Extended Family Invasion

Sights from the recent trip my brother and his family made to Wichita to (ostensibly) see my wife and I.



My brother demonstrates an important technique when his kids take the picture: get in front of the camera.

Favorite activities for the boys:

- Playing on the motorcycle, helmet and keys included.

- Shredding paper

- Playing with the dogs.

The youngest of the three kids, the only girl, doing her little-girl-cute thing.

 




We made multiple trips to the premier kid's museum in Wichita, Exploration Place.  Much fun was had.

One of the halls of the museum focussed on flight and had numerous full-motion flight simulators.  At least they used to be full motion; none of them moved or even had full yoke and throttle control.  Makes me want to volunteer to try to get them all working again.

There was an agriculture/livestock display that both boys enjoyed.

The highlight for both boys was a multi-level castle that provided numerous "educational" activities such as dressing up as knights, harvest stuffed vegetables, and firing a catapult.

The most intriguing hall was the simplest: bins of building blocks (Keva Planks, to be specific) with tables to build on and demonstration pieces on display.  For such a simple item, the Planks were inspiring and I suspect will be a part of our toy collection soon.

Two story pendulum that swings its way around a circle as the day progresses, knocking over pegs as it precesses.

The other big museum we visited is the famous Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS.  Shortly after taking this picture, there was a trip and fall down a flight short of stairs, twenty seconds of crying, followed by the question, "Was that funny?"

I wasn't laughing until he asked the question.

Proposed

To complete the PhD program in the engineering department at Wichita State, the following steps must be completed:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

After five academic years here's how things stand for me today:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

We're getting there.

(And in case you're wondering, here's a not-quite-finished copy of the proposal.)

Apple Customer Service

Two weeks ago I was hours away from taking my iMac in for repair for the fifth time.  One failed hard drive, two failed optical drives, and the second screen failure which was about to be repaired.  This is not the reputation for quality and reliability that Apple has built its reputation on and I decided to give them a call to see what could be done.

Their response was to replace the computer outright; I mailed the old one in and they sent me the latest comparable model, all at no cost to me.  They even allowed me to pay for an upgrade when making the switch, allowing me to end up with the computer I would have purchased if I had been buying a new one. And this has been just like buying a new one: new computer, new warranty, new operating system, new experience.  The machine even has that new computer smell; the smell of the scratch-prevention clear plastic sheets covering every surface: screen, mouse, and keyboard. (I would bet that long-term persistent exposure to these fumes would not be good for your health but  I inhale deeply, knowing they will disperse quickly and the magic feeling will be gone.)

Almost every aspect of the transaction has been exactly what we all want customer service to be.  When I called and was passed between customer service agents there was always a hot-hand-off (no being put on hold and transferred).  The customer support people all had access to my information, used it, and I never had to repeat myself or re-tell my story.  The incident was not settled during the first call but follow-up calls and emails were quick, clear, and effective.  I've dealt with technical support for other products and none have offered an experience this great.

Furthermore, last night I was having trouble with the new version of the address book program and with no obvious solutions on the internet, I decided to give Apple another call.  Actually, I had them call me when a customer support person was ready; Apple's website starts the process by putting you in the call queue before a phone call is even made.  In less than five minutes the problem was solved. My mistake was embarrassingly simple and it was clear the guy on the other end was not reading a script, making me jump through silly hoops before actually trying to understand the problem and work on a solution. Best of all, he never spouted company propaganda in response to my statements. There is no better way to make me, the customer, feel like a demoralized cog in a technical support machine than to respond to my words with virtually automated replies.

This I firmly believe; you generally get what you pay for and when you buy an (arguably) overpriced computer one of the things you get is incredible technical support.

iOS Board Games

Truth be told, the most common type of board game I play are translations of traditional cardboard-and-dice games to the iOS platform.  (Some would say this doesn't make them board games any more but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not going to worry about it.)  The reasons these get played more often are simple:

1. Often there is a computer controlled player I can play against when my wife doesn't feel up to it.
2. No time spent setting up before-hand and cleaning up afterward.
3. Can play where-ever and whenever the situation dictates; we can start a game in one location and finish it days later somewhere else.
4. iOS games are cheaper than their physical counter-parts.
5. Its easy to carry many, many games on an iOS device.
6. The computer takes care of the rules, making it easier to learn games you haven't played before.
7. The games almost always play much faster, sometimes over twice as fast.

