Becoming a more 'Serious' Cyclist...

Remember when you were 8 years old and your parents bought you a $1501 dollar bike? Like me, you probably put that bike through its paces, jumping off curbs, going off-road, and generally mistreating it like everything else you didn't pay for with our own money. Despite all of the abuse, I can't remember any of my bikes actually ever breaking. Like products made by Fisher-Price, they pretty much seemed indestructible.

Fast-forward to 2010: I decided to buy my first bike in over a decade so that I could get exercise by commuting to work (that it would also allow me to avoid taking Washington's terrible Metro system was just icing on the cake). Buying a brand new bike entails a lot of equipment costs (tools, helmet, rack, clothing, headlight, reflectors, lock, etc.) so I decided to go 'cheap' and pick up a Diamondback Insight 1, which frequently retails for $400, but I scored a previous-year model for $250. It took about 2 weeks for the problems to begin.

My commute is roughly 7.5 mi each way (~11.5 km). While there are a few hills and the occasional small bumps, it is paved and decidedly not 'off-road'. Yet I was snapping spokes on a regular basis (~1 every 2 weeks). The entire crank broke and had to be replaced (with certain parts removed because they were interfering with the derailleur) and the entire rear wheel was rebuilt last fall. Last week a pedal snapped off and I decided that enough was enough - to hell with this thing!

I'd saved a bit of cash and decided that this time I was going to buy a much higher quality bike. I shopped around the local bike stores (there are 3 within walking distance of my place) and after consulting a 'flock' of reviews, I set my sights on the Cannondale Quick 2, which retails at wallet burning $1,029:

For 4x the price I expect no less than 10x fewer things breaking. It's nice that it looks a lot sleeker than the Insight 1, but like many things, a bike's shininess is inversely proportional to the amount of use it gets. 

The going consensus about Cannondale according to the portions of the interwebs that I've frequented is that it's a relatively pricey, high-end bike company that's known for quality and reliability. Speaking with the technicians at REI2 I was told that given the amount of biking that I'm doing I should probably have invested in something more high-end than my previous bike in the first place. However, even they thought that my difficulties sounded excessive.   

So I biked to work on the new wheels today and noted some differences. For starters the new bike is noticeably lighter due to Cannondale's aluminum frames. It's certainly easier to carry up and down stairs, but I also think I generate less resistance on the road (more biking will be needed to confirm this). It's also a 27-speed bike, whereas every previous bike I've had has been a 21 or less. I notice a difference in that there's much less change in torque when switching up or down a single gear. It'll take some getting used to, I suppose.

So I'm excited about the shiny (not for long) new toy, but it leaves me in an odd position: What to do with the lemon? My parents think that I should sell it, but no one I know would want to buy it (I've posted too many Facebook rants about all of the difficulties I've been having). Furthermore, even if I wanted to sell it on Craig's List, I'd still have to replace a spoke and the pedals which would run me $50 (I can't imagine that I could get more than $100 for it given that the tires need replacing as well).

What I think I really want to do is this: strip the thing for parts, then find a high cliff somewhere. I'd tie a brick to one of the pedal nubs (for effect) and throw it off said cliff, preferably engineering some form of explosion when it hits the bottom. That would be awesomely satisfying. Good riddance! 

1Incidentally, this translates to ~$260 in 2011.

2For Canadian readers, think of the American version of Mountain Equipment Co-op, though I realize that this is an anachronism.

Book Club: Academically Adrift...

I've been getting a lot of reading done with this this Kindle thing. It's surprisingly convenient to carry around, and the whole 'einhander' reading ability has allowed me to do far more quick reading while waiting in lines for buses and things like that. Conveniently, I've already finished a whole book on it, and am deep into a second.

My ebook virginity was given to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (AA; 2011; University of Chicago Press), which details a recent study (in addition to citing previous studies) suggesting that modern students are failing to learn much during their undergraduate degrees.

In brief, the authors analyzed data generated by administering standardized tests (short answer and not multiple choice) to ~2,400 students at a diverse set of colleges at the beginning of their freshman year (1st year) and then again at the end of their sophmore year (2nd year). Theoretically, this allowed them to track improvements in 'critical reasoning skills' over this two year period, and correlate these improvements to all kinds of socioeconomic factors reported by these same students (gender, race, family income, student debt, etc.).

Their major finding was unsurprising: students showed very little improvement, on average, at all. However, certain traits did have significant associations with improvement: exposure to reading/writing intensive classes (positive), hours spent studying alone (positive), hours spent studying in groups (negative), etc. As someone who has been through college and gone on to TA students, these results were expected, but I was still interested in a few particular findings. Gender showed no significant effect on learning or achievement, which is good to know, but race was a major player. The authors found that contrary to much educational litterature, college education is not 'the great equalizer', but rather inequalities that groups bring with them into college are perpetuated throughout their education (the achievement gap between whites and hispanics/asians stays the same, while between whites and blacks, it increases).

