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What do science teachers need to say or not say about religion?

... In public schools. According to one Federal Judge in the US, not much. A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today. James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, referred to Creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan. The decision is the culmination of a 16-month legal battle between Corbett and Farnan - a conflict the judge said…

Anderson: Life with no parole.

Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, for some reason, is the home of (by US standards, anyway) some of the most extreme (or at least interesting) criminal behavior, and not just in the movies. And today, in Shakopee, Minnesota, a freshly convicted 20 year old was sentenced to life in prison with no parole because of his killing of Katherine ann Olson (24 years old) using Craig's List as a tool to lure his victim into a deadly trap. Surely, that is the ultimate example of incivility on the internet. Here is a pretty good overview of the slaying (you may not be able to see this because it is a…

Study on voluntary vaccination reveals interesting complexities

When word of this study gets around, you may start to hear that voluntary vaccination "works." This would not be an accurate statement. There is a new study just now out in PLoS Computational Biology that reveals that under certain conditions, which may actually be quite rare, voluntary vaccinations might lead to the eradication of a disease (contrary to 'popular wisdom'). However, you must realize that the study has some important limitations and the results do not suggest that most (if any) current vaccination issues be voluntary rather than mandatory. The idea that voluntary…

Franken lead rises to over 200

And the worst case scenario is that this lead could drop by far less then necessary to turn the race around. Everyone assumes that the loser, in this case Coleman, will file a law suit. It would fit with how the game has been played so far. But what would such a law suit do? It is not the case that there is some 300 votes laying around that Coleman could have if he won a suit. The best he could probably do, and this is very unlikely, is to get about 130 votes that may or may not have been double counted thrown out. Not enough. The other thing Coleman could do with a law suit is to…

Science Standards With A Hole You Can Drive a Truck Through?

We're talking about the Minnesota Science Standards and we're talking about nothing less than the Pope Mobile. Consider the following statement currently part of the proposed Minnesota Science Standards: The student will be able to explain how scientific and technological innovations as well as new evidence can challenge portions of or entire accepted theories and models including but not limited to cell theory, atomic theory, theory of evolution, plate tectonic theory, germ theory of disease and big bang theory. Think about this for a moment. The standard is asking that the basic, minimal…

X + Y = WHAT???

That depends ... on what X and Y are! And if that does not come naturally to you, perhaps you should read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pre-Algebra by Amy Szczepanski and Andrew Kositsky. The CIG to PA is built just like the other books in the Idiot's series, using familiar conventions to keep the flow of the book smooth while providing additional ancillary information, and in the case of this text, practice problems (answers provided in the back). This book reminds me of a tired old reference I've got on my shelf called Technical Mathematics. Sometimes you just need a place to look up…

Okapi: More lies than Sarah Palin!!!

Well, not really lies, but untruths. As perhaps the only person blogging on Scienceblogs.com who has actually eaten an okapi (Okapi johnstoni), I feel the need to clarify some misconceptions that are floating around about this beast. If you go to the Sb home page, you'll find numerous links to the current Okapi story, about how the first photographs of a wild okapi have been obtained, and how the okapi was thought to have been wiped out due to the current civil war. I do not have time to write extensively about this right now, but I'll make a few points. First, it is not the case that wild…

February at the Bell

The Bell Museum in Minneapolis is pulling out all the stops in the month of February, celebrating Darwin's birth month with an orgy of science and sex. I'm going to be there for the events on the 13th and 15th, and I'm really tempted by the talk on the 20th—I'll have to see if I can get away for that one. People in Minneapolis/St Paul ought to appreciate that this kind of public outreach is what good museums do, and take advantage of the opportunities! Bell Museum of Natural History, University of Minnesota 10 Church St. S.E. , Minneapolis, MN 55455, (612) 624-7389 In Feburary, the Bell…

No More House

As we continue to get caught up on the most important issues of the past week, we really should take note of the final episode of House. The first episode I ever saw was Season Two, Episode 19, entitled “House vs. God.” The patient of the week was a fifteen-year old faith healer who claims to be in direct communication with God. House thinks that's ridiculous, but it soon appears there might be something to it. The patient seems to know things he could not possibly know. And shortly after the faith healer touches one of Dr. Wilson's cancer patients, her tumor shrinks measurably. Even House…

Theistic Evolution is Not a Form of Intelligent Design

More precisely, if we say that theistic evolution is a form of intelligent design, then we have to stop saying that intelligent design is a form of creationism. Over at HuffPo, Victor Stenger writes: But when surveys ask moderate Christians what they really believe, they all say that evolution is God-guided. Well that's not Darwinian evolution. That's intelligent design. There's no guidance in Darwinian evolution. It's all accident and natural selection. In particular, and this is what is unacceptable to all Christians and just about every other religion: humanity is an accident. Start up…

A little Ni2+ to tickle your TLR4

Conceptually, its not excessively hard to understand how we develop allergies-- Our bodies generate an inappropriate immune response to a protein that wouldnt otherwise cause us any harm, whether its tree pollen or dust mites or peanut proteins. But whats the deal with nickel allergies? Nickel is a cation-- Ni2+. Our bodies are chock full of cations-- calcium, iron, magnesium, etc, and they dont cause any trouble (or youd be dead). And there are lots of other cations that dont hurt anyone (aluminum, silver, etc). Why Nickel? Plus, Nickel is a metal. Its not a chunk of a protein, its a…

Women and woo: Do women hate vaccines?

There are no women on the internet at Skeptic meetings, women are more religious than men, women love astrology and ghosts and talking to spirits, it is easy to get the impression that women are the 'weaker sex'-- estrogen and glitter and unicorns and intuition and strawberry bubblegum build an impenetrable wall between women and science and reason. Jenny McCarthy and her 'Mommy Warriors' campaign against vaccines dont do us any favors by perpetuating this stereotype. Science is not on their side, but they *just know* better. Mommies intuition *gigglehairflip* They *just know* their babbies…

Helping the 4-legged victims of the earthquake/tsunamis in Japan

Im not really a 'charity' kind of person. I feel I do my part to help society with my time and knowledge, and I quite frankly dont trust most organizations with cash. Even the ones run by us can have problems. There is a way to 'get me', though. The charity wanting funds must meet two requirements: 1-- Must be local. I can go talk to the people on the receiving end of my $$, and they can tell me what they did with the cash. 2-- That local charity is helping a) kids, b) animals. Of course I was upset about the recent events in Japan-- like most people my thoughts were with the victims, and…

The Silence of the Media Whores

I have nothing against media whores, per se. Kathy Griffin do what she gotta do to pay the bills. Snookie is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. The Situation actually appears to be making the most of the situation. But then you have the kinds of media whores like Chris Mooney. The whores who deny their true selves and pretend they are actually contributing to society. A vapid little git, speaking out both sides of his mouth and throwing allies under the bus whenever it suits his whorish needs. Thus I suppose it didnt come to anyones surprise that a man who professes to care so much about…

Endogenous non-retroviral retroviruses: Hepadnaviruses in the bird genome

Hepatitis B is my favorite non-retrovirus. Why? Because its a retrovirus :-D Heres another reason for me to love it-- Its viral family, Hepadnaviridae, inserted themselves into bird genomes 19 million years ago. Genomic Fossils Calibrate the Long-Term Evolution of Hepadnaviruses *happy-prospector-dance* Okay, this is like, the billionth time this has happened in the past few months-- Finding endogenous versions of viruses that arent 'supposed' to endogenize. THIS IS SO AMAZING! We do not have viral fossils for us to study what a kind of virus looked like 100, 1000, 1000000000 years ago.…

When Good Antibodies Go Bad: Antibody-Dependent Enhancement

Antibodies are normally a good thing. Neutralize viruses and bacterial toxins, tag bacteria for complement so they get blown up, tag invading parasites/worms/ew so your immune cells can kill them, antibodies even make nice cancer therapies. One of the great things about antibodies is that the cells that make them? They 'remember' what theyve seen before. Thats how vaccines work-- you expose someone to a crappy polio virus, your body figures out how to neutralize it, and if youre exposed to Real Virulent Polio, your body has a cheat-sheet. Your body already has memory B-cells that know how…

McCain Picks Palin

By now I'm sure you have heard that John McCain has chosen Alaska governor Sarah “Teach the Controversy” Palin to be his running mate. I think The New Republic has the most sensible take, by Peter Scoblic: But surely a campaign that has been charged with being too naive to manage rogue state dictators can have a bit of fun with the idea that a one-time Miss Congeniality could effectively face down Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Kim Jong Il. Surely, Obama's “eight is enough” quip ought to apply not only to President Bush's economic and foreign policy travesties, but to the elevation…

Aronian and Carlsen Win in Wijk aan Zee

If you'll forgive another chess post, the annual grandmaster chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands is now complete. It was the first major tournament of the year, and it had a pleasingly unexpected outcome. Young phenoms Levon Aronian of Armenia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway were the joint winners, with eight points out of thirteen. For Aronian this was a return to form. His ability to play with the big boys had been established in a number of tournament wins (for example, Wijk aan Zee 2007). Alas, his play had been somewhat shaky since then, but he is plainly back in form…

Gender Differences Among Chessplayers

Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young reports on a major study into the reasons for the dearth of women among competitive chessplayers. His conclusion: I am going to make an analogy to make this data make more sense. Why does it seem like the US has substantially fewer good soccer players than the rest of the world? We clearly have good athletes. We play other sports well. We train athletes just as well. Why do other countries do so much better? The answer is that when you are a good athlete in the US, you do not play soccer. You end up playing something else like football or basketball. The…

The Real Pi Day(s)

Today is March 14th, 3/14 in the normal American way of writing dates, so you'll find a lot of silliness on the web today talking about "π Day" due to the coincidental similarity with the first three digits of π (see, for example, Rhett's annual post). But, of course, this is an archaic and local convention, and not really suited to the dignity of science. After all, the defined SI unit of time is the second, so if you're going to do things properly, you really ought to measure time in seconds (like the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's brilliant A Deepness in the Sky). So, a proper celebration of…

On Irony and Ivory Towers

The outrage of the moment in academic circles is this Nick Kristof column on how academics need to be more engaged with a broader public. And it's really impressive how he manages to take an idea that I basically agree with-- I regularly give talks on the need for scientists to do more outreach via social media-- and present it in a way that's faintly insulting. This came to my attention via Chuck Pearson on Twitter, who also has a long blog response. There are also good responses from Edward Carr and Corey Robin, and the hashtag Chuck launched, #EngagedAcademics includes lots of counter-…

Friday at the University of Minnesota

Our Friday plans are getting better and better. Remember, the crappy talk by John West blaming Darwin for Hitler is at 7 on 30 November at the UM campus — come prepared to be critical. The fun part is that we're meeting between 5:30 and 6:45 in the Campus Club, on the fourth floor of the Coffman Union. Then some really good news: Mark Borrello, UM's expert in the history of science, is going to speak briefly after West's drivel. West isn't going to get away with anything, at least on Friday. Unfortunately, he's also being given an opportunity to lie unchecked to the public on Saturday. The…

Monday Math: The Euclidean Algorithm

My number theory class has moved on from Pythagorean triples. Lately we've been talking about the Euclidean algorithm. Specifically, it's an algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (gcd) of two numbers. Of course, there are lots of ways finding the gcd. You could simply list all of the divisors of the first number, all of the divisors of the second number, and then compare the two lists. Let me suggest, though, that this method gets tedious in a hurry. Even for a computer it's hopelessly inefficient. A somewhat better way involves finding the prime factorizations of the two…

Religion and Gay Rights

Here's a delightful article from the Washington Post: The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care. Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting…

Replacing Souter

Supreme Court justice David Souter announced his retirement this past week, meaning that Obama's first justice nomination will come sooner than expected. Since there is also a decent chance that he will be appointing successors to Justices Ginsburg and Stevens, it seems Obama has a real chance to put his stamp on the Court. My criteria for an SC justice are very simple. I want a flaming left-wing twenty-year old. I want a justice who sees an ocean of separation between church and state, who will be strong on defendant's rights, who will be a zealous guardian of privacy rights, and will…

Links for 2009-08-29

slacktivist: Vincible GooFiness "Set aside the edges of the bell curve -- the innocent fools and the diabolical Becks and Limbaughs and the rest of their kind. The vast, vincible middle is constituted of people who, like the GooFies, are to some degree simultaneously innocent victims and deliberate charlatans, simultaneously deceived and deceiver. They don't know any better because they have decided not to know any better. They ought to know better. And they need to know better. What they require, in other words, is both liberation and repentance. The former must be extended to them. The…

Links for 2009-08-28

Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives "In my case, I haven't taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God's truth: Since the first A.A. meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been able to drink at all. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube, I believe I'm reasonably safe. So consider this blog entry what A.A. calls a "12th step," which means sharing the program with others. There's a chance somebody will read this and take the steps toward sobriety." (tags: drugs booze blogs movies psychology medicine) Infinite Summer »…

The Importance of Distraction

Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because the people making them up don't know how to make a good quiz. Making up good questions is a skill that takes time to master. The key elements that the people behind most Facebook quizzes are missing are good distractors-- the plausible-sounding wrong answers that lead…

PNAS: David Syzdek, Wildlife Biologist

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of David Syzdek, a wildlife biologist.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work as a wildlife biologist for a large water utility in a Western state. 2) What is your science background? BS in Environmental…

Unscientific America: The Pluto Thing

I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet." I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…

links for 2009-06-25

Confessions of a Community College Dean: An Unmarked Car "[A]t work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There's nothing terribly interesting about either ensemble, but that's precisely the point. I don't have to think about them, and neither does anybody else. They're like driving unmarked cars. I go where I want without calling undue attention to myself. Except that they aren't. Over the last couple of weeks, on three…

All Physics Is Not Particle Physics

A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead "For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars." In the body of the article, we find: While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly demonstrated using computer simulations--drivers are surprisingly easy to model as a system of interacting particles--it wasn't until last year that this theory of traffic was experimentally confirmed. A team of physicists at Nagoya University wanted to see how many cars could maintain a…

links for 2009-06-04

kitchen table math, the sequel: alternate universe "While visiting schools in a variety of districts, I began to notice something that puzzled me. Some of these schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor and minority children, are working against daunting â some would say unreasonable â expectations for improvement in test scores. In more affluent schools, those pressures are much less evident. Yet the kinds of instructional problems that surface in both types of schools are strikingly similar." (tags: education academia class-war society politics social-science) Infinite…

Sigma Xi Talk: Tropical Glaciers Are Weird

Tuesday night was the annual Sigma Xi induction banquet on campus (I'm currently the president of the local chapter, and have been scrambling to organize the whole thing in between all my other responsibilities these past few weeks). Sigma Xi, for those not familiar with it, is the scientific research honor society-- like Phi Beta Kappa for science nerds. We had thirty-odd students nominated for membership based on research they have done as undergraduates, and had a little banquet and induction ceremony to celebrate their accomplishments. Tradition for this sort of thing calls for an after-…

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

I watched Jonah Lehrer on the Colbert Report a few months ago, and thought he did a really good job. So, when we were offered free copies of his new book, How We Decide, I asked for one, even though it's not my usual sort of thing. The main point of the book is that what you think you know about thinking is wrong. Through both interesting historical anecdotes and summaries of the latest in cognitive science research, Lehrer shows that our usual decision-making process is nowhere near as rational as we would like to believe. And, moreover, that's not such a bad thing-- without contributions…

Links for 2011-02-25

Caltech Scores First Conference Victory Since 1985 - NYTimes.com "The team's 46-45 home victory over Occidental, in the final game of the season, was the first Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference victory for Caltech since a 1-point win over La Verne more than 26 years ago, before any of the current players were born. Ryan Elmquist scored the winning point by making the first of two free throws with three seconds left. He missed the second, and Occidental's desperation shot from halfcourt was off target, sending students and fans in the small Braun Athletic Center gym…

Short Story Club: "A Serpent in the Gears" by Margaret Ronald

I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there. This week's post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that's okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes…

Links for 2010-02-07

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6, 010101 (2010): Teaching and understanding of quantum interpretations in modern physics courses "Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we document variations in instructional approaches with respect to interpretation in two similar modern physics courses recently taught at the University of Colorado, and examine associated impacts on student perspectives regarding…

Hearts, Minds, and Health Care

This Timothy Burke post on the current political moment deserves better than to be buried in the Links Dump. He's beginning to despair because it looks like "there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen." Take health care, for example. I can read and parse and think about the proposed legislation that actually exists and see it without hyperbole, as an okay if scattered series of modest initiatives. Whatever. I think I have a fairly good handle on the underlying cultural and social…

Science Ahead of Its Time?

Thony C has a post about the Great Man theory of science spinning off some thoughts about Darwin by ex-ScienceBlogs silverback John Wilkins. As Thony writes: Now you may ask why I as a historian of Renaissance mathematics should comment on a blog post about a 19th century work of biology and its author? The answer is quite simple; everything that John says about Darwin and his book can and should be applied to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and a host of other scientist from the early modern period and their works. Nothing that any of these scholars did or wrote existed in a…

Creepiness Is Contagious

It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views. So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following: The educational trends…

Links for 2009-11-07

WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D. "This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture." (tags: science social-science nuclear energy culture) Best Books of 2009: Science Top 10 "Welcome to our Best of 2009 top 10 lists for Science. We've put our editors' picks and our 2009 bestsellers for each category on the same page together, so you can easily compare. Click on…

Links for 2009-10-16

slacktivist: Oh, and Tony Perkins? He lies. A lot. For money. "Please don't clutch your pearls and get the vapors that such an impolite thing is stated so honestly. That Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council lies a lot in order to scare people into sending him money is not surprising, or new, or unusual or controversial. Tony Perkins lies for money. Giraffes have long necks. Water is wet. " (tags: politics religion law crime society evil stupid gender race blogs slacktivist) The Digital Cuttlefish: Someone Is Wrong On The Internet "Someone Is Wrong/ ...On The Internet,/ And I won't…

All Courses Are Not Created Equal

The Dean Dad is annoyed with the New York Times, for an article about how the recession is affecting the humanities. The whole piece is worth a read, but he singles out a quote from the former president of my alma mater: Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.…

Novels of Science

Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science: A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature. Novels such as Intuition, with their fully fleshed out characters and messy conflicts, can erase the ridiculously sinister Dr. No cartoons. And most important, these books can inspire readers to become scientists themselves. As you might imagine, this…

March (Physics) Madness

I give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever: That's small and hard to read, but it's filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.) You can get the whole thing as a 1.03 MB PDF. I wouldn't bet any money on this prediction, if I were you: the winner ends up being #14 seed Cornell... Obviously, this is not a serious prediction. I entered four serious brackets…

Magazine Etiquette in Medicine

Dave Munger has been spending a lot of time in waiting rooms: When it comes to waiting rooms, it turns out, eye doctors wipe the floor with everyone else's ass. Not only does the eye doctor have the least shabby interior decor, it also arguably offers the best selection of reading material and visual entertainment (in the form of an infomercial for Lasik surgery on a 40-inch plasma TV mounted on the wall). Here at the allergist nearly all the magazines are of the complimentary local shoppers' guide variety. We've got Charlotte Woman, the area Seniors guide, and a holistic medicine brochure.…

Earlier Alcohol Prevention?

EurekAlert tossed up a press release from the University of Minnesota yesterday with the provocative title: "U of Minn researchers find primary alcohol prevention programs are needed for 'tweens'" and the even more eye-popping subtitle "Study recommends that prevention programs occur as early as third grade." What, you may ask, is the problem this is intended to solve? The study found that adolescents who already use alcohol are less receptive to prevention programs aimed at all students. Intervening at earlier ages, specifically between third and fifth grade, would allow for truly universal…

Gender Gap In Academic Medicine

This is from a study published in the latest NEJM: The "Gender Gap" in Authorship of Academic Medical Literature — A 35-Year Perspective [ href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/355/3/281">abstract/ rev="review" href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/3/281">full text/ href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/3/310">editorial (subscription required for full text and editorial)]. First, the good news: During the past four decades, the participation of women in medicine has increased dramatically. Women now represent 49 percent of all medical…

My progress towards tenure: it's all about the $

A few weeks ago, I blogged a self-assessment of my progress towards tenure. It seemed like an apt time to reflect in the hours before my annual review meeting with the department chair(s) and in the months before my packet for reappointment is submitted. Reappointment is the first and only gatekeeping between me and submitting that tenure dossier in three years. I feel OK about reappointment, but less so about tenure. So that's the focus of the navel-gazing. (I suspect such gazing will only get worse as the next few years wend on.) In my self-assessment, I identified a number of areas where…