Most of the time, we play the cardboard version of the game first and then go hunting for an implementation in the iOS App store with a few notable exceptions.  Here are the board games I tend to play on our iPad, in no particular order

• Carcassonne - Perhaps the first iOS game I tried and I must say, it is fantastic. This is a wonderful implementation and sets the standard for how board games should work on iOS devices.  The art is great, the sound design is wonderful, the game supports local and internet play.  $10 and worth it if you enjoy the game.
• Scrabble - Another early entrant onto our iPad and also a great implementation. I'm not a big Scrabble person but my wife is and she has put in some serious time with this app.
• Dominion - There's a reason there's no link for this one; it's not available on the app store any more. Unofficial implementation, something about stealing the art work from the original game without permission. They say there's a real, official version coming soon.  It needs to be sooner.
• LeHavre - I had never played this game before I purchased it on the advice of the board gamers throughout the internet.  I'm glad I did.  The game is complicated and takes some getting used to but once you get your head around the iconography and understanding the flow of the game, it is a treat.  My wife and I played in bed before going to sleep every night for about a week.  The game does an excellent job of keeping the mountain of pieces and markers understandable without making the screen too busy.  Our experience  
• Blokus - I love this board game but I have to say, the controls on the iOS version I find fiddley.  It doesn't ruin the game for me but it does frustrate me at times and make the game less enjoyable.  It's cheap, though.  I gues you get what you pay for.
• Phase 10 - This is a fun, simple little card game done almost perfect.  The only mark against it is the artwork: I don't care for it much.  It could be worse, but it could be better.
• Risk - This is a board game that I don't usually play because it often takes forever.  The iOS version solves this problem with a two player game often being completed in under twenty minutes.  The artwork is great and if it had internet play, it would get full marks from me.
• Monopoly - It looks like the version of Monopoly we have is no longer sold in the store but there are several other official versions that should be comparable.  Like Risk, the often slower pacing of the game is solved when the computer handles the money and moves the pieces. We've played this with four players, passing the iPad around and it worked just fine, mostly; the auctions were a bit scrunched. The artwork and animation are wonderful and provide a great experience.

There are other board games I've been looking at for iOS like Tigris and Euphrates, Caylus, and Small World and others.  We'll see if I get around to any of them.

Signs of Spring in Wichita

1. The weather radio starts going off on a regular basis, warning of the frequent severe thunderstorms.
2. I ride to school in the morning in long-sleeves but need shorts and a t-shirt for the ride home in the afternoon.
3. I can't decide if a hot or cold shower would feel better after said bicycle rides.
4. It can be 75'F at 3pm and below freezing eight hours later.
5. Some days we get rain, some days a thunderstorm, and some days an ice storm.
6. My wife starts watching the weather on the TV much more regularly.

All of these have happened to me in the past week.

International Graduate Students at WSU

US News and World Report confirms the reality I experience every day: there are a lot of international graduate students here at Wichita State.  As I've said before, being a white guy in my world makes me the vast minority.  According the the report, 84.4% of the graduate students in the engineering program here are international students.

That sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: Nationwide most/many engineering graduate students are international according to this New York Times "article" (its one paragraph long).

Wichita State Basketball Fame

You may have heard that the men's basketball team at Wichita State made the NCAA tournament Final Four this year, a feat they have not accomplished for decades.  I off-handedly committed to buying a Wichita State t-shirt, my first, if they made it this far in the tournament and so today I was at the bookstore, hunting through all the black and amber apparel looking for something I liked.

On my way out of the building back to my office I was blessed with a sign, though: Carl Hall, number 22 on the team was leaving the student union the same time I was.  This is the first time I have knowingly laid eyes on a member of the team, largely aided by the fact that I've actually been watching the games and know what a few of the players look like.

Carl didn't seem interested in talking so I left him in peace.  I assume he was headed back to the gym to continue practice; he had Chick-Fil-A in his hands, though so maybe he was on lunch break.

Tomorrow, back to the bookstore to see if they have any new stock in.

Update: A new design came in and it meets all my WSU t-shirt criteria: amber-colored, has the WSU mascot on it, says "Final Four".  Mission accomplished.

Anniversary Cake

Our anniversary is coming up and its near coincidence with Easter and the Easter dinner with friends inspired my wife with a great idea: buying an anniversary cake to bring to the dinner.  So we did.  The cake was delicious and it was wonderful to be able to get to share the occasion with others.

This is why I don't care to watch football

The whole article is interesting but the graphic (which should be larger) says it all...

Board Game Storage: Domion - New Dividers

As I've recently written, my Dominion case is too small to hold all the cards in the games and I'm preparing for the day when I'll need to move to a larger box.  One of the changes I'm making is to use cardstock dividers rather than oversized plastic sleeves to keep the sets of cards sorted.  I'm doing this because:

1. Getting all ten kingdom cards back into an over-sized sleeve can be a bit of a pain.  I've been able to get up to twelve cards into those big sleeves but past the first few cards in it takes some effort.  
2. With no dividers it takes some flipping and hunting to find a specific pack of cards to pull out.  The packs are all alphabetized but I can only see the names of the pack I'm looking at and some flipping around is required.
3. The dividers I've chosen to use have common rule clarifications for the cards printed on the divider which I hope will save time if questions come up during play.

To get the most storage space out of the new box, I'm choosing to store my cards vertically and have found some excellent vertical dividers to use.  Here's an example:

I decided to print the dividers out in black-and-white on 110lb. card stock at Kinkos FedEx Office as the cost is $8 vs $55 for the color.  Most of the cards are text anyway and my original plan was to use markers and highlights to color the banners a the top of the cards myself.  After I discussed this with a friend, I'm following his suggestion of printing out just the banners on mailing labels and placing them over the black-and-white banners on the cards.  I've purchased some full-sheet mailing labels,  made a few custom pages of the banners (see below) and printed them off.

And then I spent five years cutting. 

Finally, just had to stick banners on the cards and it was done (another 3 years of effort).

If you look closely you can see the labels weren't quite the same size as the area on the card.  I suspected something like this might happen as different printers have different invisible margins for the same size physical page. I probably could have figured out a way around this but this works well enough.  As always, I consider my first attempt at anything my prototype and these dividers fit the bill.

Board Game Storage: Dominion - Small Case

Dominion is similar to Carcassonne in that it seems to be made for expansions.  Both games come with a base set of cards/tiles with a defined set of play options with additional expansions adding new options, modifying existing rules, and adding new mechanisms. In Carcassonne these expansions are mostly tiles with a few new pieces and Dominion is highly similar: cards with a few new pieces.  And when I say "cards" I mean "lots of cards".  The base game of Dominion is 500 cards, standard expansions are 300 cards, mini expansions are 150 cards, and large expansions are another 500; the complete game has almost 3000 cards.

I don't have all the expansions so I was able to use my old Catan box to store what I do have (base set, Intrigue, Alchemy, and Dark Ages):

I've chosen to sleeve all of my cards so that as I add expansions over time the older cards will not look significantly more worn than the newer cards.  (I recently had a chance to play with a Dominion set that had been slowly grown over time and had not been sleeved.  The old cards looked very, very old which, added some charm to them.  These were the old-guard cards that had been there from the beginning. It also meant it that these cards were not anonymous and very easy to identify in the deck.)  

Each set of ten kingdom cards is placed in a larger sleeve to keep them together and these packs are then stacked into the box.  I've also made packs for the Curse cards and a starting deck for each player, just to help minimize the set-up time for the game.  

The guides/dividers are made from corrugated plastic that I had left over from a photography project. (This is the kind of plastic that is used for yard signs commonly seen during election season.)  The dividers are taped into the box as I was more interested in getting something put together that would work than doing something that looked really nice.  The randomizer cards are stored over on the lower right in their own little area and the extra sleeves I have left over are in the upper right.  Instructions are stored in the lid.

As you can see, the box is pretty full and I there are a number of other expansions that will need a home.  I've already decided if/when I get another expansion I'll be moving over to a larger box, the same one I'm using for Catan right now.  I've been inspired by an online discussion of Dominion players to go this route which will slightly modify what I've done so far.  Rather than using larger sleeves, I'm going to be printing out some cardstock dividers for each deck of kingdom cards.  The lane dividers in the new box will be wood and I'm thinking of putting felt on the interior base of the box to keep the cards from sliding around as much.  Oh, and I plan to store the cards vertically rather than horizontally.

I'll keep you updated as the new Dominion storage box evolves.

One of many things I wish I had thought of (and made)

A few details here.

Board Game Storage: Carcassonne

For a birthday a few years ago my wife purchase me a Carcassonne Big Box: the base game and multiple expansions in one box (and the box was big at 39" x 18.75" x 55.75").  (She claims I had mentioned being interested in it; I think she was reading my mind and gave me one of the best gifts I've ever received because it was a complete surprise.)  But the Big Box was way too big for what boils down to a large stack of cardboard tiles.  My experience in condensing my game of Settlers of Catan gave me confidence that something similar could be done here.

Back to Hobby Lobby with a pile of Carcassonne tiles in tow, searching for boxes that these tiles could fit in neatly.  I'm sure the Hobby Lobby staff were not quite sure to do with the grown man sitting on the floor at the back of the store, trying box after box in various permutations, but my efforts made them (a small amount) of money that day.  The result is the cleanest, densest game storage box to date.

