New Year and a New Plan

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Phil Scheuerman

Four years ago I vowed to lose weight and eat healthier and for the most part, I have succeeded at that. In fact, that was probably my most successful New Year’s Resolution. In subsequent years, I vowed to up the ante on that resolution but have mostly been able to hold the status quo. I spent time reflecting on why the resolution made in 2012 was so successful and most previous, and subsequent resolutions were not as successful (many ultimate failures). My conclusion was that three critical factors about the 2012 goal that did not apply to the previous and subsequent goals.

  1. I had health and personal experiences that lead me to make the 2012 goal.
  2. I thought about the 2012 goal daily
  3. When I established the goal, I also created a plan to meet this objective.
  4. I set a single achievable goal.

So this year I committed to taking the first day of the year and establish my goals and develop implementation plans to meet them. So today I will spend time setting my goals and objectives for the next year. The first and most important underlying principle will be to establish no more than three achievable goals and then develop and implementation plan. The three goals will each fulfill a particular category.

  1. A personal self-improvement goal.
  2. A professional scholarly goal.
  3. A goal that merges personal and professional improvement.

I will report back tomorrow on what those goals are and then through the year, we will track these objectives in this blog. This blog will also contain my thoughts on many of the current critical education, science and social issues.

To all, I wish a very productive and happy 2016.

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What the College Football Playoffs Indicates About 21st Century Values

Posted on January 2, 2015 by Phil Scheuerman

Like many people I have been watching the first football playoffs and other bowl games. One of my favorite networks is the SEC network and particularly the Paul Feinbaum show. One of the revealing and sometimes entertaining aspects of this show are the callers and their passion and opinions about their favorite teams. But watching Feinbaum’s live call-in show during the Alabama vs. Ohio State game made me think. Have we gone too far with our passion and emphasis to the point that this is no longer just a game or competition between schools but something that many of us define our personal, state and cultural identity on? The anger and almost vitriolic attack on coaches and players for loosing seems to me to be inconsistent with the fact that this is a game and other then providing entertainment does little to address the many social, economic and personal issues we face in the 21st Century. Yes I know we pay coaches a lot of money to win games. But is that really the best place to spend our money and are we emphasizing the right values? The current climate in higher education is not good. We are loosing ground to many other countries in the quality and quantity of graduates. We are living in a time when most state legislatures are reducing support for higher education. The response of most institutions is to increase use of low-salaried adjuncts, pay low faculty salaries except for the salaries for the “research stars”, football coaches and basketball coaches. It is worth noting that the “research stars” and high paid coaches do not spend much or any time in the classroom at most colleges and universities.

I grew up at a time where people at least expressed the opinion that the value of sports was to teach values such as respect, leadership, teamwork and work ethic. In the current college football environment the bigger and richer schools appear to tolerate bad behavior from athletes as long as the team wins and competes for championships. My own alma mater is a great example of what may be misplaced priorities. After four years of transforming the culture on the football team at the University of Florida to one that focused on success in the classroom, being good citizens and quality individuals, Will Muschamp was fired because he did not win enough games. At the time Coach Muschamp was fired the Academic Progress Rate (APR) for the football program was the highest in program history, arrests and other personal conduct violations were almost non-existent and his players admired and respected him. They seemed to get his message and compared to previous football programs in the state there was very little negative press about his program except for not winning enough games. Most of the commentators and even some of the fans admit that given enough time Coach Muschamp would have also turned around the won-loss record and started competing for championships – but the fan base and in particular the big money donors were not willing to be patient and wait.

Remember Aesop’s Fable about the Tortoise and the Hare? This was held up to my generation as an important value that it was not necessarily how fast you got to a goal but how steadily and methodically you moved toward that goal. We were taught that the trip and how well you made that trip was more important than the destination.

My takeaway from these musings is that maybe we are becoming a society that is not too wise about where we spend our money, what we set as our highest priorities and are too impatient to do things the right way.

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Water everywhere and none to drink

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Phil Scheuerman

Remember the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by the english poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

Continue reading →

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Severe storms and climate change

Posted on January 6, 2013 by Phil Scheuerman

I have read and seen many reports and discussions that cite climate change as an important factor influencing the timing and severity of Hurricane Sandy. There was also some discussion about this by CNN reporters as they discussed the cost of recovery and the discussion about passage of a federal aid package to add funds to the federal flood insurance program. It is true that an important feature associated with climate change is extreme and often unusual events such as long droughts, severe storms and unusual or extreme seasonal temperatures. It is also true that the severity of Hurricane Sandy was influenced by climate change through warming the water in the Atlantic Ocean that strengthened the storm. But climate change probably did not cause Hurricane Sandy; Sandy was formed by the normal tropical conditions that result in the formation of hurricanes. While a late season storm is unusual Sandy did form during the period known as “Hurricane Season”.

Certainly these extreme storms are frightening and do illustrate some of the negative consequences of climate change but there are many more subtle but more frightening potential outcomes of climate change. Changes in weather and seasonal norms will change where and how we grow food crops and raise livestock. Changes in habitat for many important disease vectors will change what populations will be exposed to some pretty scary disease causing organisms. The level of the oceans will rise as the polar ice melts increasing beach erosion and taking back some of the coastal beaches.

Ok so at this point some people are scared, some are mumbling under their breath about this lunatic that says the world is coming to an end and others are just shrugging. Well, guess what? I am not saying the world is coming to an end. In fact many species will do quite well as a result of the climate induced changes and as with past climate shifts things will change but the planet will survive. What is at question is the quality of life and the long-term survival of the human populations. Oh and anyone that says the climate isn’t changing must have failed geology, because the climate has always been changing. The planet has experienced long-duration ice ages, short-duration ice ages, long-duration warming periods and short-term warming periods.

So what do we do? Well, I think we start asking what changes are expected and what their impact will be on human populations and ecosystems. Then we need to develop a strategy to – if possible – slow down or reverse the changes. But more importantly we need to start asking what social changes are necessary to survive and flourish under the new conditions. Actually, that might ultimately be a positive and maybe even fun thing if we are proactive and aggressive and get to work.

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What this blog is about and thoughts on civil discourse

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Phil Scheuerman

We have many social, political, environmental and educational challenges to address. This blog will contain my thoughts and reports about these challenges. Hopefully you will find this blog stimulating, challenging and interesting.

Several months ago I had a series of exchanges with Facebook friends about the concept of civil discourse and the lack of it in our political discussions. This originated from my observations of many people demonizing a politician, scientists or educator for their views about a particular issue. Instead of attacking the ideas people were attacking the person generating the ideas. This was manifested in personal attacks on people that might believe or not believe in global climate change, conservative or liberal political views or the value of “no child left behind”.

Now we see those same types of things happening with the current political debate over the fiscal cliff, and the upcoming debates over the debt ceiling and reducing our national debt. We have reached a point where the art and skill of compromise has been subjugated to a “draw a line in the sand it’s my way or the highway” stand by both sides. It should not matter what your political views are we must approach this debate in a civil, open-minded discussion.

But this post is not about which side I support or which side I think is more reasonable it is about the tendency in our society to be unwilling to have civil discussions about the ideas and to come to consensus views about the many important issues we face. I used to view the extreme views on all sides of an issue as a good thing because these views would result in discussion that generally brought us to a moderate middle of the road result. This seemed to work very well but now it seems to create roadblocks to progress in solving the many issues confronting us. Is this the first sign of the decline in the American experiment?

We have become a society of having more and instant gratification. What is most troubling is that we have become a society where we let the pundits think for us rather than let the pundits express opinions that we critically evaluate and discuss? Too often we hear people parroting the opinions of the pundits. Whether it is the current debt problem, the jury decision in the Casey Anthony trial, global climate change or education people are not critically evaluating the issues and expressing their opinion in their words.

The ultimate question is how do we fix this? The answer comes back to education. We must included more content that encourages not only critically thinking but also the recognition that you can respect the person holding a position or expressing an idea you do not agree with or respect. More importantly we must establish the idea that it is important to respect that person and to critically listen to their ideas regardless of what you initially think about their idea. In short we need to teach and respect good old fashioned manners.

My desire is that this blog can be a place to have civil discussion about the many challenges we have facing us. Feel free to comment and enter the discussion but please do so in a respectful and thoughtful manner.

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