My small excitement of the day: a lightbulb in the ceiling fan above my reading desk exploded and showered fine specks of glass all over the desk and floor (in addition to the main part of the bulb that came down in one piece). Fortunately, I was sitting at the computer desk a few feet away and did not get glass on myself. Well, I needed to vacuum up the tiny pieces of cloth and thread that got on the floor from the flag shirt project on Friday anyway, and I cannot remember the last time I dusted that desk.
And yes, the sound scared the hell out of me.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Three to One
It's been a long time since I've done a refashion, but on Thursday evening, I decided I wanted to finally do something with these three shirts that were screaming to be combined into one shirt - these were three nice knit tops from my mom that were both too short (petite size) and too narrow for me. I spent a bit of time playing around with different color block patterns and finally decided on what seemed like a simple approach. Au contraire.
Making small stuff bigger is a lot harder than making big stuff smaller. I quickly discovered that I would not be able to use the method that worked so nicely with the Mondrian shirt for which I pieced together the fabric first and then cut the pattern from it. I didn't have enough material to make that happen. So I had to cut the different pieces and assemble them all together in the shape of the shirt itself. This allowed for all kinds of errors, and I made most of them. I made it even trickier for myself because I really wanted to keep some of the features of the original shirts, including the bottom hem of one shirt and both the side seams and the hem of another. Luckily, the shirt was two layers of fabric thick on the front (one on the back) - without that extra material to play with, I would have been sunk.
So how did I screw up? Let me count the ways:
(1) I made a pattern for the neck and arm area of the shirt, but the material was so limited I ended up making it out of 5 separate pieces of material. For the front piece, I cut the fabric on the wrong side one time so I had to sew one front and one back of the material together. Fortunately, this isn't very noticeable at all from any normal distance.
(2) I also misjudged or miscalculated my measurements and ended up with a front that was larger than the back when it was pieced together. Luckily, my chest is also larger in the front than the back, so it was okay.
(3) I sewed the shoulders together inside out, so I had to cut that off, reshape the arm holes, and sew it together again.
At this point, I had one piece of fabric that went over my neck and under the arms. Because of the shoulder-seam debacle, the section was also about an inch shorter than I'd planned. Now I needed to make the bottom part by making a tube of the correct dimensions to sew onto the top part. This proved more challenging that it would sound. One difficulty is that it wasn't a perfect tube I was aiming for; the bottom part of the shirt needs to be trapezoidal-looking from the front and back (incorporating the original seams, bottom hem, and those cut-out notches that some knit shirts have at the side seam).
(4) The bottom section had stripes of color. I cut one of the stripes too narrow and had to cut another one.
(5) Again, despite doing the math, I ended up with a bottom section that was not only too wide, but was too wide on both the front and the sides (I wanted the side seams of both parts to match). I was able to take in some of the extra volume without it being a huge problem, but there was fiddling involved. The stripe I'd thought I'd cut too narrow would have actually been fine.
The shirt did not turn out precisely as I'd hoped, and took a long time to put together (probably close to 7 hours from design to putting the sewing machine back into working condition to finish), but it is wearable. Here I'm modeling it with my container garden.
Robert said he thought it looked like a flag, which it does (though actually less than another one of the designs I was considering). None of the state or national flags look like this one, but it could represent the pastel flag for the merger between Austria and a municipality of Lichtenstein called Triesen (which appears to be geographically possible, oddly enough).
One thing about being a grad student on an insanely small summer stipend is that your time is worth very little money. I am working on my research this summer for about $1.50 per hour. (And if I were putting in a full 40 hour work week, it'd be worse!) So essentially, I ran my own personal sweatshop on Friday to produce this shirt: The Pastel Austriesen Sweatshop Shirt.
Making small stuff bigger is a lot harder than making big stuff smaller. I quickly discovered that I would not be able to use the method that worked so nicely with the Mondrian shirt for which I pieced together the fabric first and then cut the pattern from it. I didn't have enough material to make that happen. So I had to cut the different pieces and assemble them all together in the shape of the shirt itself. This allowed for all kinds of errors, and I made most of them. I made it even trickier for myself because I really wanted to keep some of the features of the original shirts, including the bottom hem of one shirt and both the side seams and the hem of another. Luckily, the shirt was two layers of fabric thick on the front (one on the back) - without that extra material to play with, I would have been sunk.
So how did I screw up? Let me count the ways:
(1) I made a pattern for the neck and arm area of the shirt, but the material was so limited I ended up making it out of 5 separate pieces of material. For the front piece, I cut the fabric on the wrong side one time so I had to sew one front and one back of the material together. Fortunately, this isn't very noticeable at all from any normal distance.
(2) I also misjudged or miscalculated my measurements and ended up with a front that was larger than the back when it was pieced together. Luckily, my chest is also larger in the front than the back, so it was okay.
(3) I sewed the shoulders together inside out, so I had to cut that off, reshape the arm holes, and sew it together again.
