Solidarity for Sderot

I don't know how anyone can watch this, knowing that in the last three years 3000 rockets have landed in civilian areas, and carp about "disproportionate response."

Hamas needs to be defeated, now.

Merry New Year

I had a marvelous week with my wonderful kids and I miss them already. We were able to squeeze everyone into the condo and had way too much food. It was a great Christmas. My dad cut down one of his trees for me (he's growing trees to sell) and it turned out to be an attack tree--I've never had one with such sharp needles! Then again, it was VERY fresh. Eldest Daughter had to use leather gloves to put the ornaments on. It looks very nice in the corner and it is still gulping water down which is good. We won't take it down until after Three Kings Day.

Now it's easing back to work. Today I revised a conference paper and sent it off to my co-authors. Now I'm waiting for their responses and revisions so we can get this puppy submitted. In January I have two other conference papers to write, so I will be pretty busy.

In the "Well, what do you know about that?" category, I got nominated for a teaching award. I have a bunch of stuff to hand in for it, like a statement of teaching philosophy and evals from the past two years (hey, I happen to have those!). The competition for these things is fierce and I don't expect to get it, but it's cool to be nominated.

Youngest Daughter did very decently on her SATs and won't take them a second time. Now starts the applications and campus visits. We have one scheduled for the end of January and one in February for her top two choices. We are starting to amass things she will need as she goes off to college, and I called the condo landlady today to amend the lease. I've got it until the end of September 2009; after that, it's commute time again between HomeCity and UniTown, with some nights crashing at the parental palace. No way I can afford to pay rent AND tuition, since I am one year shy of the tuition exchange benefit. Dang. My timing is always off.

Only one more day of 2008 left. We don't really do anything for New Year's. I might invite the parents over for dinner during the day, but otherwise I plan to work on data for one of the conference papers. Saturday I get to see Alma Mater U's team in their first bowl appearance. I am so psyched!

Merry Christmas early

and birthday wishes to A and M!

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends. Silly me, the menorah I bought in Jerusalem is defective--it only has seven branches. I have to prop the candles up, they are a tad too small for the holders.

My boy is here, having made the long journey from the South successfully (although with a fortuitous detour to UniTown instead of HomeCity). Eldest Daughter will fly in to HomeCity tonight. Then the festivities begin!

Blogging will be non-existent this week as we are all together (sort of) and I will be enjoying my kiddos.

In the meantime, read this cool article on the link between the Shuttle and Imperial Rome.

Happy Birthday to my sister!

Here's hoping for many more happy days.

Good and bad

Random stuff:

• Got a conference paper accepted (I'm third author).
• Almost done with Christmas shopping
• I'm hosting my family's Christmas at the condo. Oy, what was I thinking?? It'll be a great Christmas. Squashed, crowded, but great.
• I've got way too much to do, and it's making me scattered. Gotta focus better and plan this gift of a quarter out. It's already Week Three!!
• We are going on two campus tours this spring as Youngest Daughter gets ready to go off to real college. Fun stuff.
• I got a new work laptop. It has Matlab on it!!!
  

Jonah Goldberg on Blagojevich

This is so good--go read the rest:

For the more historically minded, it’s a time for nostalgia. The past comes alive as Chicago’s grand tradition of corruption is sustained for another generation. As the Chicago Tribune once wrote, “corruption has been as much a part of the landscape as corn, soybeans and skyscrapers.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, as of 2006 — when Blago’s predecessor, George Ryan, was sent to prison for racketeering — 79 elected officials had been convicted of corruption in the past 30 years. Among the perps: 27 aldermen, 19 judges, 15 state legislators, three governors, two congressmen, one mayor, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a stolen pear tree. Especially in this holiday season, it’s so very important to keep traditions alive for the kids. In a sense, Blago did it for the children.

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats — self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years — explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him — and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic “culture of corruption” storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end.

I got tagged

on the "Five Things" meme.

Just in case my tagger checks up on me and publicly chides me, here they are:

Five things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. Taking care of my three wonderful, amazing, fantastic kids (hey, they are going to pick my nursing home!)
2. Finishing up my master's degree
3. Working as a consultant
4. Playing piano for church
5. Buying our first new car in eight years.

Five things on my to-do list today:

1. Read materials and rank nominees for a scholarship award (done)
2. Take Youngest Daughter to and from school
3. Go to a meeting
4. Work on research database
5. Revise lecture for Monday

Five snacks I love:
Only five??

