How not to win friends and influence people.

Most of the journals in which I publish require authors to make their data available, within limits, to anyone who asks for them for a least a few years after publication. A message that looked kind of like this one popped into my mailbox this afternoon:

Dear Angry Professor,

Some time ago I requested the raw data for the studies that you published in [Social Science Journal]. I didn't get a response from you and I am now asking for the second time. If you have decided not to cooperate at least you could acknowledge my email.

Yours sincerely,

[Some Stranger]

Well! First, I can appreciate this person's frustration, as I have myself attempted to obtain data from authors of other studies. It came as a surprise to me, naive thing that I was, that relatively few authors will actually comply with the agreement they signed in order to get their study published. I have only had success obtaining data from authors that I know personally. This is a problem that my professional organization, who publishes these journals, should probably deal with at some point.

However, imagine, if you will, someone asking for your data for a study you published, say, two years ago. Most of the software that folks in my discipline use to collect data generate output files in proprietary formats. Rendering "the raw data" in a useful format requires (based on my afternoon's activities) at least a few hours of digging through old files, rechecking and repairing machine and experimenter errors, and then generating text files somehow.

Having seen both sides of the "can I have your data" scenario, the very last thing I would do to get the cooperation of the person who must put in all this effort to send me the data is to fire off a rude email insinuating that the author was an unprofessional hack trying to hide something. I would first try to determine if my original request^* had been received. But then again, this is probably a perfect example of how electronic messages can lead to misunderstandings and bad feelings.

^*The original message, which was conveniently attached to this missive, also contained the remark: "Our goal is to verify, by reanalyzing your data, the substantive claims made in your paper." Gee, thanks. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Why should I feel bad?

Last week I made a quick run to the grocery store. I parked in the middle of the parking lot and, as I was getting my daughter out of the back, a little dog shut in the car next to me stuck her nose through the crack her owner had left for her in the window.

It was blazing hot, 92F according to my nifty dashboard thermometer. It was in the middle of a parking lot with no shade, nothing but asphalt. I was concerned.

I decided that I would wait to do anything until I finished my shopping. I went in, picked up my stuff, paid, and came back to my car. The little dog was still there, now looking very, very uncomfortable. I loaded the groceries into the car and then went back in the store. I told the service manager about the dog. She paged the owner. I went back to my car and waited.

And waited, and waited. I got out of my car with my cell phone, getting ready to call the police, when a store employee walked by. As I was explaining to her how concerned I was, the owner of the dog finally strolled, leisurely, toward her car.

I should have guessed from the lacrosse stickers all over the car that this woman was going to be out of my social class, and she was. She was tall, lean, drop-dead gorgeous, with perfect hair and teeth. She was an LSU student, a rising senior by the look of it, but definitely not a student who would be caught in one of AP's classes. She was accompanied by her big, beautiful boyfriend who hung silently off her arm like a giant accessory. She saw us, me, and got a look on her face that suggested that she had just caught a whiff of something dead.

The ensuing dialogue went something like this:

AP: Thank god. I was really worried about your dog.

Girl: (coldly) My dog is fine.

AP: No, she's very uncomfortable.

Girl: (yelling) I was only in there for three seconds!

AP: (yelling) No you weren't! I've been in, done my shopping, and come back already! I was getting ready to call the police!

Girl: (still yelling) I take good care of my dog!

AP: (yelling even louder) Right! It's 92 degrees out here! (Girl gets into her car, glaring. Big Beautiful Boyfriend is still silent.) Next time I'm just going to call the police!

I felt terrible, and embarrassed. I wasn't polite, friendly, or constructive; from my perspective, she didn't give me the opportunity to be polite, friendly, or constructive. I had just had a shouting match with someone in a parking lot in front of my young daughter (who loved every minute of it).

But the story doesn't end there. We both drove out of the parking lot and down the street toward campus. She kept glaring at me from her rear-view mirror. She drove past my turnoff, and I went home and drank a huge glass of boxed wine. I thought some about where she must live (all the students in my neighborhood shop at that grocery store) and whether or not she was going to appear in any of my classes next year.

I was working in my front garden on Saturday when a familiar little dog ran into my yard. Sure enough, at the end of her leash was Big Beautiful Boyfriend. Great, he runs in my neighborhood, I surmised. Let's try not to think about how close he and she must live to me. Maybe a few blocks to the north, where all the student apartments are?