I have to admit that I was intrigued by one of the explanations for this latter phenomenon - one that also explains the equivalent class disparity in achievement (middle class students score better than students from poorer families). It goes something like this: People who are brought up in families of the 'achieving classes' (middle and upper class) learn a set of behavioral norms that are conducive to navigating the somewhat highbrow environment of modern colleges. They write and speak more clearly, and have more exposure to media, which may make them better at forming cohesive arguments. So while different races/classes may not show big differences on multiple choice questionnaires, in the short-answer style test administered in this study, these differences become more pronounced. Something to think about.

While I have a few more interesting things to note about the book's findings, I should say that I'm not entirely blown away by its presentation. I realize that being a University of Chicago Press title, it is somewhat academic. But writing the entire book in the form of an extended academic paper is somewhat overkill. It also creates an uncomfortable lack of balance between something truly academic vs. something more popular. For instance, there are many charts, figures, and tables throughout the book, all without error bars or proper statistical description. An appendix at the end answers some of this, but it seems curious to me that you'd bother putting in so many tables and charts into something intended for the popular audience (not to mention the entire tailoring of the book to seem like a 200+ page paper). There are also some serious questions of causality that aren't adequately addressed. An example: The authors find that 'interaction with faculty' outside of class is positively associated with achievement, and suggest that schools should encourage more 'outside of class time' faculty student discussion. However, every TA knows that pre-med 'overacheivers' obsessively come to see professors in order to beg for marks. In all of these associations, are people doing better because of X or do better students tend to do X (or even perhaps far less additive scenarios?).

Many criticisms aside, there is an overwhelmingly depressing feeling that you get from reading AA. These problems are incredibly pervasive, and solutions are far from obvious. No one seems to be refused entry to college anymore (acceptance standards are demonstrably lower than they were 30 years ago) and failure rates have dropped in tandem with rampant grade inflation (it blows me away that average GPAs in the US are between 3.5 and 4 out of 4.3. That's INSANE compared to my experience in Eastern Canada where anything above a 3 meant you were doing well). Many people call for greater privatization of colleges, but the authors show evidence that there's no obvious conclusion that this will increase the quality of applicants (students as consumers gives them more leverage over their professors, for one thing). Furthermore, it appears that many colleges are no longer using academics at all to woo students, but rather are focusing on social aspects to sell their schools (something that multiple studies have found to be negatively correlated to achievement). If colleges become more businesslike than they already are, how do we ensure that they compete for quality of education over social atmosphere?

The sad truth is that there are way too many undergrads out there. The value of a BA is already almost worthless (B.Sc.s aren't far behind), and the labor market is saturated with college grads lacking useful skills. Making education more readily available while at the same time dropping standards really is a complete waste of taxpayer money. Everyone knows college grads working in low-income jobs that typically require nowhere near 4 years of expensive study - so what was the point? Answer: based on self-reports and work in the field of education, kids are basically going into debt in order to have a 4-year 'college experience', which translates a lot more into recreating popular American movie perceptions of post-secondary education rather than rigorous academics. When everyone has a useless degree, what will be next - the useless Ph.D.? Oh wait... Ungh1.

1The final piece of sadness reported by the book is that there's really no incentive for anything to change. Most colleges already get more applicants than they need and the primary focus of major universities is research, not education. Going to college has become a standard thing to do, regardless of life goals (if any) or actual benefit of attending. The authors basically advocate an evidence-based approach to reforming education at already saturated schools so that at least the students are learning something.

Wherein I Murder a Little Bit of my Soul, for Convenience's Sake...

I have never been referred to as a Luddite (at least not to my face), as I am somewhat of a technophile (I bought my first HDTV in 2005, for instance). However, there has been one area in which I've been fairly reticent: digital distribution. I guess that the idea of not actually owning what I buy is disconcerting to me. If I buy a digital copy of a movie on iTunes, for example, will I still be able to watch it in 5 years? What about 10 years? Also, who wants to watch movies on their computers (or even worse, their cell phones) anyways? I generally have the same feelings about digital music purchases - data are ephemeral, but I'm not going to lose CDs unless they burn in a fire.

Of course, as they say, all good thing must come to an end, and eventually convenience wins out against unidentified fears. CD cases are awful, being bulky as hell and more fragile than Fabergé eggs. So the cases went the way of the dodo the second time I moved across the continent (the first time is when I learned how bulky they were). Then the world went all iPod and suddenly CDs themselves seemed like a massive waste of space - so I reluctantly went digital.

Digital music, digital videos (Netflix), digital games... There was one holdout though: I LOVE the smell of paper, the feel of the page, the heft of a book, the cripness of a an unworn spine, the subtle roughness of hardcover, the... well you get the idea:

   Few things in life can match the smell of my original American 6th Ed. of The Origin of the Species (circa 1879).

Though I love all of my books as I would my own children, they do present somewhat of a problem, which can be illustrated as follows:

It is decidedly 'not easy' to haul around ~600 books every time one moves to a new place. When I moved from Vancouver, BC, to Toronto, ON, it cost me hundreds of dollars to ship these things by UPS.

