Thanksgiving

ABD Baby!

That’s right, I am now All But Dissertation status- a parlance for what is technically termed PhD Candidacy. Yesterday’s events were tough, but altogether fruitful. Having a committee of top notch researchers that I do (hopefully) makes my research all the more viable and important to the field. These guys are amazing at ’sticking it to you’ in terms of the feasibility, merit, and philosophical approach to a given research itinerary. Yesterday was no exception. Here’s how it all went down.

Technically, the process started last week with my public proposal defense, an ~hour long seminar I gave on my research. It was great, as many people attended (it’s a departmentally required seminar, but typically only a few show up anyway). I had several people attend from other departments and units on campus (Civil Eng., ISGS, Geol.). That was really awesome. It did a lot for my self esteem. Of course, I had some tough questions at the end too- including a zinger from one of my committee members, which I couldn’t properly answer (d’oh!), fun times (needless to say, I had an answer for him yesterday).

That was part of the process- the rest came in a two and a half hour questioning session (interrogation!) about my approach, philosophical underpinning, state-of-the-science know-how, and hypotheses concerning my proposed research. We debated how (and if) I would overcome the significant challenges in relating my observations to theory, and out of the conversation I have some new ideas and directions to try and field. It was exhausting, and strangely, though I was happy to pass and be onto the next leg of my education, it was anticlimactic. I think it really wore me down in that room- maybe it’s supposed to. It was a strange and immensely challenging experience, that honestly I’m at a loss to put into words.

I’ve noticed this year that the reality of research and science is setting in. Though some of you might have some preconceived notion of the ‘Ivory Tower’ in which wonderful (and perhaps elitist) science just happens- reality indicates it isn’t so. Research is a grueling, knock down, drag out battle- it’s based within a socialized  context of your ‘peers’, and it is tremendously hard work. It’s not that I never saw this reality looming, but for the first time I can feel it’s coldness penetrating my veins. I came into this experience with the goal of becoming a great, poignant, and fruitful researcher. I know that I’m capable of doing this now, it is tangible, and within my grasp- the trick is now I feel I must make a choice and evaluate the cost of doing so. It is a transforming and grueling process, but as of now I feel I am ready to take it on- I’ve begun to feel the ache and pain of it’s cost, but I still feel willing to hurt for the cause. So, let’s see where I go from here…

Proposal Text

In case you’re interested, here is my proposal:

Departmental Proposal Final

ABD next week!

At least I hope so. Yesterday I publicly defended my proposal, and I was really happy with it. It was really nice to see a full turn out, with several people from Geology, Civil Env. Engineering, and the surveys as well as the Geog. department. Thanks all of you for showing up!

I have my prelim. exam on Wednesday, and assuming I pass, I’ll officially be a PhD candidate, aka All But Dissertation (ABD).

LOTS of happenings here in my world- I’ve been a little too busy to eloborate, hopefully this coming week I can eek out some time to post more.

Loss of Decorum

Though it’s old news now, I thought I’d mention it anyway. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina got himself into hot water last night by being a turd. His outburst was uncalled for, and totally based on falsehoods as far as I can tell. I have been getting more and more frustrated with the lack of respect for the office of the President as of late. More recently, with the decision of school districts to restrict or even ban students from seeing a benign speech by Pres. Obama, I’ve wondered what is the driving force behind this progressive decay of respect for the government, and especially the president. I’m sure it is a very complicated issue, but I think the two main causes lie in a total fractionation in ideology among the two parties. With the onset of the so-called ‘neo-conservative’, and I believe a very intentional effort by those like Karl Rove, we are a nation – and thus congress divided, at odds with each other on the most basic level. I also hate to think it, but I am wondering if this apparent change in respect has anything to do with race. Maybe all of these things were present in the last administration, but it seems less so then than now. This morning I found myself asking, where did it all go? I remember in school, we took our national image seriously, perhaps through indoctrination, but in some ways genuinely. We said the pledge of allegiance every morning. Do they still do that? We had mock elections, and even debates. We were actually excited to come to age and vote (at least I was). Now, as the current administration seriously tries and push a reform that requires the American citizen to care about our vulnerables and under-represented citizens – neighbors, to the point of actually committing resources, a lot of people are barking. Why? Aren’t the two purposes of government to provide security, and public order? Health coverage is security.

As you might have guessed, I was appalled last night, so much so that I wrote a letter to Rep. Wilson, and I encourage you to do the same. Here is mine if you want a little reading:

Hon. Representative Joe Wilson:

Your actions in last night’s presidential address to Congress about Health Care reform are unacceptable. You have disrespected the highest office in the land, disobeyed decorum in the House, and worst of all hurt our national image. You should be ashamed.

