Friday Fabulous Flower - Bleeding Hearts

Oh, April is such a pretty time for our gardens!  Wait, it's still only March!  In another day, when the tally for March is complete the Phactor will reveal some stunning data that promises for a duller April-May.  At any rate one of Mrs. Phactor's gardens develops a wonderful blue-yellow-pink display of bluebells, celandine poppy, and bleeding hearts all kind of patch-worked together.  This is almost a surefire combination, easy enough for almost anyone to grow, tough and hardy, and cheerful beyond saying.  The bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) are quite a spectacular flower on their own, here showing the two rounded "spurs" that account for their generic name.  Bleeding hearts are now also a member of the poppy family the result of the small fumatory family having been found to nest within. 

Chocolate is good for you

Well, duh!  But just in case you think this is simply a good "healthy" rationalization for indulging, here's the actual list of health benefits attributed to chocolate. Whether chocolate will actually extend you life expectancy or not matters little because without such delectables life would seem short and miserable indeed.  So this falls into the "that's nice" category because even if someone gives the Phactor 10 reasons why eating chocolate was bad, he still intends to enjoy it, in moderation.  This is why it is hard to understand all these people who deprive themselves of so many things simply because they heard somewhere that something was bad for them.  It's not how long you live people, but the quality of the life you live.  This is why in spite of a entering an era of weight consciousness, the Phactors enjoyed their spring asparagus with a big dab of aioli.  Unfortunately, chocolate does not go with asparagus.  

College faculty compensation & rising college costs - analysis of a moron

Do college faculty work hard enough? What an intriguing question? So in a counterpoint, the Phactor asks, who is David Levy and why is he such a moron? The issue Levy wants to discuss is that “college costs have risen faster than inflation for three decades”. Without question this is true, and as educational costs rise, this becomes a real concern. Now here is where Levy jumps onto the crazy, stupid bus, and rides out of town. He tells us the cost increases are the result of “outmoded employment policies that overcompensate faculty for inefficient teaching schedules”. Well, here’s something the Phactor knows a great deal about, and that is faculty compensation over the past three decades. Now it is true the Phactor’s salary has gone up, but so has the cost of living, and as ridiculous as it seems, and when you figure cost of living that into the equation, over compensation becomes sort of a bad joke.
Now here’s why Levy is a complete moron. The Phactor is pure faculty, well-connected without question; he works with deans, VPs, and the President regularly, and he knows why the cost of college education has gone up faster than inflation, but Levy doesn’t and he was a high ranking administrator. So if he doesn’t know what the Phactor knows he’s one really dense admin, which given his conclusion – faculty are overcompensated, seems very realistic.
Let’s use my own public institution as an example. In 1978, Lincolnland subsidized 68% of the cost of higher education. Tuition covered the rest. Now over the past 34 years, the state has gradually withdrawn support, and at present the state pays for about 23% of the cost of a college education. OK, did you get that David? 68% down to 23%, so tuition had to make up the difference, and of course there were real cost of living increases to cover too. That’s part one.  Actually when you factor in the diminished support, the university is operating more efficiently now than 30 years ago, but do we get any thanks here?
Part two is unfunded mandates. In the process of cutting costs, the state decides it doesn’t want to pay for something it wants, and then it simply mandates that the university covers the cost after the state cut its support. So again tuition has to cover the difference.  You would not believe how many millions of dollars this costs.
Now David is this so hard to understand? The brilliance of this is "educational plan" is that no one ever passed a bill saying the state of Lincolnland is going to cut support for public education and pass the costs on to students and their families; they just gradually did it. Clever, but the true brilliance is that the very politicians who did this then jumped on the band wagon of dunning the universities for increasing tuition faster than inflation! Yes, they blame the university too. Is Levy just a political tool?  Some blunt implement?
So Levy is a moron because he presumes to write authoritatively about something he apparently knows nothing about. He also probably doesn’t know that faculty at our institution work about 55 hrs/week in comparison to our official 37.5 hr work week. Yes, we have an outmoded compensation system that pays no overtime.  Mrs. Phactor claims the Phactor has never taken a vacation in his whole career, and there’s Levy saying we take all these vacations, a week here, a week there, a month between semesters, and three months in the summer. This moron has never done research, let alone field research. And those breaks at Christmas and mid-semester, and the other 3 months of the year, are not vacations; it’s when we do our research, and train students to do research.
But here’s the Phactor, blogging away, for free, and there’s Levy publishing his moronic and insulting analysis in the WashPo.  It speaks poorly of the publication too.  And people wonder why we get so annoyed by people by Levy. Oh yes, we had a president who told it like it was, publicly, loudly, and it cost him his job!

Someone else's so-so Magnolia collection

OK, maybe Kew Gardens has a magnolia collection a bit better than the Phactor's, but then they are a bit bigger, and a bit older too.  Enjoy.

Four years of the Phytophactor

There was a lot going on Feb. 12, 2012: Darwin Day, Lincoln’s birthday, oh, and my kid sister’s birthday too. Hmm, she is the youngest of the three. So with all those things going on somehow the Phactor slipped right by the 4th anniversary of this blog. Let’s check in and see where we were and where we be. Well, a year ago, for the 3d anniversary, this blog had just passed its 600th post, and during the last 12 months almost another 600 posts were made, and at present the Phytophactor stands just short of 1200 published posts.  A year ago, this blog was averaging about 150 hits per day, which was about three times the readership at the time of the 2nd anniversary. At present readership is running well over 600 hits per day, and still increasing.  March will probably record more than 20,000 hits, and you will notice no tacky ads in the side bars either. This year's increase was the result of joining Fields of Science collective in August. According to the Nature Blogs Network, the Phytophactor presently ranks 9th among plant-related blogs, around 100th out of all the nearly 2000 nature blogs they record traffic for.
One year ago marked the addition of the 50th Phactor Phollower, and as of today there are 93, not quite doubled in the past year. The Phactor remains grateful and flattered that so many disturbed and desperate people are out there. And it remains very positive that new Phollowers are still adding themselves faster than the old ones are dying. Good going people!
Not everything is necessarily better. With less time to spend, the blogs have gotten shorter, simpler. But this is not because the Phactor has not been writing. During the past 12 months he has co-authored 3 scientific manuscripts, 2 published, 1 still in press, and the book is nearing completion.  For some reason my university gives credit for that writing, but not for this.  What's wrong with them?  After all how many people have read my last scientific paper?  It'll be fewer than read this.  This year the Phactor was fairly religious about the Friday Fabulous Flower.  So this still remains an amusing activity, so the Phactor will keep blogging away, even if artichokes remains the most read blog!  Thanks for all your support and comments, although that remains the one area where the rate has not gone up.

Violet lawn

In addition to our blue lawn, which has now faded, and a bit quickly because of the unseasonal heat, the Phactors also have some areas of violet lawn.  Here's what it looks like. Without question this is attractive, but unfortunately this is one portion of lawn that would be "nicer" if it had half as many violets and correspondingly more grass. This tells you that the Phactor does not get to dictate lawn care for the entire lawn.  In other parts of the lawn, spring beauty has turned things white-pink. Labrador violets have also invaded our lawns (along with bluebells, wild ginger, Trillium, and more), but they are much better behaved, less competitive.  Unfortunately, violets are a bit tough to get rid of, and they produce lots of viable seed which is how this whole problem got started.  So maybe the Phactors get used to a violet lawn.

New neighbors - Hmmm.

The Phactor tries to keep an open mind.  New neighbors just moved in across the street so enough of the neighborhood must have thought them OK to have gotten through the rigorous screening process.  All the best neighborhoods have them.  But the large blue garden gazing ball that they are obviously proud of, because why else would it be in their front yard, does give one pause.  Now blue gazing balls are not quite in the same category with ceramic ducks, a goose with clothes, or pink flamingos, but it is a GARDEN gazing ball and just does not belong in the front yard.  It's just like clothes lines; they are fine in their place.  So its tastefulness, or lack thereof, does deal with place.  Things that are just plain tacky, can, if properly placed, transform from kitsch to funky.  This topic was brought up with dining friends and the funkiest of them mentioned his neighbors bowling ball lawn sculpture!  Things could be worse.  Your opinions are sought.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Strange & Exotic

The fabulous thing about today's flower is that you don't see this particular plant very often, unless one is growing in your glasshouse, and it flowers even more uncommonly.  The flowers open in a most curious fashion, and the flowers are such that mostly people don't notice, and there is a reason for this.  So this is a quiz for all the plant ID sharpies out there.  What is this Neotropical (see, a hint!) plant?  You want a bit more help?  OK, it's a vine.  

Dear Me

Sometime back the Telegraph asked their writers to write a letter of advice to their 16-year-old selves. This seemed like a good idea, and thus this letter, although then forgotten, and only now finished.



Dear Me,


To be perfectly honest, the details of being 16 are pretty fuzzy memories; high school is remembered more or less as an era. Don’t worry so much about being a geek; you end up in a profession where almost everyone was a geek at that age, except maybe for Paula. Most of the people you think have it made at 16 pretty much peak out in high school, and you’ll keep getting better for a long time. So don’t worry about these people; you won’t be coming back here, you won’t see hardly any of them ever again. But you’ll get a whole cadre of professional colleagues to hang out with who are ever so much more interesting and fun. Sadly you are going to be a bit slow to mature, to develop coordination, and to get comfortable with being yourself, so success at sports is pretty much not going to happen. You will find out something you sort of knew; smart girls are more interesting than pretty girls, and pretty girls who are also smart girls are fabulous. You think you’re not very good at anything, but actually you have some as yet undeveloped talents, some physical, some intellectual, but it’s still true that you have no aptitude for foreign language. Sixteen was not a particularly good time in your life, but you have a lot to look forward to, and in particular you are quite right in thinking that you can literally hit the reset button and remake yourself in college into someone you like much better than your high school self who was too much a creature of other people’s making. It’s funny but a basic fascination with growing plants becomes a successful career even if you only sort of stumble into it, finding out, finally, that you can make a living doing what you like.


Best regards from your future,


TPP

Field work commences

Although a stack of exams awaits, field work begins this afternoon.  The prolonged early warmth of spring 2012 has moved up our field work schedule by at least 3 weeks.  And you cannot just decide to wait until later.  In this sense field work domineers your life; your needs and wants are subordinated to those of your research organism.  The prairie lousewort is one of the 1st plants up on the prairie, seen here emerging after a burn, next to a partially melted marker, inflorescence already formed and ready to go.  Fortunately some young backs have decided to get involved in our research, and their assistance will be most welcome.  When studying rain forest trees, one of my student field assistants was afraid of heights and would not climb a ladder.  With prairie field work operating down at ground level one of the students is a pole vaulter!  As usual our first act is to find all of our research plots, and although marked by a permanent metal tag and corner spikes, and although mapped, it's amazing how tough it is to find some of them even after a vegetation clearing burn.  In full vegetation finding the plots is next to impossible.  Every now and then something pulls a tag out making things really difficult.  However, only one plot has been totally lost, misplaced if you will, since 2006, and fortunately it was a second control so we can operate without it.  In particular my collaborator has lost many pens and several pairs of sunglasses, and some of them do get found.  Last year this was quite an experience because several large Nerodia (water snakes) were emerging from dens and sunning themselves, and giving my snake nervous colleague quite a bad startle.  This will not be brought up, as bad field episodes are best forgotten.