Mizzou Quads

March 11, 2012 – 10:41 pm
Pirc Defense against the Austrian Attack

Not an actual line of play this weekend, though I had feared it might be.

Saturday I had the distinct privilege of playing in the lower division of the Mizzou Quads chess tournament. I has been roughly a decade since I’ve done anything like this so I am rather proud of my 0-3 record that includes a draw in an casual game between rounds to someone with an ELO rating 400 points my senior.

It has been a long time since I’ve really though about chess, but last Tuesday a late night Google and Wikipedia session thrust knowledge of this tournament into my awareness. Most competitions offer information of hotel accommodations, but this was a twenty minute walk from my apartment. What better way to open Comps Week than to spend the Saturday competing in a field of intellectual endeavor I have neglected since March 2002 according to USCF records.

The tournament was divided into two divisions. At the top there was a four player round robin. The bottom division was a six player Swiss bracket. With an ELO rating of 914 I entered the tournament as the bottom seed of the lower Swiss paired division. As bottom seed I did not disappoint with an 0-3 record. read more »

Novelty Philosophy Science Technology
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College Football

September 7, 2011 – 5:57 pm

In the opening week of NCAA football the Big 12 went undefeated. The Big Ten did not. The PAC-12 did not. The almighty SEC also did not.  The Big East went undefeated, though it would not have if TCU would be in their line up as the Horned Frogs were defeated by unranked Baylor from the Big 12.

If the Big 12 collapses it will not be for a lack of athletic competitiveness. Sure Colorado will probably be a ringer in the PAC-12 this year boosting the relative rankings of established teams in the conference, but it could be interesting seeing what happens when Nebraska hits perennial Big Ten favorites Michigan State, Ohio State, and Wisconsin.  Nebraska also lost its membership in the AAU which probably hits on the scholarly image of the Big Ten.

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Economics Education Politics
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Snow and Syndication

January 24, 2011 – 6:09 am

University of Missouri Columns in snowThis Thursday after the biggest snowfall I have encountered this academic year, I ventured to campus to grab some pictures which I posted to my Twitter account @aaronrogier. Through searching the hashtag #CoMoSnow MyMissourian put them together in a nice album of a snow covered Mizzou Campus. Thus happened my first time experiencing de facto syndication by strangers through the instrument of social media.

I’m not going to wax contemplatively in this post on how social media brings people together, because other people are probably already doing that better and more articulately than I feel like trying to do right now. I just want to throw up some more pictures from Thursday’s walkabout.

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Education Novelty
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Research Problems

January 10, 2011 – 6:23 am

close up of water meeting lakeshoreAs the Spring semester rolls around, in this short space between the winter holiday extravaganza and the start of my second semester in Missouri’s library and information science program, I though I’d share some thoughts on a few recent pieces on research. Often positioned as a final boss in education and the thing that keeps people in the academy once basic skill and efforts to cultivate them are exhausted, research can be vexing when done well. When done poorly though whether through negligence or malice it can be catastrophic though interesting.

The first published at Ars Technica concerns a case of problematic interpretation. The setup seems very innovative, the results seem interesting, and then the investigator offers his interpretation involving an outmoded Lamarkian view of evolutionary biology. He devised an apparatus that allowed E. coli to be cultured over a gradient of differing concentrations of nutrients and antibiotics while being able to travel between these cells and observed rapid acquisition of resistance to ciprofloxacin, on the order of ten hours. And then he interprets his results through a pre-Darwinian lens. Presentation abstract available here.

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Education Science
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