Last night I was walking my own little dog when Big Beautiful Boyfriend stepped out of his house with her little dog. He lives four houses up the street from ours. He's a good friend to friends of mine, who live next door. I know he's a decent guy because they've told me about him and how nice and helpful he is. He looked at me as if I was something he just scraped off his shoe.

I guess I'm just going to have to move.

The dog days of summer.

As an undergraduate I chose to attend LGU (Land Grant University), which was conveniently located in my home town. The beginning of summer there was heralded by the appearance of thousands of blue corduroy jackets stitched in gold: the young Future Farmers of America descended on the campus en masse in mid-June and departed again just as quickly by early July.

My previous institution, ILU (Ivy League University), celebrated the beginning of summer with Bible camps. I arrived to work early one morning to find the entire quadrangle covered with youngsters reading their Bibles in utter silence. The presence of so many humans in one place had driven away all the birds and small animals that usually occupied the quad, and the net effect was like walking into a sound-proofed room. My shoes made unholy clicking noises on the sidewalk as I tried to shuffle my sinful self through these hundreds of pure and certainly virginal scholars.

My present institution, LSU (Large State University), marks the beginning of summer with Freshman Orientation. The size of the incoming class is usually so large that Freshman Orientation takes place in shifts right up until August. Groups of two (Mom and Brandon/Kaitlyn) or three (Mom, Dad, and Brandon/Kaitlyn) move slowly through the campus walkways like little globs of bad cholesterol. Brandon/Kaitlyn always looks impatient, but grateful that s/he doesn't have to suffer orientation alone. Mom is always reading off times and locations from a printed schedule of events, and Dad is always at a dead stop, looking fiercely at a campus map while juggling at least one big plastic bag filled with LSU paraphernalia from the campus not-a-bookstore.

I used to be annoyed when I couldn't walk briskly along my chosen sidewalk. I used to tremble in grim anticipation of having Brandon as a student, after watching him and his parents, standing in front of a big sign declaring "University Hall," argue loudly about which way was University Hall. Now I am a little more charitable, because I know that will be me with my little Kaitlyn in not very many more years.

But I still wish they'd get out of the way. I have summer to enjoy, damnit!

No wannoo.

"No wannoo" is my daughter's favorite phrase. She says it frequently these days, usually when told that now is the time to change the diaper, take a bath, brush teeth, take a nap, come in and eat dinner, etc.

I agreed to serve on a dissertation committee for a man who audited one of my graduate-level courses a few years ago. His department renamed itself a few years ago to try to escape the stigma of their "science," but let's call it what it really is: Home Economics. Most (but not all) of the research in that department consists of poorly rehashed psychology, marketing, and food science. One of my colleagues made the mistake of agreeing to serve on a Home Ec committee right after she arrived here. She reports that the candidate had, among other grievous errors, misspelled more than one of the words in the title of his dissertation, and proudly reported p-values greater than 2. She was the only person on the committee who found fault with the candidate, and so the candidate was passed and received his Ph.D. She filed a grievance with the Graduate School and sent a copy of the dreadful dissertation to the dean for his perusal. Because of this kerfluffle the Graduate School now requires a unanimous vote for any candidate to pass.

When the Graduate School asks me to serve as the external member on dissertation committees, something we are required to do at least once a year, the offerings from the Home Ec department are the second ones that I cross off the list (right after all the offerings from the College of Education). So why did I agree to do this one? I just don't know. I was cornered, trapped, insane!

This gentleman would like to defend soon. But he doesn't just want me to show up at the defense, ask a few questions and then walk away. He wants me to read and comment on the rough draft of his dissertation. There's a message to this effect in my email box right now, staring at me, not blinking.

NO WANNOO! NO WANNOO!

There oughtta be a law.

I was once given the opportunity to spend a day in the company of a group of hemispherectomy patients. All of these patients were kids, and all of them had the procedure as a last-resort treatment for intractable epilepsy and other seizure disorders. It's easy to describe my experience: it was just like spending the day with any other group of kids. It's important to stress that none of these kids were disabled in any obvious way. Some of them had some lateralized weakness and some of the left-hemisphere patients had mild to moderate aphasia. The older the child was at the time of their surgery the more noticeable were the effects of the surgery. The littlest kids were completely normal. What a triumph of modern medicine this group represented! And what a testament to the amazing plasticity of the human brain!

