The Backbencher

Understanding Centers of Excellence

Yesterday, I wrote about a new center of excellence that has been built at my university. Careful readers may have noticed that I never explained what, exactly, a "center of excellence" is.

Why didn't I? Well, the thing is, centers of excellence have become such a prominent trend in American higher education, it is no longer considered necessary to offer a definition whenever the topic comes up.

But you still don't know, do you?

Visualizing Excellence: As this diagram clearly shows, a "center of excellence" is a kind of nuclear explosion, closely orbited by things such as "techno-functional consulting." (Image from some company called "Customer Centria," which, we can only presume, offers "solutions" for "today's global business" or something.)

If you find yourself engaged in a conversation with university faculty and administrators about centers of excellence, here is what you are likely to do: 

1. Try to avoid having others find out that you don't know what a center of excellence is.


2. Express your fervent support for centers of excellence. (After all, you figure, they are both central and excellent. What's not to love?)

Hmmm. So, since you are too embarrassed to ask, I will now take it upon myself to provide the public service of explaining what a center of excellence is.

First, of course, I'll need to look it up. 

Like any true scholar, I begin my investigation by carefully typing "center of excellence" into the Google search box in my web browser.¹ Happily, this returns a wealth of information. Here's some of what's out there:

• "Centers of excellence affect on-target, on-value performance when they manage all processes and functions from problem definition to resolution."


• Centers of excellence will help companies to "stay ahead of the business intelligence curve."


• A center of excellence "enables organizations to centralize requirements authoring expertise, define repeatable definition processes, and to ensure communication of requirements fits internal company standards."

Okay. Well, NOW I UNDERSTAND. 

To recap, here's what happened: I searched for a definition of "center of excellence," and I found that it has something to do with defining repeatable definition processes!  

If you ever have a question that cannot be answered by googling, then there is one additional tactic that you, as a scholar, can undertake. And that is, of course, to look it up on Wikipedia.

Now, here's the really freaky thing. Are you sitting down? There is no "center of excellence" article on Wikipedia! Can you believe that? Really! Look it up! This is perhaps the only question humankind has ever come up with that IS NOT ANSWERED BY WIKIPEDIA.

Here's one thing we can say. Wikipedia is certainly not a "center of excellence." In fact, as a sprawling reference work written by the same millions of people who read it, Wikipedia is best described as a "diffusion of mediocrity." 

Apparently, the diffusion of mediocrity can't explain what a center of excellence is. But I'd bet you that anyone at Intel's Social Media Center of Excellence could explain what Wikipedia is.

Conclusion: We must establish a center of excellence on centers of excellence.

---

Notes:
¹ You can tell that a lot of other people have this same question. The first suggested auto-complete search result for "center of e ..." is not "center of excellence" but "center of excellence definition."

[Cross-posted on PrawfsBlawg.]

Our New Center of Excellence

A big trend in higher education these days is the establishment of "centers of excellence."

Close to my home and office in Grand Forks, North Dakota, we are lucky enough to have a new center of excellence, The Center of Excellence in Life Sciences and Advanced Technologies. It's a project of the University of North Dakota Research Foundation, and it is housed in a facility called "REAC 1."

Here is a picture:

It's wonderful, no doubt. But here's the thing. Whenever I drive by it, I can't shake the feeling that something very dangerous is going on in there.

I mean, just look at it. It's named "REAC 1," and it's conducting simultaneous research into Life Sciences and Advanced Technologies. 

If you've ever watched late-night made-for-TV movies on cut-rate cable networks, then you have probably reached the same conclusion that I have: It's just a matter of time until alarm bells go off and this whole thing explodes.

And when it explodes, it won't explode quickly, with a fireball. No, instead, it will explode slowly, with the roof lifting off and the walls splitting apart as some kind of weird foam substance grows out of it - the kind of foam substance that, if perturbed, may chase you.

[Cross-posted on PrawfsBlawg.]

You Haven't Earned a Flag

We're still in Plano, Texas. Let me tell you something. There is a cultural disease here. Specifically, a vexillological epidemic: Corporate flags. Every office building, condo development, and taco stand here seems to have a set of three flags, all flying at the same height: The flag of the United States of America, the flag of the State of Texas, and the flag of Global Mortgage Solutions Group ... or whatever.

