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Institutional Research and Analysis Lecture

Earlier in the year, I attended a lecture by the people who work on the institutional research and analysis at Carnegie Mellon. They gather statistical data about the university, students, faculty, programs, etc., analyze it, and the university uses it to make improvements. Most of their data comes from surveys, which is why they repeatedly emphasized how important it is for students to participate in surveys provided by CMU. Most people do not take those surveys, because they believe that their input goes into a black whole, and they think that it is a waste of time. However, that is not the case. First of all, the questions were carefully created to get the most specific results possible. And after the data is collected, it is thoroughly analyzed, conclusions are drawn, and improvements are made accordingly.

During the lecture, they explained how survey questions are created. It is not a simple process, because you do not get to simply talk to people, and all you get back is a rank or other type of short answer that later must be interpreted. Generated questions go through rigorous testing before a survey is conducted.

They also showed some data collected over the past few years about students' opinions of the university, classes, professors, and themselves. Then they explained how they interpret the results and draw conclusions. For each set of data, students were grouped based on appropriate characteristics. For example, if the survey was about schoolwork and classes, the students were grouped by their school. If it was about assessment of personal growth, the groups were divided by grade level.

I do not remember all the details of the presentation, but all the data can be found at https://www.cmu.edu/ira/index.html

Wonder Boys

Whenever reading a book, I imagine the characters in my head, but that image does not always correspond with the author's description. Throughout the book, had trouble seeing Grady Tripp as an overweight man in his 50's, and Emily being Korean. Although I did not watch the movie, I saw a preview, and the actors did not match Chabon's descriptions, either. Tripp is not as fat as he is in the book, Hannah Green is not blonde, and James Leer does not have long oily hair. However, those are just minor irrelevant things. It seems like the actors captured the characters' personalities perfectly.

Also, the movie is more of a comedy than I thought the book was. Yes, Chabon uses humor throughout, but I found it to be more of a depressing story, filled with adultery, murder, depression, drugs, etc. Netflix, however, says that it is a "feel-good" movie, and Rolling Stone calls it a "comic dazzler." I do not know, maybe this preview is misleading , but if it is not, I feel that the movie does not reflect the mood of the story.

Wonder Boys

At the end of both the film and the novel, the blowing away of Grady Tripp's story serves as a release from his baggage and burdens over the course of the story. The sudden elimination of Tripp's lifework, finally crystallizes his path and in the end brings clarity to a convoluted and confusing weekend. Tripp is able to follow his heart and move forward, while helping others along with their own paths, as each character seems to reach a final conclusion at the end with the help of the supporting characters.
Similar to Tripp, James Leer is held back by his own story, which he hides from everyone else for fear and criticism and must eventually be pulled out and pushed towards publishing. The publishing of Leer's novel serves to push him out of college, and away from the world academia that Chabon credits for holding back his own as well as Leer's genius. With help from Tripp and Crabtree Leer pushes the envelope and it is implied rewarded for his work, though one can never really know for sure.
As a result of Leer's book, Crabtree seems to motivate himself towards something better in his life, by looking out for Leer and Tripp, while advancing his own profession. Furthermore, Sara leaves her unhappy marriage and pursues Tripp as a result of his new change in heart and unique path. In the end Chabon uses the removal of Tripp's novel as a catalyst to push each individual character down a path that the reader can infer is the right direction.

Wonder Boys

I really enjoyed the film Wonder Boys. I thought the novel was entertaining, but Chabon’s descriptions dragged on unnecessarily. He wrote a very detailed novel, and it was well suited to the big screen. I was worried than the novel was too unrealistic to pull off effectively, but the characters were captivating, and the film actually had a stellar cast.

I also disagree with the assessment of the ending as dubious or out of place with the rest of the story. The story was about a hectic weekend. It was a series of out of control events that were the culmination of bad decisions, many of them made by Grady Tripp. The end of the story was the resolution. The characters in the novel, for their various reasons had wandered from their paths, and the narrative is centered on them finding their way back. If the characters had not finished the novel grounded in a new situation, there would have been no redemption. This would have reduced the story into something meaningless, and turned the characters into caricatures. Tripp is redeemed as a character when he literally and metaphorically lets go of the novel that was holding him back, and does the right thing for the mother of his child. The ending is especially interesting if you view Tripp as an analogue for Chabon himself, and the character’s resolution as Chabon subtextually allowing himself some redemption.

I also think the film contained a clear message about the role of the teacher. Professor Tripp helps his promising writer grad student James Leer become successful. It is important for the end of the story to reveal that the activities of the plot have not been pointless. Tripp's adventure with his student is important because it ultimately helps solve not only Leer's problems, but also Tripp's. That Tripp learns from the experience is an important statement about the relationship between student and teacher.

*LOST POST* RePosting my "Babes in Boyland" Entry that didn't appear

I thought I posted this for Babes in Boyland back in October, but it doesn't appear on the site so I'm posting it again.

Thoughts on Babes in Boyland:

In Babes In Boyland, Gina Barreca’s account of her days in male dominated Princeton, Barreca is sanguine about her ability to survive in the culture of male privilege and camaraderie. She says on page 4, “A bet, dare, and challenge is precisely what Dartmouth College was in 1975.” I believe her. Barreca didn’t fit into the acceptable categories at Dartmouth. She wasn’t a flawless beauty, and she wasn’t a boy, and she didn’t come from a privileged background. Instead, she had to deal with being herself, a girl from Brooklyn. I think she presents a version of herself that was very well equipped to deal with these hardships. She recalls countless instances where she was able to expose the foolish prejudice and sexism of the men who surrounded her. I found that her representation of men was almost universally negative. On the one hand she was put into an aggressive situation, so her reaction was somewhat natural. On the other hand, for better or for worse, there was no sense of distance from the events of her undergraduate years at Princeton. Even though the memoir was written years later, I did not feel as though Barreca had gained any perspective beyond straight resentment of the De Facto sexism of the day. Now that the wounds are not so fresh, and the errors of that time are widely acknowledged, I didn’t find the story that compelling.

I think that Barreca’s experiences as an undergrad had a far greater effect on her perspective as a professor than vice versa. She initially put a lot of emphasis on being an outsider to the academic world, the only girl in her whole family to have gone to college. She also implied than going to college alienated her from her old world, so she was doubly trapped. The whole thing worked because she told the story with an entertaining good humor.

I also was a bit put off by the episodic nature of the story. Because she jumped around so much, I didn’t feel like I was getting the full story. It seemed like she was leaving things out, only reporting the anecdotes that made her look like a “tough cookie,” and leaving out the rest. Overall, I felt that the story was entertaining, but it didn't make a significant impact in my understanding of male/female relations in the college experience.

Is Water the New Oil Lecture

The lecturer, Karen Piper, presented some very interesting facts that culminated into a very persuasive speech. Maybe the title should have been “Should Water be the New Oil” instead. Then at least there’s no pretense of objectivity. I felt that many of the choices she made were unfair persuasively and informatively.

The first segment of the lecture focused on giving listeners background on the big players in the water world. When focused on Suez Water, the largest private water company in the world, we learned about the slave labor used to build the Suez Canal, and an instance where they cut off water in apartheid South Africa to stop a black protest. We learned how Themes water dumps the most untreated wastewater into England’s rivers. Piper showed us how water companies have only grown, swallowed up smaller companies or mergered with other companies, and how most of these companies are linked to Iraq, colonialism, the IMF, and Hitler.

Nearly all of the graphs and figures used were label-less and caption-less. For quotes she would often say whose words they were and have the words on the slide but not their owner. Part of the ethos of presenting evidence is allowing the jurors to evaluate the evidence, but she flipped through graphs and other figures too fast for us to reach our own conclusions, accepting hers by default.

It’s evident Piper intended us to leave her lecture with a vengeance for big corporations and pity for the little man and the developing world. Some of the statements she made must have been things she only wanted us to receive and agree with without thinking about. For example, we were told, “more money flows out of the foreign countries into the world bank than into those countries from the world bank.” Yeah, damn that corrupt institution, taking back more money than it gives out---oh, wait, it’s a BANK, not a charity. That’s what everyone expects it to do. That’s what it was created for.

So far I’ve only showed the bad parts. Here’s a great quote from Thames Water CEO, Peter Spillet: “Clearly people do not understand the value of water and they expect it to fall from the sky and not cost anything.” One report showed that 30% of World Bank projects between 1990 and 2001 listed privatization of water as objectives. Water costs rose 400% in one month in Manilla. The worst cholera epidemic ever in South Africa occurred only 9 years ago when residents who couldn’t pay for water were forced to drink out of the river. When Argentina forced a water company to cease operation, they were sued for 1.7 billion dollars. According to Piper, 80% of California’s water goes to creating feed for the beef industry.

During the Q and A after the presentation, someone asked if there are any good water privatization projects. Piper replied, “Oh there are tons of them” and proceeded to list a few off the top of her head. Without prompting they would have never made it into the lecture. Overall I thought the invocation of Hitler effective and the facts informative. On a topic I generally agreed with, I wish it was presented more fairly.