I'm a huge fan of modern medicine, and, like any groupie, I hang around holding my breath in anticipation of what those wonderful M.D./Ph.D.s are going to do next. So it was with dismay and disgust that I listened to one of my colleagues a few weeks ago, when he came to me for help with his stepdaughter.

His stepdaughter, age 18, suffers from intractable seizures. Her neurologist planned a standard two-stage procedure: first, invasive monitoring of the seizure focus via surgical implantation of electrodes, and second, surgical resection of the focus. My colleague and his wife were strongly in favor of this approach, believing it to be his stepdaughter's best hope for improvement.

Enter his wife's ex-husband, who practices a particularly kooky and distasteful flavor of Christianity. This particular flavor of Christianity is opposed to surgery of any kind, even in life-threatening circumstances. (For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. Mark 8:35.) Mr. Kooky convinced his daughter that the time had come for an alternative approach.

That approach began with a meridian stress assessment, wherein a bogus electrodiagnostic device is placed on the patient's "meridians" to detect "stress" in different organs of the body. Mr. Kooky found a "licensed" practitioner in our state, someone who, strangely enough, refused to see patients in his office but preferred to see them in his home. This "medical professional" diagnosed some interesting problems in my colleague's stepdaughter that all her physicians somehow overlooked. Apparently her seizures were being caused by stress in her gall bladder, and also in her cranial bones. Her cranial bones needed "adjustment," and he prescribed massive daily doses of GABA (which is a factor in epilepsy) and a vitamin supplement STRSPLX, which seems to contain mostly large quantities of B-vitamins, according to the closest matches in the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database.

My colleague needed help. He had already called our state's attorney general and his local law enforcement agency, and had been told that unless they received a complaint from the victim patient or the patient had been injured there was nothing they could do. He and his wife decided that their best ally was going to be their daughter herself, who, at age 18, was old enough to listen to reason. So I pointed him to the Quackwatch website, and downloaded everything I could find to combat the utter nonsense that she was being fed by her father and his quack.

This story has a happy ending. Thanks in large part to Quackwatch, the young lady took charge of her own medical decisions. She was admitted to the hospital last week and the electrodes were implanted successfully. Her resection will take place shortly, and she has every reason to expect her condition to improve as a result.

The sad epilogue, of course, is the charlatan with a voltmeter who still sees patients in his livingroom. I wish there were a hell, so that people like him could roast in it.

The click of death.

I lost my hard drive last week. Thanks to my rsynch OCD I lost no data. Every loss being an opportunity, I decided to upgrade from Redhat 8 to Fedora Core 3.


I've been able to fritter away two whole days reinstalling and updating software. Now it's time to get back to work. It was fun while it lasted.

I couldn't let this one pass.

In response to this post, Anonymous writes:

Boy, for a professor, you come off rather childish. I understand having a bad day, but this makes it look like you care more about students being there so they can stroke your ego than you care for their education.

It's one thing to announce, at the beginning of a course, that there will be some number of pop-quizzes scheduled randomly throughout the year that may come at any time between the beginning of the lecture and the end of the lecture. It's quite another to punish an otherwise good student because she couldn't read your mind one day.

Lectures exist so that students can learn material. The way you present this episode, it seems that the materiatl is little more than an excuse to lecture. I guess it comes down to this: are you teaching your students useful material or are you teaching them to punch in?

Anonymous, there is a difference between a punishment and a reward. I rewarded the students who were in class that day. No one got punished; no one had points subtracted from their grade.

As for the ego-stroking part of giving a lecture, it is clear that you have never had to give one yourself. Let's not even discuss the hours of preparation that go into a 50-minute lecture nor the public speaking anxiety that a lecturer has (I have) to face every day, nor the fact that my lectures are delivered to students who hate the material I am presenting (cf. public speaking anxiety), but let's talk about the interactions an instructor has with those students that don't go to class.

