Fact:  I spend way too much time attempting to construct clever, attractive powerpoints for my classes.

Fact:  My efforts go largely unappreciated.

H1N1 made its dramatic entrance onto the great continent of Africa via Cairo a couple of weeks ago, carried inside a little girl visiting from the States.  Now it seems some of our students brought it with them as well.

AUC Suspends Classes and Events Until June 14

As a result of the two confirmed cases of the H1N1 flu in the Zamalek dormitory, the university has decided to suspend classes until Sunday, June 14, 2009.  As a result of this decision all non-essential personnel are not required to report to campus, and a limited bus service will be available to transport essential staff. Details of this schedule will follow later this afternoon.

The university is taking this action on the recommendation of the Egyptian Ministry of Health to ensure the health and safety of the AUC community.

The students who have been tested positive are residents of the Zamalek dormitory and are receiving medical treatment for the flu. The Ministry of Health has obtained samples from all residents of the dormitory and those results are expected this evening.

The university’s administration is working closely with the Egyptian Ministry of Health to effectively manage this situation and will continue to keep the AUC community informed as new information becomes available.

Keep in mind this is the same Ministry of Health who thought slaughtering all the pigs was an effective means of preventing the spread of the virus, so their recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt.  Actually, I am more concerned with finding an acceptable alternative for printing some things I was going to print on campus tomorrow than I am of getting the swine flu.  For the record, my temperature at the moment is a perfectly healthy 37.3°C.

For those of you inclined to worry, here is a little something to help take your mind on a sensual journey through last night’s pizztravaganza instead!

sticky oily goodness

perfection

Note to students:  Please check for spelling and/or typographical errors, particularly when discussing the Large Hadron Collider.

So I guess it has been a while since I have updated this.  To be honest, not much has been going on here since Emily left.  It seems most of the action is taking place in and around Portland now in the lead up to the big day.  School has been going well, and the general mood in the air around campus is much more pleasant than that of last semester.  It seems everyone has pretty well settled in to the new campus, with most problems having been ironed out.

In other news, I had my first visitors (who were not persons I wanted to spend the rest of my life with).  So that was exciting.  My great friend and peer-turned-colleague, Ira, decided to spend spring break here with me and Marti and 18 million Cairenes, along with another good guy, Jamey.  It turns out Ira and I have known each other almost 9 years to the day, having first met when I was a visiting prospective graduate student at Arizona State University, where he was a current graduate student in the department of chemistry!  How did we meet?  Ira was the guy who rode up to our picnic at Papago Park with his wife on the back of his Vespa P200, which sported the largest trunk I had ever seen on a scooter (the largest, that is, until moving to Cairo).  Years would pass by us and thousands of shared miles would pass beneath our 10″ wheels.  At one point, after Ira had graduated and remained on at ASU, I had the pleasure of teaching with him, as the TA for his Chemistry and Society course.  It was with even greater pleasure and honor, then, that I had the opportunity to invite Ira to guest-speak to my own classes and department, here at AUC.  In fact, Ira and Jamey pretty much gave me a day off altogether.  Ira kicked it off by leading a departmental seminar in a conversation on careers in science, which has since inspired a great deal of talk about potential collaboration between our schools and student exchanges.  Next up, Ira and Jamey together successfully presented a talk on science policy making to my Chemistry and Society class, despite the presence of one obnoxious heckler (and my own failure to inform them that humor falls upon deaf ears here; too bad, as the two of them seem to have refined their banter and timing down to pure comedic gold!).  After that, Jamey led my back-to-back Scientific Thinking classes through a talk on the Amish and their consideration for and use of technology.  It turns out that while the days of cowboys-and-indians movies are long gone, foreigners still “learn” a lot about American culture and subcultures through great export films and television series’, such as “Sex Drive”, “My Name is Earl”, and “How I met your Mother”.  Frankly, I was surprised no one named “Kingpin” as a source when Jamey asked the students where their knowledge of the Amish had come from.  In the end, I was quite pleased when my students managed to come up with some thoughtful questions for Jamey, well beyond simply the novelty questions of “do the Amish do this?” or “do the Amish use that?”.  Aside from that, the week was filled with cribbage, dominoes, french fry sandwiches, koshary, Stella, visits to the juice-man and the nut-man, sites I had not yet visited, hissing and tongue clicking, and good times had by all.  Way too many pics below: (more…)

For twenty-six days this apartment felt like home.  Now it is just empty and cold.  I see one too many of everything, but I can’t bear to put them away.

For now, the unused chair at my side remains.

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The new course I had proposed and have been working on was finally approved and listed in the Spring09 schedule.  Unfortunately (and partially my fault), this only finalized less than a week before classes begin and approximately one month after registration officially closed.  So I have the one week drop/add period to try to convince at least 10 students to enroll, lest the course is canceled, and I am stuck with a section of Gen Chem lab.  The course prospects for the fall, at least, are much stronger.

