Risk

I have a pretty cushy life. I don't have to make repairs to my home (though, you could make the point that nobody really wants me to). I stand at my desk instead of sitting, just so I can be slightly less sedentary. My most recent post was about cooking fish that was caught and butchered for me. I don't have to pay rent (with money, anyway, but that's another post).

So sometimes I just need to do something a little manly and manageably dangerous. On a chilly evening not too long ago, I hopped in the car in search of a good sunset view to capture with my camera. As I drove up the Hogback Road in Johnson, I realized there wasn't going to be much color in the sky but I could try for some good low-light views anyway. Just around the corner from the Ithiel Falls camp, there is a set of islands and a sandbar- the sun was setting straight on to that stretch of river.

The view from the upper bank was kind of boring, and I couldn't get a clear shot from the angle I wanted. The banks are quite steep right there, and there isn't much of a bank where I was looking, but it looked from above like there was a small landing strip at right around the angle I was trying to get to. I scooted/butt slid/clambered down the slope, tripod clipped to my camera bag and big orange coat smoothing the way. I managed to change my lens, level the tripod on a leeeeeetle stretch of sand, and get lined up to squeeze off a few shots before remembering: I don't have a light. Better climb back up before it actually gets, you know, dark out here.

There is something incredibly satisfying about skinning one's knees. By the time I climbed back to road level I had fallen, aggravated a serious cramp in one foot, scraped my hands a bit, and just generally gotten good and sweaty. It was awesome.

The pictures? Not that great. Here's the best one:

I cropped out a bunch of super boring and blown-out sky; adjusted color temp to reflect what I was actually seeing at the time of the foto; played with levels a bit to emphasize the sun's rays and tamp down the flares; created a duplicate background and tried to completely dim the highlights but the reflection on the water is blown beyond repair. Shot at 1/80, f8 at ISO 200 on a 50mm prime f1.8 lens with my D7000.

So, this one won't exactly get printed up for the office wall. But if a great result is the only point of photography, it would be too much failure to continue on. As with any art form, the process is itself a reward as much as the product. After my cliff-climbing adventure I felt sore, stiff, and exhilarated. 

Eats

I made what may be one of my more composed dishes, so far: grilled salmon over a warm spinach salad with risotto and a brown butter sauce (at least, that's what I'm calling it). I've done salmon and risotto plenty of times before, but without doing much with the greens. My sauce was the most successful so far, too.

I started the risotto and then toasted a handful of whole almonds in a separate pan while the risotto rice was toasting. Then I seasoned my salmon and brushed on a little bit of aged balsamic.

When the risotto was well along, I put on the salmon. I had pulled the almonds off well before this; now I used that pan to melt a couple tablespoons of butter and soften about a half a red onion, chopped coarsely. At this point I had all four burners going- it was pretty toasty in the kitchen.

Once my red onions were soft, I put in most of a bag of spinach and tossed them with the butter and onions to braise it. As soon as the spinach cooked down, I plated it and started a pan sauce with another pat (3-4 tablespoons) of butter, a splash of white wine, a teaspoon of balsamic, and a ladle of broth. I haven't gotten around to mastering any of the mother sauces yet, but I did notice that a lot of them included broth, and I wanted to pull the various flavors on the plate together.

I had a little timing issue with the salmon, trying to cook it more slowly. It came out perfectly, so really I just cooked everything else too fast.

I reduced the sauce by about 70%, seasoned and tasted- a definite go. The spinach and onions looked great on the plate; I chopped the almonds and sprinkled some over the salad, along with a quick hit of parmesan. I plated the risotto next to the salad, with another sprinkle of almonds, and put the salmon on top of the veg. I put a little sauce on top of the fish and a little extra around the bottom.

This was a really enjoyable dish to cook. I like the feeling of being able to manage four burners at once, and when I started cooking Jessica was at the pool with the kids so I was able to get going with a clear mind and some good music. By the time they got home, everything was well along. Elli declared that everything smelled SO GOOD and she perched herself on a stool in the middle of the kitchen so she could take it all in.

My apologies for the crappy pic, but here's an idea of what we ate tonight:

Stuff about the differences between the gents and the ladies.

Gender differences are an important topic in higher education these days because the achievement gap between men and women seems to be growing. Certainly where I work, I've noticed that women are more likely apply for leadership positions and be qualified for them. National GPA and persistence data indicates women are winning college.

Catching up on my journal reading, I came across an article in the Journal of Higher Education that documents a study of GPA differences between men and women in science majors. Women, even though they are way underrepresented in majors such as engineering, tend to do better academically in those majors.

Takeaways from Sonnert and Fox's findings:

1. The achievement gap was most pronounced at non-elite universities. In other words, at colleges the researchers classified as "Research 1" schools, the achievement gap was small or none. The article hypothesized that women are more likely to stay closer to home, whether due to protectiveness of their families or socialization to stay closer to home or something. The implication here is that these same women would be out-achieving their male counterparts at the elite universities if they went there in greater numbers.

We talk a good talk, we academics, about equality and generating more equal representation of women and minorities in sort of traditionally white-dude majors and work fields. But I have to wonder if there are holes in the admissions process that systemically hold the gender proportions right where they are. Nobody will ever be able to study this because nobody will ever share their admissions processes or data in a meaningful way that would shed light on it. But . . .

2. Women have to do better academically to have a chance at even remotely equal compensation in the engineering fields. Sonnert and Fox propose that this leads women to work harder in a compensation effect that puts them in position to compete. Is it also true that women have to have better qualifications out of high school to receive the same spots? Or are girls in high school just not applying to those programs?

If spots for girls are systemically (if not consciously) limited at elite university programs, it does seem to follow that the students "left over" would be higher-achieving that the men "left over" at the regional colleges. In other words, if the top engineering colleges take the best 10% of men and the best 5% of women (these are made-up numbers), the 90-95% women would be competing against the 80-90% men. And the 5% of women who are in the elite colleges would be driven by a compensation mechanism, knowing they have to do better to do equally.

3. Counterintuitively, the GPA gap gets smaller when the number of women professors in a field is more equal. This was the most interesting finding, I thought. One hypothesis (addressed by the researchers) is that when there are more women role models in the field- such as bio, a major they studied- there are more role models for women students; more women select the field; the group of women selecting the field is therefore less inherently confident and extra-motivated; the achievement evens out. I think there could be something to this. The researchers mentioned an area for additional research would be to look for performance gaps in traditionally women-dominated fields. Stay tuned . . .

Reference:
Sonnert, G. and Fox, M., 2012. Women, men, and academic performance in science and engineering: The gender differences in grade point averages. Journal of Higher Education. Jan/Feb 2012, Vol 83 Issue 1, p73-101.

I am now proficient at adding and subtraction!

This is my first post since some "had-to" posts when I started this for a class.

I have two thoughts about beginning to blog. 1: How cliche. 2. Seriously, how cliche.

As with every blog that currently exists, this one is basically about me, and written for myself. If anyone ever ends up reading it, and gets something out of it, all the better.

I'll post interesting articles about my field of college students affairs; random thoughts/insights about living as a Christian in a faith-unfriendly world; cute kid stories; and my progress in learning math.

Yeah, math. I don't know how I arrived at this, but I decided at some point recently that I want to learn calculus by the time I am 40. That gives me a few years, and feels like a safe goal. Step 1: e-mail a friendly and popular math professor at the college where I work, to get advice on getting started. She directed me here, and it is basically the most amazing website I have ever been on.

The math professor's advice was: brush up on arithmetic and algebra. "Nobody fails at pre-calculus and calculus," she wrote. "They fail at arithmetic and algebra." Sounds smart. And since arithmetic and algebra are really easy, hey, I should be ready for pre-calc by fall, right?

I have spent almost four hours on the site, now, and I am just now considered proficient in addition and subtraction.

The good news is that I can keep trying. Got something wrong, or don't understand because your particular fifth grade didn't do number representation with pictures of blocks? Click on the "show me" button and they'll break it down for you. Forgot that subtracting a negative number is the same as adding a positive number? That's all right. Get it on the second pass.

The thing is, learning should be like what I have been experiencing in my math adventures this week. There are videos for instruction, you can literally look at a map of how skills build on each other, and if you don't understand something you can access multiple ways of looking at the solution until you get it. There's no time limit. I've been doing it for fun, and it is fun (except when I lose track of all those carried 1's in long subtraction). We'll see what happens when I jump back into algebra, but for now I'm having a blast.