If you don't go to my lectures and choose to learn it on your own, that's fine by me. You're paying for my expertise and my assistance in learning the material, but if you'd rather struggle through it without my insights then go for it. But then don't come to me later and ask me to regurgitate my lectures for you because you realized too late that you needed my help. There are other students who do come to my lectures who need my help during office hours and they will get my first priority. Perhaps someday you will teach a course and then you will understand the frustration I and every other instructor feels when someone asks, "Did I miss anything?"

Finally, the original post was a marvel about courtesy. In a small classroom, when getting to the door requires that you push past half your classmates and whack each of them with your bookbag, walk between them and the blackboard or between me and the blackboard, and results in furniture reorganization and door slamming, if your intention is to leave early you should (a) inform your instructor because she is not a television set and watching you leave is is both hurtful and anxiety-provoking, and (b) sit near the door.

I do care about my students' educations and I am there to present the material that they need to succeed in their chosen professions. If I didn't care, I wouldn't give a shit about any of this: walking out, not coming to class, and who does or does not receive extra credit.

I hope I cleared all that up for you.

Gotta love the quarter system.

All my grades were entered yesterday. So far, I have had no complaints from disgruntled slackers.

But here's the best part: I don't have to show up in a classroom for 106 days. That's almost 1/3 of a year. How cool is that?

A peaceful end to the year.

I taught two courses this quarter, Stats I and II. Stats II is often filled with graduating seniors who have put off this particular required course until the very last minute. This is a dangerous strategy, as several of my students can attest.

One young man, a 7th-year senior with the remarkable distinction of having been on academic probation almost continuously throughout those 7 years, failed in the last quarter of his financial aid eligibility. And yes, his loss of financial aid and inability to graduate ever was entirely the fault of Angry Professor.

Another young man disappeared on or about the 7th week of a 10 week quarter. He failed, having not turned in his last three homework assignments and having failed the final exam. Again, this was entirely the fault of Angry Professor and the course TA: he had asked, back in week 7, what his grade was. The TA had, after a quick look at the spreadsheet, told him, "About a C." So he took off.

Things got ugly after final grades were reported. The TA and the student and I each come from a different racial group. The student accused us of conspiring against him, for racial reasons, to prevent him from receiving his justly-earned diploma. If he had not been told he was receiving a C he would have worked harder in the later weeks of the class. He contacted the chair of my department who, when provided with the course syllabus and the grade sheet, told him that he was being ridiculous. I assume he attempted to appeal his case to the dean, but I heard no more about it. I was a little bit nervous making my way to and from my car for a while, though.

This year all my seniors passed with high marks.

Some people don't deserve to live.

I picked my daughter up at her school this afternoon. While standing in the playground and chatting with one of her teachers, we witnessed one of the most cold-hearted, deliberate acts of cruelty I've (we've?) ever seen.

A mother drove away and left her four year old son standing in the parking lot. Drove away. Deliberately. The little guy screamed and screamed. My daughter's teacher ran out into the parking lot to help him, and he screamed "My mommy drove away and left me!" The teacher led him back into the building, while I and another (real) mommy watched for her return.

She didn't come back. I had to leave; I hope the police got involved.

Update: She came back. Apparently her son had closed the car door without getting in, and she drove away thinking he was in the back seat. She drove several miles before realizing he wasn't in the car.

In the interests of not accumulating too much negative karma, I take back my righteous horror. I hope that I will never be so stupid, but chances are pretty good I will be. Just yesterday I slammed my daughter's finger in the door.

Pre-exam jitters?

Before yesterday's final, Mr. Do-over sent this message via e-mail:

Greetings Professor,

I was wondering if you could could meet me for a few minutes sometime before [exam time]. I will walk anywhere you need me to. Thank you.

Now, this is either a few minutes in which I have to listen to some sort of sob story and request for special treatment, or not-even-close-to-a-few minutes in which I am supposed to crash-tutor him in the material to be covered on the final. Given only these two possibilities, I decided not to respond. I feel bad about it, but it was an act of self-preservation.

In which I exact my revenge.

I just wrote a killer final for my problem class. Absolutely killer, a definite sheep-from-the-goats exam. I feel only slightly guilty about it.

On the other hand, for my other class, I wrote a final for which they all should kneel down and kiss my big pink butt. I don't think they'll even need to be awake to pass it.

Finals today, grades over the weekend, then I'm done, done, done!

Let the doors be shut upon [them], that [they] may play the fool nowhere but in [their] own house. Farewell.