Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Thursday, April 26, 2007

This is always an interesting part of the year in academia. As things wind down in terms of the academic year and students are closing this chapter of their lives there's cause for celebration for some, frustration over unfulfilled expectations for others and the transition from the old to the new.

In some ways this is the best time of year. For me personally, I have had the satisfaction of receiving messages from a few former students who are graduating from their four year institutions and getting ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. That's a really gratifying part of my career; seeing students that I helped prepare go on to achieve their goals and start to change the world for the better. In addition, I get to enjoy seeing the students who are finishing up here get excited about moving to the next school and the next challenge. Sometimes they're scared about the future but I have enough perspective and I know them well enough to know that they'll do well at their transfer institutions as long as they don't forget the lessons they learned here about hard work and focusing on academic priorities.

For many though this is a very stressful part of the year. Some students are trying very hard to salvage a year that held a lot of promise but hasn't turned out as well as they had hoped. There's a lot of pressure on them to climb out of some hole or another they've dug for themselves. For others they're trying to deal with the disappointment and grief that comes from failed dreams. They came here hoping to do well and they know that for whatever reason they have failed to achieve that goal. Some will spend time coming to terms with this failure and will earn and grow from it. We'll see those students again in the future after they've cleaned up their mess and reorganized their priorities. Others are still in denial or have given up hope. These are the students who have stopped coming to class and have become problems in the dorms and apartment complexes around town. It's sad to see them flail about thinking that they have nothing left to lose when they have so much to lose from their short-sightedness.

Finally, this is a time for transition. Already we are preparing for the first New Student Orientations here for next fall's incoming students. Just after my final grades are turned in with the triumph and frustration they will represent, I'll see a batch of new students with hopes and dreams and expectations. So many of these will not line up with reality. I wish there was some way we could get some graduating students to encapsulate their experiences in a way that could be communicated to our new, incoming students. The problem is that every time we try, it seems that the students we select want to talk about where the best parties are and who to take and who not to take for classes based on what's easy instead of what's being learned. Sometimes it seem like those who end up in our student leadership positions don't understand the responsibility they have to represent the College and its mission. For some reason, the sophomores that see this don't volunteer to speak and the one's who don't want to recruit as many new students to their limited way of seeing and thinking as possible.

As further evidence of the yearly transition taking place, as we are concluding this year's business on the Faculty Senate I'm in the process of getting my Cabinet together for next year. As one one set of issues in resolved for the time being, there are new issues beginning to become visible on the horizon. Will the College really grow at the rate some are suggesting; from 3500 to 8500 in the next 5-10 years? If it does, how will we manage the growth from a physical plant perspective (classrooms, housing, dining facilities, local community support, etc.)? How will we insure that the faculty will have a strong voice during this period of rapid change? How will we insure that students have continued access to high quality instruction and relevant student activities? How will we create a strong sense of what our College is? Will we become a McCollege with little to distinguish us from 100's or even thousands of similar institutions? Will we become another Atlanta Metro area commodity that is consumed and forgotten like yesterday's Big Mac or will we be able to become something that is considered a resource, an opportunity and a treasure by those with whom we interact?

In this time of endings and transitions, I find my mind turning to these sorts of questions.

Thanks for Reading.

Labels: School, Students, Transitions

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Well, we now have clear and irrefutable proof that the system that is supposed to ensure fair and impartial testing of athletes in olympic sports and the world and national level is broken.

A little background.

Last year Floyd Landis tested postive at the Tour de France (which he won) for an elevated testosterone to epitestosterone level in one of his urine samples. In a cross check, the lab that ran the test said it found traces of synthetic testosterone int he urine and Landis was suspended. Landis appealed showing clear evidence that the lab may have mishandled his samples and definitely did not follow protocol in dealing with the samples and in releasing the results. His claim is that the lab can't establish a cler chain of custody nor can it say the sample was even his due to mislabaling errors. From what I've been able to determine, the lab also violated protocol by having the same technician analyze both the initial sample and the cross check sample.

From what I can tell, Landis has a case and his appeal is a worthy one. The problem that became clear fairly quickly is that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its American counterpart (USADA) weren't really interested in looking at the evidence that Landis' legal team presented. It seemed that he was guilty and all the rest was legal speak. After a lot of fighting Landis got certain evidence admitted that was pretty damning for the French lab involved. At an arbitration trial however, it was decided to test all of his other samples for synthetic testosterone. This is a clear violation of an athlete's rights as it is only permissable to retest if the first test came back positive. The arbitration panel didn't say whether the results would be admissible at the appeal hearing, leaving that legal sticky wicket for another day. Landis' team said that if such tests were to be performed that they should be performed at a different lab than the French one that first did the tests due to conflict of interest. They recommended a lab in Los Angeles which has a proven track record of being the best at this particular test. For a variety of reasons WADA refused to do this.

Well, the results became public today. The bad part is that they weren't supposed to. The results were supposed to be confidential but someone leaked them to L'Equippe, a French sporting newspaper with strong ties to the Tour and WADA. No one knows exactly who did the leaking but it doesn't matter. In addition, one of the conditions of the test is that Landis' own experts were to be on hand to supervise the testing of the samples to make sure that protocols were fallowed along with representatives of the lab and USADA. Landis' experts were barred from parts of the testing procedures in clear violation with the arbitration panel's decision. So know one on Landis' side of the case knows exactly how the tests were done and they have only the lab's and USADA's word that the tests were done correctly. The worst part is that the urine is destroyed by the tests so now Landis can't have any independant testing done.

What does this say to me as a cyclist? Things are rotten in France and in WADA and in USADA. Why should you care? These are the organizations that test all athletes in all sports to see if they're clean. I'm a strong supporter to strong drug policies but I don't trust any of these organizations anymore. Floyd Landis may or may not have drugged. The problem is that the lab and WADA through their incompetence has made that impossible to determine. Who says there isn't some anti-American bias among lab techs in the French lab. The anti-Armstrong bias in the French lab was well documented and the animus towards American riders surely carried over. I'm certain that the French were tired of seeing American riders take home all their best trophies. That year along LAndis won the prestigious Paris-Nice, Levi Leipheimer won the third more important stage race in France, the Dauphine, and Landis won the Tour.

It's time for Landis and all cyclists to sue the hell out of WADA and the French lab in a court of the European Union. Of course, I'm not sure it will do any good as the Europeans seem to have their own concept of justice.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Several readers of my Facebook account to which this blog is imported have inquired about my Mom's health over the last few days so I thought I'd write up an update and a few other thoughts.

For those who don't read about my life over on my Facebook profile let me bring you up to speed. About two weeks ago my Mom coughed up blood a couple of times over the course of an evening and a morning. As she is suffering from COPD (basically a combination of emphasema and chronic bronchitis) she decided it would be a good idea to see her pulminologist to make sure this wasn't a problem. The doctor, having a sense of what might be going on I think, took an X-Ray and found a large mass in her left lung. What followed was basically a week's worth of tests and biopsies to determine the exact nature of the tumor and its location. Initially, the news was pretty dire I guess: large cell tumor iint he upper lobe of her left lung right on top of a major pulminary artery. The location of the tumor seemed to make it inoperable and the type of tumor made it a poor candidate for chemotherapy as did my Mom's COPD. The treatment was going to be radiation to try and shrink the tumor but the survival rate past one year was pretty low (40% I think).

As she was being tatooed in prep for her radiation treatments, the supervising oncologist came in and told her and my Dad that things might be a lot better than he had hoped. From the latest PET scans, it looked like the cancer might not have invaded the major pulminary artery and they might be able to take part of her lung and get the tumor. So she was scheduled into surgery on Friday. The doctor told her and my Dad that it was 50/50. She was scheduled to go in at 7:30 am and the doctor said that if he was done by 9 am it was bad news-the cancer had invaded the artery and they couldn't remove it.