Along the back of the larger wooden box are my self-designed and hand-crafted tuck-boxes for the player game pieces.  Unlike the treasure chests in my Catan box, these comfortably fit all the pieces I have with no special stacking effort.  The manilla one on the end is empty and I leave it in as a spacer to keep all the others snug relatively immobile.

In front of the player piece tuck boxes are three more wooden boxes that contain all the Carcassonne tile sets; more details in the following picture.  The scoring board in front lays on top of the player pieces and the three tile boxes quite easily.  The lid closes cleanly with no hassle.

Looking at the three tile boxes you can see I've made tuck-boxes for each expansion that I own.  Working from left to right you can see Inns and Cathedrals (green), base set (no tuck-box), Tower (black), King and Cult, Count, and River II (all three in the blue box), Traders and Builders (gray), Princess and Dragon (red), Bridges, Castles and Bazaars (manilla), Abbey and Manor (yellow). I made the labels on the flaps for each one and the underside of the flap lists the number of tiles for each expansion; I can't tell you how much of a good idea that has turned out to be when it comes time for clean-up.

And when there are extra pieces for an expansion that don't fit in the tuck-boxes...?

Using some scrap metal I had laying around and some not-very-strong magnetic-tape, I constructed caps that created an enclosed space in the lids of the two appropriate boxes.  I used a little bit of gaffer tape (motto: "We do all the things you think duct tape can do but actually can't.") to create pull tabs to make the caps easily removable.  It takes a little wiggling to get these metal caps into place but the don't come out inadvertently.

Using a similar principle, I created a false bottom for the large box to store the instructions and the tile-holder that comes with Tower.  Unfortunately, the magnetic tape is only marginally strong enough to hold the metal lid in place.  Most of the time its not an issue as the box is either resting on the table bottom side down or being carried with a hand or two helping hold the bottom in place.

Incidentally, deconstructing the tower and folding it flat is probably not a good way to ensure its longevity.  Its a wonderful thematic addition to the game and provides an easy way to pass around the stacks of tile for all players to draw from but the regular assembly and dis-assembly will certainly shorten its life.  It is fun while it lasts, though.

Give how nearly perfectly this set-up stores all that I have of Carcassonne, I'm reticent to acquire any more expansions.  There aren't that many that I'm missing and what I have is more than enough, especially when multiple expansions are used in a single game.  And to be honest, Catapult really doesn't interest me that much.

Board Game Storage: Catan

As I've mentioned previously, Settlers of Catan was the game that started it all for me as it was the first modern board game I purchased.  (I actually can't remember if I purchased it or it was a gift. Regardless.)  This was back in 2005 and the game was clearly gaining traction but you couldn't find it in Barnes and Noble yet; there was still a bit of a niche aspect to it.

To make the game more profitable for its producers, it was sold in a very modular style: the basic game played four players and you could buy an expansion that would allow you to add two more players.  In fact, each major expansion (Cities and Knights, Seafarers, and Barbarians and Traders) has progressed in this two-fold manner. About the time I owned the the base game and Cities and Knights for up to six players I realized I had a serious storage problem.  This was one game (at least in my mind) spread across four boxes with a lot of empty space in each box; it was time to consolidate. Over Christmas back in Portland I picked up an art box and six treasure chests and began the process.

I found some powdered dye online in the same six colors as the Catan pieces for each player and with a little bit of trial and error, was able to color the six treasure chests to match.  This very minor innovation has been the creative foundation of the storage system and continues top impress other Catan players when I bring out my set for us to play.

In fact, until last year, that first version of the Catan box worked quite well.  I kept the cards, tiles and border pieces in rubber bands (which often broke and were replaced), the chips in little plastic bags and each player's game pieces in a colored wooden treasure chest.  Life was reasonably good; everything fit snuggly in that art box.

Then Traders and Barbarians came out and I had a problem. Though it was a tight squeeze I was able to fit all the player pieces in the existing treasure chests.  (No more haphazard dumping of the pieces back in, though; now they had to be meticulously stacked to fit.  I consider this the after-game game and most of my fellow players agree.)  The rest of the new cards, tiles, and pieces were a no-go, though, and the only solution was a bigger artbox.  I made a trip to Hobby Lobby and picket up a larger box along with a few other sub-boxes and with a bit of organizational effort, found a way to make it work.

The last piece of the organizational puzzle was tuck-boxes: folded pieces of card stock assembled to form a box. I had already been making tuck-boxes for my the box I was using to store Carcassonne and  when I decided to apply the idea to my Catan box.  The tuck-boxes  allowed me to keep the cards and pieces for each expansion separate and easily accessible.  In fact, I stumbled across some very professional tuck-box designs for storing the resource hexes and with the help of FedEx Office (which will always be Kinko's in my mind), printed and folded these nifty little creations.

And here is the final product, packed and opened up for a fuller view:

The wooden box in the upper left contain my custom color-coded tuck-boxes for the cars of the various expansions (black for Catan, green for Cities and Knights, and red for Traders and Barbarians).  The box in the top right is entirely devoted to just some of the new pieces in Traders and Barbarians; the golden men (barbarians, I think) and camels are their own boxes down below on the far right.  The fancy "professional" hex tuck-boxes are in the center with the hex markers in their little boxes to the far right.  (I've sorted those markers into the four-player and six-player variant with the Seaside pieces also on their own). Along the bottom are the colored treasure chests for the player pieces and the slot in the top of the box contains the rules and the border pieces (not very visible).

There are a few minor changes I'd like to make to this set-up.  Since my original game is the older artwork and style, I have more ocean hexes than the newer version and there is no tuck-box for them. I might just print out another page of the ocean hex tuck-box and put them in in that.  The cardboard boxes on the right outside the box are not marked on the outside so there is also a bit of guess-and-check to find the appropriate pieces; something needs to change about that.

It is true that the box is large (16.5" x 13" x 4.5") and heavy but it all fits and relatively compactly as well.  The game doesn't travel back to Portland on the airplane any more but I've indoctrinated my family enough into modern board games that they have plenty of their own now. Of the three "custom" storage boxes I've done so far, the evolution of this box has been the most involved and demanding from a design standpoint.  But its done (more or less) and I like it.

Gotta love those treasure chests, too.

Duck Truck

Wichita has a Duck Truck.  The name is mine and a misnomer but it came to mind when I first encountered said truck.  The Duck Truck is a pickup truck with speakers in the bed that drives through downtown Wichita playing what I assume to be aggressive sounding bird calls to scare away other birds from the buildings.

My first exposure to it was seven years ago on a Sunday night.  I was on my way home driving through a vacant downtown when I pulled up beside the Duck Truck. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears but before I could get a picture, it drove off.  We were living close to downtown at the time and often heard these hugely amplified calls in the distance as the Duck Truck did its thing.

Today, all these years later, I saw the truck again, parked downtown. I was on my way to drop of my motorcycle for repair and by the time I was able to get back there to photograph it, the truck was gone.

The sighting has rekindled this desire: I desperately want to photograph and/or make a video of the Duck Truck in action.  Spring is returning to Wichita (73'F today!) and with the nice weather, I'm sure the Duck Truck will be out again.  I see some evenings in my future where I prowl downtown like a superhero looking for villans, windows down and ears perked to hear the mechanical bird calls from this mysterious truck.  My day will come, I'm sure of it.

Recent Winter Snow

The last remnants of last weeks snow storm are all but gone but we have photographic evidence of what transpired.

One disadvantage of having a landing strip for a driveway: shoveling can take a while.

As a special bonus, we also have two videos of Anise chasing/hunting snowballs.

Board Games

I have my good friends Troy and Lauren to thank for my love of modern board games; they spoke often of their weekly games of Settlers of Catan and I had never seen a board game with such a devoted following. I didn't get a chance to play the game until about a year later and I loved it.  It didn't take long until I had graduated to Cities and Knights and then Seafarers (and just recently, Traders and Barbarians). The game was wonderful, varied, easy enough to get other non-gamers playing, and it became the catalyst to my further exploration into board games.

It was several years after my first game of Catan that I was recruited into the first and only board game group of which I've been a part.  The four of us, all trained as engineers, got together once a month to play board games that we figured less analytical people would find boring, tedious, and/or  overly taxing.  I don't remember what we played in those early games but as we met over the years our repertoire expanded to include Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, and Agricola.  We also played Thurn and Taxis and Scotland Yard once but they didn't seem to have the staying power. The group has grown in membership over the years as our schedules have become busier but most board game nights garner only four or five attendees.

The most unique addition to the pool has been Power Grid and not because of anything particularly unique about the game but because none of us in the group had ever played it prior to our first game together.  I was the speculative purchaser of the game and spent the day of the game reading and re-reading the rules, trying to get my  head around how the game played.  When it came time to play that evening I discovered the rules had been left at home; we downloaded a PDF and made do.  In fact, the game has been very popular in my group and we play it often.

The most recent new addition has been Dominion; it was recommended by a group member who had played it with some other friends.  I bought a copy of the base set on this recommendation and have enjoyed it a great deal, so much so that I have also ended up with the Intrigue, Alchemy, and Dark Ages expansion.  One of these days I'm sure the remaining expansions (Seaside, Prosperity, Cornucopia, and Hinterlands) will make there way over.

