March 2008 Archives

I had a meeting with a professor friend of mine about a month ago and he asked me if I was using zotero. He's working on a book and swears by it for managing his on-line research. It wasn't the first time that anyone told me about zotero, in fact, I originally heard about it from someone at the Mellon Foundation which partially funded its development. After such high praise from the professor, I decided to download it myself. I've been living with it and loving it for about a month now. Why didn't I start using it two years ago?

zotero is a Firefox plug-in, so it works everywhere Firefox works. It fits into the same space as Refworks and EndNote, although it is considerably less expensive (free!). Some of the recent literature I've read about it, including this year's win at Northwestern University's CiteFest, indicate that zotero is every bit as good as commercial products. I've been using it to collect and organize articles, Web pages, book chapters, books, and journal articles. It works a bit like del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites, but it makes a distinction between different types of on-line resources (e.g. Web pages vs. book sections vs. books, etc.).

I'm moderating a faculty panel at the TLT Symposium on Saturday an I've built a zotero folder for each of the faculty members I'm introducing. In each folder, I have links to their blogs, class pages, syllabi, and various rich media generated by them and their students along with notes and tags for each resource. Speaking of the TLT Symposium, there's a session on EndNote, Refworks, and zotero in the morning at the TLT Symposium given by Ellysa Cahoy and Dawn Amsberry.

I'm still working on different ways to sync zotero content with "the network" or all my machines. I'll follow when I learn more. For now I'm going to keep using it.

Happy Dyngus Day to all! If you're from Buffalo, Chicago, or South Bend, IN, you'll know what I'm talking about.

One of my favorite popular math books is called, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos. In it, the Temple University Mathematics professor has very short, newspaper-like articles which begin with a headline and maybe part of an actual newspaper article. Using math, he then either explains why the headline isn't all that extraordinary or debunks the facts. Professor Paulos is also the author of the book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences.

Both books came to mind the other day when I read an article from Monday's Daily Collegian. In the article entitled, "Direct loan plan could cause debt," the reporter quotes a PHEAA spokesman Keith New as saying that Penn State's decision to join the Federal Direct Student Loan Program would result in a $300 billion debt increase over the next 10 years. In a direct quote, Mr. New said, "Every loan is made from the U.S. Treasury, so every loan adds to the national debt."

When I read the number it just didn't seem right to me, so I did the math (as I assume, the spokesman, Mr. New; the writer, Mr. Weisler; and the copy editor should have done). I based my student numbers on a quote from Melissa Kunes in the article, the "vast majority of the 40,800 Penn State students who receive Stafford Loan funding used PHEAA as their lender."

Let's go to the chalkboard, shall we:

$300 x 10^9 / 10 years = $30 x 10^9/ year
$30 x 10^9 / 40.8 x 10^3 students/year = $735,294.12/student-year

Which means for the numbers to be right, each of our students must borrow over $735,000/year. I checked and while Penn State is expensive, this is about 100 times what a Penn State student can get. Another way to think about it, is that at $30 billion/year, Penn State student loans would be responsible for one tenth of the expected U.S. budget deficit each fiscal year. Somebody should have done the math.

Even if you assume Ms. Kunes is wrong (which I don't), she can only be off by a factor of 2 because there are only about double 40,800 students at Penn State. So something happened here. Let us assume that the Collegian writer misheard the PHEAA spokesman, then the number is only about $3 billion over 10 years or $300 million/year. Would Penn State add $300 million to the national debt/year? Well, only if you assume the default rate on the loans is 100%. If you assume the default rate is more like 3-4% (that's about the Pennsylvania rate, the rates for 4-year colleges are usually lower) and the interest rates on these loans are currently >6%... it's really a wash.

So, I leave the reader with two questions and some homework:

"Astroturfing" is one of my favorite neologisms. It's right up there with "truthiness" from Mr. Colbert. Astroturfing a is professional public relations campaign which appears to be a grassroots type movement. Since Astroturf is the mother of all artificial turf, the term "Astroturfing" seems appropriate. The Internet makes it particularly easy to set up a Web site for an organization which appears to be a grassroots campaign.

This weekend, The New York Times News Service exposed the latest "Astroturfing" attempt. The controversy concerns a synthetic bovine growth hormone known as recombinant bovine somatotropin, rBST or rBGH. The stuff is marketed by Monsanto under the name Posilac. It seems that some consumers desire and some food chains, e.g. Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, are selling milk which is labeled as coming from cows not injected with the hormone. A counteroffensive was launched by a group called AFACT, American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology. The NYT article points out that AFACT, while it does include dairy farmers, "was organized in part by Monsanto." It also receives help from the same marketing firm which "received a contract in 2006 to help with the Posilac campaign." Monsanto says that while they "did provide financial support to AFACT... the group is led by farmers, not Monsanto." The group claims labeling of milk as having an "absence" of something can be "misleading" to consumers. The Monsanto dairy company president thinks that the "fundamental issue" is the "dairy farmer's ability to choose the best technology." He was quoted in the article as saying, "Dairy farmer choice to use a variety of FDA-approved technologies is a at risk."

I don't blame the farmer for seeking higher yields, particularly since our "Corn as Fuel" program has driven up the cost of feed, (and therefore milk and corn-fed meat,) but it is the consumers' right to choose whether they want milk which is produced by cows which are not injected with the hormone. It seems some companies are all for "The Market" deciding until "The Market" decides against them. Monsanto like the recording industry is trying to preserve a market which is quickly moving away from them. "The Market" is working fine, and dairy farmers still have the "choice" to inject their cows with rBST, but the consumers also have a the "choice" to "pay a premium" and buy milk labeled as coming from cows which are not injected with rBST. Welcome to "democratic capitalism."