The future is uncertain, and I never know where I'll end up next. It would be a massive pain to ship these books, say overseas. And so, the last of my will crumbled and I 'splurged' on a Kindle (the 6" one with Wi-Fi1).

The device itself is pretty good in terms of reading ergonomics, the screen having only slightly less contrast than standard book paper. Also, it can be read one-handed, which is an absolute MUST on DC transit. It has a lot of features that I really appreciate, such as being able to highlight text which is automatically dumped into a text file for quote mining, and being able to add notes and annotations with the small keyboard. I'm not a huge fan of the button layout though, as my massive sausage fingers seem to hit the 'back' and 'menu' buttons continuously while trying to navigate the device.  

The future appears to be lonely.

I looked into the Kindle store and found that a surprising number of the titles on my wishlist were already available in digital editions, typically for $9.99, which is good. Furthermore, and I realize that this will only appeal to a few weirdos like myself, pretty much everything public domain is free - and I'd personally much rather read Plato's Republic on a Kindle than via a text file on my PC.

I have to admit that there's at least one potential, massive benefit to the device in my eyes: There's no reason for any 'ebook' to ever go out of print. As someone who regularly tries to go back and read classic works of science and history, this has been a constant thorn in my side. Many old books either aren't being published or are being sold by specialty publishers at exorbitant fees. I'll gladly pay a reasonable fee for server maintenance and distribution costs to have access to classic works like RA Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (not on Kindle yet). Oh well, it's a brave new world ($6.29 on Kindle) I guess, and we'll see how I feel about it in a few weeks or months. Yes, I am now one of those people. 

1 The 3G Kindle is $50 more ($189 instead of $139). Call me crazy, but I cannot possibly think of a situation where I'd desperately want to buy a new book, but not be in range of a free Wi-Fi hotspot. Well, that is, except for work. They are very anti-wi-fi at work :-(

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Update 11.04.19:

Dear Huxley, I just realized that I typed that I moved from Vancouver, BC, to Toronto, ON, when I actually moved to Hamilton, ON. I've become so used to saying that I moved to DC from 'near Toronto' that I've also become one of those people - The ones from Ontario that all claim that they're from Toronto no matter how far away from the city they grew up.

Photos from San Diego!

As intended, I got set up with Picasa, and uploaded a couple of albums, one containing the photos I took of the San Diego harborfront, and the other the zoo. I don't have one of those fancy, expensive SLR cameras though, so you've been warned.

 San Diego Harbor Front 3 Apr 2011 

San Diego Zoo 4 Apr 2011 

'Stuck' in San Diego...

After a successful outing to the Genetics Society of America Drosophila Research Conference, two of my fellow labmates and I discovered that our flight home to Baltimore Int'l was cancelled. It was part of the whole Southwest Airlines 737 safety fiasco, and thus we've been stranded here for two days. At least Southwest was nice enough to put us up in a hotel:

It's nothing really special, just a gorgeous view of the San Diego harbor at sunset and all that. I'm really suffering here as you can tell.

Yeah, two extra days stuck in this gorgeous Pacific sunshine - I guess bad things happen to good people and all that. Anyways, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade right? So after being forced to use our complementary meal voucher to have breakfast on the waterfront, we decided to visit the famous San Diego Zoo for the day. 

I'm only going to throw up a few photos here because I think I'm going to get into those 'Picasa Web Album' thingies when I get back, but in summary, the Zoo was awesome! Umm... I mean, it was awesome considering that I had to kill time in some way between now and when I could get my a$$ back in the lab (which is what I'd really prefer to be doing, of course).

I don't think I've actually ever seen giant pandas 'for real', but now I have! The pandas are one of the main attractions of the zoo, so there was even a line to see them! 

I love polar bears because they're so enormous. I mean scary huge. I'm not exactly sure why grizzly bears have such a reputation inspiring terror (their taxonomic name is Ursus arctos horribilis) when polar bears can easily weigh twice as much.

One of the things my friends and I were commenting on while visiting the zoo was our observation that the animals here seemed to be more active than other such zoos we've visited. For instance, the rhinoceroses were running around and cajoling something awful. 

Here's a snake staring in your face. People who don't think that snakes are cool are 'wusses'.

Anyways, so there you go. It was tough and extremely boring, but we survived the unfortunate circumstance of being stranded in a beautiful city featuring tons of tourist attractions and excellent weather. Despite our circumstances, we made the best of a bad situation and forced ourselves to do things such as walk along the waterfront, drink, visit a world-class zoo, drink, and barbecue mahi steaks in an apartment in the Gaslamp Quarter... while drinking. Obviously things could've been worse (we could've been stuck in Hawaii or something) but all in all I don't think that two days of unplanned vacation are going to harm me much, if at all really.

/sarcasm/

Oh, an my lab mate Nico took a photo of me that I think sums up my 'upset over having to stay in southern California' look very well:

Pardon the bandana, but it's sunny down here, and I was without sunscreen. :-)