On a side note, from a design perspective Arabic must be absolutely perfect to work with, as any word can be stretched indefinitely for any need.  Thanks Emily for teaching that me those long straight lines randomly appearing in written Arabic words mean essentially nothing!  This poster could certainly use a bit more uniformity and symmetry, especially in the top block.  Or maybe it is a good thing, distracting the eye from the lame Byrds reference.

Given that I wear a tribute to her work on my arm, it should come as no surprise that I try to sneak Rosalind Franklin’s story into my classes whenever I can, if for no other reason than to correct an incomplete history.  It was especially applicable this semester in my Scientific Thinking classes, as it raises many relevant issues involving research ethics, the understated role of women in science, and of course what is probably the most important biological discoveries ever.  A well written account of the story can be found here.  It is brief, but comprehensive, and was a required reading for my class.  On my final exam I included a question on Franklin, which I have been grading today.  The quality of answers has varied, but for the most part I have been pleased with the students’ responses.  And then I came to this:

After Dr Rosalind Franklin did much work on the DNA, she finally could find out new discoveries.  She had pictures of the DNA in her lab which was a completely significant invention at this time.

Ok.  Aside from the generic introduction, so far so good.  These aren’t science majors, remember.

Her boss took advantage of that and he managed on killing her in order to get all her work and he started to work on it.  He made an invention on the DNA and won the nobel prize based on her work.

Oh my.

All is lost, all is lost.  It’s all I’ve ever written.

During one of our new-faculty orientation sessions it was stressed that our three primary duties here are Teaching, Research, and Service.  At the moment (and for the foreseeable future) my research prospects are rather grim.  I suppose not much can be expected on the faculty end when, over one month into the semester, the student lab facilities have only been barely cobbled together, though I admit I expected more.  Teaching is keeping me plenty busy, but I decided I ought to start to doing more to account for my time and presence here.  So a couple of weeks ago I joined the Bus Transportation Advisory Committee.  Since I am a daily rider, the bus service is something of concern to me, as it is to many of my colleagues and most of my students.  This experience is serving well as my painful introduction to bureaucracy in action, and I am beginning to understand why Che left the comforts of post-revolution Cuba for the Congo.  It is harder to make the trains run on time!

With the move to the new campus, the university had to figure out some way to transport all the students, faculty, and staff out to the middle of the desert.  This is no simple feat, and one that still requires much refinement.  Of course the whole thing was handed off to some private contractor.  The most disturbing thing I have learned is that the drivers, the people we are entrusting with our lives twice daily, are paid less than the custodians on campus.  Rate of pay is outside the scope of our committee, and indeed it seems outside the scope of anyone in the university now, thanks to contractual provisions previously agreed upon.  One accomplishment that I am proud of has been the removal of all jump seats (which fold down into the aisle) from the buses.  These were a huge safety issue, especially on the smaller transports.  They only added a maximum of 5 additional riders, but ultimately packed people in like sardines and eliminated anything resembling an exit on the bus.  Anyway, we addressed and fixed that problem.

In related news, I was in the student newspaper today:

A concern of Brandon Canfield, a member of the newly established bus transportation advisory committee in charge of addressing rising concerns such as passenger safety, route adjustments and schedules, is that AUC plays no role in hiring bus drivers.

‘Currently, the committee is drafting a revised procedural requirement that all drivers must abide by,’ he said. ‘However, it is unclear how this will be enforced and what, if any, penalties drivers may face for failing to comply.’

The committee has fielded a number of complaints about bus drivers speeding and making dangerous passes on the road.

This is what I make the papers for now?  I am getting too old.

“I do not understand,” Bishop Morehouse said. “It seems to me that all things of the mind are metaphysical. That most exact and convincing of all sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is metaphysical. Surely you will agree with me?”

“As you say, you do not understand,” Ernest replied. “The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist from facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains himself by the universe.”

“Thank God we are not scientists,” Dr. Hammerfield murmured complacently.

– Jack London, The Iron Heel

I am teaching three classes this semester.  One of those is General Chemistry.  That class is pretty easy and straightforward (not much has changed in chemistry, at least in the realm covered in an introductory course, in nearly a century).  The other two are different sections of the same course, Scientific Thinking.  This is a core curriculum course that every student is required to take to graduate from AUC.  The point of the course, as I understand it, is to give the students a clear understanding of just what this thing called science really is.  We start with an introduction to the scientific method, and then give a brief overview of the history of cosmology, highlighting the idea of paradigm shifts (i.e. geocentrism -> heliocentrism, etc.).  Thats where we are currently at.  From here we will discuss questions of life and ethics.  I like the class a lot, but am looking forward to next semester when I will be more prepared with my own material.  For better or worse, the instructors are allowed quite a lot of independence in designing their courses.  For example, I just learned that while I have been teaching Newtonian physics and General Relativity, another instructor has been teaching Erich Fromm!  Granted, his is the class I would probably prefer to be taking, but it is hard for me to accept that they are listed as the same course.  Either way, I enjoy teaching my sections.  I wish I could arrange for certain family members to be here when I touch on such topics as “what is a scientific theory?” and “much like the gravity, evolution is also a theory.”

Here are some random photos from my balcony and around the hood: