be logging in a lot of co-pilot time at the SEM.

I didn't get in touch with the people organizing the CollegeNow Oceanography program, left a message at their number though. I will have to just bring in the syllabus tomorrow and see what happens.

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Feast

The wife and I went to a feast this evening with Gigi in Port Washington. It was a bigger feast than I'd've expected. Casino tents, long rows of food tables with meatballs, sausage and peppers, fried calimari, zeppollis, corndogs, etc. The old gravitron was there. I wonder if there's just one of them owned by one carnival company, or a whole bunch? I suspect that perhaps its just one or two, that most of these carnival rides are just built for specific use during a short period of time, and that new designs come out after a season or two.

We decided to book a trip to Disney next week. Gigi's brother works there, and can get us free tickets to all the parks. Her grandmother also has a little house near it that we can stay at, so we'll just have to cover airline tickets and food and the like.

SEM School and conferences

Profs. Goodrich, Connolly, and Weisberg are hoping that I can attend an SEM 'school' session, from the 13th to the 17th of November. I can almost certainly find people to cover any setup that I can't prep in advance for the regular courses, but I am not too sure about what to do about the CollegeNow and Enrichment Cluster courses. Hopefully someone can be setup to cover them. We'll have to check in with the Department Chairman.

I got a call from one of the people involved with the CollegeNow program, and they're going to want a syllabus Monday, so I will have to work that out this weekend.

Start of Classes at KCC

Today was the start of classes at Kingsborough. I had come in on Tuesday to meet with Dr. Goodrich to set up for today's labs. It was a straighforward setup, the students would just be doing some exercises to either introduce or re-introduce them to the metric system. When they actually showed up to do it today, it was interesting because almost everyone had trouble with it. In the first lab session, only one student finished, but they made some odd mistakes on the units in their calculations. Whats interesting though is that the Middle School kids from the summer program seemed about as familiar with the metric system as these college students, if not, perhaps a little more familiar with it. Both the Middle Schoolers and college students had about as much trouble with the problems as one another though. In one session, a couple of students seemed extremely dismayed by the lab, and were concerned that the rest of the year was going to be as difficult. In truth, it will almost certainly get more difficult, or at least much more involved. They seemed concerned about having to do 'formulas and stuff'. I tried telling them that any science course is going to involve at least this level of difficulty, so if they're taking the course to fulfill a science requirement, then it might not make sense to switch out. They thought that the rest of the class would involve looking at 'rocks and stuff like that', which might've lead them to think the course would be 'easy'. I told them that it'll be up to them if they want to stay in the course.

I recall the first day of classes being hectic as a student, and it appears to be just as hectic for the profressors. I think that the schedule for the day had only been finalized the night before, if not this morning. One class, an Oceanography class, was supposed to be instructed by one professor, but, as it turned out, they had to teach a course at a different college at the same time, and couldn't do the oceanography course. When I walked in this morning, I was told this, and I think it had just been revealed to anyone this morning anyway. They asked me to be ready to go over to the class so that there'd at least be someone there for the first day. Turned out to not be necessary though, as another professor was willing to take the course over.

I'll also be instructing an Oceanography course through the "CollegeNow" program, where high school students take a college level course. The professor that is teaching the regular Oceanography course doesn't have much of an oceanography background, so we are going to be collaborating on creating a syllabus. The CollegeNow students would be doing the same stuff that the college students are doing. I'll also be instructing in an Astronomy course at the highschool on campus, as part of an "Enrichment Cluster". The students will have to create a set of presentations for an assembly at the end of the semester. Neither of those will start this week however.

An interesting first day. I can't tell exactly how much the rest of the year will be like this. I sat in on the lab classes and helped out, only having to leave for a while to meet with people connected to the Astronomy and CollegeNow programs. But for the most part I'll just be setting up lab course materials. The other classes that I am responsible for, the professors don't have any lab materials yet that need to be set up, that will come in for later labs.

Final Day of Summer Program

Today was the final day of the summer Oceanography program at Kingsborough. The program was definitely a success. Torwards the end, I was asking students if they'd do it again if the program was offered next semester, everyone that answered said yes, and one kid even wanted the forms for it now. If it's done again, there's a chance it will be expanded. This was a $300k grant, next time it might be as much as $900. That will probably mean more kids. If its done again, hopefully a boat can be requisitioned earlier on.

The major problems during the program were a result of lack of planning, not at the pre-camp stage, but during the actual operation of the camp. None of us were camp counselors, so we had a steep learning curve to deal with while the camp was going on. Things worked out, but this meant that there was a lot of stress going around. A meeting, at least once a week, or heck at least once, with everyone, the instructors and college assistants, would've gone a long way to preventing most of that, I believe.

KCC Summer Program

I've been able to get a job working at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. I will be working on a special project wherein Middle School Students from around Brooklyn are brought to the campus to attend a summer camp. They'll receive two periods of instruction and science oriented activities, with physical activities in between and after. The program will run from around 9 o'clock, when they get breakfast, until around 5, when their last physical activity is completed. The college is also working on getting sailing ships for the kids to go out on,where they can perform oceanographic experiments.

College Lab Technician Position at KBCC

I've been able to get a job as a College Lab Technician at Kingsborough Community College, within the Department of Physical Science. Specifically, I'll be setting up labs for the Earth and Planetary Sciences section. So I'll be a CLT at KBCC in EPS. The job also includes responsibilities related to the maintenance of the department's Scanning Electron Microscope. Fortunately I had a course on Adelphi's SEM this past semester.

Wedding

Today, 6/2, was the day of our wedding. I am adding this post well after the fact. Everything went well, excluding the preist forgetting my name, and even using the wrong book at one point for the ceremony. The reception was excellent. The next day, we went to my new wife's parent's house to have a family party, and that was very nice too. We went to the Yucatan, the Riviera Maya, for the honeymoon. The honeymoon was great. We thought we lost my wife's wedding Thaali necklace after packing for the flight home, but luckily, after getting home, we found it in with out luggage.

More ex-Moderator Lamentations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.