A representative blurry, poorly composed picture is below:

Let me tell you something, Global Mortgage Solutions Group. You don't rate a corporate flag.

Companies should realize they are in over their heads when they throw their corporate name in Times New Roman and some clip art on a navy-blue background. Leave it alone. 

You know who can pull off a corporate flag? Maersk. Maersk is Danish shipping line with more than 600 ships. They get attacked by pirates. They've earned a flag. You haven't.

What I Am Doing to Help the Environment

We must all do our part to help the environment. In my little corner of the world, Grand Forks, North Dakota, I am doing my part. Let me tell you about it.

SOLAR POWER: I am currently using solar power to provide the energy needs for five out of the seven calculators that live in the junk drawer in our kitchen. These five calculators create zero carbon emissions. You’re welcome, Earth.

And as for the other two calculators, I am trying to cut back on the amount of math I am doing. I am achieving lowered math emissions by “powering” our household finances with a Visa card – that reduces our dependence on paper checks that lay waste to our nation’s forests and constantly require me to calculate how much money I have in the bank.

WIND POWER: North Dakota is extremely windy. I would like to buy a wind turbine for our house – that would be seriously awesome. But I looked into it, and they are really, really expensive. In the meantime, I have been able to take care of the energy needs for approximately 10 percent of all our household trash removal – and 100 percent of all outdoor litter removal – through the use of what I call “direct” wind power.

Now, I am not a slob, but some one around here, presumably someone just across the border in Minnesota, deposits an enormous number of Burger King wrappers on the ground. I refrain from expending the energy that would otherwise be required to remove the trash by following a “what blows in must blow out” policy. This allows renewable energy resources to remove the litter, and it gives my neighbors a chance to be environmentally conscious as well.

DIRECT REFRIGERATION: When the North Dakota winter comes on, it becomes possible to take advantage of what I call “direct refrigeration” technology. This involves taking things and throwing them out the front door.

Say you have a warm beer. With a sweater, long coat, scarf, wool socks, and a face mask, you can open the front door long enough to toss the bottle into a snow bank. In 180 seconds, it’s frosty and ready to drink.

Or, let’s say it’s Christmas, and your wife just cooked a ham that leaves a quarter inch-layer of residue on some enormous roasting pan. You’d like to put off cleaning it – ideally until late April or early May. How can you accomplish this? Use direct refrigeration.

Last year when I did this, I was concerned I would forget that the pan was out there. But it turns out that’s not a problem. I was helpfully reminded about the ham remnants one day when I saw all the neighborhood dogs digging around and sniffing in the melting snow by the front door. Thanks, guys.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? In the future, thanks to advances in science, I hope to be able to take advantage of still other sources of renewable energy available in North Dakota. We might even achieve the Holy Grail of environmentally conscious North Dakota energy solutions: Snowblowers that are powered entirely by hockey violence.

I can’t wait to find out what tomorrow will bring.

Unless it is more Burger King wrappers to my yard.

Why I Am Afraid of Aliens

Personally, I fear extraterrestrials. If you listen to people like Carl Sagan or Frank Drake, whom I met recently, you’ll get the impression that extraterrestrials are peace-loving tree-huggers who wouldn’t think of harming anyone.

Who is Frank Drake? He is the originator of the famous Drake equation, which estimates the number of advanced alien civilizations there are in the galaxy. (Answer: many more than I am comfortable with.) Dr. Drake also was one of the founding leaders of SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

Dr. Drake’s a smart guy. And a nice guy, too. He came to our campus to deliver a speech about his passionate work attempting to get in touch with ETs.

I’m not so excited about contacting advanced civilizations. For me, the possibility of aliens being out there is a strong argument for gun rights. Do I believe I can beat back the alien hordes with a Glock 9? No. But if I could shoot off a tentacle or two before they suck my brains out, I’d be pleased.

Now, according to the SETI crowd, there’s no reason to fear that the galaxy’s advanced civilizations would be hostile.