I spoke with both my parents on Thursday night and I could tell that my Mom had a real peace about everything. On Friday morning I kept checking my phone here at work and as the hours ticked by with no message on the voicemail I began to get excited. At 2 pm my time (12 or so Salt Lake time) I called my brother and got word that the doctor hadn't come out to see them with bad news. My Mom was still in surgery. The surgeon ended up having to remove her entire left lung as he kept finding cancerous cells all through its tissue. Fortunately, he didn't find any in either of the lymph nodes associated with the lung which was fantastic news. Right now the physicians are all cautiously optimistic that they got everything.

While I haven't talked to my Mom as she was in ICU until late last night, the word from my Dad is that she's doing very well. They have her sitting up and doing a variety of breathing exercises to make sure her one remaining lung is strong enough to provide all the air she needs. Apparently she's begun taking in small amounts of solid food which is very good indication that she's on the road to recovery.

To everyone who has been praying for her, my Mom and I say thank you. I think knowing that there were so many praying for her helped her to find the peace that the apostle Paul talks about that "passes all understanding."

For me personally this has been an interesting time. When my Mom initially called me to tell me the news, I could tell what it was going to be from the moment she spoke. I could hear it in her voice. Like many who have been given the diagnosis of cancer, she couldn't tell me the news bluntly, as if she was afraid that by telling me how bad it might be, she might make it worse for herself. My wife and I had gone through this ten years ago when her father was given the news that his cancer had metastisized. Her parents had called to try to tell us and they couldn't just come out and say it and we were left with the impression that things weren't as bad as they were. This time, I sort of assumed the worst, especially as my Mom talked about radiation. They never told me about the chances but from the sound of my Mom's voice I knew that they weren't very good.

To be honest, I had been waiting for that phone call for twenty years. My parents have both smoked since their years in high school and that was fifty years ago. I know the some of the science and most of the statistics related to smoking and cancer. I knew that it was a matter of time before there was a phone call. The funny thing was that it came just like you might expect in the movies: late at night just as I was falling asleep after a long day during a long week. After we hung up I just sort of sat there and let it all wash over me. I wasn't really sad or angry or anxious but sort of resigned. I had prepared myself for twenty years for this one phone call and had played all of the scenarios out in my mind. Of the ones I had imagined, this was pretty benign. I was still able to talk to the affected parent; there hadn't been a stroke or massive heart attack that stole them away nor was the diagnosis a "two weeks to get your affairs in order" kind of thing. That may still happen but it hadn't happened that night. I began to think of how I would try to spend some time with her as soon as my school responsibilities allowed. The only thing I got really frustrated about was my work situation. If I taught at a K-12 school, I could have the school find me a sub and I could go out for the surgery to be there to support my Mom and my family. If I was at a larger 4-yr institution with other physicists then they could have covered my classes for me. However, like most of my colleagues at 2-yr colleges, I am the only one qualified to teach my subject and we must meet so traveling out to SLC was problematic to say the least.

So I did what I could over the phone and that was good. My brother lives in town there so he was able to help out a lot and I really appreciate what he did. We're still trying to figure out how to get out to SLC over the summer to see my Mom and everyone else but for right now I'm very thankful that things have turned out so well to this point.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, April 13, 2007

As the "War in Iraq" drags on and more people who are either in leadership roles or who have loud voices begin to question the war, a sadly expected debate has begun to occur.

For many people of a particularly conservative nature the arguments about remaining in Iraq become less and less about achieving a specific set of objectives and more and more about this sort of amorphous idea of "supporting the troops". Many of these folks equate supporting our continued military presence in Iraq to supporting the men and women who put themselves in harm's way. In their minds, if you don't support our military actions then you don't support the troops who undertake them.

For those who wonder if we still, as a nation, live in the shadow of the Vietnam conflict, this should clear that up right away. Back in the early 70's, many who opposed the Vietnam War also disparaged the troops. It was only after a time of national reflection on the war and the counting of the cost of that confusion that we realized, as a nation, that the young men who fought there were upholding their commitments to this nation and our national anger about the war had been misdirected at them. In the 80's, we as a nation decided in sort of a collective sort of way (probably subtly led and encouraged by Ronald Reagan and his administration) that we would no longer subject our troops, our fellow citizens, to such abuse. This, in my opinion, was and continues to be a very good thing.

The problem now is that there are those who wish to bring up the same arguments against those who don't support our military action: if you oppose the war, you must be like those nuts in the 70's who didn't support the troops and you don't support the troops. I find such an argument pathetic. No where has there been the mass reviling of our troops, even though they have committed some pretty atrocious acts. Our troops still enjoy broad support from those on both sides of the issue.

To those who question whether those who don't support the war support the troops I only have one thing to say: Knock it off! Don't use some emotional knee-jerk tactic to deflect criticism of the war or how it's been executed. There are good reasons for our military to be in Iraq; start explaining them clearly and stop impugning the patriotism of those who demand those explanations or who don't accept them at face value. What you're doing is once again entangling our men and women in the military in a political issue just like the war protesters of the 70's did. It was wrong then and its wrong now.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

More about doping and pro cycling...isn't that why you read this blog?

So, former Tour de France winner (1996) and current CSC team manager/owner/sporting director Bjarne Riis was recently accused by a former teammate (from the time when he rode for the T-Mobile team with Jan Ullrich) of using performance enhancing substances during his years as a rider. When Riis was asked about the accusations he didn't deny them but instead told folks to stop digging around in the past. In some quarters he has been pilloried for this stance but I have to stand up and say "Bravo". After my last post about Jan fessing up, why would I do this?

You have to understand that when Riis won the Tour in '96 the use of EPO was beginning to run rampant (the same is true for Ullrich when he won the '97 Tour). Only two years later the Tour would be rocked by what was then the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports when the Festina team was found to be carrying EPO in the team car. It seems pretty clear to me that just about everyone was doping. Several ex-cyclists have written or spoken about the atmosphere at the time that held that if a cyclist were truly professional they were expected to dope as a matter of course. Riis (and Ullrich I believe) were products of this culture and they acted accordingly. There are reports that Miguel Indurian quit the sport after a famous falling out with his team director because he refused to take EPO after losing the '96 Tour to Riis. Big Mig, it was whispered, was not "professional".

After Riis retired at the end of the '97 season he spent a couple years out of the sport and then returned in 2000 as the sporting director of a new team. His goal was to do things differently and he signed the American company, CSC, as the title sponsor and enticed French cycling icon Laurent Jalabert to join the team. Jaja had just left the ONCE team (which would become Liberty Siguros) because of a falling out with his sporting director Manolo Saiz (who was later caught red-handed by the Operation Puetro investigators holding bags of blood attributed to several of his riders). One might speculate that this falling out had to do with Jaja's level of "professionalism".

Riis, I think wanted to build a team atmosphere that was free of performance enhancers and built on trust betweent he riders and the directors (which is why Jaja ended up riding for him). Actually, I think he has done exactly that. CSC has been among the best teams in the world and from all indications, it's riders have ridden clean. The one exception may have been Tyler Hamilton and he left the team in a really unexpected move that may have had a lot to do with Riis' insistence that he work only with team doctors rather than a doctor in Spain that seemed a little shady.

So what I think Riis is saying is, "Yeah, I doped. Things were different then and not in a good way. Right now I'm working hard to change things and move our sport out of a culture where doping is encouraged and/or required. I'd much rather talk about the best way to do that than to discuss what's in the past that can't be changed." Truth be told, I think Riis is a great guy to do that. He's seen the underbelly of the sport. I'll bet that when he looks at his yellow jerseys he feels a sense of regret that he didn't win them clean. I'll bet he would like the riders under his supervision to avoid the dilemma that he faced and the compromises he ended up making. He's implimented some of the best anti-doping practices for his team and has been one of the strongest advocates of a DNA testing procedure to determine a rider's innocence or guilt when the time to prove that comes.

Sometimes it takes a person who has been downt he wrong rode to understand what it takes to keep from going there. I sincerely hope that's the case with Bjarne.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

This blog is for those of you who don't get enough cycling coverage already...

So Big Jan Ullrich is on the sauce...his own sauce. DNA tests have matched him up with nine bags of blood keep by a Spanish doctor he denied having any involvement with. His lawyers now say that just because he had his blood at a doctor's office it doesn't mean he was going to put it back in his body the day before a big race to boost the oxygen carrying capacity of his blood to give him a big performance gain.

Riiiigghhhttttt! (Say it in your Dr. Evil voice for best effect.)

A guy just keeps nine bags of red blood cells at a doctor's office in a country he doesn't even live in just in case he happens to be stricken with rampant hemophilia while on a Barcelona bender? I understand Der Kaiser's lawyer is also selling beachfront property in Berlin for those who might be in the market.

Jan doesn't read this blog (though he should) but I'm going to give him a piece of advice anyway: Jan, follow the lead of David Miller and come clean. Co-operate with the cycling authorities. You don't have a lot to lose and you might actually be remembered as something other than a huge cheat. Tell your lawyer to shut up and man up to Sam Waterston in some television interview Law and Order style. He'll have some hottie ADA there to back him up and to provide some eye candy and you can have a heartfelt breakdown and blame it on cycling culture and Pevenage and the Belgian cycling mafia and the East German sports machine and all the rest and say that you wish you were half the man Jens Voight was. You can agree to give up the labs and the doctors you worked with in exchange for Waterston "taking the needle off the table" and spend the rest of your life in a self-imposed purgatory. Maybe even you can go around to German high schools and tell aspiring German cyclists to just say no to drugs and doping and to race locally for the fun of it. You can tell them how you were led down the path to perdition in the world of pro cycling where the drugs flowed like water in an underground river: treacherous and cold. You can tell them about a world were winning is everything and fairness is not getting caught.

A least, that's what I think you should do.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

I'm a geek. This is something I'm rather proud of at times. I'm a bike geek, a weather geek, a physics geek and, most of all, an astronomy geek. One of the geekier things I do is look for extraterrestrial life or at least help the Seti Institute do it. I've been a part of the Seti@Home project off and on since its inception. When I taught in Kansas, I had most of the computers at the college I worked at crunching away through the night when there were no studnets around. When I moved to Georgia, the policies were a lot more restrictive so I sort of let it go. I'm a geek but I like to be an employed geek so that was that.

Things have changed here over the last few years and I was finally givven some administrator rights to the computers in my physics lab and to my desktop machine. On a whim I decided to see if I could download the Seti@Home client and run things here. Lo and behold, I was able to! So for the last six months or so I've been crunching merrily away and this last weekend passed the 1,000,000 credit mark. Very cool to do my little bit. The great thing is that it doesn't take too much work on my part and the computers get to crunch all the numbers they want, which I know makes them very happy. The best part is that their not boring integers they're getting to crunch but high precision real numbers handled with floating point operations. Very tasty.

Of course, what I'd love to do is build a processing farm with several of the rumored to be coming eight processor Intel Macs but I doubt that'll happen anytime real soon.

Anyways, that having been said, I'd just like to also point out how great it is to be a Florida Gator. Another National Championship for the Orange and Blue boys. Pretty awesome accomplishments and I get to tease all my students who are UGA fans. We beat them in everything related to a big sport this year so that's been cool. Who knows, maybe the baseball team will get inspired and wim the College World Series.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, April 02, 2007

Well, it was a pretty good weekend. I finally, after many attempts, got my 100 mile ride in for the month. I've been stopped by screws, weather and darkness but Saturday everything worked out. I got decent weather with a moderate wind that help out a lot over the last 25 miles into home. I was able to do the ride in under 5 hours which is good for a solo effort at this point. Last night when I tried to do a trainer ride, my legs weren't too much into that but that's to be expected. All in all, last week was a really solid training week and I finally can see some form off in the distance.

Yesterday we finally got some rain to knock some of the pollen down but the air mass that's still in place is super humid so we've had fog today. I guess there was a big accident involving a couple of semis out at the interstate because of the conditions.

This week is going to be very busy with work and church activities leaving me with only Tuesday evening to get errands done. The nice thing is that things should ease off after Easter and once that happens it'll be just a couple of weeks until finals and some well-earned rest for both me and my students.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |