Why “Washington Redskins” is offensive whether you think so or not

Most of my life I’ve had teachers, friends, colleagues, consultants of various native North and Central American ethnicities.  Most don’t identify as “native American”; most identify with some specific ethnicity: Kootenai, Cree, Cherokee, and so on.  But most will use ‘native American’ as a catch all.  Some will even use (American) (or in Canada ‘Treaty’) Indian in a pinch.  My impression is that sometimes it is important to identify with a larger community of American aboriginal peoples, particularly in the context of shared history of repression, and other times it is just not relevant (or worth the effort) to explain how you are a Hopi and your friend is Navajo. 

But in case you were wondering what the big deal is with “Washington Redskins” (and I didn’t want to get into a lecture specific to anyone in particular) here’s what I have come to understand.

• The word “redskin” is and has always been use pejoratively.  You’d only call Tonto the Lone Ranger’s redskin friend if you wanted to emphasize his non-whiteness.  If you were being respectful, you’d refer to him as the LR’s Indian friend, or Native friend, or Choktaw friend, or Ute friend, or whatever he is.  If you're being really respectful, you'll just call him the LR's friend, since his ethnicity is probably not relevant.  Or you'd just call him Tonto, rather than referring to him as 'just' an appendage of a white man.  As a word, 'redskin' picks out a specific and not entirely definitional or universal trait of a wide group of people. So not only is it just intrinsically ‘Other’, like ‘spic’ or ‘dago’, it reduces membership in the group to a particular trait which is neither sufficient nor necessary for inclusion in the group. 
• Some people object to the dehumanizing effect of a reference like ‘redskin’ in the context of a mascot.  These people point out that many sports teams are named for animals.  So ‘redskin’ for many suggests something non-human, akin to ‘lion’ or ‘bear’. (Interestingly, sometimes these people don’t have the same trouble with ‘Spartan’ or ‘Hun’.  But…)
• It may not be intrinsically offensive to refer to historical groups of people who no one (or very few) living people identify as, e.g. ‘Trojan’, or to a non-ethnic group (again primarily historical) like ‘forty-niner’, ‘saint’ or ‘buccaneer’.  On the other hand, when it comes to current ethnicities and nationalities, things get problematic.  How offensive ‘fighting Iroquois/Swede/Barbadian’ is depends on how those particular ethnicities relate to whatever the mainstream culture is.  And aboriginal peoples are always in a vulnerable position with respect to dominant colonial cultures.

We don’t seem to be bothered by ‘fighting Irish’ (though many are), but a lot of people up here are concerned about ‘fighting Sioux’.  I remember someone asking if they should support a team called “the Kansas City Jews”.  So while ‘Irish’, ‘Sioux’, ‘Seminole’ may be in use, and are problematic, at least they refer to a specific group of people, with at least a more culturally neutral term than ‘redskin’. 

So it comes down to this.  If you don’t understand why “Washington Redskins” is offensive, think about what it would be if it was the “Cincinnati Darkies” or the “Denver Wetbacks”. Because basically that’s what we’re dealing with.

My left bootie: Adventures in healthcare

I’m home from my unpleasant medical procedure, “taking it easy for a few days” as directed.

Short version of the story: Inferior uvulectomy, because my uvula is (was) long and fleshy and I could feel it on the back of my tongue and it was a huge anxiety trigger and potential contributor to my gagging problem. So I had it yanked out. There has been discussion about preserving part of it so I can continue to make uvular trills for demonstration in class, but I'm not sure to what degree that has been accomplished.

Long story: except for the sleep study, I’ve never spent a night in a hospital, so I’ve been kind of anxious about the whole process. I think I was more anxious about the process than the actual procedure.

So it started months ago with the ENT (that’s Ear-Nose-Throat doctor, or otolaryngologist if you prefer). Followed by the scheduling and the rescheduling, much paperwork (fairly detailed medical history, four pages of consent and indemnification stuff, and so on), and a couple of weeks ago a pre-operative assessment. Basically information at all stages (in both directions) was the same.

The procedure itself should have been relatively minor, an outpatient deal. But because of my general health issues, my gag reflex, and so on, I had to be admitted to the hospital overnight. Which confused absolutely everyone, because all my information had dire warnings about not being alone for 24 hours, having someone around when you sleep, and so on. Which is one of the reasons they kept me in the hospital, as if I were undergoing a much more complicated uvula-pharyngeoplasty.

Okay, so the precise timing of my post-op instructions is a little cloudy, in terms of when exactly I am allowed to be out of someone's sight and to pick my own meds and drive and so forth, but I figure we’ll cope. Tuesday the hospital calls to confirm my surgery, which apparently has been moved from 2:45pm to 7:45am. So the carefully negotiated plans to get me to the hospital around noon go out the window and I have to scramble. Luckily I have many more, better friends, than I sometimes realize.

So Ken gets me to the hospital yesterday morning at 6:20 or so, in plenty of time for my 6:45 check in, which turns out to be when admitting opens anyway, so I sit in the lobby not drinking coffee or anything because I’m not supposed to eat or drink anything before surgery (this starts at midnight for food, actually 9:30 or so for me) and no more than 6 oz of water not less than 3 hours before surgery. So sitting in a waiting room for half an hour being able to smell the coffee and the donuts was a bit of a trial.

So I’m in prep. I change into my gown, put little mesh bootie things on my feet and climb into bed. Doctors come by to reassure me. I managed to do everything else right (shoes in black bag, black bag and everything else except the CPAP machine into the white bag) except that I forgot to put my shirt in the white bag. A nice orderly took care of that for me on the way to surgery. Oh, and I couldn’t work the hairnet thing so he had to do that too.

In the hall outside the surgical suite, I go through everything with nice OR RN Ricardo.  He gets me onto the table, hooks me up to my IV, attaches a bunch of electrode thingies to various parts of my body.

Surgery, I’m told, went perfectly, which from my end isn’t quite how I’d describe it. The actual procedure was fine, I guess, but as they were removing the breathing tube I experienced some kind of spasm (laryngeal, tracheal, possibly esophageal) and couldn’t move any air. Not being able to breathe is another huge anxiety trigger, which is one of the reasons I don’t swim anymore, so naturally I panic. It takes a couple of nurses and the anaesthetist (which they spell with the up here and pronounce with [i]) to hold me down and pump some Ventolin with the oxygen and get me to calm down. A little. I occupy my mostly functional brain trying to remember BSL fingerspelling, which I believe I am successful at, so I am able to convince myself, as I slowly begin to draw breath, that I haven’t had a stroke on the table. Which can totally happen. It’s not particularly likely, but, you know, a little learning….

So I’m in recovery, oxygen sensor, blood pressure and other things attached (as they have been all through the procedure). Mostly uneventful, since I’m awake and breathing, except at one point my blood pressure starts to drop (I heard 80-something/54), so they start me on some saline and things seem to moderate. I get some ice chips. Through all of this, they keep saying that it’s possible they could send me home that afternoon/evening, which would have required a huge scramble. But it wasn’t to be.

They take me upstairs to the Apnea Ward, which is empty except for me (it fills up over the course of the morning). I drift in and out of useful consciousness while nurses hook me up to stuff and monitor my vitals and make sure I don’t die, or whatever they’re there to watch out for. I get more ice chips. Eventually I get my glasses and phone and stuff, take some pills, get some lunch. Lunch consisted primarily of some cream of asparagus soup, which was actually quite good, and some orange juice, which hurt. And some milk and ice cream and some warm tea.

At some point I’m given a new gown and apparently SOP up there is to drape another gown around your shoulders. Mine is blue and I wear it tied around my neck like a Superman cape. I want one of those for wearing around the house.

Somewhere between pre-op and the ward, my left bootie has worked itself off my foot and the aide goes looking for it in the bedclothes while I try to lever myself to my feet, and take myself to the washroom without falling over or getting dizzy or anything. (Over the course of the afternoon, I figure out that I’m one of only two remotely ambulatory patient in this ward.) I figure out how to work the bed, and the table, and the IV stand. I read a comic book on the phone and doze.

More pills, then dinner is some really mediocre cream of carrot soup (didn’t care for the texture, and could really have done with some pepper or something. But since I’m supposed to avoid anything spicy for a while it’s probably just as well), warm tea, chocolate pudding and pineapple juice. I decide to skip the pineapple juice, having learned my lesson with the orange juice earlier. I do try some milk. I really don't like milk.

I make it to the bathroom again a couple of times over the course of the evening, and every time I end up looking around for my left bootie. It just won’t stay on. Around 9:30, I’m given two Tylenol 3 with codeines and told I can go to sleep. Per doctor’s orders, I’m on oxygen overnight, no CPAP. I haven’t really slept without my CPAP machine since September 2009. And I still haven’t really. Dozed some, didn’t really sleep all night.

I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever codeine is supposed to do to you doesn’t happen for me. Morphine either. I had codeine in high school for a really bad skin rash on my legs. A friend of mine got a chemical burn in her eye, and they gave it to her too. She got so dopey on it that they sent her home from school. I drove her on the same dosage of codeine. Now granted, I was fat in high school, but still. Just after grad school I had a back spasm, ended up in the emergency room was given, among other things quite a bit of morphine. I think, over the course of the morning, a whole grain. At least half. On M*A*S*H, when they amputated your leg, you got a quarter grain. And it didn’t really get me to the point where I could move or stand.

So one of the things that kept me occupied all night was the constant struggle to keep my left bootie on. The soreness, the breathing panic, the orange juice will probably fade. The memory of that stupid left bootie will linger.

Anyway, so this morning, I met my LPN student, Sam, who was going to take care of my discharge. There are vitals, pills, instructions, discussion of when and who is someone going to pick me up. Breakfast consists of a tray of food I couldn’t eat owing to the injunction against foods that need to be chewed or crunched. I had some scrambled eggs, which turn out to be the same texture as what’s left of my uvula so that was an adventure. It came with a mini-bagel (no chewing), cereal (no crunchy food), some coffee, and more milk. At some point another tray appears, this one with more or less the same stuff, but I snag the yogurt cup, which turns out to be key lime. I make it through about a third before the acidity of the yogurt, or the lime, starts to get to me, so there you go.

Good news is that this morning at 7am, my blood sugar was 7.0. It was 10.1 and 11.something all day yesterday. 7.0 is an almost normal human fasting blood sugar, and is certainly the lowest non-hypo-feeling blood sugar I’ve seen in a while. So maybe portion control really is the key.

So there’s a walk around the floor, discharge orders, post-op orders, calls to the doctor for follow up stuff, and Sam walks me through everything well. My buddy Heather from work comes about 10am to pick me up, and she takes me home. The clock radio is still on, so apparently I didn’t put it on sleep yesterday at 5:30 when I got up.

Anyway, before I settle into taking it easy, I had to dash to the store to fill a couple prescriptions and pick up some liquid Tylenol (which I've been advised to try before resortin to the prbably useless Tyl3w/codeine). Liquid Tylenol only comes in children’s varieties and flavors, so I got grape. Also an antibiotic, we believe as protection from potential infection. I've also checked the proportion of peroxide (in the form of a rinse called Peroxyl) relative to what you get in a bottle of peroxide. So Peroxyl is 1.5% H2O2, where hydrogen peroxide is 3%. So my tablespoons of peroxide in a cup of water becomse a tablespoon of Peroxyl in a half cup of water.  With which I will rinse twice a day until told to stop. Or something like that.

So two things: 1) Since I woke up yesterday I've noticed that I have a funny numb spot on my lower lip. Like most of the left side, not quite to the corner. Sam says it happens when you've been anesthetized that sometimes some small patch of somewhere stays numb, sometimes for weeks. So we'll just see. 2) I'm enjoying and iced coffee from Starbucks that I picked up while waiting for my prescriptions. While there I discovered that the thing that I thought was a knot or something in my hospital gown that I couldn't move from my left side back was one of those electrodes Ricardo put on me. I have vague memory of them being removed, but not by who or when.

So the plan now is to take it easy for the weekend. There's coconut-ice-milk-sicles and cups of vanilla Haagen-Dasz in the freezer, some vanilla pudding and apple sauce in the fridge, and some rice to make okai, or okayu, which is basically rice gruel that requires no chewing and can be eaten luke warm and is a staple of Japanese-American sickbed food.  And for when I feel like I need an actual meal with protein and fiber in it, there's some Glucerna. So here I go taking it easy.

Two years?!?!? TWO FR*CKIN' YEARS!?!?!?!?

Some symbols in this post have been changed in order to protect myself from spambots.

This rant is inspired by something I've learned over the last few hours. The instigator is that I needed to confirm my contact information for a new assignment (I've been asked to join the editorial board of a journal), and in so doing I thought I would take care of some outstanding business.

Two years ago (or so), they switched the University's email services from the old servers which were old and dying and not keeping up with demand anyway, to some kind of Exchange service that as I understand it runs out of Microsoft, or something, 'off the cloud' rather than on local hardware. In so doing, all our emails had to be changed to the new email domain.

The old email domain(s) were (at) cc.umanitoba ca or (even older) (at) ms.umanitoba.ca. The new domain is (at) ad.umanitoba.ca. For months ahead of the changeover, we were informed that the change was coming, that we'd have to adjust our server settings if we used a regular email client, that if we were accessing the email from a device (and not through the webmail site) we'd have to lock all our devices down, etc. etc. etc. There were gnashings of teeth, there were a whole new set of application-specific passwords, there were accounts to adjust and rename.

And there was the statement that to facilitate the changeover we would all receive new email addresses of the form Firstname.Lastname (at) ad.umanitoba.ca. So for TWO YEARS, I've been signing everything Robert.Hagiwara (at) ad.umanitoba.ca. I've changed my letterhead template. I've been fixing my business cards. I've changed all my sigs.

What I have never done is gotten an alias. For years, if you wanted a user-friendly email alias, it had to look like a name *and* contain an underscore. So if I wanted one, I could have Robert_Hagiwara, or R_Hagiwara, or Hagiwara_R or Rob_Hag or something like that. Then with the change we could have dots instead of underscores. Since none of those were shorter or more memorable that robh, I never got one.

With the change two years ago, I asked if I could go back to robh (at) ad.umanitoba.ca. or (at) umanitoba.ca. Both got rejected, because it didn't follow the requirements (which I presumed that it had to be a real name, and/or that it had to contain an underscore, or (as I've seen recently) a dot.

So with this new thing, I decided once and for all to at least go to robhagiwara (at) or something like that. So I tried the on-line system, which was disabled and directed me to a new system, which as also been disabled. So I emailed the support desk and asked if I could have robh (at). After all, I'd been robh (at) for the 12 years before the change, and with other domains before that (and it was just two bad there are other Roberts H out there who might have wanted it but didn't ask before I did. Failing that, could I have robhagiwara (at) or something useful, with no dots or underscores.

So I go off to my meeting this afternoon and come back to the reply. Which I quote:

Your actual email address is robh (at) umanitoba.ca.
Robert.Hagiwara (at) umanitoba.ca is the Alias.
People Search at the University of Manitoba webpage will only publish Aliases for Staff.

Huhwha?

Speech anatomy resources

A student asked me to put together a list of resources in support of anatomy/physiology study for speech/language/hearing, so I thought I'd make this public before I forgot about it.

Anatomy and physiology, in my opinion, is the sort of thing that only really starts to stick after the second or third go-round. In my classes, I'm more concerned with the typical adult case (as opposed to the atypical or developmental cases), and preparing the student to 'enter the litearture' rather than making sure they get it all in on the first try. I concentrate on big structures, connections, and functions, and throw in enough Latin and classic names (Eustace, Roland, Sylvus, and so on) so that the student can read 'real' stuff and get more.

So this list is sort of a mix of stuff that I think of as being 'this' level, and the next level up.

Perkins, William H and Raymond D Kent (1986). Functional Anatomy for Speech, Hearing, and Language: An Introduction. Taylor and Francis.

This may be out of print, but it's the textbook I use in my anat and phys classes.  It's oversized, but loaded with clear line drawings and concise descriptions.
Update:Not out of print. Yay, team.
 

Seikel, J Anthony, Douglas W King and David G Drumright (2010). Anatomy and Physiology for Speech, Language, and Hearing (4th ed). Delmar Cengage Learning.

Newer, the fourth edition is probably the most current intro textbook for this material, comes bound with a StudyWare CD with some great interactive quiz materials. Missing are the earlier 'click and exlplore' diagrams, but the old diagrams were of limited resolution and utility. I don't use it as a textbook because the earlier (I think second) edition I reviewed almost always chose names for things which were different than what I was used to (in anatomy there are always three different names for everything, and in the case of speech/hearing anatomy there are different traditions that add another layer). So I'm on the fence about the new edition as a primary textbook, but if I had to pick a new one tomorrow, I'd pick this.
 

Dickson, David Ross and Wilma Maue-Dickson (1982). Anatomical and Physiological Bases of Speech. Little Brown and Co.

Definitely out of print, but the book I learned a lot out of: this book. It's relatively concise, and is a very accessible read.
 

Zemlin, Willard R (1998). Speech and Hearing Science: Anatomy and Physiology (4th ed). Allyn & Bacon

This is “The Bible” of speech and hearing anatomy; The fourth edition seems to still be current, but there's a recent 'workbook and study guide', which I've only just looked at.
 

Fuller, Donald R, Jane T Pimentel and Barbara M Perogoy (2012). Applied Anatomy & Physiology for Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. Wolters Kluwer Health (Lippincott Willams & Wilkins).

I haven't read this book thoroughly, but it seems to be the only textbook of this time with a definite focus on atypical structures and development. So for the burgeoning SLP type, this might be the way to go. As a linguist who only serves the SLP-bound peripherally, I think it's more important to get a good foundation in the typical case, but maybe that's just me.
 

Kapit, Wynn and Lawrence M Elson. The Anatomy Coloring Book.
and
Diamond, Marian C, Arnold B Scheibel and Lawrence M Elson. The Human Brain Coloring Book.

These are not speech/language/hearing specific, but you can't do better than without actually dissecting something. These books go through different editions with different publishers, but you want to look for these authors in particular (there are other coloring books with similar titles out there. These are the best.)
 

Netter, Frank H (2003). Atlas of Human Anatomy (4th ed). Saunders (Elsevier).

For my money, the best atlas of anatomy available. Netter was an MD and anatomical artist, and this book is just plate after plate of his paintings. Some in 'natural' color, some are colored consistently in plate to plate so you can focus on the same structure from different angles (e.g. the Sphenoid Bone is always yellow in plates of the skull/cranium from the front, side, above and below). Simply beautiful paintings of just about every structure in the body you'd ever want to look at.
 

McFarland, David H (2009). Netter’s Atlas of Anatomy for Speech, Swallowing, and Hearing. Mosby (Elsevier).

This one is new to me. McFarland has taken relevant plates from Netter, and added descriptive text, elaborating the structures, their blood supply and innervation, and function.

Crowdsourcing my course materials (2013 edition)

I’m leading a seminar next term with the lofty title “Interarticulatory Timing in Speech and Sign”.

My intent was to explore issues of ‘segmenthood’ and the emergence, utility, and empiriciality of ‘organizing units’ like segments, moras, syllables, etc. I planned to start with general issues touching on articulatory content of features, coarticulation and coproduction, and Dani Byrd (principally)’s take on coordination within and between ‘units’ (syllables, words, phrases). And hopefully allow discussion on both speechand sign, the similarities, the differences, and so on.

The punchline for the course would be a task-dynamic, coordinative structure-based view of the articulators, conceptualized as a gestural score as in Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein 1986ff).I really wanted to ask, for signed languages, particularly ASL, what are the necessary articulators to specify, and how ‘simultaneous’ some of the simultaneous gestures really are, and what, in terms of timing, is coordinating them.

It’s now November, and I’m not really much closer to having an initial reading list down than I was a couple months ago. So I’m turning to you, my learned friends, to help.

I’m looking for an initial 20 or so papers to form the backbone of the readings for discussion. Topics should include things like:

• ‘Reality’ of units like segment, mora/syllable, and other prosodic units
• Task-dynamics, articulatory phonology, gestural scores (Browman & Goldstein 1986 ff)
• Coarticulation and coproduction and the representation of timing (here I’m thinking things like Beckman or Jun on high-vowel devoicing as gestural overlap/undershoot)
• Possibly epenehesis/excresence as an issue in timing
• Timing within and between units (here I’m thinking Dani Byrd’s stuff on within and cross syllable coordination, and things like that)
• ‘Simultaneity’ and ‘sequentiality’ in signed languages
• Coordination of nonmanuals (e.g. alternatives to Baker & Padden?)
• ‘Universality’ or not of units like the syllable (possibly early Corina etc debates about Ms and Hs being like Cs and Vs, Brentari vs other views of ‘syllables’ or similar units)
• Things like how movements and handshape changes are coordinated within and across signs (i.e. in compounds vs in phrases?)
• Emergence of units as ‘targets’ for coordination (here I’m thinking about acoustic landmarks in the Stevens sense, articulatory landmarks (closure, release, VO, steady-state), and non-coordination/control of specific things (like onset of nasality)
• Exteneding the above, prosodic units and processes occurring ‘around’ edges, like Nicodemus on phrase-ends in ASL interpretation, fortition/lenition processes, reset processes, and so on
• And so on.

So I have a few ideas, but if anyone has anything the could point me to, I’d be really, really grateful.

Official blurb:

Production of spoken and signed language involves coordinating physical movements of the articulators (whether the vocal tract or the hands and body) in real time. But what are the units of articulatory control, and how are they organized with respect to one another? Are the sequentiality or simultaneity of gestures on different articulators the product of higher-order timing ‘units’ (e.g. segments, syllables) or do such units emerge from a more variable articulatory dynamic? What are the limits of inter-articulator timing, and do the same limits apply in both spoken and signed language?< Some of the issues we will explore may include the kinesiological content of contrastive and enhancing features in speech and sign, task dynamics and Articulatory Phonology (Browman and Goldstein 1986, inter alia), coproduction and coarticulation, and the emergence of units like segments and syllables from ‘landmarks’.

Clear thinking, please

I don't have a strong opinion about same-sex marriage.  I don't.  Because the problem isn't whether or not people's rights to marry are restrictied--the problem is that marriage is used to define certain rights of kinship, and those rights are improperly restricted by the restricted definition of marriage.  But that's not what I want to blog about today.

What I want to blog about today is clear thinking, about some arguments against same-sex marriage.  Now in my mind, the only clear argument against same-sex marriage is the desire to restrict kinship.  The slippery slope arguments which ends with men marrying dogs (notice the argument never ends with women marrying dogs) or legalizing polygamy is, as all slippery slope arguments, fallacious.  Yes, there's a slippery slope.  It doesn't mean you'll end up where you are afraid you'll end up.  You can stop the slide anywhere you want.

The moral argument also doesn't wash--if God only wants men and women to marry (and only one) for the purpose of producing children, then regardless of your gender arrangements, any marriage which does not involve direct procreation is suspect--people in their 60's, people known to be infertile, people who use birth control.  Also, it is worth noting, people who marry without the intention of having sex, let alone having children, for instance, for political expediency, social advantage, or to disguise an unorthodox sexual proclivity.  So if we're going to start scrutinizing marriage, we have a lot bigger issues than selective kinship between two men or two women.

The one that gets me recently is the repeated message that children need both a strong male and strong female role model in the form of a mother and a father.  Who presumably must be married, and present.  This is a new twist on an issue which was current in the early nineties, that of women choosing to have children without being married.

No one is saying role models aren't important.  What I'm saying is that they aren't critical.  If they were critical, then all those single parents--be they single women who choose insemination, surrogacy or adoption, single men, who choose one of those options, divorced or abandoned people or those *generations* widows or widowers of police, firefighters, soldiers, raising their fallen spouse's children alone--are raising intrinsically and irrevocably damaged children.


And the simple fact is, they're not.  And if they're not, then obviously the premise, that children critically must have a mommy and a daddy in the home, who are married, is obviously untrue.

I would further argue that two same-sex parents in a cordial and respectful relationship, or a single parent of moderate mental health and ability, is infinitely preferable to the case of a mommy and a daddy who are indifferent or abusive to each other (or certianly the children). 

So anyway, I don't have a strong opinion about same-sex marriage. I do have a strong opinion about crap reasoning.  Come up with a good argument, and I'll listen. Spew the same old crap, and I'll happily just sling it back at you.  On any subject.

Can we please get back to furry animals?

This puzzle circulates on Facebook. With absurd answers. It's usually posed as 'how many squares are there, and the fight seems to be between the numbers 25 and 26.  I'm tired of it. Once and for all:

Check my reasoning here

This has been bugging me for a while now. It kind of keeps happening.

Let's say you are a grown up adult human being (assumption #1), enrolled as an undergraduate student at a mid-size North American university. Maybe you're not North American, and hence an 'international student', which I presume requires a certain amount of personal responsibility and ambition (assumption #2).

You are now entering the final week of classes, and you are concerned about your final grade.  You are holding in your hand a syllabus, received on the first day of classes eleven weeks ago, which details, among other things, how much the homework will count for in your final grade, and how late homeworks will not be accepted except in extreme circumstances.  The syllabus also indicates that all lecture materials and handouts are made available electronically via the university's web resources.

You calculate that if you get 100% on the final, you can barely pass the class.  And now you want to know if you can go back and do the homework, which you now walk up to your professor, IN THE LAST WEEK OF CLASSES, to ask what you can do about it.

Your professor, misunderstanding your initial question, which was 'how much is the homework worth', tries to explain, using the syllabus you are still holding in your hand, that some of the exercises were take-home homework kinds of things, and others were in-class exercises that you get full credit for, even if you weren't in the room, a policy your professor, for the record, is idiotic, but it means less work for him, and as it's free gradepoints no one has complained so far. 

You explain that you have often 'not come to class', and didn't know there were any homeworks.  Your professor explains that the homeworks, when they were given, were made available electronically, as indicated in the syllabus you are still holding in your hand. You explain that you never bothered to check. You then ask if you can turn them in now.

Is your professor being unreasonble in simply saying "I cannot accept late homeworks," as indicated in the syllabus, which I remind you you are still holding in your hand, and "You are responsible for the course material. I can't help you with this now."?

Sometimes I just want to slap some sense into people. And sometimes I really wonder if I am doing them a disservice. Then I convince myself that the bigger disservice is letting them go through life never facing the consequences of their actions, not making use of the information they are given, and not living up to the obligations they agree to be placed under.

But is this unreasonable?

I mean, it's the freaking last week of classes. The drop deadline was two weeks ago.  You're suddenly worried about this *now*? And you expect me to help you? Or for that matter care at all you don't bother to come to class (not 'had to miss classes due to illness, or hangover, or work or family or visa problems or some external reason you could not reasonably control), or that you didn't bother to check the electronic materials, or make a friend in the class, to check to see if you missed anything important, like a homework. Which you knew a) you would have, and b) you could check on, because it's in the syllabus you received on the first day of class, and was announced on the first day of class, and repeated several times during the course, which apparently you could not be bothered to attend with any regularity, or check with your professor or someone on those rare occasions you did bother to show up?

And I'm sorry, if you think you can get 100% on the final, and thus 'barely pass' the class, even if I give you credit for all the work you haven't done, you're crazier than you are stupid.

But again, am I being unreasonable?

How much clearer can I be?

We have to explain our graduate admissions process to a lot of people, so we (I) developed a FAQ for it. I tried to be as clear and complete as I could. So sometimes I get weird feedback from (potential) applicants that makes me think either I've left something out, or they've completely lost their minds.

Frinstance. We have a requirement in our applications process that the applicant suggest a potential supervisor. The purpose of this, as we explain, is to provide the applicant with the opportunity to review our research specialties and find an advisor with the relevant expertise.

The real reason we do this is so that the passionate individual who wants to develop teaching materials for teachings Anatolian Hittite to speakers of Vedic Sanskrit has the opportunity to realize that a) none of us do anything relate to language teaching and still less to materials development, and b) none of us do anything with Anatolian Hittite or Vedic Sanskrit. If that's what you want to do, more power to you, but we can't help you with it.

By the way, this does not deter the (usually Chinese) applicants who don't even mention word language, let alone Linguistics, nor even any particular language in their applications (which cost them $100 to submit, plus whatever it costs them to get whatever documents they need, and whatever they have to do or pay to get permission to study outside the country), who instead want 'devote their lives to the profession of teaching' but aren't actually interested in doing any research. Luckily these people rarely suggest a potential supervisor.

So anyway, in the last couple of years, our requirement that they suggest a potential supervisor has gotten construed as a requirement that they secure a supervisor before submitting their application. Exactly how they make that leap mystifies me, and frankly I don't think it indicates a skilled critical reader.

But let's say I require you to secure an advisor before applying (I learned recently that Education does this, but whatever). The response seems to be to send a vague email to everyone in the department, begging to be considered as a student. Occasionally, but rarely, with a vague statement of their own research interests, and usually without any useful acknowledgment of the receiver's interests. Sometimes this is obviously a 'let's send the same message to everybody' (often without bothering to conceal that you're sending simultaneously to multiple addresses).

Now let me ask you this, since if you're reading this blog you are obviously a person of high intellectual standing. If you wanted to find an advisor, what sort of message would you send? Would it be ...

"I would like to apply to your university. please be my advisor. "

... or ...

"I would like to do research on X, and I believe you would be a good advisor for this because of your interests in Y. "

Guess what we usually get.

So what I'm getting at is that if you are applying to graduate school*, you are applying to develop as a scholar and to contribute something to a field.  If you just want a degree, I'm sure you can send $3000 to any number of on-line, for-profit universities that will be happy to sell you one. But don't waste an actual scholar's time with your absence of initiative or ambition.

*Even if you are applying to professional school or for a certificate in something specifically job related, you're still applying to study *something* *with* someone.  Hopefully someone whose reputation for doing whatever they do means that you will inherit some of their wisdom.

Rob does math (is never pretty)

A while ago, a friend asked on Facebook how big a new widescreen TV should be if he wanted the height of the picture to be about the same as his old 32-inch TV, or something like that. I didn’t answer at the time, because I thought it was ridiculous. You want the width to be the same? Or maybe it was the area. It struck me as odd, because at the very least, you want your new TV to have the same picture area, or ideally, the same height.

The old standard TV picture is proportioned at about 4x3.  The newer widescreen TVs are typically about 16x9.  So if you maintained the same width, the height of the picture would shrink proportionally. So I declined to answer the question.

On the other hand, this has been simmering at the back of my head for weeks. Maybe months.  If I wanted to preserve the height of my picture (and add width to make up the new proportion), how would I do that?

So to distract myself this evening, I think I figured this out.

To do it my way (keep the height the same, add the width, starting diagonal dimension about 32 inches):  The 32 inch diagonal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle.  The two other legs of the triangle have the proportion of 4x and 3x.  Pythagoras, I think, teaches us that they length of the hypotenuse (32) squared (=1024) equals the square of the lengths of the other two sides (4x)^2 + (3x)^2.  At this point, I was stymied, since for the life of me I couldn’t remember how to take the square of a complex quantity. 

After some Googling, I finally figured out that (4x)^2 (4x-squared) is 16(x^2).  That is, both terms in the quantity square.  If this is wrong, please let me know and I’ll start over.

So now, armed with this, I know that 16(x^2) plus 9(x^2) = 25(x^2) = 1024 (parentheses here just to remind me I’m now just squaring my variable.  Divide both sides by 25 and we get x^2 = (approximately) 41.  The square root of 41 is about 6.4. 

So the proportions of the sides of my television are about 4 x 6.4 = 25.6 inches and 3 x 6.4 = 19.2 inches. I don’t mind doing a little approximating, since I assume the 32 inch diagonal I started with is also an approximation. 

So, to buy a widescreen with the same vertical height, I need one that is about 19.2 inches high, and it will be a little over 34 inches wide because (19.2/9)*16.  The diagonal dimension will be something like 39.something inches.

So having worked all this out, I built myself a little spreadsheet.  You put in the diagonal dimension of your old 4x3 TV and it tells you the diagonal dimension of a widescreen TV if the vertical dimension is the same, the horizontal dimension is the same, and if you want to maintain the picture area.

Me so smrt sometimes. Unless I got the original quantity wrong, in which case never mind.

I wonder if I could  somehow build an app out of this… Hmm….