1. Dark chocolate Pocky
2. Those chocolate-covered coconut squares Son buys me
3. Chocolate teddy grahams
4. Graham crackers and milk
5. Oreos

Five things I'd do if I was a millionaire:

1. Pay off my kids' school loans
2. Build my dream house
3. Donate a bunch to Convoy of Hope and Teen Challenge
   
4. Give all my kids money so they can come home whenever I want them to
5. Invest the rest wherever my friend Robert says I should
   

Five places I've lived:

1. The Poconos, PA
   
2. Niagara County, NY
   
3. Philadelphia, PA
   
4. Albany, NY
   
5. Erie County, NY

Five jobs I have had:

1. Consultant
   
2. Technical writer
3. Canning factory worker
4. Nurse
5. Professor

I tag Val!

The Date That Will Live In Infamy

Remember Pearl Harbor.

Photo of Battleship Row from Japanese planes: Wikipedia

SATs over and done with, and yay, AlmaMaterU!

Two nice things: First, AlmaMaterU's football team won its division championship in a really exciting game. Congrats, guys! Second, Youngest Daughter took the SAT this morning so that is finally behind us. She thinks she did decently. We find out in a few weeks.

One of my students sent me the mid-tenure recommendation letter he wrote for me. He sent it to me, with an e-mail that said he didn't believe in secrets, and if there was an opportunity for improvement we shouldn't be afraid to hear about it. I instantly got a stomachache. Then I opened the letter and read it. It was a great letter.

This whole process has been a pain. Literally. The day we come back from Christmas vacation I have to meet with the mid-tenure committee for an early morning interview. I will spend the whole time dreading that half hour. But after that, it should all be over except for waiting on the decision letter. Truly a big pain.

Two weeks until I see Son and Eldest Daughter again, for a whole week. I cannot wait. I love my job, I hope I get tenure, but there's nothing like hugging my kids close. Nothing in the world.

Okay, I will admit I am somewhat weird

but my reaction to this commercial is that a few years down the road, this birthday party would be a funny story.

Professor's kid

Youngest Daughter is taking a couple classes at the local community college while finishing up her high school work. She is a pretty good student, works hard, and takes this all very seriously. So, naturally, she gets assigned to a group with a lazy butt who never does what is asked of him on time, and what he does do is plagiarized.

She happened to find the first plagiarism before they made the mistake of handing in the materials, and the group sat down with the Lazy Butt Cheater (hereafter known as LBC) to tell him 1) they couldn't use his stuff, and 2) he needed to stop plagiarizing.

They all went off to work on the research for the group project, meeting about once a week after class to talk over their progress (of course, LBC never came to meetings, and always had some lame computer-related excuse for not having anything done). YD and another group member started compiling everything into the presentation. YD sent out an e-mail before the holiday asking everyone to get their stuff in before midnight Sunday; the assignment was due at 1 p.m. Monday. Everyone but LBC sent their materials in. He finally sent four or five pages of solid text (note that they were doing a presentation, not a paper) half an hour before YD had to leave for class. She told him it was too late, and when she met up with the other members in class they agreed that it was too late for him to submit anything.

At their after class meeting (which LBC did not attend), they was looking at what he'd sent her, and got suspicious. So they googled a sentence or two. Sure enough, he had copied from 10-11 different websites verbatim. Now they were REALLY angry, because he had put them all at risk once more of getting a zero on what amounted to 25% of their grade.

Yesterday, YD met with the professor to show him the plagiarized work and explain why LBC's name was not on the group's submission. When I picked her up afterwards, she was livid. She said the only thing she hated more than a cheater was a cheating-enabling professor. Turns out Professor Wacko (he of the jump on the desk and scream at the "racist" white kids) was trying to make excuses for LBC. "We don't know his true intention." "Maybe it is a citation problem." YD assured him that, since her mom is a professor and just HATES cheaters, she knows the difference between blatant plagiarism and citation issues. The prof said he would meet with the group at the end of class on Wednesday (today) and see if they can "help LBC paraphrase his materials."

So today he tells them that what they have is not cheating, but a "group communication problem" and then proceeds to browbeat my kid because she wants to get a good grade and doesn't want to have this kid's cheating get in the way. She's "not sympathetic" to those less smart, or "less fortunate". She's "got a superiority complex" because she's a high school student attending college. Then he tells the group they may not agree with how he's handling this issue (the other group members were backing YD up and asking how he can pass this off as a communications problem), but that *I* would not do any differently! YD unwisely piped up, "You don't know my mother--she'd give him a zero" to which he responded "Okay, so she's a hardass."

Poor kid, now the prof has extended the deadline just for this loser, and told him sweetly that he needs to write in his own words (LBC retorts, "But I cited it!"). Yeah, and some other poor slob is going to get this prize snowflake down the road, and will have to deal with this crap all over again--because the kid has learned that if he complains about being held accountable by his peers, his professor will stand up for him against those big bad students.

Wow. Just, wow. Fortunately for me, the kid is not an engineering major and I'm not likely to ever see his lying face in my classroom.