I sense a deepening trend amongst Pres. Obama’s opponents recently, of which you are an exemplary case study. The outward respect for the office of the president is dwindling amongst you all. It does not matter who is in the office, but that they are the president. The office deserves the highest respect, regardless of political stance or personal opinion. Your direct slander of the president in a formal setting such as last night indicates that you lack the civility to control your emotions and your tongue. Thus, if I were a resident of South Carolina, I would be forced to question whether or not you are capable of properly representing your constituency in a fair, ethical, and just manner. Perhaps you will discover this in the next election?

Regarding the content of your outburst, I do not see from where you are deriving these non-truths. Please enlighten me. A cursory search on my part as an ordinary citizen indicates the following regarding H.R. 3200 and providing care to illegal immigrants (quotes from H.R. 3200 http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h3200ih.txt.pdf):

• SEC. 152, pp 50 does mention that, “health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.” This is a non-discrimination clause, and to my understanding says nothing explicit about illegal immigrants.
• Furthermore, exclusion of illegal aliens is explicitly stated on pp. 143: “SEC 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS. Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”

Thus, unless there is an undisclosed, secret section stating something to the contrary, I do not see how H.R. 3200 would give care to illegal immigrants. As far as I can discern, Rep. Wilson, you are the liar in this case. In my opinion, your strong desire to see this bill fail regardless of cost is the reason you are perpetrating these lies and misinformation.

In closing, I am personally disgusted by your actions last night, and by your intentional efforts to spread falsehoods and misinformation, in order that you might get your way. A truly honorable person would choose more appropriate means of ethical persuasion and debate. You sir, have tarnished your name, the image of your state, and our national image.

Cordially,

Frank L. Engel

Just way too good not to share

The semester is almost underway. I’m at the point where strangely, I do not have to take courses anymore. I must admit, it feels a little weird, I mean I’ve been taking classes in one way or another for the last 20 years. Yowsa! This semester marks my flight towards full candidacy and the famous ABD stage. I’ll be taking my Prelims in October, and supposedly it’s all downhill from there.

Today, technically, I was supposed to be in the field taking flow measurements at my site. We canned that exercise however, as the flow was never really high enough to justify the cost of going out. Oh well. There will be other flows, and now I am free today to live up to my obligations (I have to run a meeting at 4pm among other things). Maybe today, I can also finally get some headway on the looming tasks before me. I’m really excited about this semester, as I will submit a NSF proposal (and hopefully others), will present at AGU in what looks to be a really awesome session on meandering rivers, write my first academic article, and focus squarely on my own research. Hopefully I can live up to it all and perform well – we’ll see.

I’ll leave you with a math joke from xkcd – Do you know the Leibniz Rule?

Fight Like Susan, Give Like Elden

Well as many of you know, I am an avid cyclist. There is nothing so freeing than taking a long bike ride through the countryside. Today however, I am at a loss, and deeply saddened by the loss of a special person I don’t even know. The king of bicycle blogging is Fat Cyclist (aka Elden). His witty, upbeat, and knowledgeable writing style has amassed a huge following over the years. In the recent years, he found out his wife Susan had terminal cancer and he went on a crusade, monikered, “Fight Susan” by the thousands of us who joined him. Elden is an amazing example of the power we all have to make a difference in the lives of others. Through his efforts to deal with the pain of seeing his wife degenerate, and to try and make the ordeal meaningful for Susan and his family, Elden and his team raised an amazing, phenomenal +$520,000 in individual donations to the LiveStrong Challenge. Susan is an inspiration to any who know her story, and I hope you’ll consider taking a moment to read about it, and maybe even make a little difference yourself by donating to LiveStrong.

 

And so much for using speech dictation to write my dissertation

As I continue to play around with Windows 7, I am having a great time. Today’s jewel: Built in Speech Recognition and dictation capabilities. While an incredibly fun way to write a letter, and a good way waste precious proposal writing time, I don’t think it’s quite ready for the ‘rigors’ of writing in academese.

Case in point, I just used speech dictation to record the Abstract of a recent article I read this week (See the real abstract here: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/14910/ )

Here is what I ended up with (we all need a little Channel Courage!):

A model of equilibrium that topography for me and are bands with the ruble banks.

Abstract

Channel courage are produces secondary times and a transfer is sloping taleban, along with the debt increases towards the other bank. As a result the polls to the form adjacent to the other day, promoting bank collapse. The interaction of seven and grains of the primary and secondary flows and the transfer sloping bad also causes meanders to move different brain sizes and different proportions and directions, resulting in a consistent soaring pattern. Several malls have involved to describe this process, but they’ve all the potential to over predict holdouts because they cannot account for the implausible readable banks. In reality, bank class might lead to development of a wire, shallower cross section in any resulting flood that discrepancy can bias associated predictions of flow, seven transport, and brain size sorry. While that poverty, seven and transporting rates soaring and then school will be part of a controlled by the sedimentary characteristics of the bank materials, the magnitude of this affect has not previously been explored. This paper reports of the vulnerable model flow, seven transport, brain size sorry, and that part of the river beds available banks. The models tested via inter pares some of the ticket and observe that on the one low energy and one high energy study rage, namely the river’s south ask in Scotland a good win three in Mississippi, respectively. Model predictions of that fire fever found to be satisfactory, at least close of the auspices of the bands. Finally, the mullahs use insensitivity announces that provide insight into the influence of Banco De Leon equilibrium and Emma Olivier and