Oh yeah? The way I see it, we only have first-hand knowledge of one advanced civilization. Us. And what we’ve learned so far isn’t all that promising.

I think back to my sixth-grade class. We had a month-long creative-writing unit on poetry. We wrote a limerick, a haiku, a sonnet, rhyming couplets, etc. We had to write one poem of each format. This one kid, Sean, wrote every single poem about killing ants.

A Haiku by Sean

Families of ants
Trying to get back to home
Black Flag. Raid. THEY DIE!!!!

How do we know that aliens are not like Sean? Come to think of it, how do we know Sean himself wasn’t an alien?

Okay, let me give SETI folks the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say most aliens are rational and normal, and not at all like Sean, but they have a president with pudding for brains who just goes off an invades another planet even though it WAS NOT stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and it DID NOT actually have anything to do with Al Qaeda. For instance.

Well, Dr. Drake explains that because no one – aliens included – can travel faster than the speed of light (an unproven theory, I would note), it is not plausible that aliens could reach Earth. We could, however, communicate with them, he says.

In wrapping up his speech, Dr. Drake asked the audience to envision an interconnected network of alien civilizations, who are, right now, busily communicating with one another, exchanging ideas and information. He opined that when we first establish contact with just one extraterrestrial civilization, we might thereby be able to plug into this “intergalactic internet” and establish contact with multitudes of them.

“Imagine what we could learn,” he exhorted the audience.

Actually, I tried to imagine it, and I’ve got to say, logging on to the intergalactic internet sounds like about the worst idea ever. Considering that most of our own internet is composed of utter filth – namely pornography and fan-written sports blogs – who knows what kind of unimaginable smut could come pouring down off the intergalactic internet. Count me as decidedly uninterested.

But wait a minute, you might say, what if aliens could offer us new cures for diseases? Hello?!? Think, for a moment, about what that would actually be like. Do you really want America’s pharmaceutical industry teaming up with the aliens to bring us a new round of television-advertising campaigns trying to convince us to treat diseases such as Restless Tentacle Syndrome or Frequent-Urge-to-Ooze-Green-Slime Disorder?

And who’s to assume the intergalactic internet would even work most of the time? If my crappy sporadic broadband connection is any indication, the human race could be spending more than half of every day hitting refresh just to try to see the how much alien spam has accumulated on John McCain’s MySpace page.

Even more frightening – how would we pay for it? Earthly telecom companies are bad enough. You should see the ginormous wads of cash that the cable company sucks out of my wallet each month for the bent-over-wheezing broadband I have.

One can barely fathom what the connection fees would be for the intergalactic internet. It would likely bankrupt us in a matter of minutes. The entire human race could be forced to service the debt by taking telephone-representative customer-service jobs.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth, our records show that we disconnected your cable service last week at your request. We would be pleased to start up service again for a re-initiation fee of three quintillion galactos. What’s that? You’ll destroy my home planet with laser beams? I’m sorry you feel that way Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth. Uh huh. You say you’re going to hang up right now and initiate the firing sequence? We value your business, Mr. Xurxuthurshpanaghtth. Is there anything else GalactoCast Cable can do for you today?”

Update: The Canadian Change Menace

[The following is an update to my post of February 8, 2008, in which I broke news of an international financial scandal when I noticed I stopped getting Canadian coins in my change after the U.S. dollar plummeted below the level of the Canadian dollar.]

Well, it finally happened. At 5:46 p.m. on April 2, 2008, I received one Canadian penny with my change at the Taco John's drive-thru. It was the first Canadian coin I've gotten in my change since the currency inversion on September 20, 2007.

I was very excited. Now, for the first time ever, I got a Canadian penny and didn't have to feel cheated.

So I came home, beaming with contentment, and I looked up the exchange rate to see how much I made in the transaction. Guess what?

THE CANADIAN DOLLAR IS NOW UNDER THE VALUE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR!!! My Canadian penny, as of April 2, 2008, is worth only 0.9843 American pennies. I cannot believe it! By happily accepting the penny and not handing it back to the cashier, I lost 0.000157 dollars on the con.

There are forces of malevolence in this world that you could never comprehend.