And there's more to say about this hobby: the storage systems I've assembled for games and their expansions, the iOS versions of games we play, the simpler, smaller games that we use to introduce our friends to modern board games....

I'm sure I'll get around to some of these later but I'll leave you with this: The game of choice between my wife and I right now is the iOS version of Le Havre.  We don't own the physical game but have played this version in bed many evenings over the past three weeks.  She really loves it and it goes without saying we wouldn't play it near as much if we had to set it up and take it down every time we wanted to play; as my favorite review of the game says, "Its Chit-tastic!".

Writing Dates

XKCD web-comic from today captures my sentiments exactly.

I know this is not how we do things in the US but doesn't it make the most sense?  YYYY-MM-DD. Dashes are great as the universal delimiter but with the rise of the web I'm totally fine with the decimal point. 

The slashes, though, they get to me every time.  Its like writing"A/C" for "air conditioner".  At Cessna I saw people use "A/C" for "aircraft".  Or "b/c" for "because".  Coming from one with limited grammatical skill, this makes no sense.

The Progress of Progressive Odyssey

My timing was perfect/awful.  Right after the first storm this past Thursday and Friday, I ran my computer in for repair.  We were literally on our way out of town and I wanted to drop it off so the repair could get started over the weekend hoping it would get back to me more quickly. I didn't anticipate the second snow storm that closed the school the following Monday and Tuesday.  No access to school, no computer at home.  Like it or not, I took two days off from working on my dissertation.

I used this forced hiatus to do some organizing here on the blog, categorizing all my posts and getting a chance to review what I've written about over the years. (The categorizations now appear on the right side of the home page.) I'm also going to be migrating photos that I linked to on Flickr back to the blog itself; just trying to keep everything in one place.

Reviewing and re-reading what I have written over the years is a great activity for a snowy winter day. Though writing for this blog has been far from the super-regular activity I thought it would be, I have managed to put up over 300 posts over the past (almost) eight years.  This has been the length of time I have spent in Wichita; my first post was several months after moving to town.

The topics for this writing have been as varied as I would have expected, being determined by the events of my life and the thoughts running through my head.  Going back to school has brought in a lot more of the academic material from my studies and the semi-revival of my hobby electronics projects has also been a significant theme as of late. I'm very much a board game player as well but it doesn't look like I've written a single post on that topic.  That will probably change.

And regarding the topics: this blog is a poor reflection of the entirety of my life. Most of what gets put up here is the miscellany of my life with many many subjects I care deeply about getting no webpage space at all.  There are a variety of reasons for this:

• It is hard to write clearly and effectively for an audience that consists of the entire internet.
• There are areas of my life that I don't want broadcast to the world.
• Keeping the material here on the lighter side means the stakes are a lot lower and the burden of writing well is greatly reduced.

When I set out writing this I hoped to keep most of the material accessible most of the time and looking over my writing these past years it seems like I've done that. The more technical material is challenging to this cause, though, particularly the hobby electronics.  In the spirit of the internet I'd like to be able to contribute back and post the technical details of my projects for others to use but I don't know if this blog is the place.  I guess its easy enough for you the readers to skip over the material you aren't interested in but maybe a separate blog just devoted this topic would be in order.  I'll have to think about it.

Foreign Graduate Students and Industry Employment

I read an article in Bloomberg (PDF) recently; it was titled: "How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation". (The URL for the article reveals a more aggressive title: "Glut of Foreign Students Hurts U.S. Innovation".)

The article builds the following case:

1. Though there are plenty of domestic STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) undergraduates, there are very few domestic graduate students.  
2. Domestic graduate students are virtually non-existent because
1.  Wages in the STEM fields (academic and industry) are lower than they should be due to the oversupply of foreign graduate students.
2. Universities choose foreign students over domestic students "because they can pay" (versus those students who pay the much reduced, tax-dollar subsidized in-state rates).
3. Domestic STEM holders of bachelor's degrees are being diverted into non-STEM fields due to lower wages in STEM fields.
4. To encourage development of our STEM talent pool, we should focus on the domestic students by removing competition from foreign students.  This will reduce the supply of STEM workers, raise wages, and provide an economic incentive for domestic students to continue in their STEM education.

I am a STEM graduate student now, worked for eight years previously in a STEM job, and since I am working towards being a professor in a STEM field, I think I can safely say I have the means, motive, and thanks to this blog, the opportunity to speak to this issue. Here are my opinion-neutral observations (as much as such things exist).

Item 1 - There are a lot of foreign students in the graduate program at Wichita State.  All of my graduate classes here have had far more foreign students than domestic. I would guess that most have been over 80% foreign students. In some, I am the only domestic student in the class.  Most of the faculty in our department are foreign-born.  I would expect this to be the case in many universities around the nation though I only have my experience at conferences to extrapolate from; no hard data.

My time in the engineering workforce also showed that there are a lot of foreign workers.  Not near as high as Wichita State but I would guess a that one-quarter to one-third the department was employed through a work visa. I don't know exactly how these visas are granted but it is clear that my employer was going to some amount of legal effort to get these foreign-born engineers jobs in the US.

Item 2 - Universities do enjoy getting the extra funds that foreign students provide.  As state support of public universities and colleges has diminished over the years, these institutions have become more dependent on private donations and student-derived income to continue as a going concern. The amount of student-derived income is much larger for foreign students than domestic (in-state) students so universities have an incentive to admit more of these higher-paying students. 

Item 3 - Wages in the STEM fields are lower for those who posses STEM skills.  For reasons that are still not clear to me, the invisible hand of capitalism has recently valued positions in finance (for example) over those in engineering and if a student is simply looking for the highest-paying job, they won't choose STEM.  For the amount of effort and difficulty it takes to graduate with a respectable STEM degree, the STEM industry pay does not seem proportional.  This is not to say that STEM workers are universally impoverished, just that the cost/benefit trade-off does not provide a strong incentive for students to pursue STEM fields.

In these fundamental ways I can agree with the article. I don't know enough to speak very well to many of the specific facts cited in the article but my experience generally echos sentiments alluded to by the author, an academic himself.  My personal experience makes it easy for me to believe the general trend of items 1 through 3 above.  Its item 4 that gives me pause.

The author believes that limiting the number of foreign students will reduce competition for domestic students who desire to enter graduate school and allow them to continue on with their education.  To make this case well, the author would need to provide some evidence of a direct connection between reduced domestic graduate student enrollment and increased foreign graduate student enrollment. In other words, are domestic graduate students being pushed out?  The article implies this is the case but provides no evidence.  My question: do domestic students want to go to graduate school but can't get in because all the slots are taken by foreign students?  I don't know.  

Clearly universities have the financial incentive to admit more of the higher-paying foreign students.  If the financial needs of the universities are the only barrier for domestic students, the solution is simple: remove the incentive for universities to balance their books through income from foreign students by providing more public funds. If the admissions office is being run with the university finances as the key factor, tax money from the states will change the equation. This will only work, though, if money is truly the only barrier for domestic graduate students; I suspect it is not.

The author also seems to equate a strong STEM workforce with a strong STEM academic workforce.  The F-1 visa program is for students and the article deals strictly with this type of visa.  The H-1B is the common foreign worker visa and is completely separate from the student visa. A glut of F-1 visas may in fact be the core factor in the lack of domestic STEM graduate students but what about all of the STEM employment options outside the university? It is entirely possible for the U.S. to have a thriving STEM industry that is achieving many of the things the politicians want while having a limited representation of domestic STEM students in graduate school.

Said simply: I believe the power of the American STEM industry does not primarily lie in advanced degrees.  Those degrees help and may even be a central piece in forming a the business but it takes more than an academic understanding of an issue to make a company successful. Entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and daring ideas don't come simply from working towards a PhD; the gap between a good idea well proven through a dissertation and a game-changing company is large.  The problem with the STEM industry in this country cannot be so simply tied to foreign graduate students.

Snow Day

Over the past 24 hours Wichita has received about a foot of snow.  This is enough snow to:

• Force me to shovel the landing strip that is our driveway.
• Get Katie home from work early yesterday and let her work from home today.
• Force the closure of Wichita State University starting yesterday afternoon and continuing into today (not that it keeps me from having to work on my dissertation).
• Give our dogs plenty of snow in which to play.
• Force the use of our kerosene heater to dry out the dogs after the aforementioned activities.

Photographic evidence:

Garage Heating

Graph from yesterday's home temperature measurements:

Of particular note are the garage (dark blue) and attic (green) traces. There are three bumps in the graphs that mirror each other and are co-incident; these events are when the garage door opened to let a car in or me out to shovel snow. The two areas are connected by an access hatch that I tend to leave open, allowing air to flow between them easily.  During these bumps in the graph, the garage temperature falls and the attic temperature rises.  The warm air that has formed in the garage is displaced into the attic by the cold air moving in through the open door.  When the door closes, the temperatures in both places begin moving back to their former state.

This leads me to to observations:

1. The air flow through the garage is not very large when all the doors are closed.  The space is far from air-tight but it must be tight enough because the garage warms back up once the doors close.  The cold air from the outside isn't getting in near as well.  And where is that heat that is warming the garage coming from....
2. The insulation between the living space and the garage could be better. The heated house is the only source of energy that could be warming the garage after the door closes.  This has implications for the summer; keeping the garage cool by opening doors and allowing air to flow will hel reduce the cooling demand in the living space.

The Best Cup of Coffee I've Never Had

During one of the podcasts I regularly listen to an off-topic conversation developed regarding how to make coffee.  The podcasters claimed the following:

• Most people have never had a good cup of coffee because most coffee is made poorly.
• Coffee, straight, black, simple coffee tastes great when it is made properly.
• The formula for good coffee is not very complicated but it can't be mass produced easily/cheaply.

1. Filtered almost boiling water.
2. Good beans.
3. Burr-grinding.
4. Aeropress coffee maker.

To me coffee has always smelled good and tasted terrible.  I love coffee-flavored anything, really, and am sure that I would enjoy coffee with enough cream and sugar in it.  This all seems like cheating, though, and the prospect of straight-up coffee that needs no doctoring is appealing.  I'm tempted to experiment with the above formula but the cost of the equipment is too high to take a gamble at this point.  So I'm asking around, trying to find somebody who thinks they can make a cup of coffee that is so good nothing needs to be added.  Any coffee perfectionists out there that want to try to convert me?

Sunday Bake-Off

Yesterday my wife and I found ourselves in an inadvertent bake-off with/against each other.

My entry was the product of my (three week old) weekly tradition of making a loaf of bread on Sunday afternoon.  I use a bread machine which is, obviously, very convenient and easy to use as well as able to produce excellent results. This week we decided to try an oatmeal bread and of all the alleged oatmeal breads I've had, this is the first I can recall that definitively had a distinct oatmeal taste.  My wife loved it.  A lot.

There was symmetry in our enjoyment of baked goods, though, as I found her entry fantastic: apple crisp/cobbler. We couldn't remember if she had made any baked apple deserts this winter; this is clearly a sign that such a treat was in order.  The apples were delicious and the cobbler top had an excellent chewy and crunchy texture simultaneously.

Best way to end a Sunday.

Reading Academic Papers

Today marks the day that I have been working on my dissertation for one month.  By "working" I mean that I have been devoted full-time to the endeavor; last semester the time I put in was severely limited due to the course I was teaching.

And what I have been doing the past month: reading, mostly.  A little bit of writing as I try to organize, collect, and synthesize the material I've been reading.  But mostly reading.

Reading academic papers is a bit like reading poorly written textbooks.  The value in the writing is not in how it is said but in what is trying to be communicated; there is no poetry in these papers.  The papers are not entertaining, there is no florid language; at best, they are interesting because of the results they present and the conclusions they purport.

"Reading" is even a strong word for what I'm doing; mostly its just skimming.  Read the abstract, maybe a little bit of the introduction, read the section headings, look at the tables, charts, and graphs (even graduate students like pictures more than words), and slowly skim the results and conclusions.   I highlight any important details I happen to catch, rate the paper on its expected usefulness, and sort it into folders that I've set up for my dissertation.  I "read" most papers I for the first time in less than ten minutes, more interesting ones that I know will be useful I spend a bit more time on, looking for specific details.

So how many of these have I "read" this past month: 214.

I've got 32 in the queue and am constantly adding more, usually referenced from a paper I'm currently reading.  There is also a significant subarea of my research I haven't specifically been reading in so you can be sure that there will be more reading once these 32 are done.

Flat Band-Aid

I was able to successfully use an emergency bicycle tire inflator on the way home from school today.

What you see above is a bicycle multi-tool with an integrated compressed-air cylinder (the brass-colored, shiny part in the middle).  In case of an emergency flat that needs re-inflating, put the red nozzle at the top over the stem of the tube and press down.  The compressed air will inflate the tire quickly and you'll be off and cycling again.

At least that's how it is supposed to work.  The first time I had a flat after purchasing the miracle worker, I couldn't figure out how to operate it. Aften ten minutes of puzzling, I gave up and walked the last two miles home.  Once home I spent another fifteen minutes messing with it and still had no success.  The break-through came when I realized I didn't know how to replace the compressed-air cylinder; figuring that out revealed that the cylinder had been installed upside down (I assume to prevent accidental discharge during shipping). I flipped it over and a test yielded a short blast of cold air.

So today when my front tire started deflating an hour from home, I knew what to do.  I pulled this little guy out and in less than a minute the tire had inflated enough to get me the rest of the way home.  Not only did it save me a bit of walking time but a successful field test is always reassuring.  

The big question now: do I need to replace the cylinder or is it good for another use? There is really no way to tell so I'll probably just grab another cylinder and keep it in my bag for now.