At this point, I had one piece of fabric that went over my neck and under the arms. Because of the shoulder-seam debacle, the section was also about an inch shorter than I'd planned. Now I needed to make the bottom part by making a tube of the correct dimensions to sew onto the top part. This proved more challenging that it would sound. One difficulty is that it wasn't a perfect tube I was aiming for; the bottom part of the shirt needs to be trapezoidal-looking from the front and back (incorporating the original seams, bottom hem, and those cut-out notches that some knit shirts have at the side seam).
(4) The bottom section had stripes of color. I cut one of the stripes too narrow and had to cut another one.
(5) Again, despite doing the math, I ended up with a bottom section that was not only too wide, but was too wide on both the front and the sides (I wanted the side seams of both parts to match). I was able to take in some of the extra volume without it being a huge problem, but there was fiddling involved. The stripe I'd thought I'd cut too narrow would have actually been fine.
The shirt did not turn out precisely as I'd hoped, and took a long time to put together (probably close to 7 hours from design to putting the sewing machine back into working condition to finish), but it is wearable. Here I'm modeling it with my container garden.
Robert said he thought it looked like a flag, which it does (though actually less than another one of the designs I was considering). None of the state or national flags look like this one, but it could represent the pastel flag for the merger between Austria and a municipality of Lichtenstein called Triesen (which appears to be geographically possible, oddly enough).
One thing about being a grad student on an insanely small summer stipend is that your time is worth very little money. I am working on my research this summer for about $1.50 per hour. (And if I were putting in a full 40 hour work week, it'd be worse!) So essentially, I ran my own personal sweatshop on Friday to produce this shirt: The Pastel Austriesen Sweatshop Shirt.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Student Ratings of Teaching: Part 1.5
I do not share Lee's sense of irritation that articles about student evaluations of teaching too strongly convey the idea that students are incompetent judges of professors' teaching ability.
As you may recall, in SRT Part 1, I agreed with fellow curmudgeonly critic Olivares that “to think that students, who have no training in evaluation, are not content experts, and possess myriad idiosyncratic tendencies, would not be susceptible to errors in judgment is specious.” And in addition to potential problems in students' ability to rate teachers accurately lies the extent of their motivation to do so. Perhaps many to most students do want their ratings to reflect their true perception of their professor's teaching effectiveness, but others will clearly have other agendas. Especially in a small class, it would not take many students who are dissatisfied with their expected grade to tank a professor's ratings. This is not to say that SRTs have no informational value; I agree with the SRT supporter Olivares quotes as saying, "Student ratings provide information on how well students like a course." But that is a pretty limited amount of information, and it's unclear how much we would want this evaluation to influence important decisions like tenure.
This article provides information about some higher education reforms of extremely dubious quality that are being considered in Texas public universities, with TAMU at the vanguard. I admit that I have a bias here: in the many years I spent working for a Texas state agency, I saw zero instances of governor or legislative intervention in the internal operation of departments that made any sense whatsoever and a zillion examples of idiotic and/or ill-intentioned meddling. (My god, I never blogged the lawnmower incident? the Survey Monkey incident? The "why don't we replace state parks with privately-funded amusement parks" incident? What self-control I had.) Thus, I am inclined to view any plan that comes from a conservative Texas think tank with full endorsement of Governor Goodhair Emptysuit with severe skepticism on the basis of source credibility alone.
Indicator of Idiocy #1: Their goal to "create a 'simple tool' to measure faculty efficiency." Oh by all means, let's make sure it's simple. We wouldn't want to get bogged down in any of the complexities of measuring this construct. Note that they are suggesting the following data be collected: "salary and benefit cost [huh?], number of students taught over the last year, average 'student satisfaction rating' and 'average percentage' of As and Bs given." If that last metric isn't enough to make you weep until you laugh at the obvious strategy that profs can immediately employ without improving their teaching at all...
Indicator of Ill-intentions #1: Their goal to split teaching and research budgets, ostensibly for the sake of transparency. OK, there's the fact that any graduate program is going to find it impossible to distinguish between teaching and research (since grad students spend so much time with faculty being taught to do research), but let's ignore these picayune details for now. Is it credible, for even a moment, that the goal of this proposal is not to reduce research budgets? When they talk about "cost containment," what they mean is "eliminate all that useless research that those lazy, self-indulgent professors are doing on obscure topics like, you know, how to define and measure teacher effectiveness."
Actually, I guess I should be relieved that they have not (yet) suggested turning the state universities of Texas into for-profit companies providing coursework 100% over the Internet. And if it's over the Internet, they could outsource all teaching to the Philippines or wherever labor is cheap these days...though it doesn't get much cheaper than using grad students and adjuncts, so there may be no savings there after all.
[UPDATE: And lest you think my negativity toward a lot of weight being put on SRTs stems from my getting bad evals, I got a 4.6 / 5.0 this past semester that would have put me on track to get the $10,000 bonus at TAMU.]
As you may recall, in SRT Part 1, I agreed with fellow curmudgeonly critic Olivares that “to think that students, who have no training in evaluation, are not content experts, and possess myriad idiosyncratic tendencies, would not be susceptible to errors in judgment is specious.” And in addition to potential problems in students' ability to rate teachers accurately lies the extent of their motivation to do so. Perhaps many to most students do want their ratings to reflect their true perception of their professor's teaching effectiveness, but others will clearly have other agendas. Especially in a small class, it would not take many students who are dissatisfied with their expected grade to tank a professor's ratings. This is not to say that SRTs have no informational value; I agree with the SRT supporter Olivares quotes as saying, "Student ratings provide information on how well students like a course." But that is a pretty limited amount of information, and it's unclear how much we would want this evaluation to influence important decisions like tenure.
This article provides information about some higher education reforms of extremely dubious quality that are being considered in Texas public universities, with TAMU at the vanguard. I admit that I have a bias here: in the many years I spent working for a Texas state agency, I saw zero instances of governor or legislative intervention in the internal operation of departments that made any sense whatsoever and a zillion examples of idiotic and/or ill-intentioned meddling. (My god, I never blogged the lawnmower incident? the Survey Monkey incident? The "why don't we replace state parks with privately-funded amusement parks" incident? What self-control I had.) Thus, I am inclined to view any plan that comes from a conservative Texas think tank with full endorsement of Governor Goodhair Emptysuit with severe skepticism on the basis of source credibility alone.
Indicator of Idiocy #1: Their goal to "create a 'simple tool' to measure faculty efficiency." Oh by all means, let's make sure it's simple. We wouldn't want to get bogged down in any of the complexities of measuring this construct. Note that they are suggesting the following data be collected: "salary and benefit cost [huh?], number of students taught over the last year, average 'student satisfaction rating' and 'average percentage' of As and Bs given." If that last metric isn't enough to make you weep until you laugh at the obvious strategy that profs can immediately employ without improving their teaching at all...
Indicator of Ill-intentions #1: Their goal to split teaching and research budgets, ostensibly for the sake of transparency. OK, there's the fact that any graduate program is going to find it impossible to distinguish between teaching and research (since grad students spend so much time with faculty being taught to do research), but let's ignore these picayune details for now. Is it credible, for even a moment, that the goal of this proposal is not to reduce research budgets? When they talk about "cost containment," what they mean is "eliminate all that useless research that those lazy, self-indulgent professors are doing on obscure topics like, you know, how to define and measure teacher effectiveness."
Actually, I guess I should be relieved that they have not (yet) suggested turning the state universities of Texas into for-profit companies providing coursework 100% over the Internet. And if it's over the Internet, they could outsource all teaching to the Philippines or wherever labor is cheap these days...though it doesn't get much cheaper than using grad students and adjuncts, so there may be no savings there after all.
[UPDATE: And lest you think my negativity toward a lot of weight being put on SRTs stems from my getting bad evals, I got a 4.6 / 5.0 this past semester that would have put me on track to get the $10,000 bonus at TAMU.]
You Know He's an Evil Bastard When
"The dim road hurtled towards us. A village, a huddle of houses, flickered by like ghosts. Ahead two eyes gleamed: they stared, then darted like fireflies as the rabbit turned to run. Paul Very gave a little laugh, and deliberately thrust down his foot. I heard the rabbit squeal as we hit it: behind me Rommel [a dog] whined, sharply. Paul Very laughed once more."
Later...
"He [Richard] corked the flask and put it down beside me. 'You seem a lot more worried about this dog than you do about friend Paul [who was injured when the car crashed and is still unconscious].'
'It's David's [a boy] dog. Besides, Paul Very ran over a rabbit,' I added, as if that explained everything."
The man is a murderer of humans as well as rabbits, but I can sympathize with her reaction.
(Madam, Will You Talk?, Mary Stewart)
Later...
"He [Richard] corked the flask and put it down beside me. 'You seem a lot more worried about this dog than you do about friend Paul [who was injured when the car crashed and is still unconscious].'
'It's David's [a boy] dog. Besides, Paul Very ran over a rabbit,' I added, as if that explained everything."
The man is a murderer of humans as well as rabbits, but I can sympathize with her reaction.
(Madam, Will You Talk?, Mary Stewart)
An Excellent Soccer Ad
I really loved this ad, especially the table tennis game against Roger Federer. That laughable loss was perhaps prophetic - Federer's not done well this summer on clay or on grass.
And for the record, I would totally watch a soccer movie starring Gael García Bernal.
And for the record, I would totally watch a soccer movie starring Gael García Bernal.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Good Ratios
My weekend:
4 days
2 Creatures of the Dusk outings
1 morning birding outing
6 (wild) rabbit sightings
0 badger of death sightings
Average of 1.5 rabbit sightings per day = Bliss
4 days
2 Creatures of the Dusk outings
1 morning birding outing
6 (wild) rabbit sightings
0 badger of death sightings
Average of 1.5 rabbit sightings per day = Bliss
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