Trying Something a little bit different

Well, it was time to reinstall my OS on my trusty laptop. Things were sluggish, and the poor little thing was just struggling to stay afloat. I went ahead and pulled a different stroke, and installed Windows 7 RC. So far I really like it. It has all of the nice features I like in Vista, like a text driven launcher, and built in indexed search engine for example. Also, W7, has some pretty cool eye candy I must admit – the ‘aero peep’ and ’shake out’ are my two favs I think. Best of all though, I was able to change to a 64 bit system, which is sailing along quite nicely on my 1.5 year old Intel Duo-Core. The PC is running quicker than it ever did, even when new. Awesome.

So I’ve restored all my data, and installed the massive software I use for various technical computing (e.g., MATLAB, ArcInfo, TecPlot, etc) and so far no hitches. All of the older 32 bit stuff I was worried about seems to work fine on the 64 bit OS. We will see if this continues to be the case. I have some really old stuff I need to run later, and truthfully I am worried about that. I guess if it doesn’t run, I do have a couple of field laptops with the stuff already installed, so I guess I can just use them.

This week has been nice, I’ve had a chance to catch up on some of the heap of articles I’ve needed to read, and I am even getting a rough proposal put together…slowly that is.

New Post? Sure, why not.

As is typical, I have gotten far behind in informing the masses (albeit minuscule) who want to know the know of my life as of now. I can’t help it. Several factors prevent me from being better about such things, the foremost two being 1) I’m lazy, and 2) I’m busy. What can you do, huh?

Let’s see. I just saw Ron and Pat off to San Antonio via a stint in St. Louis this morning. Pat somehow avoided crying until she got in the car. Don’t worry Pat, Jordan and I shed a tear or two also. We love, love having you guys up to visit, and it really is hard to say goodbye. Alas, we will meet again soon! It was a great time. Lots ‘o catching up, and a good dose of Ron puns abounded. I got to flash my cooking muscle, and prepared a couple of good meals, which is always a plus. And most cosmopolitan of all, we all hoped in our 209k mile-old Honda and made a beeline for Chicago. It was basically just a day trip on steroids (speaking of, we found out from a host of happy blue wearing drunk guys on the Red Line that the Cubs won out over the Cards. while we were hitting the town hard). We took another Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour (you’ve got to go on one of these if you have the opportunity), and then we walked in Grant Park, then up to the Mag. Mile for some more walking and dinner before heading home. We arrived at our hotel ($60/night in the Rosemont Hyatt via hotwire.com btw…sweet) Friday night, got to the Loop Saturday about 10:30a, and finally back in the car on the Tri-State by 10:30p. Ron figures we walked 10 miles. I’m not so sure, but kudos to all for not breaking into a heap of swollen, sore mush. It was a great trip! Next time, we’ll have to hit some of the museums!

As is typical for the summer, I’ve been up to my neck in fieldwork. The good news is that I have a killer tan…and no moles/spot (yes mom, I wear sunscreen), and best of all I have my new site pretty much ready to go for measurement. That’s about a month ahead of where I thought I’d be, so great! The bad news is that the manuscript I’m supposed to have been writing has taken a back seat to everything else, despite my best efforts. Hopefully I’ll crank that out in August. I’m working on (in a pseudo class) the linearized governing equations of uniform bend flow (don’t ask), hopefully that will work out. It’s way more math than I’m used to, and a big stretch for my small little head. Just to piss you off, here is a sampling (the final linearized steady forms of 1) continuity, 2) Momentum in the transverse direction, 3) Momentum in the streamwise direction for uniform flow in a curved channel):

I’m also working hard on wrapping my head around a proposal, and my own research. You would be amazed at how incredibly difficult that is to handle (Nate – I’m sure you’re also encountering that hurdle, good luck man!). As a brainstorming/head tutelage exercise, I may post my posits here for general critiquing in late summer…

Let’s see what else. As of Wednesday, Jordan and I will have been together 4 beautiful years of marital bliss. It’s a great feeling to realize it only seems like 2, and surprisingly morbid. if 4 years feel like 2, 40 will likely feel like 20 (that is if the relationship is linear, it’s likely an allometric exponential function, and thus 40 may be like 2.3). I love my time with Jordan, and admittedly I’m stingy. The idea of our time flying by together is honestly a bit unsettling. Oh well, that’s life, and I’m glad to be on the boat.

Through a lot of introspection recently I’ve been looking at the world in different shades. Perhaps amidst the fieldwork, academic writing, and continuing life business, I’ll try fleshing some of it out here, but I think for now I’m done. Glad to write a little here today, and hopefully you’re glad to read it!