Andrew's Blog

A while back, I posted an article called Cooking Perfect Fried Rice, & if that title is true, then why are we here? Well, looking over that fried rice recipe, I realized that there are things that could have been done better. Moreover, over Christmas break, I spent several weeks not making fried rice. Getting home, I couldn't remember how to make the dish. As such, I needed a better method.

I want to juxtapose two articles that represent a recent trend in reporting on the economic plight of my generation.

The first is the post entitled "Playing The Blame Game: Or; How Should Graduate Schools Respond To The Bad Job Market?" by the blogger Tenured Radical(sic). In it, Tenured Radical(sic) argues that current graduate students should blame themselves for discovering that graduate school in the humanities is a great way to be exploited labor for a university & that there's no hope for a tenured track job for most of us. To be far, she also says that we should look forward to a future of non-academic work in exchange for our six years as exploited labor.

What a week to end the season! Football had been really bringing me down lately, but this weekend--minus 30 minutes of watching Grand Valley State wipe the floor w/ Carson-Newman--was wall-to-wall excitement (& it was esp. helped by Georgia Tech overcoming failure & finally pulling out an ACC championship).

Ho hum, another week, another Mumme Poll ballot. I grow weary of this season.

As a lot of people have pointed out, there's not a whole lot interesting going on in college football, this season (esp. at the top). Also, this was (at least on the surface) a pretty dismal week of football. That said, I enjoyed watching Texas Tech rip apart Oklahoma with their new quarterback Nick Potts (there's two links in that name, so make sure to click both). Additionally, the bits of Oregon / Arizona I got to watch online (b/c apparently ESPN thinks ppl in Georgia are more interested in Texas & Kansas) were really exciting. I was sad to see Stanford play like, well, Stanford in The Big Game. Also, I really loved watching Notre Dame & Georgia lose on senior night at home. Fun times!

I'm currently making up my syllabus for Spring 2010, where I'll be teaching ENGL 191, Science Fiction, once again. I'm having a problem, though. Currently, the version of SF I'm teaching now ends w/ 2 novels: Snow Crash & Accelerando. The problem is that both of those books tip the scales at 400+ pages (470 & 415). This is especially a problem in a university environment where, as students start to get sucked into semester projects & final exams as the term concludes, the amount of time available for reading (esp. for an elective) starts to drop. So, essentially, at the same time their time is most impacted, I'm asking them to read over 150 pages a class period. As a comparison, I recently taught Patternmaster by Octavia Butler (a light 200 pages) & we had a great class discussion, as I suspect ppl actually read the thing. So, I'm starting to look into solutions for next Spring.

Ahh, another week, another week of football. Frankly, I'm getting a little bored. Texas, Alabama, and Florida all won and all stayed ranked in the top 3, despite the fact that I think we can safely claim that Texas is the only of those three that seems to want the ranking. While I've been a bit of a Florida booster for the last few years, I have to say I'm really starting to actively root against these guys. My dad likes to say that he vividly remembers during a Baltimore Colts game an announcer proclaiming that the Colts looked "like a bunch of tired businessmen." I'm starting to think the Gators have that same vibe: they look like they have senioritis ("ho-hum, I guess we'll win another national championship").

A few weeks ago, I posted my BCS ranking computer program. It did a pretty good job, but there were some weird results. Specifically, it had what I call "the Idaho problem."

And here we are again: another Sunday morning, another blog post about my Mumme Poll ballot.

A lot of movement this week. Also, now that I have a computer poll, I can have my first controversy: the computer and the human voter disagree! I've attached week 9 numbers for my computer poll below, so you can see the disagreements. Basically, I bounced Iowa and Alabama from the Top 5 in favor of moving up TCU and Boise State. I thought about having Oregon in the Top 5, but couldn't really figure out why they should be so ranked, esp. above Boise State (other than swatting USC like the annoying flies they are!). I also moved Alabama out of the Top 5 b/c, despite not playing this week, a lot of their competition put up some serious offensive numbers and I feel that this is going to be increasingly important down the stretch (esp. now that Florida's offense remembered how to complete passes to Florida receivers instead of defensive backs). Iowa got moved out of the Top 5, b/c I'm becoming convinced that my computer (& the BCS computers) loves them b/c they are already 9-0, while most teams are only 8-0. My ranking algorithm rewards teams w/ more games played. Also, if you only watched the first three quarters against Indiana, you would probably think about bouncing them, too. B/c as it is obvious they are going to win the Big Ten, the question becomes: "can Iowa beat Oregon in a Rose Bowl?" I think the answer, after Oregon's day against SC, is clearly "no."

I think almost all college football fans would agree that the BCS is, if nothing else, a strange system. There are human polls, computer rankings, & lots and lots of money. After the craziness that put Iowa at the top of the computers (which I agree with, I have to say), I started reading about some of these mysterious computers. Frankly, some of them are odd, as they start with preseason "power rankings," which are basically guessing (the Billingsley model actually punishes teams for not performing based on how he guessed they would perform). I was wondering if it was possible to produce a computer program that didn't involve any initial seeding and could still produce reasonable rankings.

Ahh the joys of finally getting exactly what you want from football. There were two things I was looking forward to happening this weekend:

1. Georgia Tech beats Virginia (34-9)
2. Clemson beats Miami (40-37; this was quite a game, btw)